The Fountain

If you were too young or too old to get swept up in the cultural tsunami of the Sixties, you missed a lot of good times and the rare opportunity to be part of a nationwide movement suffused with hope, idealism, and love for your fellow man.

But there was a side to the Sixties they don’t talk about on VH-1 retrospectives or classic rock stations: the self-righteous, intellectually flabby side. The side that made people spout so much gaseous nonsense about things like spirituality, unconditional love, and ancient cultures they knew almost nothing about but spoke of with pompous reverence.

I’ve been thinking about that lately because I just saw The Fountain, an anachronistic gloss on the half-baked, trippy stuff that used to pass for deep thinking back in the day.

A large part of The Fountain consists of watching Hugh Jackman float through a beautifully art-directed cosmos in an oversized bubble that looks like a snow globe without the snow. (I had to read the press kit to learn that it’s a 26th-century spaceship so futuristic it has no controls or source of power. Which they decided to do, you see, because those knobs and panels would just “get in the way of that amazing view.” Dig it.) Wearing what look like silk pajamas, his head shaved for that beatific yogi look, Jackman pads pacifically around his little bubble or assumes the lotus position, as content as a cow though his only companions are an impressive-looking but nonverbal Tree of Life and the ghost of his dead wife, the annoyingly saintly Izzi.

The bubble boy sequences are just one of three melodramatic stories writer/director Darren Aronofsky (Requiem for a Dream) keeps leaping between, in a romance novel-ish way. All three star Jackman as a man trying to find the key to immortality and spend eternity with his love, Rachel Weisz.

In the present-day and futuristic segments, Jackman and Weisz play a married couple, Thomas and Izzi. In the third story – a book written by the 21st-century Izzi, which we see acted out as Thomas reads it – he’s a 16th-century conquistador in Inquisition-era Spain and she is his embattled (and, of course, super-hot) queen. In that story, he leaves Spain for a Mayan jungle, where he nearly winds up as a human sacrifice (bummer, man) before finding the Mayans’ sacred Tree of Life, which later winds up in 26th-century Thomas’ spaceship.

Confused? Join the crowd. In the sold-out theater where I saw it, half the audience was tittering on the way out and the other half seemed to be apologizing for not having understood it.

Not that any of its elements are hard to understand in isolation. On the contrary, artless writing and frequent repetition makes individual scenes achingly obvious. The first time we see Izzi ask Thomas to go for a walk and he rejects her to go back to work, for example, the scene feels familiar – carpe diem and all that. By the time it’s been replayed for what seems like the 15th time, you ache for a remote with a fast-forward button. There are also far too many pseudo-profound statements about the grand significance of death. “We struggle all our lives to become born, to be worthy of our deaths,” says 21st-century Thomas’ boss, Lilli (Ellyn Burstyn), in a eulogy that might have been written by that Sixties icon turned self help-tinged guru, Ram Dass.

The film’s lush, gold-toned look is the best thing about it, making the case for the beauty and wonder of life more effectively than the dialogue, the plot, or the many lugubrious close-ups. Even the cinematography can get annoying, as the camera does pointlessly showy things like starting a scene upside down and then flipping over. The light shone on Weisz is annoyingly unsubtle too, growing so intense that it washes out every feature but her blue eyes and pillowy lips and makes her glow like the celluloid saint she’s in danger of becoming, after The Constant Gardener and now this.

The filmmakers do one nice bit with the sound, sending 21st-century Thomas out of a hospital where Izzi lies, deathly ill, into an utterly silent world – no music, no ambient sound, no nothing. But too much of the time, they leave annoyingly generic, vaguely New Age-y music pulsating in the background.

Tighter editing might have helped, since the repeated lines and scenes and all those lingering close-ups of tear-filled eyes make it hard, after a while, to empathize with Thomas’ grief over losing his adored wife, let alone with his zeal to find a way to “stop aging, stop dying. But in the end, I suspect, no amount of artistry could have saved this simplistic script.

Remember Siddartha? The Fountain makes it look deep.

Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan

A lot of the talk about the fictional Kazakh journalist Borat Sagdiyev, one of British social satirist Sacha Baron Cohen’s comedic alter egos, centers around who Baron Cohen is lampooning when he puts on Borat’s cheap suit, stiff smile, and bushy mustache and lumbers forth to meet an unsuspecting world. Is Baron Cohen making fun of Kazakh backwardness, as an offended Kazakh government initially assumed, or of American hypocrisy, as the Kazakhs recently claimed to have realized?

Baron Cohen started filming Borat and his comedic cousins -- Ali G, a faux Jamaican-spouting wannabe gangster and TV talk show host, and Bruno, a simpering fashion reporter -- for British TV. His recent shift to the U.S. seems to be more about expanding his market than aiming at a new satiric target, since the essence of his act remains unchanged. In his wonderfully funny and unpreachily insightful new movie, Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan, as in his British and HBO TV shows, he puts one of his blissfully unself-aware characters in front of a camera and let us watch while other people react to his ignorance, bigotry, and socially inappropriate behavior.

The Queen

The reaction of the British people to their royal family is “very complicated,” said director Stephen Frears in the Q&A following The Queen at this year’s New York Film Festival -- but it nearly always starts with ridicule. “The most extraordinary thing about this film,” he said, “is that it takes [the royals] seriously. That’s sort of the shocking part.”

For American audiences, the shocker may be that Princess Di, who plays a central role in Frears’ movie, is not its heroine. Instead, in the news footage that’s judicially sprinkled throughout The Queen, she comes off as a duplicitous self-promoter who used the media like a samurai uses his sword, burnishing her own legend while slicing her enemies to ribbons. Even that coy downward gaze she favored looks premeditated after Frears catches her slipping a camera a sly gaze of complicity and freezes the frame for a moment, burning her knowing smirk into the mind’s retina.

The Queen

The reaction of the British people to their royal family is “very complicated,” said director Stephen Frears in the Q&A following The Queen at this year’s New York Film Festival -- but it nearly always starts with ridicule. “The most extraordinary thing about this film,” he said, “is that it takes [the royals] seriously. That’s sort of the shocking part.”

For American audiences, the shocker may be that Princess Di, who plays a central role in Frears’ movie, is not its heroine. Instead, in the news footage that’s judicially sprinkled throughout The Queen, she comes off as a duplicitous self-promoter who used the media like a samurai uses his sword, burnishing her own legend while slicing her enemies to ribbons. Even that coy downward gaze she favored looks premeditated after Frears catches her slipping a camera a sly gaze of complicity and freezes the frame for a moment, burning her knowing smirk into the mind’s retina.

The Queen starts the day Di was driven to her death by a pack of paparazzi. Though already separated from Prince Charles, she is firmly established in the public mind as “the people’s princess,” as Prime Minister Tony Blair (Michael Sheen) puts it in a televised tribute shortly after her death. Blair has just been elected in a landslide vote by besotted voters eager to see the young Turk “modernize” stodgy old Britain. He cements his prodigious popularity with his response to Di’s death, his American-style emotionalism matching the mood of the crowd that was gathering outside Buckingham Palace.

Meanwhile, Queen Elizabeth (Helen Mirren) becomes a poster child for the stiff-upper-lip style that’s free-falling out of favor in the fading empire. Insisting that Di’s death was “a private matter,” the queen retreats to the royal estate in Balmoral, husband Philip (James Cromwell), son Charles (Alex Jennings), and grandsons in tow. Tone deaf about the changing mood of “the people,” she’s concerned only with shielding her grieving grandsons from the prying public eye and observing royal protocol – which is to say, doing nothing much about Diana’s death, since the lapsed princess was no longer technically a royal.

But “the people” will have none of that. The change that apparently took place in the British soul sometime during the Thatcher years manifests itself in the form of an enormous crowd that gathers for Diana, layering thousands of bouquets outside the palace gates, sleeping and weeping in the street outside.

