Quotes of the Day
Saturated by promotions for the big holiday items, moviegoers this month may stroll through their multiplex and notice, in front of the tiniest auditoriums, the titles of unfamiliar pictures starring notable actors: Kevin Spacey in Casino Jack, Paul Giamatti and Dustin Hoffman in Barney's Version, Dame Helen Mirren in The Tempest. What are these little films, anyway, and why are they taking up valuable screens that could be showing Little Fockers and Yogi Bear? If Christmas were truly the season for art, every child would want an easel under his tree instead of an Xbox.
The answer is an accident of scheduling. The two weeks before Christmas — the most intense and competitive fortnight of the Hollywood calendar, when perhaps a dozen blockbuster wannabes crowd the theaters — are also the time when critics bestow their year-end awards, and the members of the Motion Picture Academy start sifting through the screeners of movies that the studios have sent them. The critics' prizes bring timely attention to certain performances and pictures aimed at specialized audiences (like critics and Academy members); these citations convince the Oscar voters to maybe watch some of the winning films, and, voilà!, a movie like The Hurt Locker beats out Avatar for Best Picture. That, at least, is the theory in the film business, where hope and hype are best friends forever.
The tactic has a better chance of working when a specialty film has an actor the Academy has already honored — Spacey, say, who has an Actor statuette for American Beauty and one for Supporting Actor in The Usual Suspects; or Mirren, Best Actress in The Queen; or Hoffman, a two-time Actor winner for Kramer vs. Kramer and Rain Man; or Giamatti, who was nominated for Cinderella Man and earned an Emmy for playing John Adams on HBO. Casting an actor with this kind of hardware in an art-house film is the surest way to establish pedigree; the stars bring their reputations with them. It's the indie-movie equivalent of the big-budget sequel.
It happens that none of the actors in Jack, Barney or The Tempest won the favor of any of the critics' groups. But the Hollywood Foreign Press Association nominated both Spacey and Giamatti in that strange category, Best Actor in a Motion Picture Musical or Comedy; and the HFPA's Golden Globes ceremony is watched avidly by Academy voters and millions of moviegoers. As for Mirren, she copped a Best Actress nomination in the Satellite Awards, another honor bestowed by a group of Hollywood-based journalists. Publicists for the three films can declare Mission Accomplished, or at least a successful launch.
At this point we need to be reminded that Casino Jack, Barney's Version and The Tempest are not just awards-cadging machines; they're movies as well. In that small matter, how do they measure up? What are these little films, anyway?
CASINO JACK
It's not often that a recently convicted felon is the subject of two movies in the same year — Casino Jack, the bio-pic starring Kevin Spacey, and Alex Gibney's docu-exposé Casino Jack and the United States of Money — but Jack Abramoff is irresistible: Beverly Hills High graduate and Washington über-lobbyist, Orthodox Jewish owner of a D.C. kosher restaurant and scammer of Indian tribes, pioneer of the emerging Hard Right (along with his college pals Karl Rove, Ralph Reed and Grover Norquist) and Hollywood movie producer (the 1988 war film Red Scorpion). Abramoff certainly saw himself as star material. "Why would you want to make a documentary?" he once wrote. "No one watches documentaries. You should make an action film!"
That email is cited at the beginning of the documentary (now available on DVD), which is much the more entertaining and instructive of the two films. In part that's because it spans the breadth as well as the depth of Abramoff's career; Gibney offers footage of the College Republican parading his charisma, of his high-wired coconspirator Michael Scanlon and of the Native American chiefs whose casinos he billed millions to wipe one another out. Going halfway to Hollywood, Gibney calls on Stanley Tucci to lend his voice to Abramoff memos, and Paul Rudd to do Scanlon's, and provides a reenactment of the killing of Gus Boulis, a Miami businessman connected to Abramoff pal Adam Kidan, who was gunned down in Fort Lauderdale. A one-man Doc-of-the-Month Club — this year he released three other films (My Trip to Al-Qaeda, Freakonomics and Client 9: The Rise and Fall of Eliot Spitzer) in addition to the Abramoff caper — Gibney clarifies the lobbyist's intricate, infamous deals, while pouring enough pizzazz into his movie to make it what Abramoff wanted: an action film!
George Hickenlooper, the director of the Spacey Casino Jack, also had a nonfiction background (docs on Dennis Hopper, director Monte Hellman and the Francis Coppola epic Apocalypse Now); even some of his fiction films, like Factory Girl, were based in fact. For his final film — he died in October, at 47 — Hickenlooper worked from a script by Norman Snider, who wrote TV bio-pics of Los Angeles madam Heidi Fleiss and the porn pioneers Jim and Artie Mitchell. Both men have had experience bending sordid real life into sometimes equally sordid drama.
