Sunshine Cleaning

By Elise Nakhnikian

Sunshine Cleaning is so pleased with its own smug noncomformity and sometimes strenuous quirkiness, you’d think it would be painful to watch. Actually, I liked it well enough, thanks to the excellent cast. But the more I think about this paint-by-numbers indie, the less I want to.

As you probably know if you know anything about it at all, Sunshine Cleaning was produced by several of the producers of Little Miss Sunshine – and the similarity doesn’t end with the title.

This time around, another adorable grade-school-age kid, Oscar Lorkowski (Jason Spevack), sets what there is of a plot in motion. Oscar has to leave school because of a string of vaguely defined incidents (It seems he is so very quirky that only his semi-bohemian extended family can appreciate him), so his single mom, Rose (Amy Adams) decides to get a better-paying job so she can send him to private school. Instead of cleaning regular homes, which is what she’d been doing, she starts specializing in ones where someone has died – and enlists her sister to help.

This sets the stage for some odd-couple antics as Rose, the conscientious sister who always worries about what people think, pairs up with the rebel-without-a-cause Norah (Emily Blunt). Rose frets when some of her old high school friends, who used to see her as an equal – or better (she was the head cheerleader -- condescend to her because of her job. But Norah’s not having any of that. “You’re better than they are, Rose,” she says.

The Lorkowski girls’ crusty but loyal father (Alan Arkin) doesn’t care what anyone else thinks either. He’s Oscar’s biggest fan and ally, scoffing at the teachers and principals who can’t see that his grandkid is “an imaginative kid, that’s all!” In short, he’s basically the grandpa from the other Sunshine transplanted into this one. He’s even played by the same actor. (Though to be fair, if you could get Alan Arkin to play that part, would you turn him down?)

The actors really are wonderful. Adams seems skinless as a smiling-through-tears, underappreciated good girl. After her guileless Southern housewife in Junebug and her oppressed junior nun in Doubt, she runs the risk of getting typecast this way. That would be a shame, since she’s got tremendous range – just look at her charmingly sunny ditz in Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day or her savvy political aide in Charlie Wilson’s War. But she is great at playing soulful vulnerability. When she lets Rose’s humiliation slowly redden her transparent skin or tighten the corners of her mouth, you can’t help but feel her pain.

Blunt is equally moving as the sister who slides through life behind a shield of tough-guy detachment. I could have done without the scene where she goes “trestling,” climbing up beneath an elevated train track to scream and then cry as the train roars by overhead, not just because it feels so contrived but also because Blunt does such a good job of showing us the emotions her character is repressing that we don’t need to see her release them.

There are a lot of teary confrontations and melodramatic moments, most of which you can see barreling toward you, like so many trucks on a desert highway. Rose meets a nice cleaning supplies salesman, Winston (a quietly alert Clifton Collins Jr. in a role that's as truncated as Winston’s amputated arm), who looks like a romantic prospect. Norah becomes embroiled in an ambiguous relationship with Lynn (the endearingly awkward Mary Jane Rajskub), the daughter of a suicide they cleaned up after. Winston bonds with Oscar. A salesman tells Oscar that the CB in the van for their cleaning business transmits “right up to Heaven,” so Rose uses it to have a teary chat with her dead mother. Rose leaves Norah alone on a job, where she messes up in a spectacular way.

The whole thing doesn’t quite hang together, roaring from one episode to the next and finally just stopping rather than reaching a conclusion.

Maybe leaving things unresolved was supposed to be proof of the movie’s indie cred, but I found it frustrating. After all, the point of a movie like this is to empathize with the characters -- and to get a kick out of watching them. Arkin and Adams and Blunt and Collins Jr. made that work, so by the end of the movie, I cared enough about their characters to want to know they’d be okay. Would Rose and that nice Winston get together? Where were Norah and her cat heading off to? And whatever happened with Oscar’s school, anyhow?

On second thought, never mind. I could really care less.

Duplicity

By Elise Nakhnikian

Why don’t we have more screwball comedies these days? It was during the Great Depression that they first flowered in Hollywood and, as a recent Breadlines & Champagne lineup of movies from that era at New York’s Film Forum reminded us, we could use that same kind of smart escapism today.

In her 2007 book, The Star Machine, Jeanine Basinger blamed the lack of modern-day screwball comedies on the talent pool. “It’s not, as everyone supposes, that they can’t write them; it’s that there’s no one to play in them,” she said.

I beg to differ. George Clooney came as close as any mere mortal could to nailing the Cary Grant role in movies like Out of Sight and Ocean’s Eleven, playing an impossibly suave, inhumanly handsome, occasionally larcenous leading man who loves his female costar but doesn’t take anything else all that seriously – including himself. And wouldn't you like to see Will Smith take a break from saving the world, or Robert Downey Jr. take a break from soul-searching intensity, to star in a good screwball comedy?

As for women, how about Amy Adams or Anna Faris as a Carole Lombard/Jean Harlow-style glorious ditz? Téa Leoni as Katharine Hepburn without the tony accent: an intelligent, athletic, eminently capable beauty who can also play the fool? And I wish I could have seen what Meryl Streep or Emma Thompson could have done with the kinds of roles Irene Dunne and Myrna Loy used to get.

But forget speculation. If you want proof that there are actors alive who can do screwball comedy, go see Duplicity.

Julia Roberts and Clive Owen are gloriously confident in Duplicity’s leading roles. Their two-hour sparring match is a lightfooted blend of irresistible attraction, prickly defensiveness, and reluctant respect. And, thanks to a refreshingly witty script, their weapon of choice is words.

Ray (Owen) and Claire (Roberts) are former government spies now working for rival corporations. The absurdity of using computers with better encryption coding than the Pentagon’s to steal formulas for hand lotion sets the tone nicely. So does our introduction to the two CEOs, Howard Tully (Tom Wilkinson) and Richard Garsik (Paul Giamatti), who we first see as they get into an awkward fist-fight, clashing in slow motion like a pair of aging bull elephants on the Discovery channel.

Writer-director Tony Gilroy (Michael Clayton) leads us through a Hitchcockian series of twists, turns, and switchbacks as Claire and Ray labor to uncover the secret formula Tully is working on. They’re intent on cashing in on it, though all we really care about is whether the two of them will wind up together.

The movie jumps back and forth in time, doling out the story of how Claire and Ray hatched their plot – and the answer to a question that never stops haunting them both: Are they just gaming the CEOs who hired them, or is one of them playing the other one?

Their bipolar romance can switch moods in a moment: They’re forever starting to make love, then stopping to accuse one another of betrayal. Ironically, the paranoia is part of the attraction, an essential trait they have in common. But will they be able to get past it?

An overhead shot of Ray early in the movie shows him striding through the streets of New York with an athlete’s grace and speed. He never lets up, focusing on Claire with seductive intensity and never stopping his pursuit even as she keeps knocking him off balance.

But she does keep knocking him back. Ray may have the upper hand in the game they play out in public, but Claire pulls the strings behind the scenes. You could always sense Roberts’ intelligence, even when she played lightweights, but Gilroy brings it to the surface: You never doubt that Claire could not only seduce but outmaneuver Ray, and it’s fun to watch her glory in that power. Roberts hauls out her famously wide-mouthed laugh once or twice in Duplicity, but she’s much more inclined to smirk – or to cut the smile altogether, using those big brown eyes like lasers to bore through someone’s defenses.

In classic screwball comedy fashion, Duplicity also reserves some choice parts for supporting characters, and the actors make the most of the opportunity. Carrie Preston is endearingly gullible as the corporate travel agent Ray seduces in the line of duty, and the excellent Kathleen Chalfant (the original angel from Broadway’s Angels in America) has as much fun with her role as part of Ray’s surveillance team as Tilda Swinton did with another nontraditional part for a middle-aged woman in Michael Clayton.

Add in the vicarious pleasure of watching beautiful people blow obscene sums of money in beautiful settings, and you’ve got a thoroughly satisfying distraction for these tough times.

Girls Can Play

I bought this poster in a used bookstore in Corpus Christi in the early '80s. It may have been the best 5 dollars I ever spent; it's been up every place I've lived in since.

I've never seen the movie, but that's okay; stories about dying beauties aren't exactly my thing. But I love that 1930s design, and I love the title.

The Depression years were my favorite period for Hollywood movies. It's partly the sense of style -- the dresses, the clean geometric lines of those Deco sets, the melodramatic intensity of movie posters like this. But mostly I love the fast-talking couples in the great screwball and remarriage comedies of the '30s and early '40s.

Cary Grant and Roz Russell in His Girl Friday, Grant and Katharine Hepburn in Holiday and Philadelphia Story, Irene Dunne and Grant again in The Awful Truth and My Favorite Wife, Joel McCrea and Claudette Colbert in Palm Beach Story, Myrna Loy and William Powell in The Thin Man, Hepburn and Spencer Tracy in Adam's Rib, Barbara Stanwyck and Henry Fonda in The Lady Eve... If you've seen these movies, you know what I mean. If you haven't, go find them; you're in for a treat.

