Answers to Nothing | Film review

As this exceedingly strange L.A. ensemble piece drags on, you may begin to wonder where it’s heading. It turns out the title doesn’t lie. Suggesting Crash without a thematic glue, Answers to Nothing spins its wheels for two hours, juggling a dozen characters without ever remotely approaching coherence. It’s not as though the movie depicts human behavior as too complex for the confines of drama: The film simply draws out its threads until every character is revealed to be deluded or in some way narrow-minded. Cowriter-director Matthew Leutwyler extends that attitude to viewers, withholding crucial information to facilitate gotcha moments late in the game.

The movie opens with Dane Cook cheating on his wife, for instance. But it turns out he’s also a caring psychiatrist concerned about his ailing mother (Barbara Hershey), who still thinks the husband who left her is coming home. Julie Benz plays a detective working on the case of a missing girl, but her leads don’t quite check out. Meanwhile, a video-game-playing loner (Mark Kelly) who’s always watching news reports about the case certainly looks like a prime suspect—but after a while, it becomes clear the obvious answers for anything in Answers to Nothing are always wrong. It’s not as though Leutwyler has revealed some deep insight into the Way We Live Now. He’s simply misdirecting. And at a certain point, being jerked around loses its mystique.