Movie Reviews - 2011 posts

WARNING: 161 MINIATURE SPOILERS

“The Rum Diary” is a 2011 movie based upon a 1998 novel, which was actually written in the early 1960s, about misadventures in Puerto Rico in the late 1950s. It doesn’t have to be old news but it is.

It’s an odd version of old news. The lessons its protagonist learns are lessons its writer, Hunter S. Thompson, along with many others, communicated to the culture a long time ago. Druggies can be heroes and upstanding citizens can be villains. It’s us vs. the bastards, and the bastards are businessmen and bankers and land developers, shady and older and curiously sexless, while we, the heroes, or antiheroes, are young and aimless and vaguely anarchistic. We booze it up and experiment with drugs and lament the poor while trying to find ...something. Our artistic voice. Freedom. America. A girl.

If most movies present an absolutist vision from the right, with a taciturn hero taking on bad guys through direct violence and winning, the alternative version, the left-wing version popularized in the late 1960s, gives us an antihero, often glib, taking on dull but horrific institutional elements through subterfuge and losing. The very thing that Paul Kemp (Johnny Depp) needs to learn in “Rum Diary,” in other words—bankers, etc., are bad—was communicated to the culture so long ago, by Kemp’s creator, that it became a genre unto itself: “Easy Rider” and “Animal House” and almost every B-movie from 1967 to 1982. So we wait for him to catch up. We wait for him to figure out what kind of movie he’s in.

It takes awhile.

Kemp may arrive in Puerto Rico in 1960 unformed in Hunter S. Thompson’s politics but we first see him in the classic Hunter S. Thompson pose: waking up, in a hotel room overlooking the beach in San Juan, dazed and hungover and horrified, unable to recollect who knows what godawful escapades from the night before. He’s there for a job, at the San Juan Star, because his two novels never caught on—either with publishers, or, in the end, with Kemp himself. Later in the movie he’ll talk about writers he admires. He’ll quote a line from Coleridge and talk about how the poet wrote it when he was only 25; he’ll talk about the difficulty of finding his own voice. The movie is the story of how Kemp, and by extension Thompson, finds his own voice.

He wants to write meaningful articles but his toupee-wearing editor, Lotterman (Richard Jenkins), isn’t interested. He assigns him horoscopes, and pieces about the bowling alleys of San Juan, frequented by the dull and overweight middle class of middle America, and Kemp’s mind wanders. He finds a beautiful girl, Chenault (Amber Heard), but she’s engaged to a jerk, Sanderson (Aaron Eckhart), who wants Kemp, of all people, to write marketing copy for land development on a nearby uninhabited island. They plan to wreck paradise again. Kemp goes along for the ride, signing an NDA and everything, but mostly he’s sniffing after Chenault. He doesn’t reject Sanderson until Sanderson rejects him. He finds religion because he’s cast out of Eden.

Did we need narration in this thing? Once Kemp finds his voice, we get noteworthy lines, presumably culled from the novel, such as: “I discovered the connection between starving children scavenging for food and the shiny brass plates on the front doors of banks.” We could’ve used such language throughout. The movie would’ve benefited.

Depp is obviously a great actor. “How does anyone drink 161 miniatures?” Lotterman demands when he gets Kemp’s hotel bill. There’s a pause, a few blinks, a slight wobble. “Are they not complimentary?” he finally responds.

But he’s too old. Sorry. Kemp is supposed to be unformed and learning. He’s supposed to be 22. Depp is nearly 50. He should’ve been playing Lotterman.

I actually identified with Lotterman. The movie doesn’t. It hates him. He’s on the side of the establishment. He’s old and toupee-wearing and soul-crushing. He makes sure that nothing really noteworthy gets in his paper. Except, I kept thinking, it’s not his newspaper, is it? He’s just the editor. He’s a higher-up flunky. Maybe I’m projecting, maybe Richard Jenkins added a humanity at odds with his character (see: Philip Seymour Hoffman in “Patch Adams”), but I get the feeling Lotterman would’ve liked the San Juan Star to be more than articles about bowling alleys and horoscopes. He would’ve liked to have had hair. He would’ve liked to be as handsome as Johnny Depp. Who wouldn’t? But that wasn’t his world.

Instead, the movie has sympathy for the worthless and vaguely fascistic Moberg (Giovanni Ribisi), who also works at the San Juan Star but who rarely contributes copy. He spends his days in a drug-addled stupor, stumbling from spot to spot, and occasionally putting on an LP of speeches by Adolf Hitler. Riotous, dude.

