When you take a film class, the first thing you're told is that if you can't capture
the attention of your audience in the first five minutes, you will lose them for
the duration of the narrative. For the most part, in practice, this is actually true.
Think about the number of times you've waited for a film to get better and it simply
hasn't, then you walk out of the theater lamenting the loss of those two hours of
life.
In sharp contrast to this rule, Chaos Theory's first ten minutes are painful, followed
by a moving journey that follows one couples' path to forgiveness after the realization
of infidelity. The last few minutes mirror the beginning in their annoyingly simplistic
banality, but the middle hour of the film is completely engaging. Even more impressive
is that, though it is mainly Frank's (Ryan Reynolds) story, the separate actions
of both he and his wife (Emily Mortimer) are treated as equally important in terms
of how they impact their family unit. The chemistry between parents and child feel
lived-in.
In flashback, Frank is revealed to be an efficiency expert that is just beginning
to get hired for public speaking events after the recent publication of a booklet
on saving time. At this first lecture, an attendee attempts to seduce Frank, whose
wife, Susan, calls at an inopportune moment to hear another woman in the background.
Frank escapes the room, remaining mostly faithful to his wife, but ends up in a car
accident with a pregnant woman, whom he escorts to a hospital. His name ends up on
the kid's birth certificate by mistake, which ends with Frank fighting against hard
evidence that he's leading a double life. The tide turns, however, when DNA testing
reveals that not only is he not the father of the baby in question, he's not the
father of his own child either. He's sterile. Now Susan's past becomes an issue.
Normally you'd assume that the story of a guy breaking loose from his uptight foundations
when everything he's known for eight years changes would be a blas� venture. After
all, people are always changing their lives drastically in a movie when they find out
something enormously upsetting. But Frank's internal battling, and the random explorations
he invents for himself on index card lists, build nicely to support why he could
choose to either return home or to stay away. For once, the requisite "best friend"
character (Stuart Townsend) gets to do more than just show up to say a line you
can predict from several scenes away. The acting of both Mortimer and Reynolds is
superb, especially when they finally have a conversation about what his being a parent
means to their child, regardless of biology.
It's unfortunate that a film that is only 86 minutes long is bracketed by 20 minutes
of aggravation, bookends that almost feel like they were shot by PBS or Disney to
cushion the adult content in the middle. The fairly unique ideas that Chaos Theory expl
ores are worth watching if you can get past the schmaltz.
We're thinkin' babies.
See Also
