November 2011

MELANCHOLIA  (2011)
      This dazzling, audacious and superbly textured examination of the sanity and very existence of life on Earth dives into the same daringly ambitious pool as “The Tree of Life.” But Lars von Trier’s film avoids the spacey vagueness of Terrence Malick’s movie and adds the seemingly ubiquitous doom and gloom of Nordic filmmakers.

     After an impressionistic preface that is part teasing trailer and part David Lynch-like hallucinatory trip, the narrative begins with Justine (Kirsten Dunst), still wearing her elaborate wedding dress, heading to her reception with husband Michael (Alexander Skarsgård).  They arrive hours late at the palatial estate of her brother-in-law (Kiefer Sutherland) and sister Claire (intense British actress Charlotte Gainsbourg). The reception provides a short-hand chronicle of Justine’s life (and, seemingly, von Trier’s view of lives in general).

    She battles with her angry mother (Charlotte Rampling), irresponsible father (John Hurt), arrogant, single-minded boss (Stellen Skarsgård) and eventually cheats on and breaks up with her groom, all in the span of the evening’s reception.

     The writer-director, best known for “Breaking the Waves” and “Dancer in the Dark,” uses only a handheld camera as he follows the bipolar Justine trying to find something in “life” that will bring her a sliver of happiness. The film’s guiding theme reflects an old Woody Allen quote: “Life is miserable, painful, irrational, tortuous and over much too quickly.”

   The second half of the film also takes place at the sister’s home, beginning with Justine’s arrival looking as if she’s on the verge of a nervous breakdown. In fact, the whole world—represented by the three adults and the sister’s young son—is a bit on edge as a previously unknown planet named Melancholia is on a path to just miss Earth in a few weeks.

     Claire grows less confident that Earth will survive this celestial event even as her husband and son anticipate it like a sporting event. Meanwhile, Justine's mental state seems to grow stronger as Melancholia moves toward Earth and she becomes content with her belief that life is about to end.

     I can't recall seeing a film that is so utterly consumed with debilitating depression, yet it soars in its uncompromising vision and unrelenting intensity. Von Trier’s films have never been known for outstanding performances (though Emily Watson was nominated for his “Breaking the Waves”), yet here Dunst and Gainsbourg, though unlikely sisters, creating complex, memorable characters. It’s a career-changing performance by Dunst, who previous had never impressed me as an actress capable of carrying a film of this seriousness and magnitude. She takes the character to the depths of depression before her catharsis.

    Adding to the epic sweep of the film (as if two planets near collision isn't enough) is the use of sections of Wagner's "Tristan and Isolde" on the soundtrack. One of the most stirring pieces of music ever penned, this orchestral thunderbolt provides the perfect background to this larger-than-life, unsettling movie experience.

       In some ways, the film reminded me of the surreal experience of "Apocalypse Now." Both films are set in unknowable worlds in which fear is always in the air and no one knows what to expect from one minute to the next.

      Von Trier has made a career of putting uncomfortable moments on screen; with “Melancholia,” he’s found the ultimate unthinkable event as these symbolic humans face the possibly end to everything that ever was and ever will be.

J. EDGAR  (2011)

    Over the past 10 years, no American filmmaker has delivered first-rate, often great, movies as consistently as Clint Eastwood. Yet, he was the wrong director to tackle the long, controversial career of J. Edgar Hoover.

     This bio-pic of the pugnacious FBI director—who served every president from Coolidge (when it was the Bureau of Investigation) to Nixon—utilizes every cliché of the genre without ever making a good case for devoting a major motion picture to his life. And while much screen time is spent on Hoover’s legendary secret files illegally complied on the 20^th Century’s most influential figures (most famously, Eleanor Roosevelt, the Kennedy family and Martin Luther King), the portrait never exposes the epic scope of this public servant’s venality.

     That problem is exasperated by the casting of a charismatic, popular actor, Leonardo DiCaprio, as this petty, vengeful tyrant who set the agenda for national crime fighting for more than 50 years. No matter how many of Hoover’s dirty deals Eastwood depicts, DiCaprio, on screen almost every second of the film, is hard to hate. I was never convinced that DiCaprio, who has some terrific moments as Hoover and convincingly looks twice his age, was that famously short and fat bully I remember from news reports from my childhood.

