Third Person
Paul Haggis and the Cost of Divided Attention
Paul Haggis’s Third Person is a film frequently dismissed as confused or overreaching, when in fact it is deliberately exacting. Set across Paris, Rome, and New York, the film presents three storylines that appear, at first, only loosely connected. Yet Third Person is not a network drama searching for clever intersections. It is a moral triptych: the same initiating failure replayed three times, followed by three different attempts at survival, meaning, and redemption.
The failure itself is deceptively small. An adult steps away for a moment. Attention fractures. A child is left vulnerable. What follows cannot be undone. What the film examines is not the act itself, but what people do afterward.
Paris: The Writer, the Lover, and the Call
In Paris, Michael Leary (Liam Neeson) is a celebrated novelist living apart from his wife, Elaine (Kim Basinger), and involved in an intense but uneven relationship with Anna Barr (Olivia Wilde). Michael offers closeness without transparency. Anna senses the imbalance but initially accepts it, believing she understands the nature of loving a writer.
The source of Michael’s emotional restraint is revealed gradually. Years earlier, his young son, Robby, drowned in a swimming pool after Michael stepped away to take a phone call. The child had asked for his attention moments before. Michael returned too late.
Michael does not confront this guilt directly. Instead, he converts it into writing. He is shown working on a manuscript—still under review by Elaine—while also keeping a private journal. Haggis is careful to distinguish between the two: the manuscript is shaped, edited, mediated; the journal is raw and confessional.
Anna’s own history deepens the moral stakes. The film reveals that she has been engaged in an incestuous sexual relationship with her father. This is not metaphor or implication. Anna meets him in Paris, calls him “Daddy,” and has sex with him. The trauma is presented as lived experience, not psychological shorthand, and it explains her guardedness and her longing for a connection chosen freely rather than imposed by origin.
Anna ultimately breaks from her father and chooses Michael, believing she is placing trust where it will finally be honored. It is not.
In the final Paris sequence, Michael is on the phone with Elaine, who asks him directly, “Did you write about her father?” Michael replies, “No. She read my journal.” At the same moment, Anna is outside a bookstore, browsing the racks placed along the exterior. A clerk hands her a thin, leather-bound volume—something that looks far more like a private journal than a commercial novel. Anna flips through it briefly. Recognition is immediate.
What Anna understands is devastating. Michael has published her most intimate trauma without fictional protection and without warning her. Worse, she understands her proximity to the original catastrophe: she was the call—or part of the same moral space—that distracted Michael when his son drowned.
As Anna walks past Michael, without addressing him directly, she says quietly, “Watch me.”These were the last words Robby spoke before drowning. It is not accusation. It is judgment. Michael hears, at last, what he once ignored.
Rome: The Father, the Swindle, and Chosen Penance
In Rome, Scott Lowry (Adrien Brody), an American businessman, becomes entangled with Monika (Moran Atias), a Romani woman claiming her daughter has been kidnapped and that ransom money is required. Scott gives her money, protection, and emotional investment as the story increasingly appears to be a con.
The Rome storyline functions as displacement. It eventually becomes clear that Scott did have a daughter. She drowned after he stepped away to take a business call. She was not in the pool when he left, but she was dead when he returned.
The swindle thus takes on a different meaning. The film allows for the possibility that Scott understands, at some level, what is happening. What matters is not whether Monika’s story is true, but that it gives Scott a way to act, to give, to suffer. The ransom narrative offers him a form of penance—chosen suffering that substitutes for confession.
Rome ritualizes guilt. Scott does not name his failure; he endures it indirectly. It is a path toward healing that remains morally incomplete, but psychologically necessary.
New York: The Mother, the Margin, and the Moment She Looked Away
The New York storyline follows Julia Weiss (Mila Kunis), a former actress now living at the edge of solvency, fighting to regain custody of her young son from her ex-husband, Rick (James Franco). Julia cleans hotel rooms for a living. She struggles to afford food. She runs out of minutes on her phone. Her life is defined by exhaustion, isolation, and quiet humiliation.
Initially, Julia frames herself as the victim of an unforgiving system and an obsessive former partner. Rick’s rigidity feels punitive. The audience is encouraged to share her sense of injustice.
Her confession arrives late and without polish. Julia admits that her son had been playing “ghost,” placing plastic bags over his head. She knew it was happening. Yet her admission is halting and defensive. She explains that she was alone. That he was a child—everywhere at once, difficult to monitor constantly. Her words trail off: “The next thing I knew…”
The implication is unmistakable. Julia, like Michael and Scott, looked away for a moment. Not maliciously. Not deliberately. Just long enough.
The child survived, but narrowly. The damage remains.
Unlike the men in Paris and Rome, Julia does not convert guilt into art or ritual. She speaks it aloud. The confession does not absolve her or restore custody. It simply ends the lie.
Intent, Consequence, and Imperfect Redemption
As writer and director, Paul Haggis is less interested in narrative mechanics than in moral repetition. Each storyline hinges on the same initiating lapse of attention, followed by three divergent responses:
- Paris aestheticizes guilt
- Rome ritualizes it
- New York finally names it
Haggis trusts the viewer to assemble this symmetry without overt guidance, a choice that explains both the film’s ambition and its divisive reception. Third Person demands sustained attention from its audience, the very quality its characters fail to give their children.
The film ultimately closes not on Rome or New York, but on Michael. He wins a Pulitzer Prize. He achieves the recognition his craft promised. Yet he stands alone, having traded intimacy for articulation and confession for publication. Success cannot compensate for what has been broken.
The film’s final assertion is quieter and more exacting: being present is not the same as paying attention. When attention falters at the wrong instant, no explanation, no ritual, and no act of confession can fully undo what follows. Yet Third Person does not deny redemption altogether. It suggests instead that redemption, if it comes, arrives imperfectly—through art that cannot heal completely, through sacrifice that avoids truth, or through confession that names the fault without erasing its cost.
In Haggis’s moral universe, redemption is not absolution. It is the willingness to live honestly in the aftermath of irreversible harm.
Olivia Wilde (Anna Barr)
Adrien Brody (Scott Lowry)
Mila Kunis (Julia Weiss)
James Franco (Rick Weiss)
Kim Basinger (Elaine Leary)
Moran Atias (Monika)
No comments:
Post a Comment