Yesterday, Arclight Films released The Mysteries of Pittsburgh on DVD. The movie, based on Michael Chabon's first novel, hit selected markets a year ago, though as far as I know it never played Portland. It disappeared quietly. You probably didn't hear about it.

This was because it is not a very good movie.

The novel is about a young man, Art, and the summer he spends suspended in hesitation about whether he should embark on the career path his gangster father has chosen for him. Art makes new friends, gets a girlfriend and then a boyfriend, fights with his father, gets into trouble. It's the type of book that makes you feel like you should be drinking or fucking or, hell, going for a jog, doing something, but you don't—you keep reading.

The restless, stifled quality of the novel is nowhere to be found in the film, which simultaneously slight and florid, like a Merchant Ivory adaptation of a Bret Easton Ellis novel. The movie centers on a young man in Pittsburgh with a gangster dad, but otherwise the plot is barely recognizable—significantly, and irritatingly, the book's gay character has been axed, and Art's sexuality, a significant source of confusion in the book, has been reduced here to one baffling encounter with the boyfriend of the girl he's in love with. (The boyfriend is played by Peter Sarsgaard, so at least it's hot.) Sienna Miller plays the love interest, which is somewhat in keeping with the source material—given that she looks like a gay man's interpretation of what a straight man might find attractive—but the geometric shape that's formed by the orientation of these three characters is too lopsided and diffident to strictly be described as a "triangle." Things happen in this movie, but with no particular urgency; it's hard to pinpoint any relationship between one event and the next. So: Skip it. Reread the book.