REVIEW: Dane Cook Is the Most Sympathetic Presence in Answers to Nothing, Which Tells You a Lot
Movies with multiple intersecting storylines aren't exclusive to Los Angeles, but it's a city for which they seem ideally suited, perhaps because it's one in which incidental contact with the lives of strangers is less common and therefore more weighted with meaning. (Or maybe it's just that L.A. has such an abundance of screenwriters sitting in coffee shops projecting potential narratives on passers-by.) Out of disparate threads we're meant to draw common themes or emotional resonances, from Crash's "everyone's a little bit racist" to Magnolia's ideas about loneliness and coming to terms with the past. Answers to Nothing, written and directed by Matthew Leutwyler (Dead & Breakfast), follows a group of linked lost souls navigating personal obstacles against the backdrop of a missing neighborhood girl, as they all come to discover that it's OK to be an awful person, as long as you don't tell anyone about it.