Its voice amplified by the tabloid papers, which call on the queen to “show us you care,” the mob’s as ugly as the one that called for Marie Antoinette’s head. And this one threatens to do away with its queen as well – albeit just the role, not the person. But Elizabeth reads its mood in the nick of time and saves the monarchy by delivering the public gestures the crowd demands.

By giving us a ringside seat at the reenactment, The Queen lets us imagine what those gestures must have cost. From the queen’s vantage point, Di’s celebrity-studded funeral looks outre. Even the bouquets outside the palace turn poisonous when she does her public viewing, getting close enough to read the hateful notes blaming her and her family for Di’s unhappy life and death.

Frears best movies – including My Beautiful Laundrette, The Snapper, and Dirty Pretty Things – have been absorbingly realistic tales of working-class Brits struggling to break free from some deadly socioeconomic trap, like flies stuck in a spiderweb. His heroine this time is no working-class hero, but this queen is just as trapped as her subjects.

Like The Devil Wears Prada, Peter Morgan’s script subverts the usual narrative, flipping a story about a vulnerable young heroine abused by a ruthless and powerful older woman on its head. With her thick ankles, sensible shoes, and helmet hair, Mirren’s queen is an unlikely star. Worse yet for this emotive age, she’s a mistress of minimalism, making an art of hiding her feelings in public -- and every part of her life is public, even the bed from which she’s awoken in the middle of the night by an apologetic aide bearing news of Di’s death.

Mirren was riveting as the queen’s fiery ancestor, Elizabeth I, in an HBO miniseries last year. Working on a much smaller and grayer canvas, she makes this dowdy Elizabeth every bit as compelling. “As an actor, you find yourself falling in love with your character, no matter who it is,” she said at the film festival. “And that happened to me. I ended up absolutely falling in love with the queen – which is very embarrassing. It’s very uncool.”

She makes us love her too, showing us the unshowy virtues that make her a good leader. A member of the World War II generation whose motto might be “never complain, never explain,” Mirren’s Elizabeth is unfailingly dignified, fair, and respectful of others. “Duty first, self second,” she says to the prime minister in one of the private audiences between the two that bookend the story. “That’s how I was brought up. That’s all I’ve ever known.”

At least in the Western world, where we’re all supposed to be the center of our own cults of personality, that attitude is a thing of the past. The Queen lets us see what we’ve lost in letting it go.

Friends With Money

Writer/director Nicole Holofcener has a gift for exploring the inner lives of women and the relationships that challenge and sustain them. Particularly interested in how women rely on one another, both for emotional support and as yardsticks to measure their own progress or stagnation, she makes movies that feel like a conversation with an old friend: affirming, engaging, and entertainingly gossipy, yet studded with thought-provoking insights.

If her movies haven’t gotten the attention they deserve, it’s probably because they’re basically art-house chick flicks, and people like to sneer at chick flicks. But brushing off movies like this is often just another way of belittling women.

The action in Holofcener’s movies is almost all talk. The things her characters do are never remarkable, though they sometimes convey a shock of recognition. But mostly her characters talk and talk, hurting and healing each other’s feelings while constantly, even obsessively, taking the temperature of their relationships.

In distilling the poignancy from everyday pleasures and indignities, Holofcener risks seeming as if she’s talking about nothing at all, and indeed some people have always found her movies too tediously lifelike. I never did before, but her latest sometimes feels a bit shapeless even to me.

The theme of Friends With Money, if there is one at all, seems to be how the friends of the title are adjusting to middle age. Holofcener’s characters are growing up along with her. The two best friends in Walking and Talking (1996) were young women not long out of college, who grow apart and then come back together after one gets engaged, leaving the other to feel neglected. The two biological sisters in Lovely and Amazing (2001) are a little older, starting their careers and their families – though their adopted sister, who seems more self-possessed and mature than either one of them, is only eight. The four best friends in Friends With Money, some of whom Holofcener says were based on friends of her own, are in their late 30s and early 40s. Settling into their lives, they’ve lost the youthful illusion that anything is possible.