      Casting problems though can’t be blamed for the bland, stiff performances from the supporting actors, including Naomi Watts as his loyal secretary, Jeffrey Donovan as bitter enemy Robert Kennedy and Armie Hammer as Hoover’s devoted assistant Clyde Tolson, who may or may not have been his lover. Hammer also is forced to don what may be the worst old-man makeup in movie history; it looks like a Halloween mask.

      Eastwood and screenwriter Dustin Lance Black used the tired device of Hoover dictating his memoirs to offer his version of events, while failing to provide enough moral indignation from other characters. It’s too much Hoover through Hoover’s eyes to earn even a semblence of credibility. Even his fiercest adversary, RFK, comes off as shrill and insignificant.

      Most disappointing is that while the film correctly plays up Hoover’s role in modernizing crime fighting (advocating for finger prints and other forensic evidence) it fails to even acknowledge Hoover’s cozy relationship with the Mafia (he denied its existence) and his role in thwarting the Civil Rights movement.

       About halfway through the picture, I tried to imagine what Oliver Stone might have done with this material. Subtlety would have been thrown out the window (along with DiCaprio), but it would have been a wild, entertaining ride, surely an improvement over this dull walk-in-the-park Eastwood has made.

FOUR SONS (1928) and PILGRIMAGE (1933)

      What makes John Ford one of the half dozen greatest filmmakers of the past 100 years is the versatility he displayed during in his legendary career. In his time, he was pigeonholed as a maker of Westerns, yet some of his best movies were social justice pictures—“The Informer,” “The Grapes of Wrath,” and “How Green Was My Valley” and “The Fugitive.”

      Ford also directed sentimental romantic comedies (“The Whole Town’s Talking” and “The Quiet Man”), a Shirley Temple hit (“Wee Willie Winkie”), an historic epic (“Mary of Scotland”), a disaster film (“Hurricane”), a political picture (“The Last Hurrah”), a war film (“They Were Expendable”) and a series of powerful documentaries capturing fighting during World War II.

     And even among aficionados, who thinks of Ford when important directors of silents are discussed? I’ve seen a handful of his more than 50 silent picture and they are all superbly told dramas, ahead of their time. “Four Sons,” recently refurbished, is Ford at his sentimental best, showing his understanding of the power of family bonds and the pain of warfare, foreshadowing many later works. The film was among the biggest hits of 1928.

    Opening in pre-World War I Germany, we’re introduced to the Bernle family, headed by Little Mother (Margaret Mann), who is devoted to her four sons, played by Francis X. Bushman, George Meeker, James Hall and Charles Morton. But this loving family is soon splintered, as one son (Hall, later one of the stars of “Hell’s Angels”) moves to America and finds success as a restaurant owner and two others find themselves on the Russian front as Germany goes to war. Only the youngest son (Meeker) remains with his mother, but only for awhile as he is soon forced into the military.

      The script by Phillip Klein doesn’t play out as expected and balances the tragedy of war with the amusing eccentrics of the family’s Bavarian hometown, along with the key role of the postman in a country at war. The acting reflects Ford’s understated touch that marked his films throughout his career, especially in the quiet, moving performance by Mann as the mother.

      Some critics would have you believe that camera movement began with Martin Scorsese (with a slight nod to Orson Welles). But Ford, in this 1928 film, tracks up and down streets, following characters through the village and generally creating a dynamic visual storytelling style, invigorating this Old World tale of a mother’s love for her sons with the magic of a movie camera.

     Along with enjoying the timeless tale of brothers divided by war, “Four Sons” is an insightful peek at a filmmaker on the verge of becoming one of the 20^th Century’s most essential artists.

    Ford explored the American side of World War I five years later in “Pilgrimage,” a minor, but interesting picture that also focuses on a mother-son relationship and the devastating effects of war.

     Henrietta Crosman, a then-famous turn-of-the-century stage actress, plays Hannah Jessop, a tough, no-nonsense farm widow who is incredibly protective of her only son Jimmy (Norman Foster, who went on to a successful directing career). She’s especially displeased with his relationship with the daughter of a pitiful drunkard.

     In the ultimate act of selfishness, she waives her right to keep an only son on her farm and signs him up for war duty. The consequences are inevitable: Jimmy dies in Europe, his fiancée gives birth to his son and the mother hates the world.

