Among group-suicide movies, “A Long Way Down” may prove uniquely inspirational: It’s bound to make audience members want to kill themselves. It might be the only summer movie during which the snack bars will be selling cyanide Kool-Aid.
As directed by France’s Pascal Chaumeil, Nick Hornby’s soulfully woven novel of light and darkness comes across on-screen as merely the world’s most contrived feature-length sitcom. Four strangers (Pierce Brosnan, Toni Collette, Imogen Poots, Aaron Paul) meet on a London rooftop on New Year’s Eve, each having decided to jump off the same building at the same moment.
With far too little attention paid to why despairing people would suddenly turn into a support group for each other, the group agrees to put off a reckoning until Valentine’s Day, go on a vacation to Tenerife and cook up a silly story for the tabloids about how their minds were changed by an angel who looked like Matt Damon. (Yet, a key plot point turns on one character’s hurt feelings about giving an inadvertent interview to the press.)
Old pro Collette, a Hornby veteran (from the film “About a Boy”), provides the only solid footing for the film, in a sequence in which we see what her home life is like, while she cares for a severely disabled son. Her pain is easy to share, as is her sense that her son’s life would be much the same in an institution.
The others simply don’t give good reasons, with Brosnan especially unable to register anything more than mild annoyance at having been prosecuted for sex with a minor. He’s an actor whose face writes checks his skills can’t cash.
As for Britain’s doll-faced, Disney Princess-eyed Poots, in her fourth film of the year, she is rising up the list of the world’s most insufferable actresses faster than a high-rise jumper approaches the sidewalk. Her radioactive cuteness, complete with head feints, childish intonations and simpering morning-television smiles, is not only at odds with the character’s supposed deep sorrows but actually makes you wish she would put herself out of our misery.