This movie attempts to be wise and subtle, but the whole thing is incredibly, painfully fake. Right away the audience gets to see what kind of movie it will be. The main character Don is talking to his neighbor on the phone. The neighbor offers him coffee. "Will it be a cup of... Ethiopian coffee?" Don asks. Here we have an entire line solely for the purpose of telling the audience that the neighbors are Ethiopian. I think that's when I realized that the movie was going to be awful. (The stiff interaction with Don's current girlfriend was bad too, but I figured it might be an outlier. The Ethiopian coffee proved it was part of a larger trend.)
I would have stopped watching at that point, but I had paid money to rent the film so I felt obligated to sit through it. The movie basically goes from bad to... equally bad. Bill Murray plays Bill Murray, as usual. We soon meet his (Ethiopian) neighbor Winston, who plays the part of the quirky, cheerful spirit guide character for our hero. Not much more to say about him. With the prompting of his sidekick, Murray grudgingly goes on a journey in search of his past partners and possible progeny. Each of these former girlfriends apparently represents a different stage in his life, from lusty (and lustful) youth, to grim middle age, to the bitterness and decay of aging, and finally to death. After completing his journey Murray returns to where he started, but with newfound perspective. Instead of worrying about some past love, maybe he should settle down with that colorless woman from the start of the film, he thinks... (Things are looking pretty bleak at that point.)
At the end of the film, Murray meets a kid who might be his son and buys him some food. There he delivers some pearls of wisdom, possibly intended to sum up the lesson he's learned from his travels: the past is gone, the future hasn't happened yet, so the present is all you've got. "Are you a Buddhist?" the young philosopher wonderingly asks Murray. (The poor kid -- he should give up philosophy and take up a less mentally challenging pursuit, like screen writing.) Then the kid runs off, there's a momentary, confusing shot of Murray's real-life son driving by, and Murray is left standing at a crossroads to ponder what to do next.
To summarize: this movie was intended to be a thought-provoking portrait of a man revisiting his past and confronting his own character, but it was written with all the emotional depth and humanity of a romantic comedy. The result was painfully insincere, uncomfortable, and often boring. In a word, terrible.
I would have stopped watching at that point, but I had paid money to rent the film so I felt obligated to sit through it. The movie basically goes from bad to... equally bad. Bill Murray plays Bill Murray, as usual. We soon meet his (Ethiopian) neighbor Winston, who plays the part of the quirky, cheerful spirit guide character for our hero. Not much more to say about him. With the prompting of his sidekick, Murray grudgingly goes on a journey in search of his past partners and possible progeny. Each of these former girlfriends apparently represents a different stage in his life, from lusty (and lustful) youth, to grim middle age, to the bitterness and decay of aging, and finally to death. After completing his journey Murray returns to where he started, but with newfound perspective. Instead of worrying about some past love, maybe he should settle down with that colorless woman from the start of the film, he thinks... (Things are looking pretty bleak at that point.)
At the end of the film, Murray meets a kid who might be his son and buys him some food. There he delivers some pearls of wisdom, possibly intended to sum up the lesson he's learned from his travels: the past is gone, the future hasn't happened yet, so the present is all you've got. "Are you a Buddhist?" the young philosopher wonderingly asks Murray. (The poor kid -- he should give up philosophy and take up a less mentally challenging pursuit, like screen writing.) Then the kid runs off, there's a momentary, confusing shot of Murray's real-life son driving by, and Murray is left standing at a crossroads to ponder what to do next.
To summarize: this movie was intended to be a thought-provoking portrait of a man revisiting his past and confronting his own character, but it was written with all the emotional depth and humanity of a romantic comedy. The result was painfully insincere, uncomfortable, and often boring. In a word, terrible.