Here's a film that successfully employs literary methods. Jumping around among points of view, time references and locales; it creates a kind of "god's eye view" of the protagonists' lives that fails in most films that attempt it. The actors do a wonderful job, and the directing is superb. The film shows us the messiness of real life, the incompletions and their ramifications. One of its many intertwined messages seems to be the role of goodness [or maybe just goodwill] that we are all capable of but for no particular reason demonstrate or not to the benefit of others in such a manner that we seldom appreciate the effects. Yes, we are assurred, sex and other satisfactions do seem to make the world interesting, but love, honest and simple, is what makes life worth living. Every generation it seems must re-affirm these basic truths for themselves. It is the stuff of great lit, great art and great films. Go see this movie with the same eyes with which you live life.