Director: Stuart Blumberg
Talent: Mark Ruffalo, Gwyneth Paltrow, Tim Robbins, Josh Gad
Release Date: 4th October 2013
Ostensibly a human drama about sex addiction, Stuart Blumberg’s directorial debut concerns itself with an ensemble of New Yorkers twelve-stepping their way towards recovery. Some can boast lengthy sobriety and its attendant wisdom, like the patriarchal Mike (Tim Robbins); some struggle to reconcile their commitment with budding romance, like Adam (Mark Ruffalo); while some seem unwilling to address the damaging behaviours causing real problems in their lives, like Neil (Josh Gad). It is the character of Neil who is most fascinating: he is an overweight young doctor who gropes women on the subway and covertly films up the skirts of his co-workers. These behaviours are symptoms both of a psychosexual disorder as well as of a misogynistic culture that normalises sexual assault and fetishises the non-consent of women, but Blumberg’s film conceives of them only as the former. In this manner, its attempts to aestheticise the anxieties and temptations of its sex-addicted characters are extremely problematic: Neil sweats profusely while walking down a busy street populated by chaotic close-ups of women’s breasts and bottoms, but is this fragmentation, and objectification, of the female body not fundamental to the language of our very cinema? Mike observes early on that sex addiction is a unique beast to conquer in that it’s ‘like quitting crack when the pipe is attached to your body.’ Thanks for Sharing bears the logic of the addict in much the same way, unable to determine where its (or our) social normality ends and illness begins.
