The Upper West Side is the perfect spot for the strivings of Eros and Thanatos to be poetically unraveled. On Wall Street, such strivings would be torn asunder; in the suburbs they’d be glossed over, and everywhere else, there’d be jokes. Direct and intelligent earnestness is the hallmark of those who must articulate their struggle with life's meaning, and they do so with sincere, sometimes charming, aplomb in Tim Blake Nelson’s ensemble film, Anesthesia.

While the threat of death looms inconsolably dark for some, it’s a seductive promise to others. Walter (Sam Waterson), a soon-to-be retired Columbia University philosophy professor, is perhaps the cheeriest of the lot of mostly dissatisfied souls caught up in their own erotic strivings. Walter is also the crux of what’s-to-come, someone wonderfully alit with fresh hope, perhaps from having examined his life closely and finding an intoxicating clue to happiness. We have his adoring/adored wife (Glenn Close). We have their Eeyore-ish son (played by Tim Blake Nelson) who is married to a shrewish wife confronting some (possibly) life-changing bad news, which they must break to their coming-of-age, weed-smoking kids. We have a philandering husband, his alcoholic wife, and his botanist mistress. We have a crack addict and his best friend, an attorney who wants to get him sober. We have the professor’s self-destructive star student (a marvelous standout performance by Kristen Stewart). Each of these characters are driven by unspeakable longing.

The movie itself seems to drown at times in its own strivings, as with each story, it yearns to teach us something important about the pain and futility of modern life, the way Walter does during his philosophy classes. While the network of characters do collide effectively in the film, during the unraveling there are too many details which detract from the main point. What is the main point, anyway? We have the how’s and why’s leading the characters to the dramatic juncture of the film. The characters are for the most part, engaging, and you care about them as they’re caught during their most vulnerable moments. However, their stories represent dissatisfaction in forms we’re already far too familiar with. Further, the would-be resolutions, at least the transformations/realizations that occur during this very short time span (the film seems to takes place within a 24 hour to three day period) are dramatically too neat and pat for the complexity of struggles that undoubtedly took years to bear fruit… the fact that each of these characters is somehow transformed by a twist of fate, is summed up in a way that feels staged.

Finally, one key story remains untold. Mr. Nelson unveils the lives of nearly everyone even remotely connected to Walter on this fateful day. An important character that crosses paths with Walter has a story we never see. This feels like a huge oversight in a movie longing to understand the enterprise of being or not being… particularly anyone who might hold the fate of such wishes in his own hands.