Three’s company

Writer-director Paul Haggis’ Third Person, like his 2005 Oscar-winner Crash, tells multiple stories, but this time they don’t intersect in the same obvious way. They seem to run on parallel tracks, or even in parallel universes. Themes and visual touches link individual scenes, and sometimes we’re briefly disoriented at finding ourselves in one story when we thought we were in another. There’s a headlong drive to the movie’s narrative that keeps us watching and wondering.

Watching. That’s one of the linking themes. The movie’s first spoken line is “Watch me,” whispered by a child as Michael (Liam Neeson), a Pulitzer Prize novelist working on his latest book, sits at his laptop in his Paris hotel room. Michael looks up. Did he hear that? Imagine it? Was it one of his characters talking to him? The line, in varying readings—whispered, hissed, spat—recurs throughout the movie, exhorting someone to do something, reproaching them for something undone.

Michael is joined in Paris by Anna (Olivia Wilde), a New York journalist and his lover of the past two years. The two of them bicker, jab, cajole, caress, make love with wildcat desperation, all following some game plan they seem to be making up as they go along.

Then there’s Scott (Adrien Brody), in Rome on a mission of industrial espionage. He covertly buys the pilfered designs of Italian clothing designers, taking them back to the states to be counterfeited in sweatshops. Stopping in a bar for a drink, he becomes fascinated by Monika (Moran Atias), a Romanian woman waiting to be reunited with the 8-year-old daughter she hasn’t seen in two years, who is being brought into Italy by smugglers. When Monika loses the 5,000 euros she was supposed to pay the smugglers, Scott involves himself in her story out of some impulse he seems only dimly to understand. Altruism? Or is it guilt? After all, he has a daughter about the same age as Monika’s whom he hasn’t seen in a while himself.

Finally, there’s Julia (Mila Kunis) in New York, leading the disordered, chaotic life of a perpetual screwup—things are always somehow going wrong for her, and always her plaintive mantra is “This time it isn’t my fault!” She’s in an ugly fight for visitation rights with her son; Julia’s ex-husband Rick, a well-to-do artist (James Franco), has custody because of something Julia may or may not have done to hurt the boy. Julia’s lawyer (Maria Bello) regards her with barely controlled exasperation, wondering if Julia really deserves to see the boy at all. Julia, chronically unstable, is currently on her seventh job in less than a year, working as a hotel chambermaid, thanks to a man who seems to be one of her last remaining friends. Kunis plays Julia in a constant state of hyperventilating desperation, less than an inch from the end of her rope.

The movie’s title refers, at least on the surface, to the fact that Michael keeps his journal in the the third person: “He” did this, “he” saw or said that. But there’s another side to it as well. In each of the three stories, there always seems to be a third person involved—Monika’s daughter, Julia’s son. In the Michael-Anna thread, there are a third and a fourth: Michael’s estranged wife Elaine (Kim Basinger) and Anna’s other lover, also in Paris.

Watching, we sense that Michael and Anna are the central story here. Maybe even the only one: Lines of dialogue in one story appear on Michael’s laptop, and we see evidence—indirect but unmistakeable—that Julia has been in Michael and Anna’s hotel rooms, even though they’re in Paris and she’s in New York.

Michael says at one point that his new novel is “about a man who can only feel through the characters he creates.” Is that what’s going on here? Is Michael creating Scott and Monika? Julia and Rick? For that matter, is he creating Anna, or is she creating him? Haggis teases us and leaves us thinking up our own answers—which will no doubt alienate as many people as it tantalizes.

Third Person ends with Haggis’ dedication: “To my father, Ted, who taught me to take risks.” Haggis takes risks here, and his dedication lends a metafictional resonance to the movie’s recurring line: “Watch me!”