Paula Patton Joins Indie Drama DISCONNECT

Actress Paula Patton landed a breakthrough role with her performance in Precious and now she’s hopped onto another indie drama with Henry Alex Rubin’s Disconnect.  Deadline reports that Patton will join Alexander Skarsgard, Andrea Riseborough, Frank Grillo, Michael Nyqvist, Colin Ford, and Jason Bateman in the Andrew Stern-scripted drama.  The plot revolves around “disparate lives that intertwine as the digital technologies intended to bring people closer together push families further apart.”  I hope the movie is 90 minutes of a parent telling their child, “No cell phones at the dinner table.”

Hit the jump for more details on the film and why I’m dreading it despite the strong cast.  Patton will next be seen in theaters this December in Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol.

Here’s what we reported last month about some of the actors and their characters:

Skarsgard is in line to play a former Marine who is emotionally cut off from his wife, causing him to seek out an affair. Grillo will play a single father trying to protect his child from the dangers of the interwebs with Ford playing his son who deals with emotional pain by talking to another troubled teen online under the pretense of being a teen girl. Nyqvist plays a man who Skarsgard and his wife suspect of taking their identity (Skarsgard apparently gets screwed double by the net), and Riseborough is eyeing the role of a TV reporter who seeks out a story about a young man who poses nude online when she becomes frustrated with her job.

There’s no word yet on who Patton and Bateman will play, but as I said in my 360 review, anthology films rarely work.  They may share a central theme, but there’s never enough time to develop any character or plotline.  Disconnect has even more of a problem because it looks like it’s a morality tale and the only thing worse than an anthology movie is a preachy anthology movie.  I loved Rubin’s previous film, Murderball, but Disconnect has me all kinds of wary.