   But she’s given a chance to redeem herself when she’s invited, along with other American mothers, to visit the graves of their sons in France. On the trip, she befriends a pipe-smoking Appalachian woman named Hatfield and then takes a young man not unlike her son under her wing.

     “Pilgrimage” is sentimental as all get out, but it gives now long-forgotten stage star Crosman a chance to shine in a rare leading role and allows Ford another opportunity to preach a favorite theme (best portrayed in “The Grapes of Wrath”): The eternal bond between a mother and a son.


QUINTET (1979)
    Robert Altman was responsible for some of the most interesting movies of the past 40 years, but he also directed some of the strangest pictures in that time. In fact, many of his films fit in both categories (“3 Women,” “Images,” “Secret Honor”); “Quintet” isn’t one of them.

    Like “Brewster McCloud,” “H.E.A.L.T.H.” and “O.C. and Stiggs,” this metaphor for a society growing more cutthroat and self-centered (I’m guessing that’s his point) makes you wonder how the director of “MASH” “McCabe and Mrs. Miller” and “Nashville” suddenly can turn into a hack.

   It’s not only that “Quintet” is ham-fisted hoo-ha, but it looks like a freshman film class project--filled with sets left over from ‘50s sci-fi cheapies and shot through fogged up lenses, the frames ringed with a fuzzy, iris effect.

     Paul Newman, who had one of his best roles in Altman’s “Buffalo Bill and the Indians,” seems as baffled by what’s going on around him as I was. He plays Essex, a resident of a snow-bound, frozen futuristic world, who takes his pregnant partner to visit his brother in “the city.” He barely arrives when the girl along with his brother’s family are all massacred as part of a popular game played by some members of this mysterious society.

     Game players include Fernando Rey, Bibi Anderson, Vittorio Gassman and Nina van Pallandt, all of whom say a lot of words but communicate very little. Among all these international stars, the All-American Newman looks and sounds out of place; it’s as if Hud walked onto a Bergman set.

     The frost-bite Altman suffered in “Quintet” continued to send a glacier down on his career through the 1980s. (His best work in the era were the decidedly uncommercial “Fool for Love” and “Secret Honor.”) Not until “The Player” in 1992 did he resuscitate his reputation.

KING SOLOMAN’S MINES (1950)

    I’m not sure why I avoided watching this popular film from 1950 (and Oscar best picture nominee), but it turns out to be more entertaining and less schmaltzy than I imagined.

     It’s better than your typical jungle adventure film—though I’m hardly endorsing its selection as a best picture candidate over such films as “The Third Man,” “The Asphalt Jungle” and “Harvey”—in large part because of the underplayed acting of Stewart Granger and Deborah Kerr and the stunning cinematography of Robert Surtees. One of the cinema’s great cameramen, who went on to shoot “Ben-Hur,” “The Graduate” and “The Last Picture Show,” Surtees won a well-deserves Oscar for the color photography of “King Soloman’s Mines.”

   The plot goes down very familiar paths: the privileged wife of a lost adventurer arrives in Africa determine to hire the region’s top guide to search for her husband. Granger plays Allan Quatermain, the cynical, seen-it-all guide who agrees to take Kerr’s Elizabeth Curtis into uncharted territory along with her brother (Richard Carlson). After the film dispenses with all the city girl-in-the-jungle gags, the trio, along with a cadre of African hired men, face numerous obstacles—real footage of Africa is intercut with the controlled-atmosphere where the actors were filmed—highlighted by their arrival at a Tutsi village, the probable locale of the silver mines of the title.

    The tribe’s distinctive manner, dancing and rituals must have been stunning images for filmgoers in 1950, long before television brought every corner of the world into our living rooms.

    Granger never had a role that matched this one, but had a busy career playing swarthy, romantic adventurers in the 1950s and into the ‘60s.

     Kerr, of course, went on to one of the great careers in movie history, highlighted by memorable performances in “From Here to Eternity” (1953), “The King and I” (1956), “An Affair to Remember” (1957), “The Innocents” (1961) and “The Night of the Iguana” (1964). Here, she recognizes she’s playing a cliché, but manages to inject flesh and blood into the character, especially as she begins to fall for the macho Quatermain.

      The film was co-directed by Compton Bennett (best known for “The Seventh Veil” (1945) and veteran second-unit director Andrew Marton, who later made “Green Fire,” starring Granger and Grace Kelly.


