Movie Review: 'Three Birthdays' is an Early Worst of 2025 Candidate

Three Birthdays

Directed by Jane Weinstock

Written by Jane Weinstock, Nevin Schreiner

Starring Josh Radnor, Annie Parisse, Nuala Cleary

Release Date January 24th, 2025

Published January 22nd, 2025

Three Birthdays is utterly insufferable. The film is about a group of whiny characters creating their own problems by failing to communicate with each other for their own selfish, manipulative, and moronic reasons. The film is set in Ohio, in 1970, and uses the rise of campus violence and protests against the Vietnam war, as a backdrop for a story about progressive-liberal characters who fail spectacularly in their vain attempts to live up the ideals they claim to believe in.

The structure of the story takes us through three singular days in the lives of a family that includes daughter Bobbie (Nuala Cleary), dad, Rob (Josh Radnor), and mom, Kate (Annie Parisse). Each day the movie focuses on is a birthday for one of our main characters, beginning with Bobbie. On this day, Bobbie has decided to lose her virginity but not before she writes treacly poetry about it that would make a real 15 year old girl cringe. The movie seems to find her attempt to find a rhyme for virginity quite amusing but it doesn’t translate to being actually amusing.

Bobbie joins her parents for breakfast and further cringe unfolds as she refers to Rob as Daddy. I don’t know at what point a kid should move on from using the word ‘Daddy’ but hearing it from a 22 year old actress playing 15 years old, makes it sound super gross. It is deeply, disturbingly, unconvincing as the trait of an actual teenager. Will Bobbie go through with her plan to lose her virginity? Yes, it will have little to no dramatic impact. Instead, the sex at a hotel with her boyfriend is just a device to set up a hack cliche in which she finds out that her mom is having an affair.

The clumsiness of this derivative plot device is laughable. The movie could not telegraph the ‘revelation’ any more if the movie had paused and had a character break the fourth wall to explain it to us. Ah, but there is a twist to this affair. You see, dear reader, Bobbie’s mom is a super-feminist college professor who is duped by her forward thinking feminism into believing that an open marriage is the true feminist ideal. That the plot will punish her into reconsidering this is another damning element of this abrasively insufferable deconstruction of hippie philosophy.

Next we go to Rob’s birthday. Rob is fully aware that his wife, Kate, is having an affair. He even knows who the affair is with. He too is a forward thinking progressive college professor on the tenure track teaching about the sociology of protest and the Black Panthers and whatnot, 'I'm a hippie-free love-stop-the-war, man.' But, shock of shock, it’s all a lie. Secretly, Rob is super-jealous of Kate having a lover. And, shock of shock, when Rob finds out that an actual Black Panther turned college professor has received the tenured position in his department over him, he becomes an aggrieved white man who has had everything taken from him simply for being a white guy.

Yeah, that’s the plot. And it includes a scene where star Josh Radnor passive aggressively masturbates in front of his wife as a way to stick it to her for cheating on him. Never mind that he was also cheating and, unlike his wife, he was lying about it. Yeah, when we get to Kate’s birthday, she meets her husband’s lover, one of his former students, who tells her that they were together even before she’d suggested their ‘open marriage’ concept. So, he’s truly a hypocrite in every sense and yet, the movie is so poorly constructed that it plays like we’re supposed to have sympathy for him. What???? No!

And then the ending arrives and this already insufferable movie has the temerity to try and add the real life Kent State tragedy to this dreary, insufferable, have I mentioned that the movie is insufferable, melodrama. One of our characters is at the protest and gets shot. It’s a truly mind blowing twist that I am sure is intended to make these characters realize how trivial their problems are in the face of a real life tragedy. Yeah, Kent State happened so we should simply excuse how awful these people are. That's the thesis statement of Three Birthdays.

And what truly stinks about this is that actress Nuala Cleary actually comes into her own in these moments. She’s genuinely moving in the final act, bringing genuine emotion to this gross and treacly plot device. I can say the same for Annie Parisse as well but, my goodness, Josh Radnor is awful. He's awful from start to finish. His performance is not helped by a screenplay that casts him as a faux-liberal who gets exposed as a selfish hypocrite, but Radnor does himself no favors by leaning into all of Rob’s worst qualities. He’s whiny and passive-aggressive, and never comes off like a real human being. He’s a collection of character traits, all of them terrible, all intended to show a progressive-liberal as a fake ally, pouting about society conspiring against him as a white male. And we're supposed to sympathize with him?????

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