Riffing on autobiographical elements, writer-director Mark Webber fashions a fiction about a young actor named Mark who’s struggling to raise a two-year-old (played by Webber’s real-life son, Isaac) on his own in Los Angeles. Widowed, unemployed and overwhelmed by paternal responsibilities, the filmmaker’s avatar careens between prematurely propositioning a cute single mom (the enormously appealing Shannyn Sossamon) and alienating his Hollywood friends. It’s a kind of self-portrait made out of quotidian meals, naps and scattershot car-seat conversations, and though the loss that underlies Mark’s emotional state feels like a scripted conceit, The End of Love excels at conveying the moment-to-moment frustrations and exhilarations of being a dad.
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