Those girls could play.

The Race to Witch Mountain

By Elise Nakhnikian

Crammed full of shock-and-awe music, Glock-toting SWAT teams, Road Warrior-lite car chases, and Darth Vader-looking alien assassins, Race to Witch Mountain is a Jerry Bruckheimer/Michael Bay–style testosterone fest on training wheels. Would someone please tell me who decided it’s okay to have that much violence in a movie for kids?

And while we’re on the subject, what exactly makes this a children’s film? Is it the fact that there’s no sex or swearing? Is it because the closest we come to nudity is the way the sleeves of the Rock’s T shirt keep inching up his arm, nudged aside by those cartoonishly bulging biceps? Or could it be that the violence is all video-game spectacle, with none of the good guys getting the least bit hurt?

Jack Bruno (the always likeable Rock, who’s now using his real name, Dwayne Johnson), is a Las Vegas cab driver who’s already having a bad day when a teenage brother and sister pair, Sarah (AnnaSophia Robb) and Seth (Alexander Ludwig), materialize in his backseat. The two trigger the first of several games of high-speed bumper cars in what’s basically a movie-long chase scene.

See, the kids are aliens from a planet hundreds of light years away, come to Earth to save their dying world. There’s a vague ecological message and a lot of talk about science, which is mainly invoked as “proof” that UFOs are real.

The kids are, as one character puts it, “humanoid in form” – much like the Rock himself. But the stiffly formal diction and weird powers of this towheaded Aryan twosome (Sarah can read thoughts and move objects with her mind; Seth can pass through any barrier and set up force fields powerful enough to deflect bullets) make them seem a little fishy.

The kids are after some special device that looks a lot like one of those things they give you at busy restaurants to light up when your table is ready. We never get a good look at it, though, or at any of the scary alien assassins or amazing alien hardware – probably because the special effects are surprisingly cheesy.

Jack appoints himself the kids’ father figure, following them into danger even as he warns himself aloud: “Don’t go into the pimped-out frig, Jack.” Newsflash to screenwriters: heroes who crack wise about the clichés in your script are a cliché themselves. Maybe that’s why none of Jack’s “funny” lines got even a giggle at the screening I went to.

It doesn’t help that the dialogue is so wooden (Sarah keeps saying things like: “If you abandon us now, our mission will be in serious jeopardy” and “Maybe you need help too, Jack Bruno”), or that the acting is no better. Johnson’s range of emotion runs from mildly concerned to annoyed, while Robb wears out the look of worried supplication she overused in Because of Winn Dixie, and Ludwig simply looks robotic.

Something about this movie makes even good actors turn bad. Ciarán Hinds is so stilted as the head of the government agency in charge of dealing with a whole new kind of illegal alien that I was convinced he was going to turn out to be an alien double agent. And the usually tough and tender Carla Gugino is stripped of her usual intensity as UFO expert Alex Friedman, a pillow-lipped PhD who winds up playing mommy to Jack’s daddy in this wholesome insta-family. They even adopt a dog – though Junkyard disappears for long stretches, as if the screenwriters had forgotten he was there.

That’s typical of this sloppy script, which doesn’t even bother to follow its own internal logic. The movie was adapted from a book, so maybe the screenwriters just tried to fit in too much and left out crucial connective tissue. But not having read the novel, I was left to wonder why two kids who can deflect bullets or make things explode spend so much time running from guys with guns. And, if Sarah can read minds, why does it take them so long to realize they can trust Jack?

About halfway through Race, Jack drops off his battered cab with a mechanic (Cheech Marin), telling him he has an hour to give it a major overhaul. Race to Witch Mountain feels like it was thrown together in about as much time, using spare parts from a dozen other films.

This deeply cynical movie is not just lifeless; it is anti-life, both a product of and a promotion for the military industrial complex.

But, hey, it must be good, right? It was tops at the box office last week!

Gomorrah

By Elise Nakhnikian

Based on a novel about the camorra, a criminal underground that apparently has a pretty effective stranglehold on Naples, Gomorrah is a whole new kind of mafia movie. Beautifully shot but bleak, this naturalistic tale of relentless brutality makes the Godfather series look like a romantic fantasy. Compared to the goombahs of Gomorrah, even Tony Soprano looks tony.

Roberto Saviano, who cowrote the screenplay, must have struck dangerously close to the truth in his 2006 novel: He’s been under constant police protection since the book was published. Director Matteo Garrone, who is a painter as well as a filmmaker, artfully translates the novel’s grim intensity to the screen. He creates a world as visceral as a kick in the gut and as claustrophobic as the tanning booths that cocoon a group of paunchy men in the opening scene, bathing them in an eerie blue light.

We never do learn who those men are or why they get slaughtered like so many penned cattle, but as Gomorrah layers scene upon scene, their gory ending becomes part of the fabric of this bloody society.

Gomorrah’s hand-held camera joins people in mid-activity, simply following one individual or group for a while before switching to another. Before the main characters emerge from the crowd, you get a sense of their world and the rules they live by.

And what a world it is. Men kill each other with dull, emotionless efficiency while boys watch and girls and women hole up in their apartments, locking their doors in midday. Everyone – even housewives and children – must choose a side in this perpetual war. Wads of money are constantly being counted and passed off – yet nobody ever seems to enjoy his earnings. There’s no release to be found, even in nature, from the limited horizons of this gang-ruled gulag. And while the kids are beautiful and full of life, the grown-ups generally look either drawn and defeated or coarse and cruel.

Much of the action takes place in one teeming apartment complex, a multi-layered maze of dwellings and walkways that functions almost as a city within the city. Everyone seems to know everyone else’s business, and the most private things get played out in public – sometimes all at once. In one particularly memorable scene, a wedding party parades through one passageway while gangsters wage a gunfight from the next tier up.

Saviano grew up in Naples, which may explain why so much of the focus is on boys and young men. We spend enough time with Marco (Marco Macor) and his skinny friend Ciro (Ciro Petrone), wannabe gangsters foolish enough to think they can operate independently, to grow fond of the half-feral knuckleheads. Their eventual destruction by the gang feels as inevitable, and weighs as heavily, as any classic tragic ending. So does the catch-22 that traps Totò (Salvatore Abruzzese), an even younger boy who gets adopted by one of the gangs after returning a pistol they lost in a gunfight.

The boys – like many of the adults in the film – are played by nonprofessional actors from the area. The filmmakers direct and shoot them masterfully, making it easy to forget that they’re acting. When a few boys serve as crash test dummies for bulletproof vests, testing them by getting shot at point-blank, Garrone shows just enough of the fear on their faces and the vulnerability of their small bodies disappearing into the dark of the cave where the gangsters are waiting for them. You ache for these little guys, who believe what they’re told about this dark passageway being the route to manhood.

The stories of a couple of grown men expand the picture, showing how the camorra’s tentacles reach into the bowels of the global economy.

Pasquale, a gifted tailor who has been virtually enslaved since boyhood by his connected boss, sneaks out at night to coach the workers at a rival sweatshop. His story is a grim illustration of how the camorra deals with competition. We also get a sense of how far their business dealings extend, as we watch Scarlett Johansson spin on a red carpet in a dress made by Pasquale.

We also get a window into another camorra-controlled business – and the damage they’re doing to the land around Naples and the people who live there – when a young man named Roberto (Carmine Pasternoster) is apprenticed to a slick operator who manages the dumping of toxic waste in the area. “We solve problems created by others,” Roberto’s boss says of their waste-dumping scam.

That may be a rationalization, but it contains an uncomfortable dose of the truth.

Waltz With Bashir

“My basic thought in life is that suppression is not that bad. It might help you live your life,” said Ari Folman at a Q&A after a screening of Waltz With Bashir last December.

For individuals, that is. When it comes to nations, the writer, director, and “protagonist” of Waltz With Bashir is clearly no fan of denial. This may be an animated movie, but it’s definitely not kid stuff.

In 1982, thousands of Palestinian civilians in the Sabra and Shatila refugee camp were murdered over a two-day period. The camp was outside Beirut, and the killings were carried out by Lebanese troops: Christian Phalangists who were loyal to Lebanese President Bashir Gemayel. Waltz is an explosive exploration of that notorious incident.

The camps were under the control of the Israeli army and ringed by Israeli troops – including Folman himself. Those soldiers stood by during the two days of the massacre, sometimes catching glimpses of the horror but unsure of what they were seeing, and under orders from their superiors not to intervene.

The movie starts by literally unleashing the dogs of war, while a friend of Folman’s describes a nightmare he’s been having about the time he served in Lebanon. As the two sit in a bar late at night, we see the dream played out, and it’s terrifying: 26 ferocious dogs gallop through the streets of a city, eyes and fangs aglow as they snarl and snap at the people they pass.

