Six Degrees of Separation

Take a funny, touching, complex play that moves at a breakneck pace, filter it through the huge (if often underrated) talents of director Fred Schepisi, and you've got Six Degrees of Separation. Such a rare gift - a film that treats language with infinite respect and ideas with cultivated precision, a film that challenges us to keep up and rewards our efforts with a bittersweet comedy of manners. [24 Dec 1993]

It's got sharp wit and a wise heart, and as good as it was onstage, it's even better as a movie. [22 Dec 1993, p.33]

A resonant moral conundrum tripling as a wry social satire and an armchair mystery, Six Degrees of Separation has been transferred to the screen with intelligence and panache, if some initial disorientation in the jumpy opening sequences. [22 Dec 1993, p.E3]

Six Degrees is the next best thing to a great play; a fantastically clever, verbally scintillating, consistently amusing one. Read full review

Despite some fuzzy thinking in the third act, when it gets hard to see what is on Guare's mind, the result is a thoroughly engaging and pointed film. Read full review

Six Degrees is magical when addressing the preposterous. Like any good storyteller, Paul is deft at knitting eyes with wool. Smith proves himself an extremely charismatic presence, convincing in his sincerity and cunning in conveying his ability as a human sponge. Read full review

Guare's play is austerely funny and cerebral, and the film stays true to it, neither warming it up nor dumbing it down. [22 Dec 1993, p.E1]

Combined with Guare's bountiful writing and Schepisi's ambitious style, Six Degrees of Separation approaches the sublime. [21 Jan 1994, p.G5]

Schepisi, with his camera always moving, has the knack of keeping the viewer as slightly off balance as Guare's story does, and the result is a fascinating motion picture. [21 Jan 1994, p.3F]

Mr. Schepisi's directorial vigor wins out over his film's skittishness. This version may horrify purists, but it winds up working entertainingly on its own broader, flashier terms. Read full review

What seems to start out as a burlesque against the rich -- a satire of class-consciousness -- ends up mutating into something stranger and richer and more ambiguous. [10 Dec 1993, p.F4]

I'm not sure if this is a failing of the play, the actor, the director, or whatever, but it's a nagging perplexity at the center of this story. Yet there's so much else going on here, ideas and lines of thought that it engenders, that it's difficult not to enjoy the experiences. It's also bitingly funny. Read full review

Adapted with unusual faithfulness from John Guare's much-heralded 1990 play, the movie, directed by Fred Schepisi with a screenplay by the playwright, is nothing if not frenetic. And yet it attempts to explore a slew of profound ideas -- about race, social class, art and the whole nature of experience among a very particular and unusually sophisticated segment of contemporary urban American society. [22 Dec 1993, p.48]

Witty, wordy, well-acted satire of contemporary class and race relations, based on John Guare's acclaimed stage play. Read full review

By the end, most moviegoers are liable to see it as much ado about nothing. Read full review

The relationships feel contrived, less a drama than an exercise in cuteness. Read full review

What felt appropriately metaphorical and ruminative on stage becomes somewhat muddled and inane onscreen. The real attraction here is the controlled, charismatic performance by the man formerly known as the Fresh Prince. Read full review

In the end only Channing, reprising her award-winning stage role, manages to inject some authentic feeling into this somewhat mechanical enterprise. Read full review