Overrated and overhyped

Expected more

I cannot think of one single thing that I would change about this film. The acting is incomparable, the directing deft, and the writing poignantly brilliant.

It's funny, it's tense, it features two great performances from two actors and the director expertly creates a web of odd tension where you actually don't know what is happening for the majority of the run time.

This film pretty much mirrors my own experiences in Pittsburgh prior to leaving and only returning years later to bury mom. At a party, Art meets the attractive Jane, whose boyfriend, Cleveland, is both friendly and strange. These two mess with Art's mental state. Although Jane doesn't mean to, but Cleveland is a twisted manipulator. The first little "joke" Cleveland plays on Art should have sent Art running as far from Cleveland as he could get. But Art is pathological pushover.As with my own complications, the fractured relationship with the gangster father. Art's possessive girlfriend. Jane's ambivalence. Cleveland's weird manipulation and emotional, if not attempting a sexual menage a trois. Art, as I did, cannot see how Cleveland is using him to get out of a bad criminal situation - then the climactic ending arriving out of thin air involving Art as the summer ends as mine did on a very small world.

Comments are so tough with the film that I feel alone in the camp of the "positives".OK this film is far from being a perfection and I think I will never understand the very purpose of it. I even hesitate to say what was the topic. I assume it was about the coming-out of the main character, but even that I am not sure.Plus, I can't say Jon Foster, the main actor, is captivating. So why did I like ?I think the main thing I appreciated in that film is the atmosphere of mysteries. As the title suggests it, all along the film provides an imperceptible mystery. Because it plays with suggestions and switches. The storyline helps for sure to plunge into this atmosphere as the storyline is a mystery in itself ! But there are other causes. The photography for example, which clearly remains in my mind. Although Pittsburg is not a beauty on its own, the director manages to capture some good photos of it. Also the director did well regarding the changing weathers and lights. Switching between sun and rain, lights, twillights and darkness.The soundtrack follows the mysterious atmosphere well too.Saarsgard plays an interesting character as he acts an ambivalent tough but sensitive bi-sexual. There is also the constant hesitations of the main character. Obey his father or not ? The dark haired girl or the blond one ? The girlfriend or the boyfriend ? We can also capture the questionings of all the others characters.All this provides a sentiment of interrogations.So this atmosphere the director manages to render leads us not to be surprised when the main character admits at the end he is confused, because this is the feeling we have too.Mysteries. This is what I appreciated in this film I guess.

This movie came so close to being a very good movie but fouled up at the end-leaving one to mourn what would have been a very good adaptation of a very good book.It is the summer of 1983. A college graduate (Art) is trying to enjoy his last summer before he leaves Pittsburgh (his home) to become a financial broker. We find that his dad (fantastic portrayal by Nick Nolte) is an organized crime chief, of the local mob, and is proud of his son graduating and does NOT want his son to go into organized crime. The son takes a job for the summer at a local bookstore and is immediately seduced by his only slightly older female supervisor; an affair ensues. During this same period of time Art meets a stunningly attractive young blond (portrayed by Sienna Miller) who likes him; even though she already has a boyfriend (dude named Cleveland). The next day Cleveland, a tough biker type, comes to the bookstore and gives Art a deal "he cannot refuse"- which is a ride on the bike to a local abandoned factory site. At the factory site is a smokestack that still belches out clouds; even though the factory has been shut down for thirty years! Why? It is a mystery, a mystery of Pittsburgh. Why is does Cleveland turn to be actually friendly towards a potential rival? Well, that is another mystery of Pittsburgh.The movie portrays the last summer of youthful abandon and care; set in surprisingly beautiful settings of a city that is reinventing itself from the traditional "smokestack technology" to a more "greener" environment. Yet, the problem with the movie is its unrealistic portrayal of male and female friendships. It was a very good movie; showing Sienna Miller, for example, doing some very good driving of golf balls at a party. Yet, this subplot never plays out- never explains why she is shown doing something so atypical. Loose ends, poor connections, double meanings that invoke something that is hard to believe even with the typical "suspension of disbelief" found at movies. All of these plot error and loopholes foul up the movie beyond redemption.

I am quite a fan of novelist/screenwriter Michael Chabon. His novel "Wonder Boys" became a fantastic movie by Curtis Hanson. His masterful novel "The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay" won the Pulitzer Prize a few years back, and he had a hand in the script of "Spider Man 2", arguably the greatest comic book movie of all time.Director Rawson Marshall Thurber has also directed wonderful comedic pieces, such as the gut-busting "Dodgeball" and the genius short film series "Terry Tate: Office Linebacker". And with a cast including Peter Saarsgard, Sienna Miller, Nick Nolte and Mena Suvari, this seems like a no-brainer.It is. Literally.Jon Foster stars as Art Bechstein, the son of a mobster (Nolte) who recently graduated with a degree in Economics. Jon is in a state of arrested development: he works a minimum wage job at Book Barn, has a vapid relationship with his girlfriend/boss, Phlox (Suvari), which amounts to little more than copious amounts of sex, with no plans other than to chip away at a career for which he has zero passion.One night at a party, an ex-roommate introduces Jon to Jane (Miller), a beautiful, smart violinist. Later that night they go out for pie, and she asks Jon a question that begins to shake him from his catatonic state of existence, "I want you to tell me something that you have never told a single soul. If you do, it will make this night indelible." Jon then tells her a reoccurring dream of his in which he wanders about town looking at the faces of strangers passing him by, yet none of them look him in the eye. "I imagine it must be what death feels like," he says.The next day Jane's wild boyfriend Cleveland (Saarsgard) kidnaps Jon from work and takes him out to a hulking abandoned steel mill, and soon Jon, Cleveland and Jane are spending every waking moment together going to punk rock concerts, doing drugs and drinking lots of alcohol. This doesn't sit well with Phlox, who pushes Jon for a more personal relationship, namely letting her meet his new friends and his father. The film then attempts to take us on Jon's journey as he shakes off the shackles imposed on him by his father, Phlox and his dead-end job as he finds freedom and expression through his relationships with Cleveland and Jane.There is a problem having us follow Jon throughout the film: he's completely uninteresting. He has no ambitions, passions or goals. He walks through life like the invisible wraith he described to Jane the night they met. At the outset this isn't a problem. But he never gets any more interesting. He's a completely passive character. He simply follows along the bohemian Cleveland and Jane, but he never once gives us any inkling as to what he cares about or wants to to do with himself.Consequently, the film and its supporting characters have nowhere to go and little to do other than party, have sex and get in arguments. In other words, much ado about nothing. What we have here is the shallow skin of a good movie without anything on the inside. Sweeping cinematography, ponderous voice-over with characters staring off into the distance, lots of sex scenes both straight and gay, big arguments, more angry sex, a chase scene and a tragic death... but it doesn't seem to matter. Ironically, at one point Jane, confused at a number of Jon's aimless actions, asks him, "What's going on, Jon? What is this all about?" Yes, Jon, do tell. We in the audience are dying to know, too.The title "The Mysteries of Pittsburgh" must refer to the characters themselves, because that's what they are. They are all facades, one-dimensional stand-ins for actual people. The film never lets us in. We never know what makes any of them tick. We see them do lots of things, but we don't know why. And the absence of "why" is one of the worst things a movie can have.