Folman has suppressed his memories of his own time in Lebanon, which is by now about 20 years in the past. But that night he dreams about it, seeing an eerie image of young soldiers emerging slowly from the ocean and putting on their uniforms as if in a trance. That dream – or it is a memory? – prompts him to look into what happened when he was stationed in Lebanon.

Just as he did in real life, the movie’s Folman (the filmmaker and most of the other characters provide their own voices) seeks out other now-middle-aged men who served there at the same time, all of whom he either knew or is connected with by one or two degrees of separation. He also consults a couple of psychologists for perspective on how soldiers deal with post-traumatic stress, piecing together his own suppressed past like a detective investigating a crime. As he hears his former comrades’ vivid stories and he starts to remember his own, we see it all play out, in hand-drawn animation that changes its look to fit the tone of each scene.

This is Folman’s first animated film (before Waltz, he directed two live-action features and wrote for the original, Israeli version of In Treatment), and it was a smart choice. “Memory is dynamic; it’s alive,” he says in his voice-over. That’s one of this movie’s key themes, and animation helps make it concrete.

The drawing also turbo-charges reality, from the young soldiers’ panic to the middle-aged witnesses’ taut self-control and fevered dreams. Key memories are imbued with a pathos or horror that would be hard to achieve with live action, and characters are drawn to subtly emphasize key traits, like the haunted hazel eyes of Carmi, a former soldier turned falafel king.

The animators focus our attention on details that pull us in, like smoke slowly drifting upward from a shared joint or the juddering weight of a tank as it lumbers down a city street. And they make the soldiers’ nightmares and fantasies so vivid that certain images, like the slavering dogs of that opening scene, burrow their way into our own memories.

But animation has its limits. At the end of the film, Folman shifts from animated scenes of the few surviving refugees as they flee the carnage on foot, passing corpses of little children, to news footage of the same scene. The videotape serves a documentary function that Folman found “essential,” proving that the story he has told was “more than just my personal story, my memories.”

The Israeli government submitted Waltz as its contender for the Best Foreign Film Oscar (it was one of the five nominees) and sent Folman all over the world to flak it. Folman, who said he’s surprised to have written “this thing that the establishment just loves,” thinks Israelis embraced the film partly because nearly everyone can relate to post-traumatic stress in a country where military service is mandatory. “I think they thought: ‘He’s one of us. He’s a little bit freaked out, but it’s okay.’” But he wonders if the government also latched onto it the movie because it could help clear up the common misconception that it the Israelis killed the refugees.

In other words, the film Folman made to remind people of the massacre and the responsibility Israel shares for it could serve as propaganda for a government looking to absolve itself. If that’s so, it’s a bitter irony.

Folman’s film is a powerful anti-war story about what happens when middle-aged men with opaque motives throw clueless young men into battle. “I think this [story] could be told by anyone who woke up one morning in a distant place and is getting shot at and thinks: ‘What am I doing here? It has nothing to do with my life,’” he said.

This is hardly the first time that story’s been told, and it won’t be the last. But it’s a rare treat to see it done so well.

Two Lovers

By Elise Nakhnikian

James Gray's latest and perhaps best feature, Two Lovers, is a clear-eyed, unromantic movie about romance. (His first, Little Odessa, won a Silver Lion at the 1994 Venice Film Festival.)

Gray respects all his characters and lets us in on everyone’s motivation, so nobody comes off as a bad guy. And yet, in this Midsummer Night’s Dream of a story, one person’s happiness is inevitably another person’s pain.

Leonard Kraditor (Joaquin Phoenix) is a hulking bipolar bear of a manchild, old enough to live on his own but living with his parents in a claustropobic but beautifully shot Brighton Beach.

Leonard loves women. He lights up when he flirts, showing flashes of humor and attentiveness that make it plausible – just barely – that the lovely Sandra (Vinessa Shaw) would be drawn to him. But when he’s in shutdown mode, as he usually is, he’s as awkward as Quasimodo, hulking about in the shadows of his own bedroom to spy on his glamorous neighbor, Michelle (Gwyneth Paltrow).

Michelle is a shiksa goddess right out of a Woody Allen movie – in fact, at first she seems to be channeling the Mia Farrow of Crimes and Misdemeanors. A frail blond beauty who seems girlishly undefended, she assumes center stage from the moment she wanders into Leonard’s life, displacing Sandra, the nice Jewish girl his parents want him to marry. Michelle has no romantic interest in Leonard — she’s got a smarmy married lover at the law firm where she works – but she likes keeping him around as an adoring sidekick.

Phoenix, a Gray regular who starred in We Own the Night and played a key role in The Yards, is painfully vulnerable as Leonard. You cringe when Leonard goes to a fancy restaurant and tries to cover up his unease by ordering a girly drink, then trying to suck it up through a swizzle stick. And you brace yourself for something bad to come of the feverish happiness that emerges as he starts spending more time with Michelle— and stops taking his meds.

As Leonard’s parents, the elegant Israeli actor Moni Moshonov and the always sympathetic Isabella Rossellini exude waves of quiet empathy. Everyone in this daisy chain – from Leonard’s parents to Leonard to Sandra to Michelle to her lover – seems to mean well. They all want to take care of each other, but they just keep getting in one another’s way.

Two Lovers mines the gap between what we want for ourselves and what others want from us.

The Class

By Elise Nakhnikian

French writer-director Laurent Cantet is one of the best filmmakers alive. Working in the tradition of Robert Bresson, he shows how forces like class, race, and gender can warp lives, and he does it without preaching or pyrotechnics.

His deceptively simple yet engrossing stories contain too many levels of truth to be summed up in one pitch-friendly phrase. They also have an almost documentary sense of reality, partly because Cantet works mainly with nonprofessional actors. Workshopping the script with them for months before shooting, he helps them develop characters who are based on themselves or people they know.

Cantet’s Time Out (2001) is the story of a man too ashamed to tell his family he’s been laid off, who slides into a shadowy secret life parallel to – but increasingly removed from – the comfortable routine his wife and kids still follow. Human Resources (1999) looks at the gulf between blue-collar and white-collar workers through the eyes of a young man, the first in his family to go to college, who takes a summer job in the HR department of the factory where his father has labored for years. Heading South (2006) follows a group of white, middle-class North American women at a Haitian resort, where their relative wealth and the color of their skin makes them the inadvertent oppressors of the local men who serve as their companions – an imbalance we barely bat an eye at when the sexual tourists are men.

Cantet’s latest, The Class, recreates life inside a multicultural Parisian high school to look at what it means to become acculturated and what kids really learn in school. Cantet, whose parents were both schoolteachers, was working on the script when he met François Bégaudeau, a teacher who had written a novel based on his experience at a multiracial Parisian school. The two rewrote the screenplay, merging their stories with the help of frequent Cantet collaborator Robin Campillo.

In the movie, which was nominated for a Best Foreign Film Oscar, Bégaudeau plays Francois Marin, a version of himself. The other teachers are all played by actual teachers, and the kids are students from Belleville, a district much like the one where Bégaudeau taught. Cantet filmed almost entirely inside the school, mostly staying in Marin’s classroom as he teaches French – or tries to. Three digital cameras were always running, one capturing unscripted things kids did when they didn’t think the camera was on them.

Marin uses a kind of Socratic method of teaching, peppering his students with questions to get them to think about what they’re learning and why. The students respond in kind, forcing him to confront some of his own assumptions as his frustration bubbles up, cracking his cool façade. Cultural differences keep getting in the way of communication, and Marin winds up in a toxic standoff with Souleymane (Franck Keita), an alienated Malian immigrant; the rebellious and outspoken Esmeralda (Esmeralda Ouertani), and her quiet but equally strong-willed friend Khoumba (Rachel Regulier). For a while, Marin’s job appears to be in jeopardy, but when Souleymane winds up taking the fall, you wonder if he ever really had a chance.

Cantet says he wanted to make a movie that upends the false pieties of Hollywood films like Dead Poets Society, "where the teacher is always a guru figure, always says exactly the right thing. Our teacher is the opposite of the Robin Williams character – he takes risks, gets it wrong sometimes, asks questions more than he provides answers.”

Mission accomplished.

The International

By Elise Nakhnikian

At the end of The International, Interpol investigator Lou Salinger (Clive Owen) draws a bead on bad-guy Jonas Skarssen (Ulrich Thomsen), a banker who thrives on creating chaos. Skarssen's bank, IBBC, funds insurgencies, buys up missile guidance systems, and blithely assassinates whoever gets in the way of its nefarious plan to control the debt produced by wars worldwide.

Salinger has spent years trying to hold the bank to account for its evil ways, so this showdown should be his moment. But The International apparently aspires to be more than just a travelogue studded with shoot-em-up showdowns. And so, instead of pulling out an RPG or pleading for his life, Skarssen tries to calmly talk Salinger out of killing him. Shooting me won't solve a thing, he says. Another banker will just take my place, and business will go on as usual.