Jane (the wonderfully acerbic Frances McDormand) is in a full-blown, depressed midlife crisis, railing at strangers and refusing to wash her hair because she just can’t see the point. Christine (Catherine Keener) lives in denial, building a huge addition to her house while her marriage falls apart. Only sweet, spacey Franny (Joan Cusack) seems to have no complaints, content with her life as a well-heeled housewife with a husband and son she loves.

The friends talk about each other almost as much as they talk to each other, and the subject of their conversation is usually Olivia (Jennifer Aniston), the only one of the four with no money. Olivia is still unmoored, drifting from one masochistically inappropriate relationship to another, working as a maid, and toying with the notion of becoming a personal trainer even though she hates to exercise.

As usual in Holofcener’s movies, a slow accretion of detail leaves you feeling that you know – and care – quite a lot about the characters by the end. This time around, though, some notes are sounded too loudly, as if there were one thing about each person that the director wanted be sure we would notice. Olivia is forever cadging expensive anti-aging makeup she can’t afford; Jane keeps picking fights; people keep assuming that Jane’s husband is gay; and Christine keeps hurting herself in household accidents and waiting for someone to ask if she’s okay.

But with actors this good and this well cast, there can be pleasure even in watching something play out for the second or third time. Catherine Keener has starred in all three of Holofcener’s films. She’s a kind of muse to the director, who writes parts with her in mind, and it’s easy to see why. Here, Keener’s nervous intelligence makes Christine’s clumsy neediness touching rather than gauche. Cusack’s puckish sweetness and McDormand’s ferocious sarcasm are also just right for their characters, while Aniston’s relative blandness and lack of affect fit the self-denying “pothead” Olivia.

The men are also well cast and well written, given their due though they’re at the periphery of the action. Simone McBurney is particularly good as Jane’s ambiguously gay husband, starting out as a punchline but emerging as a likeable, thoughtful, and surprisingly dignified man.

Friends With Money may not be Holofcener’s best work, but it’s an ambling, likeable tale that almost earns its fairy-tale ending. Even if it does nothing else, it’s a rare pleasure to see a movie about female friendship where both the women and the men are believable and there are no heroes or villains.

Inside Man

As the letters of Inside Man’s opening credits break apart and rearrange themselves like tumblers in a lock, an infectious Hindi song cranks up the energy inside the theater. The song, “Chaiya Chaiya,” is so good that I googled it later: It’s from Dil Se, a Bollywood film that Inside Man director Spike Lee reportedly loves and Variety’s Grady Hendrix describes as maybe “the greatest movie about terrorism every made.”

Welcome to another love letter from Lee, one of America’s best directors, to his New York City, a brash, impassioned, soulful mix of people from everywhere else on earth.

A lot of the credit for this “Spike Lee joint” belongs to first-time screenwriter Russell Gewirtz, who came up with a story fresh enough to make it easy to forgive the occasional plothole and the ending that fizzles to a halt several minutes too late. This is a bank robbery movie with a twist: The robbers aren’t after the money, so the focus soon shifts from the usual question (how will they do it?) to a new one (what exactly are they doing in there?)

In most heist movies, you’re inside the job, watching the thieves as they race to crack that safe or complete that sting. Inside Man mostly leaves us outside with detective Keith Frazier (Denzel Washington). Frazier is doing his best to manage the situation – and the cops who are jockeying with him for control – but the shots are being called by Dalton Russell (Clive Owen), the man inside the bank.

The pace is surprisingly languid, since neither Frazier nor Russell appears to be in much of a hurry to get the robbers and their 50 or so hostages out of there. That leaves a lot of time to savor the actions and interactions of the characters, who represent a wide range of New York types.

Salted throughout the story of the siege at intervals are flash-forwards to Frazier’s interrogations of the hostages after they escape. These flesh out Frazier’s character, showcasing his sly wit and the sweetness Washington usually reveals in brief glimpses in his movies, doling out just enough to hook us. They also give us another puzzle to solve, since every hostage is a possible perp.

