A Million Little Pieces

The story behind James Frey’s A Million Little Pieces is a convoluted one. A celebrated work of literary linguistics and language publicly shamed and exposed as embellished fraud rather than the warts-and-all (and-all) memoir it was initially sold as. The kerfuffle surrounding it is a crying shame as the book is a masterwork and a vitally important comment on addiction and recovery. Commissioning a film is interesting for a number of reasons. Clearly, Sam and Aaron Taylor-Johnson wanted to challenge themselves and put a great piece of writing on the big screen, no harm there. Bringing Frey in as executive producer again makes sense but brings with it an inevitable backlash. Not acknowledging any of the surrounding controversy gives the whole project a cynical air which it can’t quite shake. What we’re left with is a very functional and watered down depiction of the text. We keep none of the verbal gymnastics but Taylor-Johnson instead embellishes the film with some stunning cinematography. She does her utmost to bestow the film with the pain of a broken soul and the turmoil of the psyche with some of the more hallucinatory sequences doing a good job, particularly the opening which shows the incident that led to Frey going into recovery. Aaron Taylor-Johnson finds a perfect balance between pain, ambivalence and likability and is helped by a strong cast all round, although Charlie Hunnam and Juliette Lewis are underused. It’s a difficult book to depict on screen but not many of the big story beats are left out including the dentist trip from hell and the brilliant ending. It’s another interesting example of an ‘unfilmable’ text getting the inevitable filmic treatment. It doesn’t succeed as well as previous examples but does a competent enough job that would have benefited from more of Frey’s visceral language in the script. Enjoyable and worthy but inessential and leaving a slightly cynical taste in the mouth given its surroundings. 3 stars ***