Two narratives diverged on the Brooklyn Bridge

Uncertainty

Crit

In principle, this is invigoratingly adventurous filmmaking. In practice, it's hard not to wonder which of the many ambiguities are just sloppiness.

We begin in media ponti, where Bobby (the always excellent Joseph Gordon-Levitt) and Kate (the less so Lynn Collins) face a Big Decision. Having said that he's fine with either choice (and thus, crucially, establishing it as an A/B proposition), Bobby tosses a coin. They look at the result and go tearing off in opposite directions, and, as it turns out, into distinct (and, formally if not literally, mutually exclusively) stories, one set in Manhattan, the other in Brooklyn and Queens--but both characters are in each, and their relationship is the same.

But what is the choice? Well, in the Long Island story (Green--an ingenious and useful color coding helps the viewer always know immediately which story he's in), the answer is simple: abortion or baby? And the Green narrative follows an arc we've seen often, and one, moreover, that most of us are familiar with in life, secondhand if not first-.

But in the Manhattan story (Yellow), I'm not really sure. Is it what to do with the Trio they find in a cab at the start? That's certainly the question that occupies them, and the possibilities are potentially rewarding but also life-threatening. But that's not a coin-toss A/B proposition, not by a long shot. Moreover, it doesn't lend itself to the calm contemplation of the opening scene, as the pregnancy issue does. So is it the same pregnancy question in Manhattan, and the risks and rewards of the found Trio simply a fantastic approach to answering it?

Seems doubtful, for aside from there never being any direct mention of it, as there eventually are in Green, there's a lot of action-movie-ish running and jumping that you would think would elicit a nod to her delicate condition if her condition were delicate. So how the hell does that story work, vis-à-vis the more real-life-conventional one?

Not that that question necessarily has to be answered. But in a film that seems to be implying a well-wrought if somewhat warped symmetry--an A/B coin flip--you can't help but wonder whether you're just too dim to get it. And there's another major asymmetry of setting at the end that seems just wrong as well.

An interesting film, and clearly a thought-provoking one, but I have a sneaking suspicion there's less to it than meets the eye.