the mysteries of pittsburgh

As thrilled as I was to see Sienna Miller back on the silver screen since her stunning performance in Factory Girl, director Rawson Marshall Thurber's (Dodgeball) film version of Michael Chabon's debut novel, The Mysteries of Pittsburgh, left me dissatisfied. with its overuse of coming-of-age clichés.

The film is set in Pittsburgh in the early 1980's, and college has just ended for Art Bechstein (Jon Foster), son of an infamous gangster. It is his last summer before he enters the real world, and unsure of his plans, Art consigns himself to a dead-end job at the Book Barn where he simultaneously sentences himself to a dead-end relationship with his sex-crazed manager, Phlox (Mena Suvari). One night at a party, however, he is introduced to Jane Bellwether (Miller), a wealthy wild-child who, along with an unstable boyfriend, Cleveland (Peter Sarsgaard), takes a striking interest in this cautious intellectual. For reasons that are never made clear to the audience, the self-destructive couple take Art under their wing of revelry where his eyes are opened to the world of sex, drugs and "love," a word that harbors about as much meaning to these Pittsburgh natives as it does on Tila Tequila.

The ultimate problem with Pittsburgh is Thurber's tendency to race his characters through the revealing moments he should savor and indulge in episodes of unwarranted intimacy and gore. He reduces Chabon's love triangle to one big, hormonal mess. Thurber should either stick to dipping, ducking and dodging or look into curling. We hear its all the rage in Finland.