Weekly Review -- Fractured reflections

Spread (2009) -- The misadventures of the young, the trendy and the beautiful are always great fodder for romantic and dramatic cinema, giving us insight into lives that are often mirrors of pain merely waiting to smash against reality. This David Mackenzie offering is a peek into one of such lives, peppering the glossy surface with healthy doses of irony and reproach. Nikki (Ashton Kutcher) is a womanizing hipster, well versed in the politics of seduction and charming his way into his conquests' bank accounts. His current flame is Samantha (Anne Heche), a successful lawyer who, unlike most of Nikki's other sugar mamas, wants more out of the fickle affair. While Nikki fails to comprehend this disruption of the arrangement, he meets Heather (Margareta Levieva), a waitress who seems to be his wisecracking match and who makes him reconsider his lifestyle... Although Spread does a great job demystifying many a young'un's illusions and delusions of glamour in the City of Angels, its problem is its lack of interesting turns of events. Yes, we know that Nikki is, for all intents and purposes, a loser. Yes, we are hopeful that the women who fawn over him have at least one ounce of self-respect, and yes, we are aware that his way of life cannot last forever. The movie keeps bringing up the same points over and over again, without much development. The characters do not boast any redeeming qualities, what with the movie being an equal opportunity sexist piece. One can occasionally feel a glimmer of sympathy toward Nikki -- one of the 30,000 dreamers that arrive in Hollywood every month, as he puts it -- for getting lost in a utopian fantasy, but a glimmer would be the extent of that sentiment. However, Kutcher injects the aimless gigolo with plenty of self-deprecation, the kind of dryness that attempts in vain not to appear jaded, and it is his performance that makes the film watchable. Heche is pretty pale as a femme fatale, though she does have good moments of subtle emotional gravity, and Levieva brings casual charm to a positively bewildering character, one that appears unfinished as the movie comes to a close. Spread does have its own perspective on its protagonist's lifestyle, a stance confirmed in the film's unique final scene, but it is mostly too distracted by this lifestyle's fictional trappings to pay attention to its own story.

5/10