OF GODS AND MEN (2011)
     Considering the prominence of religious beliefs in the public discourse during the past 10 years, it’s surprising there haven’t been more films dealing with the issue. In a world seemingly breaking at the seams over the distrust and even hatred between Christians/Jews and Muslims, it’s about time filmmakers confront these difficult issues.

     This film uses the true story of a group of French monks, living in a remote Algerian mountain village, deciding how to deal with a growing threat of Muslim terrorism to explore what it means to live a life of faith and their responsibility to the community they serve. Director Xavier Beauvois, who directed the thoughtful cop drama “Le Petit Lieutenant,” and screenwriter Etienne Comar put the focus not on the violence of the terrorist (which is mostly spoken of rather than seen) but on how each of the nine monks react to pressure from the local government and military to desert their monastery and the ways they balance safety and principles.         

       On the surface, not much happens in the film, but the filmmakers and the actors (led by familiar French performers Lambert Wilson and Michael Lonsdale) are able to project the gravity of the moral and practical decisions these monks face and communicate their doubts and fears. It makes for a quiet, understated yet powerful sign of the times.

ALVAREZ KELLY (1966)

     Though Westerns were just a decade away from become nearly extinct, in the 1960s they thrived and evolved like never before. While the legends of the genre, John Ford and Howard Hawks and Henry Hathaway, continued to produce quality films, Sergio Leone (and his protégé Clint Eastwood) and Sam Peckinpah were breathing new life into the venerable genre.

     While hardly groundbreaking, this Western, directed by Edward Dmytryk (more comfortable with war and its aftermath—“Crossfire,” “The Caine Mutiny,” “The Young Lions”), is a cross between the classic cattle drive tale of “Red River” and the off-beat, cynical characters that made the best of ‘60s films stand out.

     Elevating the Civil War-set picture is William Holden’s cool, commanding title performance, bringing to life a renowned Mexican-American cattleman who supplies the Union army.

      After driving the herd hundreds of miles to Kansas City, Kelly is forced by an arrogant Yankee colonel (Patrick O’Neal) to accompany the cattle as they’re transferred by rail to troops in Virginia. There, a rich Southern widow (stiff and chilly Janice Rule) arranges the kidnapping of Kelly by rebel troops, who demand that he help them steal the cattle from the Union army.

    Richard Widmark, sporting an eye patch and providing a loud, crass counterweight to the cool, sophisticated presence of Holden, plays Col. Rossiter, the Confederate platoon leader who forms an uneasy bond with Kelly.

     Beautiful wide-screen photography by Joseph MacDonald, especially of the very convincing stampedes, makes up for the rather static direction by veteran Dmytryck, who has too many scenes of three people standing in a room talking. But the real show here is Holden, one of film’s true naturals, whose soothing voice and casual manner always makes him stand out among those around him who are clearly “acting.” Holden’s impeccable enunciation raises the intelligence quotient of every line of dialogue.

     After becoming a major star in the 1950s in “Sunset Boulevard,” “Stalag 17” (winning the Oscar) and “The Bridge on the River Kwai,” his career sputtered through most of the 1960s. But three years after this film, he starred as Pike Bishop, a world-weary gunslinger, in the greatest of all Westerns, Peckinpah’s “The Wild Bunch.”

     The performance signaled a mature actor hitting his prime, confirmed when he gave his finest performances as Max Schumacher (the Pike Bishop of the TV age), fighting for a semblance of integrity, in Sidney Lumet’s “Network” (1975). Unfortunately, there were no more great roles for Holden before his tragic death at age 61 in 1981.

October 2011

MEEK’S CUTOFF (2011) and BLACKTHORN  (2011)
    About the only connection between these two Westerns is that men on horses are traveling across dry, dusty deserts in search of a safe haven.
    "Meek's Cutoff" follows a ragtag group of mid-19th Century pioneers lost on the Oregon Trail in a story that offers minimal dialogue and the most basic of plots. "Blackthorn," set in Bolivia in the mid-20th Century, chronicles the late-in-life adventures of Butch Cassidy, who, in this reimagining of his life, survived the legendary shootout that killed both him and the Sundance Kid.
      Both rank among the better made, more interesting Westerns in recent years.

      Director Kelly Reichardt, best known for “Wendy and Lucy” (2008), brings indie sensibilities to “Meek’s”: long scenes with little camera movement; short, symbolic-laden dialogue; and introspective, dispirited characters. She also becomes one of the few women to have ever directed a Western.

