Oh, it is, indeed, a comedy, and a drama. I thought about the reviews here that said this film was miscategorized and I think I know the problem. Everybody on the planet has behavioral health issues. Some of us just have them to such a degree that denial and hiding are no longer possible. The options then are: commit suicide, be a pathetic loser for the rest of your life or face that person in the mirror, learn to love her, forgive him for being human and imperfect and then take a deep breath and live life. All this somber talk about so-called mental illness, how tragic the film is and how damaged and limited these people are? That is just a smoke screen: pretending you are better than someone whose behavioral health challenges are more obvious -- often temporarily, I must add -- does not bely the fact that all of us have stuff, whether we pretend we do not or just admit it and go on. This is a FUNNY MOVIE! Ok, it over generalizes about clean freak behavior and other stuff. Heck, for all we know, everybody in that support group DID have compulsions about cleaning! It is possible. That is knit picking. Mark is not a pathetic bum who makes excuses not to participate in his own life. He has burned himself out, trying SO HARD to mask symptoms of a neurological disorder, feeling guilty and responsible for something that was never his fault, trying to deny there ever was a problem. Even when he loses everything: when everybody in his life hands him black, plastic trash bags with his stuff in them, he is STILL trying to cover up his challenges! That is a lot more exhausting than just embracing the degrees of madness we all possess, forgiving it, celebrating our creativity in living with it and learning to run along the seashore. It is a sweet and honest movie, with much attention to composition, musical score, props, costumes and atmosphere/mood. Fact is, we are ALL strange, under our masks. And is that not the funniest thing of all?
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