Review of Picking Up the Pieces (2000) by Kelly W — 19 Feb 2009

A really strange, surreal comedy from Alfonso Arau that has one of the few performances from Woody Allen that exists outside of material that he wrote and/or directed. It's easy to see why he chose to be in this movie since it deals with themes of religion, death, and the afterlife in a humorous way, and a lot of the dialogue Allen delivers almost feels like it was written specifically for him.

The film is full of memorable characters, including a whore-mongering priest with a heart of gold played by David Schwimmer, a psychotic Texas state trooper played by Kiefer Sutherland, and a violent bug-eyed nun played by an almost unrecognizable Fran Drescher.

The themes and ideas in this movie are in a constant state of war with each other, making this movie as thematically chaotic as the town it takes place in, but that seems to be the point at the end. The movie is deeply flawed, as the motivations for the actions of Allen's character during the final act don't much sense and a lot of the execution feels a bit half-baked and poorly thought out.

However, at the end of the day this movie is pretty much what it set out to be, which is a surreal, absurd flick that giggles hysterically in the face of things that Woody Allen seems to laugh nervously at in his films, and I enjoyed it for what it was.