No Thanks For Sharing

Thanks for Sharing is Director Stuart Blumberg’s Hollywood debut. An ensemble film starring Mark Ruffalo, Gwyneth Paltrow, Tim Robbins, and Alecia Moore (better known as Pink) it's pitched as a ‘dramedy’, or drama-comedy to us lay-folks, about sex addiction. However, Thanks for Sharing never quite manages to achieve either the ‘drama’ or the ‘comedy’ aspects successfully enough to combine the two. Some of the most powerful stories are those that manage to offset utter tragedy with just the right level of humour to hammer home the message - Thanks for Sharing is not an example of this. This film is not what you think it is, judging by the poster anyway.

I had a number of issues with this film, but mostly I was bothered by the superficial way in which the impact of addition on other people is almost entirely glossed over. Take, for example, Mike’s (Robbins) long suffering wife (Joely Richardson) and son (Patrick Fugit). In a passing discussion we learn he has given his wife Hepatitis-C and all too briefly we learn that the reason his son has gone off the deep-end is due to being the constant subject of negativity and rage from a father who is a violent drunk. Nor do we know why Phoebe (Paltrow) refuses to date another addict beyond her statement that it’s all too complicated.

In truth, the film doesn't even consider the real impact addiction can have on the addicts themselves. We don’t really know what Adam (Ruffalo) has been through to get to his five years, although we do briefly see how superficial his sobriety is. But it’s not sobriety so much as it is outright exclusion from modern life in many respects. Continuing with the superficiality, we have no real concept of Dede’s (Moore) experience beyond her introductory statement that without 'another way' she’d end up killing herself. Powerful stuff but it is left hanging. This, unfortunately though, is the only way this film can deal with anything that can’t be pointed and laughed at.

And this is where I have a fundamental problem. Worse than the treatment of those characters already described is the lack of acknowledgement that the character of Neil (Josh Gad), a doctor and someone in a position of power and trust is actually a sexual deviant. He has been up on some sort of charges relating to his ‘addiction’ as he is attending group sessions not voluntarily but because a court ordered him to do so. Given that in some American states you can be put on a sexual predator list for having a wee outdoors, I fail to understand how he is allowed back into the ward at all.

It’s also scary to think that the tapes he destroys later in the film are videos he has shot himself. Of what, and of whom is not actually revealed but the path we are led down is a frightening one. Instead, Neil is played as the misunderstood lovable rogue, with no consideration of the impacts on those whom he has violated for his own gratification either on public transport, as patients or as colleagues. And I'm sorry, but he’s not going to go from a chronic up-skirting habit to burning tapes and singing Kum-ba-ya in what, thirty days?

It’s really not clear what the film is trying to achieve with the character of Phoebe. Her obsessions are obviously intended to present a contrast to Adam's, with Phoebe’s presented as eccentric, quirky and a bit weird while Adam’s are apparently beyond his own control. Here’s the thing though, Phoebe’s preoccupation with health, fitness and food appear to be motivated by an actual disease, being cancer, while Adam’s constant referral to his own obsession as a 'disease' presents a degree of self-righteousness and arrogance in the character, almost a sense of my suffering is worse than your suffering, which eventually comes to undermine their relationship.

Competent casting means that there is nothing wrong with the performances. Ruffalo plays his Adam as charming for the most part, until he adopts the victim mentality and we see glimpses of a potential arsehole. Robbins delivers some absolute clangers with conviction, however in an effort to be perpetually Zen his character is one dimensional in situations where you’d think he’d be far more multifaceted. The rest of the cast is equally competent but restrained. On the whole the film and its characters suffer from this idea that the middle classes cannot be anything other than one emotion, all of the time, and plays this as being normal.

And thoroughly middle class this film is. Even Pink’s ‘alternative’ character has a day job in a hipster hair salon. It deals with none of the underlying causes of addiction, nor does it look into the consequences of addiction in any meaningful way. But then how could a dramedy, really? All you need to know is that middle class life is hard.

Thanks for Sharing is in cinemas October 3.

-Stevie O'C