Thomas Middleditch in Entanglement.
How miserable are things for Ben Layten, an out-of-work recent divorcee? He can't even kill himself correctly. A botched suicide sets in motion Entanglement, a so-so but charming enough story concerning the connections that bind, define and sometimes confound us. Thomas Middleditch (who is much less herky-jerky here than he is in his Verizon commercials or the HBO series Silicon Valley) is the psychiatrist-seeing down-and-outer. Examining the collage of his life in order to determine why and where it all went wrong, he searches for the woman who was once almost his adopted sister. He believes he finds her, in the form of a sparky blonde (played by Jess Weixler) who encourages him to do the things only screenwriters believe adults would ever do (like breaking into the community swimming pool at night). Entanglement suffers from an unsureness in tone, somewhere between quirky and sombre. "I thought it was whimiscal," the confused protagonist says at one point. He was wrong, and the film doesn't quite nail it either.
Entanglement opens Feb. 9 across Canada.