Butler's Cinema Scene

Sam Waterston, Kristin Stewart

“ANESTHESIA” My rating: B-

90 minutes | MPAA rating: R

Like the Oscar-winning “Crash,” Tim Blake Nelson’s “Anesthesia” delivers a handful of well-known performers in a series of interlocking stories built around a theme.

That theme, as close as I can tell, is about the anesthetizing elements of modern urban life, which tends to isolate us and numb us to our feelings and those of our fellow man.

The film begins with a brutal mugging. In the lobby of a Manhattan apartment building a white-haired man (Sam Waterston) is stabbed, robbed and left for dead. From that traumatic introduction the film then flashes back in time to reveal the victim’s recent past as well as the lives of others involved in the incident.

Waterston plays Walter, an NYU philosophy professor who, only as he nears retirement, realizes how little he actually knows. “I used to believe in nothing,” Walter says. “Now I believe in everything.”

One of the things he believes in is offering a helping hand to students like Sophie (Kristen Stewart), a bright young woman who nevertheless is addicted to burning her own flesh with a hot curling iron.  Only then does she really feel anything.

Tim Blake Nelson

Outside the city middle-aged mom Sarah (Gretchen Moll) rails against the emptiness of both her bland suburb and her marriage. Her husband Sam (Corey Stoll), phones every now and then to announce he’s still on a foreign business trip, though Sarah can hear NYC police sirens in the background.

Attorney Jeffrey (Michael K. Williams) must drag his heroin-addicted friend Joe (K.Todd Freeman) kicking and screaming to yet another stint in rehab.

Then there’s Walter’s son (writer/director Nelson) and his family, who are all going through a cancer scare.  Not to mention Walter’s wife Marcia (Glenn Close).

There’s nothing terribly wrong about “Anesthesia.” It’s certainly watchable, technically proficient, and a couple of the performances are exemplary.

But there are too many characters, too many coincidences, to lift the film above being a sort of illustrated philosophy lesson. We may want to spend more time with one or two of these individuals, really get to know them, but instead we’re yanked away for another display of narrative synchronicity.

| Robert W. Butler