If Philip Roth had ever switched his consideration from the nice American novel and determined to write down a light-weight indie dramedy, it may need turned out like this. Gabriel Byrne stars as poetry professor Samuel O’Shea, who's a cross between certainly one of Roth’s protagonists and Keith Richards: a hard-drinking self-absorbed womaniser with a penchant for paisley scarves and chunky silver rings. It’s an insubstantial little movie with slimly conceived characters, however Byrne provides at the least 10 factors to its IQ rating and makes it twice as watchable.
Demise of a Girls’ Man begins promisingly sufficient when Sam walks into his Montreal condo to seek out spouse quantity two (she is half his age) in mattress with one other (even youthful) man. Is it lastly dawning on Sam that his charms not have the specified impact? That his narcissistic white masculinity is trying a bit twentieth century? The proof is in every single place: in a bar, his eye repeatedly wanders admiringly to a younger lady studying a battered paperback. However as a substitute of selecting up the cue, she flicks Sam the finger. On the college, his gen-Z college students look appalled by his drunken rock’n’roll lecture room type: throwing up within the bin and slurring scraps of poetry.
However simply as you assume that is going to get attention-grabbing, and Sam is on the verge of being cancelled, life does the job for him. He will get a mind tumour analysis – which at the least explains his quirky hallucinations involving late evening conversations along with his useless dad (Brian Gleeson). Sam flies off to Eire for a final redemptive go to, the place there’s a foolish shaggy canine storyline involving one final feminine object of pursuit.
There are a few nice moments of comedy and poignancy, and the Leonard Cohen songs on the soundtrack do some heavy lifting. What’s lacking is chunk, any sense of Sam raging towards the darkness. The end result offers this movie a bargain-bin literary film really feel, which is a disgrace since you sense Byrne may go the total Roth.
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