Entertainment

The Trouble With Bliss

Striving mightily to be the indie equivalent of a wacky sitcom, “The Trouble With Bliss” fails to draw much humor from farcical situations.

Michael C. Hall plays Morris Bliss, an unemployed Manhattan slacker and dreamer whose chief accomplishment is to be well-read. Also, he carefully places pushpins on a map to indicate places to which he’d like to travel. He lives with his crusty father (Peter Fonda).

Naturally, the ladies can’t keep their hands off him. There is a coquettish 18-year-old student (Brie Larson) who practically jumps him in a record store, and a married neighbor (Lucy Liu) who flirts with him in the vestibule.

Bliss can’t believe things are happening to him, and neither will you, especially when his teenage girlfriend’s dad (Brad William Henke), who doesn’t know about the pair’s relationship, sees him on the street and strikes up a quick friendship with him because the two were once classmates.

A quality cast is wasted amid dismally unfunny scenes. The flustered Bliss spends scene after scene cringing and trying to keep his worlds from colliding. Not only does it seem unlikely that such a nonentity should inspire so much sexy mischief, but he isn’t interesting enough to bother caring about anyway.