Six Degrees of Separation

1993
Director: Fred Schepisi
Cast: Donald Sutherland, Stockard Channing and Will Smith

Plot: Flan and Ouisa Kittredge, rich NYC art dealers, are called on one night by a young man, Paul, who professes to be a friend of their kids' from Harvard. They offer him a bed for the night; he enchants them with a home-cooked meal and magnificent conversation. The next morning, they learn that he is not all he seems to be. Their investigations are intriguing and lead them to re-evaluate their lives.

A Movie You Might be Meant to Hate
by C. True

There comes a point when a movie tries for too much and you just don’t enjoy it anymore. Six Degrees of Separation barrels past that point and enters a sometimes comical level of cluttered confusion. The movie begins with a bourgeois Upper East Side couple relaying a story to a group of friends at a wedding. The story is about how the previous night the couple received an unexpected visit from a young man (played by Will Smith) claiming to be friends with their children at school. I think the pretension in this portion of the film is meant to reflect the melodramatic quality of antecdotes in general, and it is nauseating. On purpose or on accident? I think the moviemaker wants you to hate this portion of the film, and as it turns out its important for the big finale. But regardless of the ending, why make a movie that makes your viewers hate it? (It is precisely this sort of film making that makes this a Mean Movie, it is purposely unpleasant to its audience)

The second portion of the movie takes a big turn, as the couple, feeling they were dooped, continue to relay the story with a bit of self-reflective dry humor at their own folly of being conned so easily after just a little name-dropping by their visitor. This part plays out better since we are no longer trying to “get” this overly sensitive contrived relationship between these loathsome characters. And this next portion is genuinely funny. I was surprised to be generally interested in where this story was going, for it obviously wasn’t going anywhere conventional, after really just hating it 30 minutes earlier. But sometime later the story gets a little too enamored with its own originality and complexity and just seems to go off the rails. There are many more plot turns and new characters introduced that really detract from the original story. Every question is answered with its own plodding strange little subplot and the movie feels like it is about 3 hours long with its actual running time being 112 minutes. It makes sense that so many stories within the story might have translated better on the stage, where Six Degrees of Separation was originally conceived and well received. The movie ends with a real sentimental little speech by Stockard Channing, and I really just couldn’t take the movie seriously enough to find the revelation about how we shouldn’t turn experiences into antecdotes compelling at all.

I fluctuate between thinking this is one of the most pretentious movies I've ever seen, and thinking it had a good thing going for it but became to cluttered. Regardless, it is not a conventional movie and I can't say it didn't make me think, though it was usually about why I disliked it so much.