Third Person announces itself in a messy tangle of people and locations, an unsolved Rubik’s cube of disparate lives waiting for a hand to start turning. There’s a harried woman running late for an appointment in New York. A stereotypical ugly American receiving a secretive envelope in Rome. A shapely woman changing clothes in a cab in Paris. A woman scared to jump in her pool, an artist teaching his son to finger-paint, and, most importantly, a Writer.
We know immediately that the latter is The Writer, because he sits in a dim room in front of a glowing computer screen, cigarette smoke lazily curling out of the ashtray in front of a bottle of booze, while he pops a couple of pills out of a prescription bottle. The setting is the answer to an unspoken challenge to fit as many movie-author stereotypes into one shot as possible.
Writer/director Paul Haggis has traveled similar territory before, in his Oscar-winning Crash, giving us characters based around well-established types, who marginally intersect in service of conveying an Important Lesson. Where the former film takes on racism, Third Person examines love, particularly as it relates to issues of betrayed trust, victimization and what happens when we catastrophically fail those we love and who love us.
There are three main stories at work here: In Paris, that writer, Michael (Liam Neeson), is plugging away with frustration on his new book when his mistress/protégé Anna (Olivia Wilde) comes to visit. In Rome, Sean (Adrien Brody) is a corporate spy who is drawn into a human trafficking/blackmail scheme by the mysterious Monika (Moran Atias). And in New York, a hotel maid (Mila Kunis) accused of attempting to kill her son fights with her artist ex (James Franco) to be able to visit the boy. In all of these barely intersecting stories there are either explicit or hinted references to lost or abused children, who are the catalysts for fractured adult relationships.