Alas, they've hobbled their chances at an epic tale by concentrating on the final, crumbling years of Abramoff's reign; the movie is less Raging Bull than the last episode of an overextended horror film series. Hickenlooper injects the proceedings with a cinematic hyperactivity; he'll use four shots of Jack from four different angles in a few seconds, when a simple reaction shot would do. The movie is giddy fun, but no match for the sick thrill of the real perpetrators. Though Spencer Garrett does an expert impersonation of Tom DeLay, the House Majority Leader and convicted money launderer, he can't measure up to DeLay's smiling mug shot or his rendition of "Wild Thing" on Dancing With the Stars.
Partly because Scanlon was the least public of the story's major malefactors, Barry Pepper can bring the man to adrenaline-fueled life as a roaring, strutting alpha male. And Jon Lovitz makes Kidan a bracingly appalling caricature of grossness and self-doubt. The big casting problem is Spacey. An actor whose gift is suggesting, not displaying — revealing character by seeming to conceal it — he captures little of the confident showman in Abramoff; this Jack is a knave ever brooding that his house of cards is about to collapse. Some love of the game is required here. Abramoff, as shown in Gibney's doc, could easily be played by Seth Rogen, if he could ramp up his urgency quotient. Oddly, Hollywood often refrains from casting Jewish actors in Jewish roles; by choosing Spacey to be Abramoff, Hickenlooper chose a fine actor without even a soupĉon of chutzpah. That's the main reason Casino Jack lacks the felonious zest of the Jack Abramoff.
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.
THE TEMPEST
"It's about this old wizard who is trapped on an island," Stephen Colbert told Julie Taymor, his guest a few weeks ago, about her film of The Tempest. "I think of it like Lost meets Harry Potter."
Shakespeare's last play, which turns 400 this coming year, has always been deep and allusive enough to provoke the freest interpretations. Four previous film versions show the range of adaptive possibilities. In 1956, an MGM team turned the story into the science-fiction semi-classic, Forbidden Planet. Derek Jarman's 1979 The Tempest gave the tale a pansexual funkiness that fully justifies Alonso's remark, "This is a strange thing as e'er I look'd on." Three years later, Paul Mazursky's Tempest (with John Cassavetes, Molly Ringwald and, as Ariel, Susan Sarandon) was a study of male-menopausal restlessness. In the 1991 Prospero's Books, Peter Greenaway had Sir John Gielgud intone the text in a lavish indoor pool, surrounded by naked nymphs and satyrs; it was as if God lived in the Playboy Mansion.
Taymor — who is currently trying to get the Broadway show Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark into opening-night shape without loss of life or limb — made her feature-film debut 11 years ago with a splendidly vivid version of Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus. Her take on The Tempest, which Disney is releasing after selling off its Miramax subsidiary, doesn't have Titus' sweep, gore, poetry or hard kick, but there's enough visual verve to keep the eye occupied intelligently. The movie is about as faithful to the Bard as Taymor's last film, Across the Universe, was to the Beatles. Which is to say, fitfully. Like the other film adaptations, this is not "The" Tempest, just "a" Tempest.
The director's twist is that Prospero — the Milanese Duke who exiles himself and his daughter to a feral island when his reign is overthrown — is now a woman, Prospera (Helen Mirren). The old monarch's child hasn't changed sexes: Miranda (Felicity Jones), is still a girl, making The Tempest the second Disney-released film in a month about a magisterial woman who confines her doting daughter in splendid isolation (the first was Tangled). Caliban (Djimon Hounsou), the brute creature whom Prospera has herself usurped from his position as lord of the island, is a Goliath with white patches on black skin. And Ariel (Ben Whishaw), the "tricksy spirit" whom Prospera also keeps in rebellious servitude, is more ethereal than ever: a rippling figure in the water, and very LGBT.
The latest interlopers on the island, which by the end of the story boasts nearly as many visitors as Aruba in February, are a group of Milanese nobles. The convoy of supporting players, which includes David Strathairn, Tom Conti, Alan Cumming, Chris Cooper, Alfred Molina and Russell Brand, displays a jumble of accents and acting styles — most painfully, Brand and Molina in the low-comedy roles of Trinculo and Stephano. The groundlings slapstick in Shakespeare is often a chore to sit through, especially when the actors are prodded into strenuous loopiness, as Taymor has done, instead of letting the characters' sublime idiocy speak through the text. It's a relief when the director unleashes a pack of fiery CGI hounds to chase Trinculo and Stephano briefly out of the film.
Yet when the movie concentrates on Prospera and her menagerie of captives, its tone is sure and seductive. Mirren, who made her filmed-Shakespeare debut 42 years ago as a miniskirted Hermia in Peter Hall's A Midsummer Night's Dream, is, at 65, finally a movie star. She makes full use of her marquee majesty here, wearing short hair seemingly coiffed by a blind butcher, stalking around the island while proclaiming in pentameter, and investing Prospera with the rough authority of Prime Suspect's Supt. Jane Tennison. Taymor sometimes envelops her star in hallucinogenic, cotton-candy back-projections of the woods and the sea.
In moments like these, this Tempest shakes off its shortcomings and, as Ariel says, "doth suffer a sea-change / Into something rich and strange." Is it a film for Oscar? No, but at times it summons a magical blend of Shakespeare and Taymor.
- Richard Corliss