A father is in search of a sold out toy for his son’s Christmas present. He is roped, along with an elderly man, to be bystanding witnesses to a police raid of a shady doctor. The doctor’s too-interested neighbor encourages the policemen to steal the doctor’s clothes and belongings. The father tries in vain to get out of this situation, but ends up helping the elderly man when the experience becomes too stressful for him.
A commitment-phobic man tries to visit his girlfriend in Buenos Aires but can only catch a ride with a untalented emcee he meets at a bat mitzvah. The emcee cracks corny jokes and they get lost and run out of gas, and his passenger abandons him, catching a ride with truckers instead.
A doctor spies a beautiful woman and tries to chat her up, but a man in a wheelchair wheedles him into pushing him home, then carrying him up flights of stairs, then changing a lightbulb, and other favors he is not grateful for. The doctor does eventually meet up with the beautiful woman, and they almost have a tryst, but something happens and the doctor cannot confront her again.
There is lots of stuff going on, but the stories meander quite a bit and although some characters cross paths briefly, there really is no connection between the main stories. Each main character does not connect/reconnect how they want, and even the supporting characters have pangs of loneliness on a smaller scale. The theme of loneliness is strong, but the execution I think needs to make the theme more evident. The scenes were mostly filmed in mid-closeness and needed more close-ups of faces to show the emotions the characters were going through, but perhaps this too was to distance the audience from the characters to give us less of a chance to connect with them, therby enhancing the loneliness theme.
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