“The Mysteries of Pittsburgh” arrives on DVD next week as seriously damaged goods.
Shot in 2006 and screened at the Sundance Film Festival last year, the picture received mostly withering reviews and was barely released in this country.
The trade papers Variety and The Hollywood Reporter liked the movie, but if you look at the Rotten Tomatoes Web site, “Mysteries” gets a pitiful 14 percent rating and the reviews there include words like “stillborn” and “clumsy.”
Earlier this year, the picture had a kiss-of-death booking at that downtown Manhattan direct-to-video graveyard — the Sunshine Theater — no doubt to fulfill a DVD contract that insisted ”Mysteries” be theatrically released somewhere.
In last month’s Vogue, leading lady Sienna Miller semi-trashed the film as something she wouldn’t do now — she was depressed at the time, she explained to her interviewer, and wanted to get away from the “media intrusion” of her life as a New York City and London fashion plate.
Through all of this, I found it hard to believe that a film version of Michael Chabon’s fine debut novel, starring Sienna Miller, Jon Foster, Peter Sarsgaard and Nick Nolte, could be as bad as most of the reviewers suggested.
I popped an advance screener into the DVD player last week and expected to hit the “off” button ten or fifteen minutes in.
My first surprise was the beauty of the cinematography and the other strong production values of this 1980s era coming-of-age tale about recent college graduate Art Bechstein (Foster) who spends a summer in Pittsburgh working in a menial job, pondering the next stage of his life. Dad (Nolte) is a gangster who only comes through town once in a while to take Art out to a fancy catch-up dinner.
Miller and Sarsgaard play a troubled but very charismatic couple who become Art’s friends for the summer. The young man finds himself drawn to both friends and he acts on the sexual attraction (the casual bisexuality of the Chabon story might be one of the things that turned some early moviegoers off — it’s an unusual development in an otherwise fairly standard summer-I-became-a-man remembrance piece).
Rawson Marshall Thurber’s direction seemed solid to me and the three leads are very good. Sienna Miller has had a troubled film career to date, with her best work going largely unseen in flop indies like this one (and the 2006 bomb “Factory Girl” in which she gave a very good performance as the Andy Warhol “superstar” Edie Sedgwick).
Maybe if I had gone out and paid $12.50 to see “The Mysteries of Pittsburgh” last winter I might have felt gyped. But at home on TV it was a perfectly acceptable viewing experience with memorable acting.
