Between Can You Ever Forgive Me and JT Leroy, literary con-artists are a popular subject in Hollywood right now. However, those films at least were about the pulling off of the hoax…not lending credence to the fabrication itself. Such is the unusual case of the adaptation of A Million Little Pieces, a “memoir” that it’s author James Frey admitted in 2006 was a whole lot of bullshit.
Mark Romanek began working on the film in 2006, boosted by the Oprah Book Club pick’s best-seller status. It would’ve been a huge project, too, if not for Frey appearing on The Oprah Winfrey Show that same year and admitting the whole thing was a lie. The story he told was not his own, but a literary forgery. The novel has been marketed as semi-fiction ever since, and the film adaptation was shelved for understandable reasons.
For some reason we now have that adaptation, anyway, only it’s directed by Fifty Shades of Grey’s Sam Taylor-Johnson and starring her husband, Aaron Taylor-Johnson. They collaborated on the script, as well, the first time they’ve ever done that, so clearly they feel something for the bogus story of Frey’s rehabilitation from drug and alcohol abuse. A pretty good supporting cast must agree with them, too, as Billy Bob Thornton, Odessa Young, Giovanni Ribisi, Juliette Lewis, Charlie Hunnam, Dash Mihok, Charles Parnell, Ryan Hurst, David Dastmalchian, and Tom Amandes co-star with Atticus Ross on the music.
SYNOPSIS:
An alcoholic and a drug addict, 23 year-old James has two options: treatment or death. After waking up on a plane with a smashed up face and no memory of the past few weeks, he heads to rehab where he discovers much more than detox and therapy. As James endures the white-knuckle journey of mending his broken body, he heals his broken soul by connecting with other kindred spirits who also yearn and fight for a better life.
This doesn’t look like a bad movie by any means, it’s just strange that it exists. A Million Little Pieces opens December 6th, prime Oscar bait season, so somebody has high expectations.