The robbers made all the hostages wear the same outfits and face masks they wore and ran out of the bank with them, so Frazier can’t figure out who’s who. One of Inside Man’s running jokes is that any of the hostages could be a scofflaw: After all, these are New Yorkers, mouthy and noncompliant. Even a middle-aged woman who looks like somebody’s bubbe barks “go ahead – make my day!” when Russell points his gun at her head, and a civilian the cops call in to help shows up with a shopping bag crammed full of parking tickets she wants fixed in exchange for the favor.

The movie gets in some nicely pointed yet unpreachy riffs on racism, which show the grinding gears of “message” movies like Crash for the creaky contrivances that they are. My favorite was an economical, gently humorous evisceration of the racial stereotyping and violence of gangsta video games, but there are plenty more, including a bit about Armenians (thanks, Spike!)

Then there’s the pure pleasure of watching Owen and Washington, both separately and together. Tall men with a cocky looseness in their loping gaits, the two are well-matched, with rhyming styles of cool. Both burn with a charisma that comes as much from intelligence as from intensity, and both can switch in mid-sentence from playful to menacing. Their characters here, both of whom operate from a strong sense of what’s right, recognize one another as kindred spirits.

In a supporting role as Madeline White, the fixer brought in by the bank president to discreetly short-circuit the robbery, Jodie Foster is mesmerizing, stalking about in heels so high it hurts just to look at them. Seal-sleek and smirking, Foster exudes a sense of steel-nerved self-satisfaction that almost disguises the fact that she’s nothing but a deux ex machina in Jimmy Choos, plopped into the plot to get Russell to explain what he’s after.

Chiwetel Ejiofor, the enormously talented British-Nigerian star of Dirty Pretty Things, is wasted here as Frazier’s nearly silent partner, and the two corrupt rich white men who represent the power structure are little more than straw men, despite the best efforts of the immensely talented Christopher Plummer to bring one of them – the bank’s president – to life.

But there’s so much to enjoy in this movie, including loving close-ups of only-in-New-York street scenes, architectural details, and settings like White’s showy office. It’s also a pleasure to see a heist movie in which nobody is killed and nothing’s blown up – except in the boy’s Grand Theft Auto game and a scenario the cops imagine, which is played out as if it were happening while they discuss it.

Best of all, it’s a joy to see Lee back in form. Inside Man may be “just” a genre flick, but it’s as inspired in spots as Lee’s last great opus, 2002’s 25th Hour.

Inside Man

As the letters of Inside Man’s opening credits break apart and rearrange themselves like tumblers in a lock, an infectious Hindi song cranks up the energy inside the theater. The song, “Chaiya Chaiya,” is so good that I Googled it later: It’s from Dil Se, a Bollywood film that Inside Man director Spike Lee reportedly loves and Variety’s Grady Hendrix describes as maybe “the greatest movie about terrorism every made.”

Welcome to another love letter from Lee, one of America’s best directors, to his New York City, a brash, impassioned, soulful mix of people from everywhere else on earth.

A lot of the credit for this “Spike Lee joint” belongs to first-time screenwriter Russell Gewirtz, who came up with a story fresh enough to make it easy to forgive the occasional plothole and the ending that fizzles to a halt several minutes too late. This is a bank robbery movie with a twist: The robbers aren’t after the money, so the focus soon shifts from the usual question (how will they do it?) to a new one (what exactly are they doing in there?)

In most heist movies, you’re inside the job, watching the thieves as they race to crack that safe or complete that sting. Inside Man mostly leaves us outside with detective Keith Frazier (Denzel Washington). Frazier is doing his best to manage the situation – and the cops who are jockeying with him for control – but the shots are being called by Dalton Russell (Clive Owen), the man inside the bank.

The pace is surprisingly languid, since neither Frazier nor Russell appears to be in much of a hurry to get the robbers and their 50 or so hostages out of there. That leaves a lot of time to savor the actions and interactions of the characters, who represent a wide range of New York types.

