* * *
A rich, strange, tonally adventurous portrait of one man’s unraveling in the face of grief and hardship. To call it melancholy would be generous; some will find it simply too depressing to bear. But if you had to file it in the DVD store of your mind, it might have to go in Comedy, for this is comedy in the Chekovian sense, about the bleak absurdity of life, and how we in turn must be absurd to live. The fact that the protagonist is a policeman only adds to the texture: we’re used to seeing cops as their profession, not as human beings who weep at their lot. Officer Jim Arnaud, played by Jim Cummings, who also wrote and directed the film, weeps a lot at his lot; I daresay a male lead character has never burst into tears so many times in one film, with the possible exception of Jason Segel’s character Peter in Being Sarah Marshall. Arnaud has reason to weep; his mother has just died, his wife left him a year ago, and he may lose custody of his daughter. All of this is causing him to melt down, to lose it, and that’s the spine of the film. It’s a portrait of a man in crisis, and it is so original, so unformulaic, and so bold in its tonal shifts, you are honestly fearful that anything might happen. That’s good stuff, the stuff of dramatic suspense, but the journey can be tough going, if only because Cummings has drawn Arnaud’s pain so well. There is nothing to do with this movie but damn it with praise.