      If you saw “Wendy and Lucy,” with its interminable takes of Wendy (played by Michelle Williams, who also stars in the new film) waiting in a small town for her car to be repaired, you’ll recognize Reichardt’s style.

       This small band of travelers roams the hardscape of an unsettled West (beautifully captured by cinematographer Christopher Blauvelt) in search of a coastal paradise under the guidance of hired-man Meek. This boastful, pseudo tough guy is played by an unrecognizable Bruce Greenwood, who gives the only energetic performance in the film. The dynamics of the journey change when they capture a lone Native-American and decide—against the warnings of the Indian-hating Meek—to follow him, assuming he knows where to find fresh water.

      “Meek’s” is a blank canvas that viewers can draw their own allegorical conclusions on. It’s not hard to extrapolate a suspicion of America’s leaders (the blustery, fascist guide) and a push for trusting those more in touch with nature and an understanding of basic needs (the misunderstood Indian).

     The acting (led by Williams, Will Patton, Paul Dano and the fine young actress Zoe Kazan) captures the naïve yet determined spirit of those who deserted their life in the East to find something more in the West. 

      In “Blackthorn,” not unlike another of Sam Shepard’s recent leading roles—in “Don’t Come Knocking” as a rebellious movie star—the 67-year-old stars as a celebrity on the run. In the new film, Shepard’s Cassidy is living a quiet, secluded life in a mountain village somewhere in Bolivia, having taken the name James Blackthorn. If there was an actor born to play an aging Butch it’s Shepard, who looks and sounds like a man of another century who easily could have lived that infamous life.

     As settled as Blackthorn seems to be in Bolivia, he longs to see his son (or is it Sundance’s?) in the U.S. and sets out on the journey north. He’s barely started when a man hiding in the hills chases off Blackthorn’s horse along with the money packed on it. Turns out, Eduardo (Eduardo Noriega) is on the run, having stolen money from a local mining company. Blackthorn/Butch can’t help but admire this younger version of himself and they form an uneasy alliance.

     What makes “Blackthorn,” directed by Spaniard Alejandro Amenábar (“The Sea Inside”), more interesting than your typical Western is how it portrays the bad decisions and miscalculations of Butch. Shepard, in one of his better performers in a long career filled with excellent work, isn’t the slick operator of Butch’s youth, but an old man who occasionally shows flashes of his gun slinging early days. What on the surface seems like heroic actions leave this one-time criminal with deep regrets.

      For fans of Westerns, it is a rare bounty of discovering two thoughtful films (and neither of them remakes) in the same year—one for the traditionalists and one for those who like their movies, even Westerns, ambitious and edgy.

 

SKIDOO (1968)

    You really haven’t lived until you’ve witnessed Jackie Gleason playing a retired gangster on an LSD trip. Or Groucho Marx as “God,” the mob boss of all bosses, dressed in Hindu robes sharing a “pumpkin-flavored” joint.

    That’s just a small sampling of the semi-coherent, incongruent craziness, performed by a bizarre collection of 1960s personalities, stuffed into this Otto Preminger satire that compares and contrasts the peace-loving hippie movement and a cold-blooded mob organization. While “Skidoo” is breathtakingly stupid, cast as if it was a SCTV parody, and directed by the famous Austrian in a manner that makes one wonder if he was indulging in the same hallucinogen as the film’s characters, it’s so utterly campy, seen 43 years after its release, that I just couldn’t look away. Let’s face it: a really bad movie is a heckuva lot more entertaining than a mediocre picture.

     The film announces its insanity in the opening scene in which Gleason’s Tony and his wife Flo (played by the freakishly cartoonish Carol Channing), each armed with a TV remote, keep changing the channel. It continues for about five minutes longer than was necessary, but we do catch a few glimpses of a televised congressional hearing on organized crime, featuring old friends of the couple.

     While Tony is demanding to know what his daughter (Alexandra Hay) is doing with an ever-smiling hippie (John Phillip Law), he gets a visit from a pair of mob goons (Cesar Romero and Frankie Avalon) who have orders from God for Tony. He’s to be admitted to a federal prison for the purposes of killing “Blue Chips” Packard (Mickey Rooney, you knew he had to be in this), who is planning to testify against the mob. 

