Critical and Scholarly Reception
While many critics saw the film as a series of uneven vignettes, Roger Ebert thought that "the very lightness of the premise gives the film a kind of freedom. We glimpse revealing moments in lives, instead of following them to one of those manufactured movie conclusions that pretends everything has been settled." Ebert was so engrossed by Christopher Lloyd's performance that he almost forgot about the film's title object, and liked the movie as a whole while acknowledging its vignette construction.
Scholars have compared this film to other films which track a single object traded among various persons (such as Diamond Handcuffs, Tales of Manhattan, The Gun (1974), Dead Man's Gun (1997), The Red Violin, etc.) However, by emphasizing a ubiquitous object rather than a more unique object (such as the auction-worthy violin in The Red Violin), this film "ushers the genre into heretofore unexplored territory."
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