Bumping along from suburban satire to drama to noir, the 2011 Sundance leftover “The Details” cancels itself out by being too campy to take seriously and too tragic to laugh at.
Tobey Maguire, whose limitations as an actor are becoming more apparent, plays a sexually frustrated Seattle OB-GYN with a porn fetish, and he harbors an equal dislike for the raccoons who keep destroying his lawn and the wacky New Age cat lady (Laura Linney) who threatens to call the city to report his unauthorized home-improvement project. Unable to connect with his wife (Elizabeth Banks), he hooks up with both the oddball Linney character and a married college friend (Kerry Washington), while a basketball buddy (Dennis Haysbert) fights a life-threatening kidney disease.
Huh? Exactly. From the opening moments, it becomes clear that writer-director Jacob Aaron Estes has created the Maguire figure as a mere type. As he obsesses over his raccoons and his X-rated Web sites, we’re meant to laugh and sneer. So as the movie goes on and begins to echo “American Beauty” and “Crimes and Misdemeanors,” its efforts to establish the doctor as a thoughtful, compassionate human come too late. As if to underscore the problem with Maguire, Linney gives an absurdly campy performance while Haysbert delivers a sincere and touching one. They don’t belong in the same movie, unless it’s an incoherent one.