The Vanishing of Sidney Hall is a 2018 mystery drama about a young writer who finds accidental success and unexpected love at an early age, then disappears without a trace.
There’s a certain sort of hook that I find inherent in films about writers, be it their miseries with writer’s block or inner demons or characters they write who somehow come to life … or even obsessed fans who decide to kidnap and hobble them. This is partially the reason I was feeling somewhat forgiving of the opening moments in Shawn Christensen‘s latest slow drama The Vanishing of Sidney Hall, a film that puts in overtime to be exhaustively heavy, yet is rife with emotional burdens and over saturated with melodrama.
As a teenager, Sidney Hall (Logan Lerman) is well ahead of his fellow students, at least creatively, weighted by a sense of drama that would seem far heavier than a person his age would be shouldering already. His direct and very adult approach while reading class essays earn snickers from classmates and harsh eyes from teachers. Still, he draws the interest of slightly left of center girl-next-door Melody (Elle Fanning) and an old friend now hallway bully Brett (Blake Jenner) who shares with him a secret. Urged by his English teacher, Duane (Yahya Abdul-Mateen II), to write his thoughts into a book, Sidney churns out an epic treatise on teenagedom called “Suburban Tragedy,” a novel that not only gets published, it climbs its way to the top of the New York Times Bestsellers list, staying there for an astonishing eight months, considered for a Pulitzer Prize. Needless to say, it changes everything, eventually, several years later, sending the phenom into hiding, leading a mysterious unnamed man known only as ‘The Seeker’ (Kyle Chandler) to find him.
Cut into three parts, The Vanishing Sidney Hall divides Sidey’s life into flash forward and flashback sections, beginning at 18 where we witness a young man living on the outskirts of his peers, his gift for observation and prose catapulting him into a stratosphere as his voice speaks for an entire generation. At twenty-four, he is a gold mine for his agent (Nathan Lane), his books keeping him on tour, and then igniting a romance with young Alexandra (Margaret Qualley), the cracks beginning to show. And at thirty, he is all but destitute, running from demons, homeless and looking to shrink from the world. All of this would be okay if it weren’t for the filmmaker’s appetite for saccharin subplots and genre clichés, lagging this two hour movie into a slog of contrivances that fail to feel authentic. Issues with drugs, conflicts with his mother (Michelle Monaghan), and a mystery involving a video cassette leave Hall a curious mess, but ultimately very hard to get behind. He clearly has issues but the film refuses to tackle them with any semblance of maturity, though he is not alone in this mishandling. There are others damaged in the wake of trauma that are presented with kid gloves, failing to earn any investment. Yes, Christensen paints with vivid colors yet the image is far too layered and off-putting to draw any meaning from it.
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All of this leads the older Sidney Hall to commit acts of vandalism at local bookstores and libraries, which gives The Seeker reason to show up, his ultimate identity one that will surely further divide audiences, though admittedly, this is the film’s only real sense of mystery. The larger problems perhaps lie with the otherwise talented young cast, with Lerman, who’s done terrific work in films like The Perks of Being a Wallflower and Fury, and Fanning, who was very good in last year’s The Beguiled, both unable to pull off the aging of their characters and the general weightiness of their years, despite good efforts. Add that to the movie’s general misshapen convection of great tragedies and few highly questionable motivations that feel especially out of place in today’s climate, and this becomes a pass with no second thoughts.