On paper, Love Liza seems like it would be a sure thing come Oscar time.  The Academy has recently fallen all over itself to acknowledge a bunch of first-time feature-film directors (see Todd Field, Spike Jonze, Sam Mendes, Kenneth Lonergan, Stephen Daldry, etc.) like Todd Louiso, and Gordy Hoffman's script, which won the Waldo Salt Screenwriting Award at this year's Sundance Film Festival, follows in the massive footsteps of Memento and You Can Count on Me, which both went on to receive multiple Oscar nominations.  The film's star – the incredibly talented Philip Seymour Hoffman – usually appears in critically lauded ensemble pictures, but the closer he gets to being a leading man, the more he's praised (Flawless won him a Golden Satellite Award and a Screen Actors Guild nomination).

In practice, Liza seems like anything but an Oscar contender...which is not a knock against the quality of the film.  It's dark.  No; make that very dark.  It offers little background about its protagonist.  There is no character arc.  Its ending is ambiguous. It's about suicide.  It's about mourning.  It's about addiction.  And it's about huffing gas fumes. Hoffman, (Red Dragon), who once again channels Daniel Clowes' mouthbreathing loser Dan Pussey, plays Wilson Joel, a web designer whose wife Liza recently offed herself with what we can only assume was little or no warning.  We see Wilson stumbling through what used to be his life and trying to avoid everyone intent on helping him (each offers support but has ulterior motives that aren't initially clear).  We see him sleeping on the floor or in his car, because he can't bear to use the bed, and, like Wilson, we can practically feel the hairs on our neck stand up when he discovers Liza's suicide letter while reaching for a pillow because the kitchen floor is just too damn hard.

After an attack of inappropriate laughter at work, Wilson is sent on a mandatory vacation, which leads him into the wacky world of radio-controlled cars, boats and planes.  And why not?  The guy down at the gas station is starting to get suspicious about Wilson buying one gallon of gas at a time, but the people at the hobby shop will sell him as much Tetra-5 as he needs ("Do you smell gas?" almost becomes a recurring joke as everyone who visits Wilson at Chez Joel crinkles up their nose, trying to place the odor).  In the meantime, while on the run from his mother-in-law (Kathy Bates, Dragonfly), an amorous coworker (Sarah Koskoff) and his past, Wilson befriends the weasel-like Denny (Jack Kehler, Men in Black 2), forming an unlikely R/C-based friendship.

If you replace the gas huffing with booze or drug addiction, Liza would probably be a much more accessible film (like, say, Leaving Las Vegas), which I think is a disturbing commentary on how society accepts alcoholism and pill-popping as just another part of the American experience. Hoffman, whose older brother Gordy wrote the award-winning script (read our interview with him here), one-ups Nic Cage's Ben Sanderson performance-wise, which is impressive enough, but he also has to carry this entire film on his back.  There's no Elisabeth Shue-type sidekick here as he huffs himself into next week.  Jim O'Rourke provides an appropriately erratic score, while Louiso's (he's best known as the guy who wasn't John Cusack or Jack Black in High Fidelity) direction is fairly low-key and unobtrusive, allowing Hoffman to work his magic.

1:33 –

for drug use, language and brief nudity