The film pushes itself beyond shrill predictability in its willingness to indict the public and familial histories at its core.
This isn’t a film of bedside conversions or radical emotional transformations, nor is it a story about laughing at one’s own hardships as a coping mechanism.
The film is clearly wary of either being too saccharine or taking itself—or the notion of compulsive infidelity—too seriously, though its schadenfreude is unwavering.
Patrice Leconte struggles to find a coherent rhythm, a problem exacerbated by a hurried running time that compresses some of the novella’s more interesting socio-political nuances.
The film works best when it shows Jonathan Daniel Brown’s drug kingpin at his most inept and incapable, rather than elevating him to a pothead martyr.