New York, I Love You (**1/4)

This is something you don’t see so much but seems to be becoming a little more common. It’s an omnibus film, a compilation of short films built around a theme. Lately there have been a few where the theme is a city, a recent example being Tokyo!, a three-films-in one release. Actually, New York Stories did the same sort of thing back in 1989. But this is closer in conception to Paris Je t'aime; both feature parts crafted by a number of writers and directors, loosely strung together as a feature.

So you get eleven different credited directors, some of whom wrote the segments also. The film is dedicated to the late Anthony Minghella, who wrote a segment featuring Julie Christie and Shia LaBoeuf in which the actress plays a singer. Like many of the segments, there is a twist ending, though for the most part they feel kind of forced. Possibly worst is the opening segment, in which two randomly placed-together strangers turn out to both be brilliant pickpockets, hamming it up to impress a woman. Like the city at its worst, it seems smug and false.

Besides the singer, there are a painter, a photographer, a composer, an actress, and a writer. No one is a banker or a slum dweller or a celebrity (well, maybe the singer is), but a lot of real-life celebrities play the characters. Orlando Bloom is the composer, Ethan Hawke the writer. James Caan plays the father of a wheelchair-bound girl who pays a kid to be her date. Either funny or crude, it will probably divide viewers the most. Natalie Portman appears in a Mira Nair-directed segment in which she plays a Hasidic Jew who’s about to be married, and also directs one about a father getting mistaken for his lighter-skinned daughter’s male nanny.

It’s a cliché, but the film adds up to less than the sum of its parts, with a so-what framing device sort of bringing them together. Except for the last segment, with Eli Wallach and Cloris Leachman as a long-married couple walking in Brighton Beach, the movie doesn’t so much evoke the city as seem to serve as a clearinghouse for some experiments and small ideas by local talent. You can, in fact, make even a ten-minute segment compelling, but nothing here is anything more than mildly diverting.

IMDB link

viewed 10/13/09 at Ritz 5 [PFS screening] and reviewed 10/27/09