He's right, of course. You can't fix a corrupt system by blowing away a few head guys and henchmen. But by pointing out the futility of Salinger's quest, director Tom Twyker and screenwriter Eric Warren Singer undermine their own narrative, making their hero's attempt to hunt down the people behind the bank look dumb or deluded -- or worse. After all, Salinger's personal jihad causes a lot of what someone in the film actually refers to as "collateral damage."

What really cuts the legs out from under this story is its hamfisted dialogue and almost total lack of character development. Salinger, his allies, and his enemies are the flattest set of characters I've seen in a long time. Were the filmmakers trying to prove Skarssen's point about individuals being interchangeable or is this just bad writing?

The scene where Salinger interrogates Skarssen's right-hand man Wilhelm Wexler (Armin Mueller-Stahl) highlights one problem with that approach. Since we know almost nothing about Wexler, the movie has to grind to a halt while Salinger delivers a long, lumpy speech about Wexler's background and motivation and the role he has played in fomenting mayhem for IBBC.

The other problem, of course, is that you don’t really care what happens to someone if you don't have some idea of what makes him tick.

If there were a law against wasting acting talent, Twyker would be locked up for years for this movie. Owen works hard to give Salinger heft, frowning and fretting and throwing the occasional tantrum. Naomi Watts swathes her neck in scarves to show that she's tightly wound as Ella, Salinger's colleague in the Manhattan DA's office. Brian O'Byrne and Mueller-Stahl make a mesmerizing if opaque hitman-handler pair, and Thomsen's icy Nordic banker is so composed he seems almost embalmed. You can't take your eyes off any of them, but they have so little to work with that you can't do much besides ogle them, as the caressing close-ups invite you to do.

The International does some things well -- the showy shootout at the Guggenheim Museum is very good in spots, though you'd think they could have done more with that setting. But even the things it does best, like its travelogue-style shots of cities like Berlin, Milan, and Istanbul, feel as rote as its undistinguished soundtrack.

By trying to be more than "just" a genre piece, The International winds up being much less than international chase films with soul, like the Bourne series or the Daniel Craig version of Casino Royale. Instead, it's just an x-ray of a movie: all structure and no substance.

Coraline

By Elise Nakhnikian

From the needle-thin metal fingers that rip apart a rag doll and sew it back together over the opening credits to the flying Scottie dogs that zoom over the audience during the ones at the end, the 3-D version of Coraline makes us all Alices in a stop-motion wonderland.

Based on an award-winning children’s book by Neil Gaiman, Coraline spins a fanciful story on classic fairy tale foundation: Coraline is a resourceful little girl who has to rely on courage, wit, and a little help from her friends to defeat a dangerous witch, who disguises herself at first as an ally. A door in Coraline’s house that usually opens onto a brick wall sometimes becomes the portal to a magical parallel world. And Coraline keeps going repeating her journey, but her reasons for going and her actions once there change as she figures out what’s going on under the surface.

Coraline and her parents (she’s an only child) have just moved halfway across the country, to a rambling old house in Oregon. Her parents are preoccupied with work, leaving Coraline to her own devices. She drops in on the eccentric neighbors, explores the surrounding woods, and befriends a shy neighbor boy, Wybie (Robert Bailey Jr.), and the semi-feral black cat (voiced by Keith David) who shadows them both. And she goes through that door in the wall, of course, where she finds a world that’s almost exactly like her own, only better. Or is it?

The house Coraline finds on the other side of the door is better decorated, brighter, and cosier than her real home. Even the parents she finds there seem better at first. Her “other mother” is all cooing attention and perfectly roasted chicken. Her other dad is suave where her real dad is embarrassingly geeky, crooning away like Bing Crosby. Even the stuff there is cooler: her toys talk and move, and some of the furniture is alive.

Coraline’s world pulls us in because, surreal as it is, it always feels real enough to touch. The 3-D helps, since it’s used not so much to shock and awe as to place you right into the middle of the set. Director Harry Selick specializes in moody, emotionally complex animated fairy tales (he also directed The Nightmare Before Christmas and James and the Giant Peach), and he makes Coraline’s worlds – particularly the one she enters through the door in her wall -- feel more vivid than our own. You can practically feel the damp chill of the big empty rooms in Coraline’s house, the spongy floor of the tunnel she crawls through to the other world, and the warmth of the other mother’s kitchen.

Selick recorded his Coraline script before shooting the movie, capturing vocal performance by an excellent cast that includes Dakota Fanning as Coraline and John Hodgman and Teri Hatcher as her parents. The handmade sets and puppets were then filmed to match the dialogue, creating what its press release calls “the biggest animated feature production ever to be made in stop-motion animation, and the first to be made in stereoscopic 3-D.” It’s amazing to see how much feeling and life this laborious process generates.

Coraline is a pistol. Brave and funny, curious and ingenious, capable and vivacious, she’s one of the most memorable heroines to appear in a year that was studded with great female movie roles. Wybie is charming too, with his kind heart and nervous motor mouth.

There are also a lot of nice moments where the filmmakers remind us about things like how suddenly lighthearted play can turn scary in childhood, the instant friendships that can form, the almost brutal honesty that’s part of daily conversation between friends, and the things kids notice that grownups look right through.

The faces are amazingly expressive, too – so mobile you almost forget that they’re not real people. The filmmakers created thousands of subtle variations by using so-called replacement animation, making computer models based on drawings created by a 2-D animator. These were then printed out on 3-D printers, hand-painted, and placed on the puppets.

But using puppets in place of actors lets the filmmakers exaggerate body language enough to make it comical – while keeping it accurate enough to be eloquent. Coraline’s affable but ineffectual father, for instance, is so used to hunching over his laptop that his neck extends like a giraffe’s, and Coraline sometimes flings her body around in an exaggerated version of that thing kids do when they’re bored. And every time I see my cat cock her head to look at something, I think about the cat in Coraline, whose head sometimes tilts so far to one side you half expect him to tip over.

The animation also lends itself to equisitively atmospheric creepiness. When Coraline catches on to the witch's game and the witch lets her true self emege, it's like a children's nightmare come to life as she morphs from a prettier, cuddlier version of Coraline’s mother to a skeletal monster, more spider than witch.

Moments like that may be too scary for very little kids, but the preteen Coraline fans sitting behind me last weekend approved of this movie, and it definitely delighted this particular post-teen.

Che

By Elise Nakhnikian

There's a limit to how many Americans will watch a four-hour movie shot mainly in Spanish, so the Internet chat about Che focuses mainly on why director Steven Soderberg made the movie, with a lot of carping from Che haters who see it as a whitewash.

Watching Soderbergh do the publicity dance on YouTube won’t tell you much about his motives. “I was interested in Che as a warrior, Che as a guy who has an ideology who picked up a gun,” was the closest I could find to an answer. But this scrupulously unsensationalistic movie speaks loud and clear if you're willing to lean in and listen.

Soderbergh, Del Toro, and screenwriter Peter Buchman clearly admire their subject, who comes off as a deeply caring, charismatic man who loves Latin America’s campesinos and hates the repressive class and political systems that keep them mired in poverty, ignorance, and fear. He’s also a by-any-means-necessary revolutionary, convinced you can topple oppressive regimes only by force.

As the often hand-held camera follows Che and his men and occasional women through the jungles of Cuba and Bolivia, you get a stripped-down sense of how it may have felt to wage those particular revolutions. And as this two-part epic outlines his strategies and philosophy, we have plenty of time to wonder why the same tactics worked almost magically in Cuba and failed dismally elsewhere.

It’s easy to see why the Che haters are so worked up about this movie. For one thing, it focuses on the romanticized idealism of armed resistance to injustice, side-stepping the harder questions of how to rebuild and lead a nation. As Che himself says to one of his men at the end of Part 1, just after he’s helped Fidel Castro oust General Batista: “We just won the war. The revolution begins now.”

But the real problem for those who hate Castro and his commandante is how good they look here. The filmmakers have reclaimed the idealized Che of all those T shirts and posters, making him three-dimensional again. Their Che is never larger than life -- and that's part of what makes him great. He’s just wants to be one of the guys. Maybe that’s why he seems most at home in the jungle, reading one of his omnipresent books or joking with one of his men.

Del Toro’s Che has a matter-of-fact directness and humor that goes a long way toward breaking down barriers between people -- but some people even he can’t put at ease, like the young servant, who can't stop acting servile around Che, despite his gentle insistence that his followers think for themselves. “A country that doesn’t know how to read and write is a country easy to deceive,” he says.

This is the kind of father every struggling country needs.

Soderbergh’s framing (the director shot the movie himself, and the cinematography is beautiful) undercuts the usual Hollywood hero treatment, favoring group shots over close-ups and shooting all the rebels and peasants – Che included – in all their sweaty, unglamorous grunge.

