The Tracey Fragments

Self-indulgent and relentlessly unpleasant, The Tracey Fragments follows a rebellious 15-year-old (Ellen Page’s Tracey Berkowitz) as she fights with a succession of authority figures and eventually embarks on a search for her missing younger brother. It’s not the premise or the performances that sink The Tracey Fragments; rather, it’s director Bruce McDonald’s inexplicable decision to break up the screen into tiny little windows for the duration of the film’s far-too-long running time. The end result feels more like an art-gallery installation than a movie (or, worse yet, a film-school experiment gone horribly wrong), and there’s ultimately exceedingly little here that actually works. Even if one were able to overlook the egregiously in-your-face visuals, Maureen Medved’s meandering, remarkably pointless screenplay would surely frustrate even the most avant-garde viewer (ie the whole thing is so pretentious that even the word pretentious doesn’t really do it justice). Only the casting of noted cinematic weirdo Julian Richings as a British (and female!) psychiatrist prevents The Tracey Fragments from sinking into complete awfulness, though it’s still awfully difficult to imagine anybody walking away from the movie satisfied.

* out of ****