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This may play out over the next month as the Congress comes back into session and takes up the budget talks in earnest.

But just when the central characters’ fascinating messiness achieves peak interest, you realize this movie’s earnest commercial shimmer is never going to segue into a denser, darker poetry.

At this point, what started as a throwaway joke has grown into something vaguely earnest — too big to fail and too enmeshed in the neighborhood to be abandoned in good conscience.

A great deal of care — the handmade, digital and location kind — has gone into realizing this earnest, archly amusing tale of a brooding teenage girl bonding with a threatened furry forest creature.

“He’s worked as a satirist; he’s written parodies, political thrillers; he’s moved from a fairly earnest modern style to a very lucid, clear style.”