The Subtle Art Of Not Giving A F*ck Film Review
★★★☆☆
Self-help guru Mark Manson explores society’s obsession with happiness, revealing his counterintuitive method to living your best life.
When a book of any kind sells nearly ten million copies you can bet a film adaptation isn’t far behind. It took them far longer than expected — the wildly popular self-help sensation was first published way back in 2016 — but Mark Manson is finally here to remind you that you’re going to die real soon.
Manson’s stark philosophy has never been more pertinent. It’s 2023, and we’re all a little fucked up, with well-intentioned generational initiatives breeding unhappiness, resentment, and entitlement that’s led to our current “sweat the small stuff” malaise.
From personal experience, Manson’s book proved revelatory, a much-needed hard dose of reality that successfully snapped me out of my rut. It wasn’t an immediate fix (nothing is), and such brutal truths are likely to be met with passionate resistance from those still hooked into nonsense like obsessing over which selfie to post on Instagram.
The book is fantastic, but the film lacks the same kind of disruptive potency. Its presentation is disappointing, footage mostly featuring Manson sitting (presumably) in his trendy industrial-chic living room, interspersed with clips ripped from social media trending pages. Dramatic recreations of Mark’s childhood come with that icky Hallmark quality, and then there’s a load of metaphorical visuals that look as if they were just farmed out to the lowest bidder on Fiverr.
It all looks a bit cheap and ultimately distracts from the all-important messages the film is trying to convey. To use another self-help buzz phrase, it’s getting in its own way.
Readers of the book will likely enjoy this as a refresher, a way to augment lessons taken from the original text. I know I did.
But I’m not sure how it’ll benefit those stumbling across this for the first time. Who is this Mark guy? Why should they care? Why isn’t someone like Chris Pine delivering this much-need sermo…
…oh sorry, phone just pinged.
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