To be honest, “Rum Diary” reminded me of all I disliked about those cinematic, absolutist visions of the left: the celebration of drugs and anarchy. We get that damned quote of Oscar Wilde’s for the zillionth time: “Nowadays, people know the price of everything and the value of nothing.” We get Depp as Kemp writing his credo:

“I want to make a promise to you, the reader. And I don't know if I can fulfill it tomorrow, or even the day after that. But I put the bastards of this world on notice that I do not have their best interests at heart. I will try and speak for my reader. That is my promise. And it will be a voice made of ink and rage.”

It’s tiresome. Putting hallucinogens in your eyes isn’t a political act, it’s a stupid act. The left never got that. They conflated the two. Watching “Rum Diary,” I thought of the sadness of the political arc I’ve lived through. Kemp is working toward a credo, an ethos, a style, that dominated our culture for a time but ultimately led to Reagan and Bush and Bush. He puts the bastards on notice but the bastards only got stronger.

WARNING: A SPOILER A DAY

“One Day” is a gimmicky little film that doesn’t deliver. It gives us one day a year for 20 years in the lives of Emma (Anne Hathaway), a smart, mousy girl who loves Dexter, and Dexter (Jim Sturgess), an attractive, outgoing, shallow lad who's too busy sowing wild oats to get serious about Emma. That’s the film’s main conflict: When will they get together? This year? Next?

The day in question is always July 15th, or St. Swithin’s Day in Britain, which is famous because of the following traditional verse:

St. Swithin's day if thou dost rain
For forty days it will remain
St. Swithin's day if thou be fair
For forty days 'twill rain nae mair.

I knew about the day mostly because of the Billy Bragg song, and because it sounds so fantastically British: Swithin’s. According to a quick online search, St. Swithin was “a Saxon Bishop of Winchester. He was born in the kingdom of Wessex and educated in its capital, Winchester. He was famous for charitable gifts and building churches.”

So is the movie about building churches? No. Is it about the weather? Not so much. Does it have anything to do with Billy Bragg’s song of lost love?

The Polaroids that hold us together
Will surely fade away
Like the love we spoke of forever
On St. Swithin's Day.

Sort of. But the movie fudges things in the manner of movies about love.

It begins chronologically in the late 1980s with the graduation of Emma and Dexter from college. Each has grand plans. She’s moving to London to write a book. He’s going to France to... I forget what. Learn about other cultures and then forget them.

In London, Emma winds up working long hours in a cheesey Mexican restaurant and getting nowhere with her writing and feeling defeated. Eventually she becomes a teacher involved with the wrong guy, Ian (Rafe Spall), a drab fellow who wants to be a stand-up comedian even though nothing he says is remotely funny.

Dexter winds up breezing through life. Before we know it, he’s the host of a loud, shallow TV show aimed at loud, shallow twentysomethings who like clubbing and video games. His dying mother (Patricia Clarkson) is appalled that he’s wasting his talents and his time in this manner. His father (Ken Stott) is merely appalled. He feels his son is drinking too much and not spending enough time with his dying mother. We’re supposed to take the father’s side in this, but the structure of the film, the one-day-per-year template, doesn’t allow for much emotional involvement. The father harangues the son for drinking before we even realize he’s drunk, for example.

Then fortunes change. Emma breaks it off with Ian, writes a book, it’s popular, and she moves to Paris and meets a gorgeous Parisian man. Dexter gets married to a busty blonde, has a kid, but loses his job and can’t find another. His wife cheats on him with his best friend. He’s washed-up and gray at 30.

But Emma still takes him back. She ditches Frenchy for him. True love.

With the central tension of the film thus resolved, other tensions need to emerge. They do. Year by year, Emma: 1) wants a kid; 2) still hasn’t had a kid; 3) dies in a biking accident. All on St. Swithin’s Day.

Afterwards, director Lone Scherfig (“An Education”) and screenwriter David Nicholls (from his novel) do a good call-back to that first St. Swithin’s Day, in the late 1980s, and to a moment where the relationship could’ve deepened immediately but didn’t. There’s a sadness to it, certainly, this early scene, but it’s not the sadness of the Billy Bragg song. Bragg’s sadness is about how love, which we claim to be forever, fades. “One Day” claims that love is forever. So the sadness of the callback, and of the movie, relates to the earlier, shallow choices Dexter made with his life and his love. It’s about all that time wasted.