Buchman uses telling moments from Che’s diaries to bring Che and the daily life of the camps he helped create to life. Che’s and Fidel’s political and military strategies and beliefs are woven in deftly, as Buchman uses things they said in interviews and speeches and avoids hokey proclamations.

Part 1 is the story of the Cuban revolution. We cut between 1964, in which Che is representing Cuba in the UN, and the months leading up to the revolution in the 50s. In the 60s, he’s engaged in a cat-and-mouse interview with an American journalist played by Julia Ormond, who exudes so much Mod-era cool her whole body seems to have been Botoxed.

Meanwhile, back in the ‘50s, Che sets up camp in the jungle, recruiting and training troops and winning the hearts and minds of the locals (he demonstrates what the revolution will bring by building a school, a printing press, and a hospital) while Fidel (a convincingly commanding Demián Bichir) takes care of the big picture, cooking up strategy and forming allegiances with other rebel groups. It all builds to the final showdown, a gripping reenactment of the battle of Santa Clara that feels as if it’s playing out in real time.

Part 2 starts almost a decade later. This time, Che is in charge, leading a campaign to overturn the Bolivian government. Once again, he sets up camp in the jungle, but this time the locals are more suspicious and fearful, more prone to rat out the rebels. There’s also more infighting and mistrust among the rebels themselves, partly because many feel disrespected by the foreigners running their revolution (Che was from Argentina, and some of his right-hand men in Bolivia were Cubans.)

And there’s trouble from outside: The head of Bolivia’s Communist Party won’t cooperate with the rebels and the U.S. has sent military advisors to train a “special forces” division of the Bolivian Army.

If Part 1 is a feel-good story, Part 2 is a downer. Even the landscape in Bolivia is darker as Che and his steadily diminishing troops slog toward defeat. But the two are flip sides of the same coin. Put together, like two mirrors reflecting each other into infinity, they point to areas worth exploring.

Is a military coup the best way to bring down a repressive regime? Can a national rebellion led by outsiders ever succeed? The ideology that fueled Che’s revolts may be on the wane, but the questions raised by his writing and fighting are as relevant as ever.

Groundhog Day

On the DVD commentary for Groundhog Day (1993), director Harold Ramis rather grumpily allows as how Bill Murray said it was probably the best work he or Ramis would ever do.

No kidding. Groundhog Day outshines Murray’s and Ramis’ other movies like the sun outshines the North Star. And that’s not the half of it: This deceptively modest little rom-com is one of the best movies anyone made in the second half of the 20th century.

Ramis, who wrote the script for Animal House, still specializes in that antiauthoritarian, frat-boy/stoner brand of baby boomer comedy that was invented by him and his pals at the National Lampoon. Movies like Caddyshack, Stripes, and Ghostbusters have a kind of tossed-off, anything-goes vibe that’s appealing. But they’re allergic to emotion, and they can be tiresomely manic and boyishe, like watching a hyperactive kid as he gets all wound up.

On the other extreme, Murray can be too still in the movies. For about two decades starting in the late ‘70s, he played the coolly ironic, often conniving eye of the storm in kinetic boomer comedies. But the more fans warmed up to his work, the cooler he seemed to grow. In time, the bemused distance he projected from nearly everything else infected his acting as well. Casual to the point of contempt, he began to let his deadpan smirk congeal into a mask.

During the height of his popularity, a lot of Murray’s movies were written and/or directed by Ramis. But no other was like Groundhog Day, the seventh movie they made together. (It was also the last, since they clashed over how philosophical the movie should be. Murray wanted to go more serious; Ramis insisted on sticking to comedy.)

The very funny and elegantly simple script is the story of an arrogant, emotionally walled-off TV weatherman, Phil Connors (Murray). Phil goes to podunk Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania, on Groundhog Day, along with his long-suffering cameraman, Larry (Chris Elliott) and his new producer, Rita (Andie McDowell). They’re supposed to cover the ritual emergence of the weather-predicting rodent and then go home to Pittsburgh, but a blizzard snows them in overnight.

When he wakes up, Phil finds himself repeating the same day over and over again. What’s worse, only he remembers the other Groundhog Days. Everyone else keeps living each new day as if it were the first.

But sometime in the past few years, Groundhog Day has slipped into a seat beside other American classics--movies like The Wizard of Oz and It’s a Wonderful Life–about people who learn to appreciate what they have only after they’re pulled out of their lives and into an alternate reality.

A nicely edited cascade of scenes shows Phil waking up to his situation, going through a range of emotions based on Elisabeth Kübler-Ross’ five stages of grief and cooking up inventive ways to pass the endlessly looping time. Eventually, though we don’t know whether it’s been months or years, he’s climbs out of his own head and connects with other people.

His motivation is Rita, the moral center of the film. McDowell is good without being pious, radiating a skeptical intelligence and a palpable warmth that help keep the movie grounded. At first, Phil just wants to trick Rita into bed, but after spending countless days with her, he falls in love. And once he can see her generosity and warmth, he can start to emulate it, becoming a better man.

Both Murray’s snark and the sensitivity that lurks way, way below his smarmy surface are used here to perfection, for once. Phil is fun to watch when he’s being gleefully nasty, plunging daggers into people who barely know they’ve been nicked. He’s even more interesting when he starts to feel vulnerable. And when he finally delivers a couple of romantic speeches, his hard-won vulnerability makes them more affecting than they would have been from an easier mark.

The soundtrack makes witty and memorable use of a Sonny and Cher song, the Pennyslvania Polka, a bluesy theme song cowritten by Ramis and sung by Delbert McClinton, and old standards like “You Don’t Know Me.” The dialogue is memorable too, full of the kind of snappy lines you don’t hear much in movies these days. (“Don’t you have some kind of line you keep open for emergencies, or celebrities?” Phil demands, when he first realizes he’s trapped in Punxsutawney. “I’m both! I’m a celebrity in an emergency.”)

Screenwriter Danny Rubin is a Buddhist, and he wrote Phil’s journey as a metaphor for reincarnation. But Rubin and Ramis, who reworked the script before shooting it, slip in the movie’s messages and meditations unobtrusively, leaving you to discover them for yourself.

This lovely little story illustrates a message so basic it’s central to all the world’s great religions, not to mention the concept of secular humanism: Being a mensch is its own reward, since being good to your neighbors makes you part of the neighborhood, and we all want to be part of a community. And that makes Groundhog Day a good fable for this Irony Age.

Last Chance Harvey

By Elise Nakhnikian

The story arc in Last Chance Harvey is as old as the setting sun, but it’s a pretty sunset, thanks to the grace and skill of its actors and their evident delight in one other.

Harvey Shine (Dustin Hoffman) and Kate Walker (Emma Thompson) make an odd-looking couple at first in this middle-aged romance. He’s considerably older (Hoffman’s 71 to Thompson’s 48), and she’s nearly a head taller in heels. More importantly, he’s a brash American on a spectacular losing streak, while she’s a briskly cheerful, self-effacing Englishwoman whose life seems all too stable.

But those facts are given their due – which is to say they’re acknowledged head-on, then dismissed. And as soon as Hoffman and Thompson start talking, it’s a delight to watch their believable, beleaguered characters slowly wake up to the notion that they might actually have a chance at happiness together.

Hoffman and Thompson wanted to act together again after their collaboration in Stranger Than Fiction, which Thompson described to MoviesOnline as “one of those rare discoveries that you make sometimes in our profession. You could just work with someone and there seems to be no obstacle, no solving, no edges to rub off, no nothing. It seems to happen with a very peculiar intimate ease.”

Writer/director Joel Hopkins, whose Jump Tomorrow was another formulaic love story galvanized by a marvelous cast, allowed his actors to improvise in rehearsals and adapted the script accordingly. As a result, Hoffman says, the characters are “close to ourselves” – Harvey, for instance, is a frustrated jazz pianist turned advertising jingle writer because, before he became an actor, Hoffman was a would-be jazz pianist who wasn’t good enough to make the grade.

When we first meet Harvey, he’s struggling to keep his job. In London for the wedding of a daughter he’s been estranged from for years, he’s also struggling to find his place among strangers while her mother (an astringently excellent Kathy Baker) and stepfather (James Brolin, aptly cast as a self-satisfied silver fox) beam from the center table. Harvey’s unease makes him clumsy, and Hoffman does some nicely deft slapstick, sometimes literally scrambling to keep his footing in a world where things just keep falling apart.

Kate, in contrast, is self-contained to a fault. A classy yet earthy Englishwoman, she calls the writing workshop she goes to a “clawss” but gets a kick out of the geriatric student there who writes violent porn. She’s a good soul and a good sport whose broad smile and devoted friends signal that she knows how to have fun. But she’s settled into a deadening routine, grown “comfortable with disappointment,” resigned to a life with too many obligations and not enough companionship.

