Glimpse Inside The Mind Of Charles Swan III, A

Director Roman Coppola and stars Charlie Sheen and Jason Schwartzman grew up amongst Hollywood royalty so I guess, that yes, reality in the sense of most people’s lives means little to them.  The trouble with this film that they have made about themselves (more or less) is that their lives also means very little to most people.  

Sheen plays a variant of his infamous (well, at the time) bad boy persona as Charles Swan III, a hotshot graphic designer who is devastated that his girlfriend, Ivana (Katheryn Winnick) has just left him and the film is (more or a less) an account of his feverish attempts to get over her/win her back.

Coppola has worked to good effect as a writer with Wes Anderson on Moonrise Kingdom and Darjeeling Limited and here he tries to bend Anderson’s pop-inflected whimsy to his own purpose (although the title suggests more Charlie Kaufman) but the result is underwhelming.  We watch the grab-bag of tricks as off-beat characters do off-beat things sometimes in fantasy segments (Bill Murray steps up to the plate attired as The Duke) but we don’t really care probably because Sheen who is almost permanently behind a pair of shades almost never emerges as a protagonist of interest.  There is a kind of self-congratulatory ending in which the director (I assume) appears, but unfortunately the film is not as satirically witty or even as entertaining as this apparently is intended to suggest

Coppola shares his father’s taste for neon-coloured, 70s Art Deco-ish production design (seen most extensively in One From The Heart but the production design here is supplied not by Dean Tavoularis  but by Elliot Hostetter.  It is in many ways the most striking thing about the film but at the same time it is also terribly kitsch.

A Glimpse Inside the Mind of Charles Swan III isn’t exactly bad but it’s like watching someone’s home movie. It simply doesn’t mean as much to us as it does to them.

FYI:  Charles Swan is the name of Marcel Proust's central character in "Remembrance of Things Past".

 

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