I would argue that, regardless of what we do with time, whether we “waste” it like the grasshopper (Dexter), or "make proper use of it” like the ant (Emma), it keeps going. That's what's truly sad. It's not about bad choices made but of any choices made. Time takes us from a place where we are young and have many choices to where we are old and have but one: death. It takes us to the moment when one of us is gone and the other is mourning, to the moment when both of us are gone and what survivors we have are mourning, to the moment when both of us are long-gone and there’s no one left to mourn.

Love the poster, though.

WARNING: SPOILERS

Our sympathies keep changing in “A Separation” in a way that reminded me of life.

Initially, Simin (Leila Hatami) seems the sympathetic one, at least to western eyes, since she wants out of Iran for both herself and her daughter, while her husband Nader (Peyman Maadi) seem stubborn and awful for refusing to go. When Simin does leave, she goes, not out of the country but across town, to stay at her mother’s, leaving Nader to care for their daughter, Termeh (Arina Farhadi), who’s 11 and smart, as well as his father (Ali-Asghar Shahbazi), who is old and suffering from Alzheimer’s.

But we also have sympathy for Razieh (Sareh Bayat), whom Nader hires to help in his wife’s absence. She’s pregnant; she has her own daughter, Somayeh (Kimia Hosseini), an adorable, big-eyed thing, to worry about; and now, for 300,000 rials a day (about US$26.50), she has to look after Nader’s father, who wets himself, and who may wander off at any moment to get the newspaper at the newsstand down the street. Wetting himself, and not being able to change himself, is the big problem. She’s unsure whether it’s a sin for her to be this close to a man she doesn’t know, but there’s a kind of Islamic hotline she can call to plead her case. She does, successfully, but it’s really more than she bargained for. So she asks Nader: Could her husband, Hodjat (Shahb Hosseini), take the job instead?

Nader is willing, even grateful, but surprised when it’s still Razieh who shows up the next day, and the next. Something about her husband being in jail? Something about creditors? Nader is even more surprised, and angered, when he comes home early one day to find no one at home and his father tied to the bed. Initially he thinks he’s dead. He’s not, but he’s bruised. And really who would do such a thing? And where is the day’s money Nader left on the dresser? And it’s at this point that Razieh returns, with her daughter, and with nothing like shame or guilt on her face. Who is this woman? How could she do such a thing to his father? And still she demands her day’s pay? Why doesn’t she get out of his apartment. Out! Out!

Yeah, so what if Razieh slipped when he shoved her out the door. Really? She miscarried? That’s awful. From the shove? That doesn’t seem...? She and her husband are pressing charges? For murder?

Poor Nader.

God, where the fuck is his wife during all of this?!

The relativity of all of this is key. The lack of absolutes is key. The small lies that occur daily, or the big lies that occur when our backs are to the wall, or the information withheld to make one’s case better, all of these things are key. “A Separation” begins inconclusively before an unseen judge, and it ends—beautifully—in a kind of purgatory of inconclusiveness, and in the middle ... is anything resolved? The more both parties go to find justice, the more injustice they find. The more control they attempt to exert, the more things fall apart. “A Separation” isn’t just about the separation of a man and a wife; it’s about a separation from truth, from respect, and maybe from love.

In my late twenties I got corrective lenses for the first time, for near-sightedness, and I remember how they not only clarified my vision but polarized the world. The muddy middle disappeared. Both beauty and ugly became sharper: the former's perfections, previously half-hidden, now dazzled, while the latter's imperfections, also half-hidden, were now sadly revealed. The glasses seemed unfair. Part of me felt the world would be a kinder place if we all walked around with a bit of myopia.

Writing about movies is in some sense like putting on corrective lenses. It clarifies my vision but it also also polarizes my feelings. The good becomes very, very good; the bad godawful. The muddy middle disappears.

I think this explains why I'm always a little surprised when end-of-the-year pronouncements are made and the recent year in movies is found lacking. People said 2009 was a bad year for movies and I thought, “Really? With 'Summer Hours' and 'Up' and 'A Serious Man' and 'Seraphine' and 'Avatar'?” People said 2010 was a bad year for movies and I thought, “Really? With 'Un Prophete' and 'Restrepo' and 'True Grit' and 'The Social Network' and 'A Film Unfinished' and 'Inception' and 'Toy Story 3'?”

Now people say it of 2011 and my reaction is just as strong. Really? Because I can't squeeze all I want to into my top 10. I think, “Surely I have room for 'Hugo' or 'Midnight in Paris' or 'Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy,'” and I look back at what I already have and I think maybe this, or maybe that, or should I substitute the other? For what it's worth, my top six were decided early. It's the last four that caused hand-wringing.