As Hopkins cuts between the two to introduce us to them before they meet cute in an airport lounge, we can’t guess at the playfulness and ease they’ll bring out in each other, but Harvey senses it from the start. Praising Kate’s habit of speaking the truth, he really listens to her. She warms under his admiring gaze, soon dropping her guard and revealing the charm we glimpsed beneath her reserve.

Hoffman says Hopkins and cinematographer John de Borman set out to make London look like Paris in this film. If so, they succeeded. Hopkins, who grew up in London and whose parents were both architects, sends Hoffman and Thompson wandering through gorgeous locations. Their all-day, all-night courtship encompasses a golden sunset on the Thames, a silvery dawn in a beautiful plaza, and a lively rockabilly band encountered on the street.

This is a love story about and for grown-ups. The stars are refreshingly Botox-free, looking like better but attainable versions of the average baby boomer. The self-confidence Hoffman has developed with age makes him looser and more attractive, but those lips that still keep twitching before curling into a smile are so thin they’ve nearly disappeared, while Thompson has a bit of a tummy and lines around her eyes that make her look tired when she’s not flashing that 100-watt smile.

Hoffman and actress Liane Balaban also make the relationship between Harvey and his grown daughter feel painfully real. When Harvey toasts his daughter, he teeters on the same cliff edge Ann Hathaway’s Kym falls over with her self-pitying wedding toast in Rachel Getting Married. Harvey winds up on his feet, but it’s a harrowing journey.

Not even Hoffman can salvage his end of the obligatory missed meeting that throws an artificial roadblock in the way of Harvey’s and Kate’s relationship, though. (What, he couldn’t call?) And the marvelous Eileen Atkins is wasted as Kate’s overbearing mother, in a stereotyped, would-be comic role that involves way too many calls to her daughter’s cell phone and an unhealthy obsession with a Polish neighbor.

But then you’re back with Harvey and Kate and all is forgiven. Watching these two charming, touchingly vulnerable veterans fall in love with each other, we fall a little in love with them ourselves.

Revolutionary Road

By Elise Nakhnikian

Like AMC’s Mad Men, Revolutionary Road is set in Eisenhower-era Manhattan and the surrounding suburbs, where bright young men and beautiful women work hard to project glamorous insouciance, sucking on cigarettes and knocking back martinis as if their lives depended on it. But while the TV series puts fully realized characters on that tightrope, making us feel the thrill when they pull off the balancing act and the terror when they look into the abyss below, the movie puts everything in air quotes.

The problem is not that every detail of director Sam Mendes’ adaptation of Richard Yates’ 1961 novel is so meticulously planned – from the immaculately costumed, beautifully lit herd of commuters flowing into Grand Central Station behind Frank Wheeler (Leonardo DiCaprio) to the painfully chipper chatter of his realtor, Helen Givings (Kathy Bates). The problem is that it feels so premeditated. The filmmakers have drained the juice and heat out of Yates’ lacerating prose, as surely they leached bright colors from their tastefully muted “retro” palette.

The self-deceiving Frank and his desperately unhappy wife April (Kate Winslet) are starting the slow slide into middle age, just beginning to lose their long-held conviction that they are somehow special, though they don’t know quite why. Then April has a brainstorm: They’ll climb out of their comfortable rut and head to Paris, where she’ll support the family while Frank takes some time off to “find himself.”

April is galvanized by the idea, regaining lost vigor. Frank likes it too for a while, using their plans to prove to himself and their friends that he really is destined for greatness. But the dirty secret he hides even from himself is that he actually likes his conformist life, even takes pride in the job he affects to scorn. Before long, Frank and April are waging an undeclared war, as he looks for a way out of the plan she clings to like a lifeline.

The novel gives us enough of the couple’s back stories and thoughts so we know what they’re feeling even when they’re not sure themselves. But the movie strips that away, leaving us to watch with increasing detachment as Frank, April, and their friends and coworkers do things that seem quaint, even absurd.

April in particular suffers as a result, demoted from a kind of protofeminist tragic heroine to a baffling neurotic. One moment she’s unable to stand the sight of her husband; the next she’s as solicitous as a Stepford wife. Without knowing what’s making her act that way, you’re apt to think Frank’s right when he tells her she needs psychotherapy.

Winslet and DiCaprio do their considerable best to bring April and Frank alive, even risking looking like bad actors to showcase their characters’ insincerity. DiCaprio, who proved in The Departed (2006) that he could finally pull off a grownup role, reverts to callow insecurity here, letting us see Frank strain as he tries to act sophisticated and “manly.” And Winslet, who won a Golden Globe award for this part, constantly recalibrates her expressive face to cue us into April’s turmoil, while using a theatrically mellifluous speaking voice to show us the effort she makes to control it.

But the filmmakers undercut that effort. The wide-aperture, blurred-background close-ups they favor may reveal every shift in their actors’ mobile faces, but they’re shooting from a cool, Olympian distance. Yates pulls you into his story with the sharp specificity of its details and observations, but Mendes and screenwriter Justin Haythe emphasize generics over specifics, often leaving us in the dark about what motivates the characters. Instead, they highlight the tragic arc of their tale, scoring it with an intrusively ominous soundtrack.

Like Mendes’ American Beauty (1999), Revolutionary Road flatters its audience by dressing up conventional wisdom as hard truths, constantly finding new ways to make the point that the “hopeless emptiness” of comfortably middle-class suburban life kills the soul.

That observation may have landed with the force of fresh insight when Yates wrote about it in 1961, but it hardly qualifies as news these days. In fact, with most women scrambling to pay their own bills and Manhattan’s suburbs becoming an increasingly diverse refuge for people who can’t afford to live in the city, the life of a stay-at-home mom in a sweet little house in Connecticut is beginning to look more like an enviable option than a stifling norm.

Of course, the past is never dead -- it’s not even past, as Faulkner famously remarked. But to give the past its due, you have to reanimate the ghosts who lived there. Otherwise, you’ve just got a set, not a story.

The Wrestler

By Elise Nakhnikian

Darren Aronofsky’s latest movie, The Wrestler, appeals to the part of us that gawks at car wrecks. Only this one’s a bumper car pileup, patently fake and not much fun to watch.

There’s been a lot of talk about an Oscar for Mickey Rourke’s performance as Randy “The Ram” Robinson. A 50-something professional wrestler reduced to working tiny crowds in third-tier venues, Randy’s trying to get back into the limelight, coaxing his failing body into a rematch with an arch-rival from his glory days in the 1980s.

Rourke ruled in the ‘80s too. In movies like Diner, Body Heat, The Pope of Greenwich Village, and Rumble Fish, he played a soft-voiced, sideways-smiling tough guy with a heart of gold, the kind of man every girl wanted to date and every boy wanted to be – or be friends with. For a while, he looked almost like the next Brando: not as much range, maybe, but a similar mix of innate coolness and emotional accessibility.

Then he started turning down interesting stuff like Pulp Fiction for forgettable dreck like Wild Orchid, turned in some bizarrely mannered performances, and dropped out of acting to go pro as a boxer. He also trashed his delicate good looks, bulking up his body and making his face so puffy, presumably from steroids, that he became almost unrecognizable. (Come to think of it, that was pretty Brando-ish too.)

In the last decade or so he’s made a comeback, getting great reviews and progressively bigger parts. The Wrestler is his first leading role in years, and with so much of the focus on the similarities between Randy and Rourke it could easily been another case of stunt casting, like so many of his throwaway roles of the ‘90s. But Rourke injects his character with generous amounts of his old charm and charisma. Randy is a self-saboteur, the kind of guy who breaks the hearts of everyone he tries to get close to, yet you can’t help but like him.

What looked like a fascination on Aronofsky’s part with charismatic down and outers in Requiem for a Dream is beginning to look more like an infatuation. The camera in The Wrestler ogles Randy admiringly even when, after seeking out Stephanie, the daughter he’s been estranged from for years (Evan Rachel Wood with a severe black dye job), he lets her down again. She sobs, swearing that she never wants to see him again, and we zoom in to see how sorry he feels – for himself.

Sure, I can empathize with a screw-up who can’t help alienating the people he most wants to be close to. But when a father makes a dinner date with a daughter he hasn’t seen in years and then forgets to show up, is he really the one you want to feel bad for?

A couple years ago, Sherrybaby told the story of another well-meaning but dysfunctional parent through the eyes of both parent and child. Wood is an excellent actress, but she couldn’t make Stephanie’s feelings as real to me as Sherrybaby made the excitement and trepidation of Sherry’s six-year-old -- and caring about what happened to that little girl gave me a bigger stake in that story.

Former Onion editor Robert D. Siegel’s script makes it clear that Randy acts more like a kid than an adult and lets us see the pain he causes to his daughter and his aging stripper girlfriend, Cassidy (Marissa Tomei). But the power of POV overrides all that.