     Channing’s Flo, whose outfits make any hippie garb look perfectly sensible, invites Law’s friends to their home, while she goes off to seduce Avalon in hopes of discovering her husband’s whereabouts. The film should have gotten an R-rating just for the scene in which the gangly, pale Channing strips to her underwear. No one should be subjected to that.

     Among the other has-beens/famous faces making appearances in this druggie version of “Mad Mad Mad Mad Mad World,” are Peter Lawford, Frank Gorshin, George Raft, Burgess Meredith, Richard Kiel and Slim Pickens. I’m guessing Strother Martin and Dub Taylor were out of the country at the time.

     The most bizarre moments occur in prison, where Austin Pendleton (the one actor in this film still working) introduces Tony to mind-expanding drugs and, in a plan of pure genius, laces the prison’s food with LSD. It’s a seminal moment in American entertainment: Ralph Kramden on acid.

       In one sequence that looks like an outtake from a Ken Kesey Acid Test party, TV veteran Fred Clark, playing a prison guard, hallucinates a music video featuring the prison’s trash cans. Standing by his side during this trip, also playing a guard, is singer/songwriter Harry Nilsson, the picture’s musical director.

      It all comes to an appropriate end on Groucho’s yacht, where hippies and mobsters alike end up in the bed of God’s mistress, the razor-thin model Luna, and Channing gets to sing and dance to Nilsson’s song “Skidoo.” Then, just in case things weren’t nutty enough for you, the closing credits, down to the studio trademark, are sung.

    It’s hard to believe that Preminger, director of two masterful crime pictures, “Laura” (1944) and “Anatomy of a Murder” (1959) and screenwriter Doran William Cannon (whose next credit, not surprisingly, was on “Brewster McCloud”) didn’t set out to make a horribly imbecilic movie. Stupidity at this level, such as the short films of the Three Stooges or the Farrelly brothers’ efforts, doesn’t happen by mistake. Looking at it that way, I guess “Skidoo” is a masterpiece.  

THE IDES OF MARCH (2011)

     While offering insightful commentary on American politics and, specifically, the election process, George Clooney’s new film can’t overcome predictable plot devices, rather bland dialogue and a tightly buttoned performance by its leading man.

    I wouldn’t discourage anyone from seeing the film, if only for the excellent work by supporting performers Philip Seymour Hoffman and Paul Giamatti (as rival campaign managers), Evan Rachel Wood as an ambitious campaign worker and Clooney as presidential candidate Gov. Mike Morris, the politician liberals can only dream about.

    Ryan Gosling, one of the best young actors in Hollywood, stars as Stephen Meyers, working as Hoffman’s No. 2 in Moore’s campaign as they maneuver to win a tough primary fight in Ohio. He’s a young man on the rise until he makes a couple of mistakes: he gets involved with Wood’s campaign worker and briefly meets with Giamatti, the opponent’s manager. While it seems like minor indiscretions, they are the tiny threads that lead to worse complications. It seems like a juicy role for Gosling, but I never got the impression that he had a handle on what Meyers was all about. Sometimes he’s a slick politico, sometimes he’s a naïve ideologue, but he never comes across as smart and accomplished as his character should be. 

     What writer-director Clooney and screenwriters Grant Heslov and Beau Willimon (working from Willimon’s play) do best is show that for all the saturation coverage of politics today, the voters are seeing just the very tip of the iceberg; a very muddy iceberg, at that. Clooney’s stump speeches can be seen as scolding the actual Democratic Party and its candidates for failing to tell the truth and stand by one’s principles even when they aren’t positions voters want to hear.

    But when the conflicts become intense and personal, the acting and writing never provide the spark needed to communicate the importance of the stakes. The energy never rises to the level you’d expect from a story about the backroom deals that may decide who will be the president of the country.

MAIN STREET  (2011)

    The final screenplay of two-time Oscar winner and legendary playwright Horton Foote, exploring the fate of a typical, rundown American town, probably should have remained unproduced.

     As interpreted by director John Doyle, who worked with Foote on Broadway, and a first-rate cast led by Ellen Burstyn, Patricia Clarkson and Colin Firth, the film begins with an interesting scenario then spins its wheels for the next hour. “Main Street” plays up its Southern atmosphere, but that can’t fix the half-developed, dead-end plotlines and inconsistent characterizations.

