My guess is that it was trying to be artsy. What it achieved was a mind-numbing boredom. Ben Affleck played his part with so little emotion, or motion for that matter, that it could have been played by a mannequin. Both of the women he was with were beautiful and wanted very much to love him and be loved, but he was too busy doing nothing whatsoever. My guess is that the movie was supposed to be a portrayal of the characters emotional response to things without showing us the things they were responding to. It didn't work. Oh, and there was a Catholic priest who wandered in and out of the movie with no connection to the other characters except that they occasionally showed up at his church. The priest uttered random Catholic maxims in Spanish.