THE VANISHING OF SIDNEY HALL: Tricksy Melodrama About a Depressed Novelist Falls Flat

Shawn Christensen won an Oscar in 2013 for his live-action short, Curfew, but has found the transition to making features a tougher proposition. 2014’s Before I Disappear (a longer version of his Academy Award winner) was passable but uneven, receiving mixed reviews, while The Vanishing of Sidney Hall, his follow-up, is ambitious and certainly has its moments, but ultimately underwhelms. It’s also been absolutely savaged by critics.

Downward Spiral

The titular Sidney (Logan Lerman) is a high-school senior propelled to fame and fortune when he writes “Suburban Tragedy”, a massively successful but controversial novel based on terrible events in the life of a classmate. However, his seeming triumph fails to bring our protagonist happiness, jeopardising his relationship with neighbour Melody (Elle Fanning) and sending him on a downward spiral into depression and alcoholism. Christensen tells Sidney’s story at three different points of his life – in high school, as a successful author struggling to remain sane, and, post breakdown, when he wanders the U.S. with only his dog and a large beard for company, storming into libraries and book stores to burn copies of the novel he has come to despise.

It’s a tricksy melodrama and Christensen throws the kitchen sink at trying to keep you both hooked and on the back foot throughout. There are three different timelines, a mysterious red box, a “detective” on Sidney’s trail (Kyle Chandler‘s “The Searcher”), romance and break-up with Melody, and eerie visions of a former high-school frenemy (Blake Jenner‘s Brett). The director hands you a jigsaw puzzle and slowly but surely helps you put it together as he cuts from one period in Sidney’s life to another. He does this effectively, at least for the first half, before you start to realise that maybe the secrets he is giving up aren’t all that fascinating in the first place.

Fogeyish interests

It wouldn’t be so bad if his central characters were more compelling. But Sidney and Melody – especially in the high school timeline – are very much an adult’s idea of what cool, smart kids should be like. Melody’s into Annie Leibovitz, Bob Dylan, and old Atari games, while Sidney has photos of Oscar Wilde and Arthur Rimbaud on his wall. These fogeyish concerns are meant to make the pair seem authentic and real but have the opposite effect. Worse still, it reminded me of the teenagers in Me and Earl and the Dying Girl, and their low-budget “remakes” of classic films (Sockwork Orange, The Rad Shoes), which is never, ever a good thing.

That said, Fanning’s Melody starts off as a typical manic pixie dream girl, before transforming, later in The Vanishing of Sidney Hall, into a darker, more enthralling character as her relationship with Hall wilts on the vine. Her story arc – youthful joie de vivre turned to bitter adulthood – is only partially successful, though, as she is jettisoned in what is perhaps the film’s most unforgivably bleak moment. In fact, it’s one of several very odd storytelling choices Christensen makes, which also include a supposedly redemptive scene towards the end between The Searcher and Sidney that made me roll my eyes so far back into my head I became concerned they might stay there.

Despair and disillusion

I found myself drawn to the background characters more, especially Sidney’s mum and dad, played by Michelle Monaghan (Kiss Kiss Bang Bang) and Darren Pettie (Mad Men). He’s been through some sort of breakdown, she’s a study in despair and disillusion (mirroring Melody and Sidney perhaps). The film lights up like a Christmas tree every time Monaghan turns up, and I was far more intrigued by what had happened to his parents than I was by dull Sidney’s rise and fall. Nathan Lane is similarly and reliably impressive as Hall’s literary agent, Harold, who may only command a smidgeon of screen time but at least gets to deliver The Vanishing of Sidney Hall’s best line, telling his glum client: “It’s like throwing a party for Sylvia Plath.”

There are plot holes, too. The true identity of someone Sidney would have surely recognised immediately is drawn out unnecessarily, so Christensen can have his “ta-dah!” moment, and his lead character’s refusal to report a heinous crime to the police, despite having in his possession a piece of damaged but perhaps salvageable evidence, is utterly baffling. You get the impression things happen because they fit the story the director wants to tell rather than because they make sense.

Storytelling pyrotechnics

What’s most frustrating about The Vanishing of Sidney Hall, though, is that there’s enough here to suggest a better film trying to clamber out from under all the narrative pyrotechnics and plot twists (not that there’s anything necessarily wrong with narrative pyrotechnics and plot twists, you understand, they’re just slathered on rather too thick here). The first half-hour or so, when you’re trying to figure out if the later timelines are flash-forwards to Sidney’s life as an author, or whether they’re happening in the novel he is writing, is nicely judged and made me think of Tom Ford’s chilly, disturbing Nocturnal Animals.

Also effective is the way the director darkens the tone of his movie the further into it we go, Christensen developing his themes of guilt, shame and authorial responsibility (Hall does, after all, get rich writing about an awful tragedy). As he demonstrated in Curfew/Before I Disappear, the director (who co-wrote the screenplay with Jason Dolan) has visual flair to burn and also does a fine job of winding his three time-strands around each other, cutting smartly from one to the other. There’s one terrific transition between scenes, the first ending with Melody telling a friend she intends to marry Sidney, before Christensen jumps forward to the day of their toxic break-up. It’s jarring, but in a good way.

The Vanishing of Sidney Hall certainly lives up to its title. Yes, it concerns the lead character’s physical disappearance as he drops out of society, but also talks about the way in which the real Sidney becomes submerged by the terrible weight of events he carries around on his shoulders. The mental and emotional consequences of profiting from a tragedy involving people he knew turn him into someone barely recognisable from the bright young man we saw at the beginning. This is a story in which the creative process is a curse, a millstone around our protagonist’s neck, and that simple, elegant idea gets a bit lost here. Ultimately, it’s a rather grandiloquent film (not helped by Darren Morze‘s ponderous score) and it really didn’t need to be.

The Vanishing of Sidney Hall: In conclusion

Less than the sum of its parts, Christensen’s sophomore movie contains little that is egregiously awful (although Lerman’s inert performance as Sidney is nothing to write home about), but never quite lives up to the promise of an intriguing first half. It’s ambitious, takes risks, and contains some finely crafted lines (“Life isn’t very interesting unless you’re a bit psychotic”), and yet I’m still not sure I could recommend you give up two hours of your life to see it. There have been some great movies about authors down the years – Capote, Misery, Adaptation, Le Mépris, Iris – but this never comes close to being one of them.

What’s your favourite movie about an author?

The Vanishing of Sidney Hall is in US cinemas now. Check here for international release dates.