     Burstyn, at 79 still one of the great American actresses, plays Georgiana Carr, the last of a once-powerful tobacco family living out her days in a large, unsustainable home in Durham, N.C. When she rents out one of her family’s long-idle warehouses to a fast-talking Texan (Firth, overacting and struggling with his Southern accent), her talkative niece (Clarkson, channeling one of those lonely, offbeat Tennessee Williams’ spinsters) objects to his plan to store hazardous waste. Apparently, they weren’t bothered by the moral issues of producing cigarettes.

    Georgiana has two choices: lose the house and stand by her (or her niece’s) principles or take the Texan’s money and stay in her beloved house. But the controversy or the weight of her decision is never developed or explained enough to make it the least bit dramatic. The script gets very fuzzy when Clarkson’s Willa softens her stand on the storing of the waste when romantic sparks fly between her and Firth’s businessman.

     Despite good acting from Burstyn and Clarkson and a supporting cast that includes Orland Bloom as the town’s young sheriff, Amber Tamblyn as local woman considering leaving town and Andrew McCarthy as her repulsive boss, the film is frustratingly pointless, not even in the same league as Foote’s best screenplays. I’m guessing that respect for the late playwright (who died in 2009) kept the filmmakers from reworking the script, but the results don’t help anyone’s career or reputation.

      While primarily writing for the stage (winning a Pulitzer for “The Young Man from Atlanta” at age 79), Foote screenplays include “To Kill a Mockingbird” (1962), “Tender Mercies” (1983), “A Trip to Bountiful” (1985) and “Of Mice and Men” (1992). Yet Foote’s signature work on film is his World War I era trilogy “Courtship,” “1918” and “On Valentine’s Day” (from his nine-play cycle “Orphans’ Home” based on his family), a touching look at those turbulent times through a young couple and featuring a brilliant performance by Foote’s daughter Hallie.

    Foote’s understanding of the complexities of the human heart and the timeless importance of one’s hometown are essential to what made him a great playwright and screenwriter. Those issues are just passing fancies in the forgettable “Main Street.”  

KIPPS (1941)

   This quaint amusement, a Dickens knockoff from an H.G. Wells novel that was directed by the great Carol Reed, tells the ironic coming-of-age saga of Arthur Kipps.

     Played with a bumbling, boyish naivety by the impeccable Michael Redgrave, Kipps is sold into indentured servitude at age 12 to a bustling London department store and stays there into adulthood. It was a horrid life—working all day under the unforgiving thumb of the owner and then boarding with other employees in a communal room behind the store. Here it’s played for laughs but it’s a stark reminder of what life was like for the underprivileged before labor laws. Kipps gets fired when he misses curfew, but hours later he finds out he’s inherited a princely sum from a grandfather he scarcely knew.

      It is no surprise that almost immediately Kipps is taken advantage of, struggling to remain in control of his own life. Turns out bring rich isn’t all it seems to be or, at least, not as easy as one would guess to hold on to your money.

     If it wasn’t for the way Redgrave turns Kipps into a character you can’t help but be protective of, I would have tuned out the film early on. Needless to say, the Redgrave family has yet to produce a bad actor and Michael was one of England’s most underappreciated mid-century performers. Making his debuted in Alfred Hitchcock’s “The Lady Vanishes” (1939), Redgrave’s best performances were in the World War II fantasy “Thunder Rock” (1942), as the twisted ventriloquist in “Dead of Night” (1945), as part of the dysfunctional family in “Mourning Becomes Electra” (1947) and as a scandalize professor in “The Browning Version” (1951).

     As Kipps, he reminded me of a young Gary Cooper, though Redgrave’s acting skills are way beyond what the American star ever displayed. 

     Reed’s finest works were still ahead, with “Odd Man Out” (1947), “The Fallen Idol” (1948), “The Third Man” (1949) and “Outcast of the Islands” (1951) establishing him as a world-class filmmaker. He later earned an Oscar (for best picture and directing) with the musical “Oliver!” (1968). With “Kipps,” he brings an artist’s eye to the composition of the scenes, especially in the fast-paced craziness at the clothing store. Reed was always looking to shoot from some unusual angle or with the primary action shot over someone’s shoulder or from behind a piece of furniture.

