Multiple Sarcasms

Name: Multiple Sarcasms
Director: Brooks Branch
Released: 2010

Brooks Branch

2010

Synopsis

Gabriel is a man who on the surface has it all-successful professional life as an architect, a beautiful wife, Annie, and a devoted young daughter, Elizabeth. But slowly it dawns on him that he is not really happy. Gabriel decides that he wants to write a play about the sorry state of his life. He quits his job, gets a pushy literary agent friend to represent him and starts writing. Although his marriage ends in a divorce, the play is success and although his life is different than it was, he is happier.

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Recommandations

60
New York Daily News
The cast is uniformly appealing in out-of-left-field ways, but writer-director Brooks Branch lets the story amble lazily, which -- like Gabriel and almost every character like him you've ever seen -- gets a little tiring.
50
Boxoffice Magazine
Channing doesn't bring any new tricks to the table but with her character's tenacious and spirited nature she's fun to have around for a few brief scenes.
42
The A.V. Club
Branch also adds some welcome visual pizzazz when needed, and admirably tries to keep the movie from becoming the story of a heroic creative adventurer and the people who try to drag him down. The characters in Multiple Sarcasms are more nuanced, and don’t reduce to a generic good or bad.
40
Variety
Timothy Hutton's fine, loose-limbed perf as a man adrift lifts Multiple Sarcasms, frosh scribe-helmer Brooks Branch's male menopause apologia, out of cliche-ridden territory -- at least temporarily.
40
Time Out
Cowriter Branch isn’t much of a dramatist either, as this hoary midlife-crisis tale is watchable solely for its reliable cast.
40
Los Angeles Times
Rather than some deeper understanding of the human condition, what we get from Multiple Sarcasms is a lot of heavy breathing.
40
The New York Times
Woody Allen proved long ago that the self-pitying introvert is a fit subject for a movie, but only if the film has a strong enough sense of humor to make us laugh at ourselves. But Brooks Branch, who directed Multiple Sarcasms and wrote the screenplay with Linda Morris, was either too lazy to come up with the absurdist aphorisms that might give Multiple Sarcasms a lift, or he labored under the delusion that Gabriel’s metaphysical malaise is such a fresh idea that it deserves microscopic inspection.
38
New York Post
Multiple Sarcasms happens to be the title of the play within the movie, and it turns out to be by far the most interesting thing in the film. Not that many people will want to suffer through the first 90 minutes of this vanity production to get there.