Missed this the first time around. I saw the flick a few months ago, toward the end of its theatrical run.
I was bored to death. It wasn’t too subtle for me, but rather the opposite: The character development was completely by-the-numbers. I felt the entire time as if someone were sitting next to me, bonking me on the head and going, “Get it? This is a good movie! You can tell because they talk about wine! Get it? And he wrote a book! And we can tell the book’s not very good from the way he talks about it, even though he thinks it IS good! GET IT?” And so on.
Imagine sitting through about 1,000 “character-driven” films simultaneously superimposed on one movie screen. “Oh, here comes the part with the big conflict… Here comes the sensitive part with the sad music… Here comes the part where he’s feeling really upset and he opens that special bottle of wine he talked about earlier…”
They even had it raining during the sad scene at the end. That’s about the level of directorial invention that prevailed throughout.
As I left the theater, I remember thinking to myself, “I’ve seen too many movies.”