Dan Among Den

The film centers on four characters: Dan (Jude Law), Alice (Natalie Portman), Larry (Clive Owens), and Anna (Julia Roberts). In fact, the others characters in the film are trivialities, typically limited to single lines.

Dan is the debatable protagonist in the film in that we focus more on him than the others, but not by much. There's also various attempts to make him the sympathetic character, but he's not someone you'd want to date. He starts off in an uneven relationship with Alice where he holds most of the power, and then he has an on-and-off affair with Anna. Eventually, he unceremoniously dumps Alice, and then goes back to her when things don't work out. He lies and cheats with only a meandering sense of guilt, i.e. "oh, yeah, I'm a bad person for doing this...", and yet he can't forgive anyone who would do the same to him.

Anna is a bit less garbage but not much. She starts in with Dan when she knows he's living with Alice, and she keeps this up while dating Larry. She even marries Larry while secretly sleeping with Dan, and eventually, she leaves Larry to be with him. And then, of course, Dan shows off his tarnished character, so she goes back to Larry.

Larry carries less of the blame for all of this in that he just fell in love with Anna only to be dumped and then reclaimed by her. However, he's an incredibly spiteful man who seems to to be at his best when intentionally inflicting emotional pain on others. He had even tried to sleep with Alice to have revenge on Dan, and even after she refused, he told Dan that he had, in fact, done so, just because he knew it would mess up their relationship. "I was going to lie to you about it," he said, "but I hate you too much for that courtesy."

Alice is the closest thing we get to an innocent party. An ex-stripper/waitress, she serves as the source material for Dan's failed novel, and she gives Dan up for Anna without a fight. Then going back to stripping, she refuses to be Larry's "revenge fuck". She even takes Dan back and prepares to wisk him away on a surprise vacation, but then she grows tired of his endless needling about what had happened with Larry that she lies and says that she did have sex with him. It all goes to hell at that point, and she smartly walks away, leaving Dan behind. But then, in the final irony, we discover that she's been lying to everyone for years about who she really is, even using an assumed name the entire time.

About the only redeeming thing in all this was Natalie Portman's performance. She plays a character much closer to Matilda (Leon/The Professional) than Padme (Lucas' self-love trilogy), enough to most assuredly break her out of any damsel-in-distress typecasting. Plus, she looks damn fine in a thong.

Overall: one flaming bag of dog-shit.