Review of 52 Tuesdays (2014) by Mark D — 04 May 2014

With an innovative film style to its name and some complicated but interesting subject matter, 52 Tuesdays sounded like a film certainly worth the viewing.

Unfortunately, 52 Tuesdays was certainly not a good film in my opinion, and it was largely problematic for the reason it is iconic.

The style of the film has it shot the way the title suggests, each Tuesday every week for a year. Unfortunately, in an effort to fit 52 separate vignettes into a running time of 109 minutes, 52 Tuesdays ends up filled with a series of scenes which vary in entertainment value as well as in length and pacing. Some come and go in a matter of seconds while others stay around for several minutes, and the lack of consistency makes it easy to be worn down by it all. The first half of the film especially is very dull because among other flaws, the story just jumps past the eyes of viewers with a series of excessively fast sequences which don't take a second to harness the drama of the situation or explain everything that is happening in general or in the minds of the characters to viewers. I walked away from 52 Tuesdays confused because of the fact that Matthew Cormack and Sophie Hyde attempted to fit way too much into the film without giving it sufficient time and intelligent thought to truly explore everything that it was presenting. 52 Tuesdays is really an overly ambitious film which repeatedly cries out the words "I am a different kind of film" but audiences are not too likely to shout out "this is a good type of different cinema". The style of the film is ambitious but faulty and doesn't give the film a consistently strong narrative path.

The narrative in 52 Tuesdays has a very high concept since few films really deal with the transgender theme, and none that I have ever seen before have honestly faced the journey from one gender to another. Unfortunately, while attempting to deal with the character James as he transitions into the gender he identifies with, the story gets interrupted by a surplus of characters and each of their own individual dramatics they face which becomes too much to take in especially as it is only ever dealt with through the aforementioned brief vignettes, and the final product is unsatisfying. Although the relationship between Billie and James is interesting, Billie's own life is full of too many characters who are thinly sketched but are jam packed with a few too many plot dynamics for their own good. 52 Tuesdays doesn't keep its eyes on the ball and ends up going all over the place, deviating from its central theme and attempting to incorporate it in with the story of a girl who is coming of age and facing confusions of sexuality and other problems, but it attempts to incorporate way too much and does not follow a consistent path which leaves it thoroughly unsatisfying. There is no better way to describe 52 Tuesdays than to say it is overwhelming and weighed down by an excess of ambition as well as the fact that the pacing is all over the place. 52 Tuesdays simply has too much to fit into its running time especially due to its plot structure, and it is problematic for many other reasons as well. But the main one is simply the fact that as a viewing experience, 52 Tuesdays is not enjoyable and has too much to take in which leaves me wondering if I should bother trying to figure it all out. Try as I might I couldn't and I still don't understand one particular plot dynamic which involves Billie's relationship with Jasmine, so I can't say that I found 52 Tuesdays to deal with all the themes it came up with well enough when it could have stayed focused on the transgender theme of which it did not do.

And the script really does not carry the heft that it wants to. From very early on in the film until the end, I found that the dialogue in 52 Tuesdays was cringe worthy. The language in 52 Tuesdays is clearly not real because the actors have to force it from their mouths. And despite the actors doing it well enough, they cannot disguise the weakness in the language. Nothing in 52 Tuesdays feels organic due to the script and it makes everything feel way to forced and therefore less natural in its attempt to honestly deal with its subject matter. It seems like 52 Tuesdays attempts to use a lot of plot dynamics to overshadow shortcomings in the quality of the dialogue, but it simply does not work and it made the film hard for me to tolerate. None of the characters were really all that good and most of them were either stereotypical or annoying, so keeping my interest was one thing that 52 Tuesdays simply could not do.

The only aspect of the film that I found half decent was the cast.

Despite being faced with a very repetitive character and the most weak lines in the script, Tilda Cobham-Hervey manages to make her character Billie seem mostly realistic. It is hard to play a character so artificial and annoying, and even harder to play one that faces the kind of life changing experiences that Billie does, but under some inexperienced direction and script writing, Tilda Cobham-Hervey manages to do a decent job. She is at least a memorable presence in 52 Tuesdays.

And Del Herbert-Jane manages to do a terrific job playing the transgender man that the film chronicles. She shares a complicated chemistry with Tilda Cobham-Hervey and really changes her identity to a male one well which is impressive as it is challenging work. Del Herbert-Jane gives the greatest performance of the film in 52 Tuesdays, and she takes on the subject matter really well with natural dedicated acting spirit.

Mario Spate, Beau Travis Williams, Imogen Archer and Sam Althuizen also give firm supporting performances.

But despite a decent cast, 52 Tuesdays is too ambitious for its own good and clutters its story with an excess of subplots and a lack of sufficient screenwriting which ends up leaving the film to collapse under its own weak plot structure.