Review: 'Six Degrees of Separation' is too close to being deadly dull

Six Degrees of Separation    R         

            Fred Schepici's adaptation of the John Guare hit Broadway play, 'Six Degrees of Separation' is not a fair telling of the episodic adventures of six people who encounter tale of a man claiming to the son of Sydney Poitierre, a famous black actor from long ago. (Only baby boomers or current college students taking film and media would even know who Poittierre was). Also in the story there is a supposed murder. The movie has an Oscar caliber cast, including Anthony Hall, Will Smith, JJ Abrams, and more, and that may be its only saving grace as a film. However, the relentless pretense that places the six people in a room for 2 hours discussing the class system of New York vicariously through Smith's story, is just boring if you're not a wealthy aristocrat playwright! Come on! Guare likely didn't intend for this to take place in a room for the whole film. He intended it to go out to the places in the play. He just only had a stage to work with. Spawned several reviews by critics fawning over it to the point that the director probably needed a restraining order! Ha. Sure it was the best of 1993, but that year was lackluster for hits of any kind. Surprisingly, it didn't get the Oscar. It use is that kind of movie, long, pretentious, boring, drawn out with dialogue about a contrived idea wherein people are interconnected by only a few degrees. Nobody stopped to think that it doesn't make sense. (Oddly enough, the Academy ignored it, and it seems right up their alley)? Dated because only 7 years later, the Internet would connect people instantly by less than four degrees. A recent university study in 2008, fifteen years later, suggested that indeed there are six degrees of separation, in a given scenario involving the 2004 spin off drinking game, Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon. The study included a test group and a focus group connected via the Web. This however doesn't make it a good movie. It's an okay movie. It is basically My Dinner With Six Guests, (a New York version of My Dinner with Andre perhaps). If you're into that kind of thing, and long to be an aristocratic director making plays about talking, then it probably gave you two hours of unending orgasmic joy. All it did for everyone else was give them reason to watch it just once, headaches, uneasiness, an excuse to hit the fridge, or perhaps to use the loo, and never go back for a second helping. Perhaps it's to be avoided unless you like torturing yourself.   

     Review by Adam Browne