Earlier today I came across an old DVD of Brian Koppelman and David Levien‘s Solitary Man (’10), a Michael Douglas drama about an immature, self-absorbed sexaholic who betrays and disappoints women he ostensibly cares for.
For nearly 25 years Douglas specialized in playing men who, in David Thomson‘s words, were “weak, culpable, morally indolent, compromised, and greedy for illicit sensation without losing that basic probity or potential for ethical character that we require of a hero.”
Douglas’s last role of this kind was Liberace in Steven Soderbergh‘s Behind The Candelabra (’13).
What threw me this afternoon was the fact that I couldn’t (and still can’t) recall a single damn thing about Solitary Man…nothing. Not a scene, not a line.
I’m fairly certain I caught it at the 2009 Toronto Film Festival in Toronto, and if not there then certainly at a Manhattan all-media screening a few months later. I can almost always recall something. I can’t figure it.
Please name any film released within the last 15 or 20 years that you’re dead certain you saw and yet your mind is a blank.