    In addition to Redgrave, the standouts in the cast are Phyllis Calvert as Kipps’ loyal boyhood sweetheart, Diana Wynyard as the “high-class” lady he’s taken in by, Max Adrian as her confidant who does his best to separate Kipps and his fortune, and Arthur Riscoe as a flamboyant eccentric who has theatrical ambitions. While not quite the collection of characters from “David Copperfield” or “Great Expectations,” Wells’ prose and Reed’s cinematic storytelling elevate “Kipps” into an amusing slice of a early 20^th Century life. 

BIUTIFUL  (2010)

     Alejandro González Iñárritu, the Mexican director responsible for “Amores Perros” and “Babel,” again taps into the multiculturalism of the 21^st Century, finding it this time in Spain. While I’ve been underwhelmed by his previous efforts (though parts of “21 Grams” were interesting), there is no denying that Iñárritu is a superb filmmaker who constructs complex, intellectually rich and adroitly composed pictures.   

      While Uxbal (the extraordinary Javier Bardem) is at the center of “Biutiful,” the theme speaks to Spanish diversity and how lives are intertwined in ways we can’t anticipate.

     Uxbal, struggling to raise his two young children without their mentally unstable mother (a superb Maricel Alvarez), works as a middle man between a family of Chinese importers of knockoff products and the young African immigrants who sell the illegal stuff on the streets. He also places a group of illegal Chinese workers with a building contractor. For better or worse, in the midst of Barcelona, these divergent groups are all working together for survival as they hang onto different rungs of the ladder. Though he’s repeatedly warned, Uxbal becomes too close to the illegal workers he’s helping to exploit; a black marketer with a conscious.

  Though he can be cruel and foolish and makes his living in dubious ways (he also claims to hear the thoughts of the recent dead and gets paid for it), Uxbal is determined to do right by his children.

    In a short amount of time—his first performance that earned notices in the U.S. was as persecuted Cuban poet Reinaldo Arenas in “Before Night Falls” (2000) —Bardem has established himself as one of the world’s most remarkably expressive, heartbreakingly truthful actors, digging intense emotions out of every character he inhabits. From his paralyzed man desperate to die in “The Sea Inside” (2004) to his talkative killer in “No Country for Old Men” (2007) and his smooth-talking painter in “Vicky Cristina Barcelona” (2008), the Spanish-born actor seems incapable of giving anything less than an Oscar-worthy performance.

     “Biutiful,” which earned him his first best actor nomination, sometimes teeters on being too damn sad to enjoy, but Uxbal’s unlikely humanity and the far from perfect world he inhabits make this Iñárritu’s best film and well worth the emotional roller coaster.

SMILLA’S SENSE OF SNOW (1997)
      There’s so much right about this film adaptation of Peter Høag’s best seller that even when the plot turns into an over-arching James Bond scenario, I couldn’t help but enjoy it.

     Julia Ormond plays Smilla, a reclusive, possibly troubled Greenland native living in Copenhagen who takes up the case of a young boy (also of Greenland heritage) who dies in a fall from her apartment building’s roof. Ormond is an actress of impressive depth and subtlety, who, after Hollywood tried to turn her into a star—“Legends of the Fall” (1994), “Sabrina” (1995)—has fashioned a low-profile but interesting career. After the box office failure of “Smilla’s,” the British actress has shined in David Lynch’s “Inland Empire,” his daughter Jennifer’s “Surveillance,” David Fincher’s “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button” and in the cable movie “Temple Grandin.”  In the upcoming “My Week With Marilyn,” she portrays Vivien Leigh opposite Kenneth Branagh’s Laurence Oliver.

     The frigid beauty of the Denmark winter becomes an important character in “Smilla’s,” especially for these Greenlanders who have an understanding of snow way beyond what we warm weather folks can comprehend.

     Sweden’s Bille August (“Pelle the Conqueror,” “The Best Intentions”) is the perfect director to capture the cold, isolative mystery of the white stuff, impressively photographed by veteran cinematographer Jörgen Persson.

    The supporting cast is another reason to see the film with Gabriel Byrne as a neighbor who Smilla puts her trust in, Tom Wilkinson as a corrupt medical examiner, Ona Fletcher as the dead boy’s alcoholic mother, Vanessa Redgrave as a reticent bookkeeper with a chilly secret, and Richard Harris as a wild-eyed bad guy.

    Don’t get too involved in the too-numerous plot twists because you’ll be disappointed by the end, but for fine acting and an unusually gorgeous setting, “Smilla’s Sense of Snow” is worth a look.