Parents' Guide to Full Frontal

FULL FRONTAL is less a story than a series of moments, variations on the themes rather than a narrative. Digital and analog images alternate as we go into and out of a movie within a movie, even a movie within a movie within a movie, performed by actors playing actors. Several different stories overlap and intersect. Alice (Catherine Keener) is unhappily married to writer Carl (David Hyde Pierce). Alice's sister, Linda (Mary McCormack), is flirting online with Brian (Rainn Wilson), Carl's co-author. Linda is having an affair with Calvin (Blair Underwood), an actor who is currently playing the part of an actor named Nicholas who is playing the part of a sidekick to a detective played by Brad Pitt (playing himself). In his movie, Nicholas becomes romantically involved with a journalist named Catherine (Julia Roberts), who works at the same magazine that Carl works for in what sort of passes for real life in Full Frontal. Then it starts to get confusing. Themes and images flicker through several levels. In the end, just as one set of fictions are abandoned in favor of reality, a fiction at a deeper level is revealed.