Thanks For Sharing Review

Director: Stuart Blumberg 

Starring: Mark Ruffalo, Tim Robbins, Gwyneth Paltrow, Josh Gad, Alecia Moore, Joely Richardson. 

Running Time: 110 minutes 

Certificate: 15 

Synopsis: A group of sex addicts, with varying degrees of control over their condition, undergo a 12-step treatment to help get their lives back on track.

Offering something of a lighter alternative to Steve McQueen’s grimy depiction of sex addiction in the absorbing SHAME, THANKS FOR SHARING goes about tackling the subject matter in two rather distinct, but quite imbalanced ways, supplementing the drama with cutesy comedy.

Directed by first-time filmmaker Stuart Blumberg – whose previous work includes scripting the slapdash romantic comedy, THE GIRL NEXT DOOR and Lisa Cholodenko’s superb artificial insemination dramedy, THE KIDS ARE ALL RIGHT – the film has a particularly adroit and wholly believable stance depicting a contemporary society governed by the taken mantra that sex sells, especially within the hub of cultural metropolis that is New York City. The film plays on the harsh reality that the predator-like disease that is sex addiction exists amongst the everyday, and it goes about exploring its numerous setbacks and ramifications through the highs and lows of its three main protagonists.

Mark Ruffalo plays eco-aware businessman Adam, a recovering sex addict whose five years of sobriety have been facilitated by harsh regimentation; no sex, no masturbation, no TV, no laptop, just a continuous desire to get clean and save the planet. He attends an addicts group with his mentor Mike (Tim Robbins), himself a man repenting for an assortment of dark, violent compulsions through meditation, being a devoted husband and helping his troubled disciples on the road to sobriety. Adam himself plays mentor to Neil (Josh Gad) a slobbish doctor whose compulsions for engorging on food and sex are having shattering repercussions on his personal and professional life.

Donning a narratively convenient structure, Blumberg’s screenplay contrives the trials and tribulations of each of the three portions so that they neatly comingle, with each contemporaneously reaching damning crescendos and wistful nadirs respectively. Adam, encouraged to reach out to the opposite sex (with due caution), begins dating Phoebe (Gwyneth Paltrow), a breast cancer survivor; Mike is forced to question his son’s reformation upon his return to the familial fold; and Neil begins altering his destructive ways by befriending fellow sexual pariah Dede (Alecia ‘Pink’ Moore). What follows are three intermingling arcs that wallow in stark truths and occasionally atonal melodrama.

Where SHAME explored the damaging anxieties that ensnared Michael Fassbender’s haunted sex enthusiast on a deeply introspective level, THANKS FOR SHARING has a far more mainstream and agreeable outward sheen that, on an objective level at least, allows larger audiences a more identifiable product. However, despite inevitable lapses into murky and uncomfortable territories, Blumberg (who co-wrote the screenplay with Matt Winston) blunts many of the narrative and thematic strings that reside, untouched, beneath the formula – namely the clear decision to depict addiction as a disease that is both, in some cases, hereditary and universally endured.

Mike’s apparently ex-junkie son (played by Cameron Crowe alumni Patrick Fugit) and Paltrow’s Phoebe, who is lumbered with an unexplored eating disorder, appear extraneous simply because they have no room to breathe, stifled as they are by the three awkwardly pieced together sections. As a film about the suppression of obsession, THANKS FOR SHARING exceeds in conjuring emotiveness through strong characterisation, but does so at the risk of over-stressing its not-so-subtle adherence to safeguarding a prerequisite for easy answers and happy endings, where everyone gets by with a little help from their friends.

 THANKS FOR SHARING opens in the UK this Friday 4th October.