After reading through many of the comments so far on this film I think that a few of them missed the point entirely. This is an easy film to sit back and think of it on a level that "this is what I would do and what I would think and they are not going by that so they must be wrong". The problem with this is that person on the screen isnt you and what they are doing (if they were real) makes perfect sense to them.
* possible spoilers *
The jumps in time make perfect sense if you grasp them fast enough and they point out many aspects of Hurt's character. He is to absorbed by his work to even notice that time goes by and as someone else has said here I wonder if he even realized himself that all that time had gone by. He was a strange man, a very, very strange man and he acted like that so I do not see why some critics here have held him up to what they would have acted like. It is not a movie that could be made in these days because it would be considered to slow.
It is not a perfect film but one worth watching for the questions that will be rattling about your brain for days afterwords.
A fun note here: Check for a very young John Larroquette during the film where they are looking at some x-rays.
* possible spoilers *
The jumps in time make perfect sense if you grasp them fast enough and they point out many aspects of Hurt's character. He is to absorbed by his work to even notice that time goes by and as someone else has said here I wonder if he even realized himself that all that time had gone by. He was a strange man, a very, very strange man and he acted like that so I do not see why some critics here have held him up to what they would have acted like. It is not a movie that could be made in these days because it would be considered to slow.
It is not a perfect film but one worth watching for the questions that will be rattling about your brain for days afterwords.
A fun note here: Check for a very young John Larroquette during the film where they are looking at some x-rays.