Squeezing a Short Cuts-sized tale into an American Beautyuniverse, this adaptation of an A.M. Homes short-story collection features too many characters engaging in too many peculiar activities in too rapid a succession to work. At times, watching it feels like tuning into the second season of a cable series that's too intriguing to turn off, and too deep into its own universe to make sense to the uninitiated. The third film from director Rose Troche, The Safety Of Objects is certainly ambitious: It follows the lives of more than a dozen characters who share a patch of a New York suburb, and whose lives intersect at unexpected junctures, most of which can be traced back to Joshua Jackson, who lies comatose in mother Glenn Close's house. Nearby, lonely Patricia Clarkson tends to her troubled children, lawyer Dermot Mulroney has given up practicing law, his son develops a sexual attachment to a Barbie-like doll (voiced by Troche's Go Fish writing partner Guinevere Turner), and the unhappily married Mary Kay Place suffers the spurned advances of hunky pool cleaner Timothy Olyphant. It's a lot to handle, and Troche brings out every trick in the book for the task, as flashbacks give way to weird optical dissolves, parallel editing, and voiceovers, all before the film hits the 20-minute mark. Troche leans on stylistic gimmicks when her film desperately needs a consistent point of view; it echoes the black comedy of Happiness one moment, and goes for the death-comes-to-the-suburbs bleakness of One True Thing the next. Essentially, it's a mess, albeit one too well acted and too obviously well intentioned to write off wholesale. The stories neither cohere in their own right nor benefit from overlapping, and the film leaks momentum as its tales lurch toward one arbitrary finale after another. Adolescent doll fetishists, on the other hand, should be delighted to finally score some on-screen representation.