When Aronofsky finds something he likes, he can be like a kid with a new video game, playing it over and over again. In The Fountain, it was those interminable shots of Hugh Jackman floating around space in a snow globe-looking spaceship. In Requiem for a Dream, it was a montage that translated the rush of getting high into a series of dramatic jump cuts and sound effects. 

His favorite new thing in The Wrestler is the handheld camera that trots behind Rourke like one of the actor's faithful dogs, framing scene after scene with part of Randy’s steroid-broadened back and dark-rooted blond mane and making sure we see everything through Randy's eyes, often almost literally. That means he's essentially forgiven every time he hurts somebody, since we see the transgressions from his point of view and know that he just forgot or did his best or whatever. Aronofsky's interested in the price Randy pays for his own mistakes, not the pain he doles out to other people.

A lot of this movie's appeal boils down to cheap thrills. Tomei, who’s too young and far too lushly gorgeous to play over-the-hill, seems to be there mostly to titillate us, since she does a lot of the pole dancing and lap dancing that appear to be part of every young (or youngish) actress’ repertoire these days.

We also get our noses rubbed into a lot of brutal fake fights, since the filmmakers seem to think we all thirst for the sight of large men grinding each other’s backs into barbed wire or shooting each other with staple guns.

Of course, this is a Serious Movie, so they try to have it both ways, criticizing our imagined bloodlust even as they cater to it. But are we really supposed to buy Cassidy’s analogy between Randy (“the sacrificial Ram”) and Jesus Christ?

Personally, I preferred Nacho Libre.

Frost-Nixon and Gran Torino

By Elise Nakhnikian

“Are you really saying the President can do something illegal?” David Frost (Michael Sheen) asks Richard Nixon (Frank Langella) in Frost/Nixon.

"I'm saying that when the President does it, that means that it is not illegal!” says Nixon.

Spoken like a true Nixon-era Clint Eastwood character. Substitute “a cop” for “the President,” and can’t you hear Dirty Harry saying the same thing?

Nixon never changed his mind, remaining unrepentant to the end, but Eastwood’s vigilantes know better now. Like Bill Munny of The Unforgiven, Gran Torino’s Walt Kowalski is not just a lot older than Harry Callaghan; he’s a lot sadder and less self-righteous too. And though he’s still a hero, he’s also a goat, a funhouse-mirror version of the actor’s youthful antiheroes.

At first, we laugh at the retired Detroit autoworker as he snarls and growls at his disrespectful grandkids and his suspiciously foreign Hmong neighbors, surrounding himself with a protective circle of empty beer cans and blanketing anyone who approaches with insults and racial slurs. But by the end of this tightly constructed entertainment, we’re laughing more with Walt than at him.

His reluctant rapprochement with his neighbors may be a foregone conclusion, but Eastwood and screenwriter Nick Schenk make it fun to watch as it plays out. They also make the cliché of kids who melt the heart of a closed-off old man feel fresh, letting us see the core values the gimlet-eyed geezer rejects in his own relatives and finds in the family next door. And, though we know Walt will defeat the gang that threatens his newfound friends, they keep us in suspense about just how he’ll do it, right up to the satisfyingly melodramatic end.

Frost/Nixon also keeps the suspense cranked up. Screenwriter Peter Morgan, who adapted his own play for the screen, specializes in dramatizing important historical figures and turning points. He likes to focus on the relationship between two people at the center of the storm: Queen Elizabeth and Prime Minister Tony Blair in The Queen; Ugandan dictator Idi Amin and his Scottish doctor in The Last King of Scotland; and guess who in Frost/Nixon.

The writer portrays the two men as fighting for their professional lives, each trying to use the other to salvage his reputation. Nixon sees the interview as a chance to burnish his legacy as president by focusing on his foreign policy triumphs. Frost, a TV personality whose star is falling, sees it as his chance to climb back to the top of the ratings – but only if he can get Nixon to confess to having broken the law by having ordered and then covered up the Watergate break-in.

Sheen and Langella do excellent work, reprising the roles they played onstage. Sheen looks nothing like Frost, yet he recreates his strangled diction and natty bearing while hinting at his underlying insecurity. Langella brings a pitch-black intensity to the role. Hunched over like a hibernating bear, his black eyes radiating wary intelligence, his Nixon is a formidable foe.

It’s a riveting show, but two questions nagged at me afterward: did Nixon really make that drunken late-night phone call to Frost, laying out the movie’s themes so perfectly? And why would he suddenly decide to confess to having been part of a cover-up, after having worked so hard and long to deny it? The answer to both questions turns out to be the same: He didn’t. The phone call and the confession were Morgan’s inventions.

The phony phone call bothers me mainly as bad drama: it’s the sort of intrusive exposition that takes us out of the moment, like the “interviews” Howard films with the actors playing Frost’s research team, who talk to the camera about the story as we watch it unfold.

The fake confession bothers me as bad history. In a story that’s centered around a battle to land a confession, inventing a confession that never happened feels like a significant cheat.

Howard’s directing can be heavy-handed in other ways, too. He often sends the camera zooming in to search for the truth in somebody’s iris or to ogle Frost’s mistress, Caroline Graham (Rebecca Hall), who gets way too much screen time for someone whose main purpose is to brighten up the scenery.

Still, both movies are well-made machines, entertaining while they last and thought-provoking enough to give you something to talk about afterward. Just don’t mistake either one for the truth.

2008 Top 10: A good year for women

By Elise Nakhnikian

2008 was a good year for women in film. Four of my favorite movies this year -- Happy Go Lucky, Wendy and Lucy, Trouble the Water, and 4 Months, 3 Weeks, and 2 Days – are built around extremely capable and sympathetic women, and there are memorable female characters in all six of the others. It may just be a fluke – this year’s picks are from seven different countries, and it doesn’t seem likely that they’re all experiencing a simultaneous renaissance in women’s roles – but it’s a hopeful sign.

Happy-Go-Lucky. The effervescent Poppy (Sally Hawkins), an English primary school teacher with a wide-open heart and eyes to match, sees hopeful signs everywhere. Unused to that much guileless good cheer in the movies, except from ditzy dames and all those infantile adults played by Adam Sandler and Will Ferrell and their pals, I wondered what was wrong with her at first. Then I braced myself for the trouble she was bound to get into (girls in movies can’t be friendly to scary strangers, can they?) But finally I relaxed and just enjoyed director Mike Leigh’s “anti-miserabilist film.” Leigh’s and Hawkins’ portrait of a generous, loving, and vivacious woman is a delight. Like its heroine, it’s also deeper than you may at first assume.

The Class. Like Poppy, François Bégaudeau of Laurent Cantet’s The Class is a caring schoolteacher whose kids are a multicultural mélange. The characters and plots of both films were developed in months of workshops and improvisation, giving them a feel of caught-on-the-fly reality. (That documentary feel is particularly strong in The Class, since Bégaudeau is an actual teacher who plays a version of himself, and the kids in the class are all students in a Parisian school much like the one where he taught.) But where Happy-Go-Lucky is mostly about Poppy’s personal life, The Class takes place almost entirely within the walls of the school (the movie’s French title literally translates to Between the Walls). The cultural conflicts and communication gaps between the well-meaning but sometimes blundering teacher and his equally good-hearted but easily offended students feel painfully real, making us think about how acculturation works and what we’re really meant to learn in school.

The Edge of Heaven. Another sensitive and insightful exploration of the chain reactions that can occur – for better and for worse – when cultures collide, The Edge of Heaven tells the gracefully interwoven stories of three sets of parents and their adult children as they shuttle between Turkey and Germany. You learn so much about its six main characters that, by the end of the movie, you feel almost as if they were part of your own family. It’s an amazing achievement: an intelligently structured, deeply felt story about the power of old-fashioned virtues like kindness, forgiveness, and love.

Synecdoche, New York. Watching screenwriter Charlie Kaufman’s first outing as a director of his own work is like finding yourself inside someone else’s dream: always intense, often achingly beautiful, and frequently incomprehensible, with sudden sideways leaps into the absurd. Speaking more to our subconscious than our conscious minds, this profoundly moving movie somehow manages to peel aside the veils of self-delusion we all hide behind, leaving us face to face with the elemental truth of our shared humanity.

Mad Detective. Hong Kong’s prolific Johnny To hit another home run with this funny, poignant, stylish hard-guy mystery about a wildly unconventional detective. Is former police detective Bun certifiably insane or does he have a supernatural gift – or both? To keeps you guessing as a rookie cop enlists the forcibly retired pro to help track down a cop killer. As usual, To takes you far enough inside his main character’s lives that you care what happens to them when they start blasting away at one another, unleashing maximum mayhem in claustrophobically close quarters. And Bun’s intriguing, often absurd visions, Cheng Siu Keung’s beautiful cinematography, and a charismatic cast help make this unassuming genre film a great escape.

