Barney's Version, The Tempest and Casino Jack : Warming Up for Oscar

It's holiday time at the multiplex, when little films peep about between blockbusters in hopes of receiving some early awards-season notice. TIME's Richard Corliss takes stock of three contenders

By Richard Corliss Friday, Dec. 31, 2010
    • Melinda Sue Gordon / Touchstone Films / Everett Collection

    Actress Helen Mirren in The Tempest.

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    BARNEY'S VERSION

    A movie can suffer from comparison with the real-life events it dramatizes, or from a beloved book it's based on. That's the tripping point for this adaptation of Mordecai Richler's ribald, picaresque novel. Richler, who died in 2001, and whose The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz became the 1974 movie that gave Richard Dreyfuss his first signature role, was thought of as Canada's Saul Bellow, or the Robertson Davies of the Jewish diaspora in Quebec. Barney , published in 1997, was Richler's career capper: the purported autobiography of Barney Panofsky, a TV producer with a sardonic worldview, a fabulously unreliable memory and a boundless appetite for sexual melodrama.

    Spanning a half-century, from postwar Paris to '90s Montreal, the book bubbles with acid-etched portraits of Barney's friends, rivals and wives; he eventually acquires three spouses, the middle one referred to only as "the second Mrs. Panofsky." The first, in Paris, is Clara Charnovsky, a Brooklyn refugee whose mental instability helps her write some first-class poetry; the third is another New Yorker, Miriam Greenberg, whom he falls in love with and immediately pursues at his second wedding . The book has a violent death (of which Barney is widely suspected), a panoramic fascination with Jewish archetypes (stereotypes, if you're offended by them) and a guest appearance by Duddy Kravitz. But the dominant, hurricane force is the indefatigable, unforgiveable, irresistible Barney. It's fair to say, without choosing sides, that the novel is Richler's Herzog .

    The movie, directed by Richard J. Lewis and scripted by Michael Konyves (I'd like to think it's pronounced "connives"), telescopes the sequence of events, transferring Barney's boho period from Paris 1950 to Rome in the '70s. A few characters are missing, but the film tries to get most of the book's 417 pages into two-and-a-quarter hours. This requires rushing through some choice scenes — the hilariously bitter exchange Barney has with Clara's rabbi father — and an overall lumpiness. (The project might have benefitted from George Hickenlooper's more hurtling approach to Casino Jack .) We advise you to consider this version of Barney's Version not as a coherent work but as a series of episodes in an adult sitcom of widely varying quality. Given those diminished expectations, the film's not awful.

    Nearly balancing Barney's sexual or romantic selfishness — he thinks that his women can be happy only by devoting their lives to making him happy — are the performances by Rosamund Pike as Miriam and, as the second Mrs. P., Minnie Driver — whose eloquently exasperated body language signals that her character isn't nearly so ruthless as Barney is. Dustin Hoffman plays Barney's father, a retired cop, with an uncomplicated warmth and passion that make him the one mensch in the movie.

    Again, it's the laurelled lead actor (another Gentile in a quintessentially Jewish role), who's lacking. Paul Giamatti usually plays the ingratiating loser; in films like American Splendor and Sideways the resentment that seizes him is directed at least as much at himself as at the world. He's fine in Barney's more melancholy moments as a neurotic nebbish, which suit Giamatti's woodwind strengths. But the character needs to embody the sort of rough charisma that makes him a focus of envy or enmity whenever he enters a party. Giamatti's Barney is just the opposite: the soft, sullen waiter taking the drink orders.

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