Salted throughout the story of the siege at intervals are flash-forwards to Frazier’s interrogations of the hostages after they escape. These flesh out Frazier’s character, showcasing his sly wit and the sweetness Washington usually reveals in brief glimpses in his movies, doling out just enough to hook us. They also give us another puzzle to solve, since every hostage is a possible perp.

The robbers made all the hostages wear the same outfits and face masks they wore and ran out of the bank with them, so Frazier can’t figure out who’s who. One of Inside Man’s running jokes is that any of the hostages could be a scofflaw: After all, these are New Yorkers, mouthy and noncompliant. Even a middle-aged woman who looks like somebody’s bubbe barks “go ahead – make my day!” when Russell points his gun at her head, and a civilian the cops call in to help shows up with a shopping bag crammed full of parking tickets she wants fixed in exchange for the favor.

The movie gets in some nicely pointed yet unpreachy riffs on racism, which show the grinding gears of “message” movies like Crash for the creaky contrivances that they are. My favorite was an economical, gently humorous evisceration of the racial stereotyping and violence of gangsta video games, but there are plenty more, including a bit about Armenians (thanks, Spike!)

Then there’s the pure pleasure of watching Owen and Washington, both separately and together. Tall men with a cocky looseness in their loping gaits, the two are well-matched, with rhyming styles of cool. Both burn with a charisma that comes as much from intelligence as from intensity, and both can switch in mid-sentence from playful to menacing. Their characters here, both of whom operate from a strong sense of what’s right, recognize one another as kindred spirits.

In a supporting role as Madeline White, the fixer brought in by the bank president to discreetly short-circuit the robbery, Jodie Foster is also mesmerizing to watch, stalking about in heels so high it hurts just to look at them. Seal-sleek and smirking, her muscular calves shown off to perfection, Foster exudes a sense of steel-nerved self-satisfaction that almost disguises the fact that she’s nothing but a deux ex machina in Jimmy Choos, plopped into the plot to get Russell to explain what he’s after.

Chiwetel Ejiofor, the enormously talented British-Nigerian star of Dirty Pretty Things, is wasted here as Frazier’s nearly silent partner, and the two corrupt rich white men who represent the power structure are little more than straw men, despite the best efforts of the immensely talented Christopher Plummer to bring one of them – the bank’s president – to life.

But there’s so much to enjoy in this movie, including loving close-ups of only-in-New-York street scenes, architectural details, and settings like White’s showy office. It’s also a pleasure to see a heist movie in which nobody is killed and nothing’s blown up – except in the boy’s Grand Theft Auto game and a scenario the cops imagine, which is played out as if it were happening while they discuss it.

Best of all, it’s a joy to see Lee back in form. Inside Man may be “just” a genre flick, but it’s as inspired in spots as Lee’s last great opus, 2002’s incandescent 25th Hour.

Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story

Gentle satires like Day for Night, 8½, Stardust Memories, and now Tristram Shandy are made by people who love movies for people who love movies. They take us behind the scenes of the making of a fictional film or a filmmaker’s life not to uncover any scandals but to poke affectionate fun at the needy but loveable people without whom we’d never have movies.

British comedic actors Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon bite into their multiple roles in Tristram Shandy with relish. They two play rival – and equally narcissist – costars in the movie within this movie, which is an attempt to film the 18th-century novel of the title. The other actors are fun to watch, too, especially the always compelling Naomie Harris, who play a production assistant, and Gillian Anderson as a Hollywood star who flies in at the last moment for a small role that gets bigger as soon as she commits to it.

Director Michael Winterbottom made this film about the impossibility of making the movie you meant to make as a tribute to the spirit of the book, whose narrator keeps trying to tell his life story but getting sidetracked, ultimately getting only as far as his birth. But you don’t have to have read the novel to enjoy the film – in fact, one of the movie’s running jokes is that none of the people making the movie has bothered to read the book first. To enjoy this funny valentine to those wacky folks whose biz is show, all you need to do is relax and go with the flow.