Trouble the Water. If you see nothing else about the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, see this movie. As Katrina approached New Orleans, Kimberly Rivers Roberts was there with a video camera. A natural leader, Roberts picked up her camera and roamed her neighborhood, checking in with friends and relatives who, like her, had no car and could not afford a ticket out of town. She kept the camera rolling after the storm hit, filming the rising water and the chaos outside, the people she brought into her attic, and their odyssey as she, her husband, and some of their neighbors left the only home they had known to try to put down roots elsewhere. Two weeks into the Roberts’ journey, documentarians Carl Deal and Tia Lessin (whose credit include Fahrenheit 9/11, Bowling for Columbine, and No Direction Home: Bob Dylan) joined them. Trouble the Water combines Roberts’ footage with Deal’s and Lessin’s to paint a riveting and ultimately inspiring picture of their struggle to survive. The real damage, the film makes brutally clear, was done not by the storm but by the government whose stunning indifference – even antipathy -- to the poor people of the city is documented in literal black-and-white.

Wendy and Lucy. We learn almost nothing about where Wendy (Michelle Williams) came from or what led to her being homeless and almost flat broke, living out of her ailing car with her beloved dog, Lucy. But as we watch her navigate an unforeseen stop on her way to Alaska, accepting occasional kindnesses and enduring occasional indignities with the same self-contained dignity while doing her beleaguered best to take care of her dog, we learn enough about her character to care deeply about her fate. This spare, beautifully shot fiction (the film is based on a Jonathan Raymond short story), with its soundtrack of train whistles promising an escape Wendy may not ever achieve, boils reality down to its essence, and not knowing Wendy’s back story helps. As you wonder what knocked this warily resourceful, conscientious young woman off the grid, you can’t help but think about all the real people you probably encounter in your daily life who are in the same boat.

Still Life. In its recent push to industrialize, China has been transforming on a scale unprecedented in human history. Morphing from a primarily rural society to a primarily urban one in the space of a generation or two has made China the world’s rising superpower, but it has also caused tremendous upheaval in the lives of its people. Director Jia Zhangke has made an art of recording the effects of those cataclysmic changes on individual people – a perspective, he notes, that has been left out of the official record. At a recent New York screening of his 24 City, Zhang said he sees history as “a mixture of reality and imagination.” That’s a good description of Still Life, the beautifully filmed, deceptively simple tale of a couple of people who go back to the alien landscape of a mostly leveled town, which will soon be flooded as part of the enormous Three Gorges dam project. The two are searching for spouses they lost in an enormous sea of constantly moving humanity. The movie feels slow and uneventful at first, but as the details and atmosphere soak in you begin to appreciate how densely textured Jia’s composition is, layering the frustrations and scams encountered by the unassuming main characters with the poignancy of losing not just your own personal past but an entire, ancient city and everyone in it. Filming on location while workers destroyed the city and mixing in real people with the professional actors adds to the movie’s near-documentary feel.

4 Months, 3 Weeks, 2 Days. This grim tale follows Gabita, a college student in search of an illegal late-term abortion (Laura Vasiliu) in Ceauşescu’s Romania, and Otilia (Anamaria Marinca), the sad-eyed roommate who helps her get it, for about 24 hours. It starts in the middle of a conversation and ends during a lull in another, and it feels so realistic that you almost forget that Gabita’s and Otilia’s lives don’t continue beyond the frame of the film. But thank goodness they don’t, since the two are mired in a nightmarish totalitarian world. Nothing works as it should even when they go by the book, and getting what they need on the black market requires enormous tenacity, ingenuity, toughness, and personal sacrifice – almost all of it from Otilia. As we watch her soldier through this day from hell we steadily gain respect and empathy for this admirable young woman, so her final bleak stare into the camera – which contains a bitter awareness of just how stuck she is – cuts like a knife.

Tell No One. This Hitchcockian French thriller is based on a Harlan Coben book, and it owes much of its appeal to his signature elements, including strong, unconventional female characters and an ordinary-guy main character who finds himself on the lam and turns out to have a hero’s ability to think – and run – fast. The acting is excellent, artfully planted red herrings add texture and suspense, and we get an intriguing tour of Paris, from high-society horse shows to low-rent back alleys. Though the pace is brisk and the plot complicated, we never get lost, in part because so much is conveyed without words. And somewhat miraculously – especially since there isn’t a moment of tiresome exposition – every loose end is neatly and ingeniously tied up. This is an elegant piece of work, as beautifully put together as those show horses.

Milk

By Elise Nakhnikian

When it comes to telling the story of a real person’s life, it takes a great fiction film to beat a good documentary. And since The Times of Harvey Milk was good enough to earn an Oscar, you have to wonder just why we need director Gus Van Sant and screenwriter Dustin Lance Black’s flatfooted Milk.

One of the best things about Milk is its use of documentary footage. In the silent, black-and-white opener, furtive men in what appears to be the ‘50s carefully shade their faces from the camera while mingling in gay bars or getting stuffed into paddy wagons. It’s a chilling introduction to the gay experience as it was first encountered by Harvey Milk, who was born in 1930.

Milk shows Milk (Sean Penn) only briefly as a closeted middle-aged businessman in his native New York, but Penn’s delicately calibrated acting lets us appreciate the sense of liberation Milk must have felt after moving to San Francisco in the early ‘70s. Indulging his own interest in photography while running a camera shop in the Castro with his beautiful boyfriend, Scott (James Franco), Milk became a pony-tailed, blue-jeaned bohemian – and found himself at the center of a fledgling gay-rights movement.

After jumping around in time a bit, the movie soon settles into chronological order. Milk organizes his gay friends and customers to boycott the Castro’s gay-unfriendly businesses and then moves on to bigger political battles, rallying gays to help the Teamsters boycott Coors beer and launching a campaign for city supervisor. Somewhere along the line, he becomes the self-styled “Mayor of Castro Street” and begins running for elected office (it took him several tries to win a city supervisor slot), fueled by the conviction that gay people need political representation just like any other minority group. “If you help elect to the central committee and other offices more gay people, that gives a green light to all who feel disenfranchised,” he says in a moving signature speech that’s reenacted in the film.

The movie spends a lot of time outlining the strategies that led to Milk’s eventual victory, yet it always feels a little stagey and never quite recreates the feel of his legendarily disorganized campaign. Its overreliance on montage keeps us at emotional arm’s length, and a generally welcome lack of sensationalism has the unfortunate side effect of making Milk’s election to office feel anticlimactic.

But the main problem is the script’s failure to dig beneath the surface. We get little more than a cameo appearance by crucial campaign manager Anne Kronenberg (Allison Pill), who we learn about more by hearing how others describe her than by watching her in action. And we know almost nothing about either of Milk’s two live-in lovers, Scott and Jack (Diego Luna), except that Scott is supportive and stable while Jack is demanding and unstable. Of course, that makes Milk’s relationships with both men feel pretty thin.

Milk’s fellow city supervisor and eventual murderer Dan White (Josh Brolin) remains wholly opaque, which in turn makes it unclear whether Milk was killed because his activism set off anti-gay bigotry or because he crossed paths with an emotionally unstable coworker who fixated on him for some unknown reason. And Milk himself comes off as too good to be true – although one scene, in which he directs campaign organizer Cleve Jones (Emile Hirsch) to incite a near-riot just so he can play the hero by stopping it, hints at an opportunistic, manipulative side.

The movie leans too heavily on a couple of gay stereotypes. There are at least two too many scenes of Milk basking in opera, including a laughably heavy-handed death scene. Not even Sean Penn can pull off teetering before a window on his knees, mortally wounded, while gazing at posters advertising Tosca.

Penn also gets the unenviable task of reading from the final statement Milk left to be played in the event of his assassination. Every so often, the movie grinds to a halt while we watch Penn’s Milk sit at a kitchen table and record parts of that statement, most of which tell us things we’ve already seen unfold or are about to watch.

In spite of everything, Penn does a wonderful job. Widening his deep-creased smile and softening his eyes, he exudes waves of joy, loving kindness, humor, and courage that make it easy to imagine why so many people might have been so drawn to Milk – though I could never quite stop wondering what might have been airbrushed out of that portrait.

Brolin is also excellent, giving White a stiff, needy nerdiness that makes him pitiable rather than odious. And Franco’s slow-burning incandescence, Luna’s askew intensity, and Hirsch’s flirty charisma make their characters interesting to watch even when they don’t have much to do.

And yet, when the filmmakers intercut footage of the actors with documentary footage of the people they’re playing at the end of the film, almost all the real people look more complex and compelling than their Hollywood counterparts.

The last one we see is Milk, caught in the middle of an extended laugh, surrounded by friends, and delighted by the life he was living so fully. More than anything else in this two-hour-plus movie, that fleet, flickering image made me mourn his violent and untimely death.