What can I say about this movie? It's really hard to describe how I feel about it. The sound 'ein' comes to mind. Or maybe a shrug of the shoulders. I really didn't care about it. I'm not saying that it was a bad movie so much as is wasn't amazingly good either. It was average. Very, very, average.
Inventing stars Joaquin Phoenix (yes, brother to River) who is the narrator of the film. He talks about his past and the relationship his family had with the Abbotts, a prosperous family in Hayley, (some state I can't remember), and how this relationship affected him and his brother, Jacey (Billy Crudup). The Abbott girls, Alice, Elanor (Jennifer Connelly [labyrinth]) and Pamela (Liv Tyler [Empire Records, That thing you do]), are pretty much one sided characters. Alice in the oldest, Elanor the middle child and Pamela the youngest. All three, well, end up in the 'arms' of Jaycee.
Joaquin's character is Doug, who is in love with Pamela, who can't seem to make up her mind about anything. This is pretty much the theme of the movie.
The plot is long, and stretched and drawn out, and it dwells on the wrong things for too long. Things that should be looked at more, or at least given equal time, seem to be slapped in for filler. Doug's character is the only one with depth, it seems, and the others are one sided, flat characters who work on one or two general emotions throughout the movie. Crudup works on switching between angry and incredibly horny, Connelly sticks with horniness, Tyler (who is a great actress when in a decent role) alternates between crying, looking uncomfortable, and pouting. Kathy Baker (picket fences) who plays Doug and Jacey's mother, is a character than has depth somewhere, if only the plot allowed her time to show it. Other than that, she looked worried, and motherly, and altogether too calm for her own good.
Although I liked Doug and Pamela, I really didn't like Jacey, or the other two Abbott sisters. I could not bring myself to feel sympathy for anyone, including Doug and Pam. Had the movie been about 45 minutes shorter, I might've been able to conjure some up, I think. By the end of it all I was convinced that had life actually been "a cafeteria," as Tyler's character says, this movie would have been the mystery meat.