I love the many connections between the choices below: the ominous, near silent moods of 9, 8 and 7. (“Tinker Tailor” would've fit in well there.) The stubborn, sad persistence of character in 8 and 3. The everyday transcendance of 5 and 4. The search for safety and God in 2 and 1.

Lacking? No, 2011 was a great year for movies. Here is my very, very late top 10.

10. “Bridesmaids”: When I came home from viewing this opening night and Patricia asked me how it was, I said, “It's the funniest movie of the year.” I paused. “And not just so far. I'm saying it'll be the funniest movie I see all year.” That prediction was really only threatened by one film, “Young Adult” (see below). Much of the movie is actually conventional. When her best friend, Lillian (Maya Rudolph), gets engaged, Annie (Kristen Wiig) tries to be happy for her but can’t help compare where she and Lillian are both heading. Annie's life is in the crapper but she's her own worst enemy. She keeps going back to the wrong guy (Jon Hamm), keeps ignoring the right guy, (Chris O’Dowd), is forced to move home with her mother (Jill Clayburgh, the original unmarried woman). We’ve seen this kind of thing before yet it feels different here. It’s funnier, yes, but it also feels truer. The way people try to talk Annie out of her downward spiral and the way she doesn’t listen. There’s a scene where, after Rhodes encourages her to bake again, she does, she bakes a glorious cupcake, topped with all kinds of candied configurations. Then she stares at it on the counter, unhappily. Then she eats it, unhappily. Not because she wants the cupcake but because she doesn’t want to make the cupcake. Because baking isn’t satisfying what it used to satisfy.

9. “Drive”: Driver (Ryan Goslling) is so laconic he makes Clint Eastwood’s characters seem like blabbermouths. Initially this annoyed me. Initially I felt there was too much atmosphere and not enough substance. I’m not a fan of cool, or profess to be such, since cool is silent and distant, and the most interesting people I’ve encountered in life are the ones who are most engaged. Who talk. I’m a word man. Driver is not. He’s most definitely cool, with his toothpick in his mouth or tucked behind his ear, and so silent, a man of so few words, that I began to wonder, a half-hour in, if there wasn’t something wrong with him mentally. Was he autistic? And yet, despite all this, by the end of the movie I had absorbed him, or he me. I could feel it as I put on my yellow biking jacket, so similar to his silver racing jacket, and my biking gloves, so similar to his driving gloves, and walked out of the theater immersed in the dreamlike silence of the movie. I imagined I was tough and cool and hard-to-read instead of what I am: a tired 48-year-old in need of a shave and a beer. Holden was right. The goddamn movies.

8. “Shame”: “Shame” is a snapshot from a life because there’s no real resolution. There’s just need and heartache and awful need again. Sissy (Carrey Mulligan) tries to kill herself but she’s tried to kill herself before. Brandon (Michael Fassbender) binges on sex but no doubt he’s binged before. It leaves him exhausted and crying but the thing inside him won’t come out. Sexaholism used to be a punchline to me—who isn’t addicted to sex?—but writer-director Steve McQueen shows us the difference as well as the similarity. The difference is in volume and the similarity is in almost everything else. The similarity is in trying to get this thing out of us. The similarity is in the lack of resolution or resurrection. In the end, Brandon is back on the subway, and there’s that girl again, and now she’s ready; and the hunger is always ready.

7. “Margin Call”: J.C. Chandor's debut film is our best dramatization of the global financial meltdown and should be seen on a double bill with “Inside Job” and maybe several “Frontline” episodes, including the ones on Brooksley Born and the demise of the Glass-Steagall Act. It's an ominous, moody, sometimes silent film with a great cast and a kill-or-be-killed message that the film doesn't celebrate but doesn't exactly condemn, either. It's about knowingly selling toxic assets so they infect some other schmuck. It's about how to SURVIVE, as CEO John Tuld (Jeremy Irons) tells the 3 a.m. board meeting. I love how the characters surprise in small ways. Will Emerson (Paul Bettany) immediately comes off slick and fierce but that doesn’t mean he’s disingenuous or doesn’t have a moral code of his own. Sam Rogers (Kevin Spacey) is appalled by what he’s asked to do but that doesn’t mean he can’t rally the troops to do that very thing. What kind of world is Wall Street? The kind where Kevin Spacey plays the moral pillar. Be very afraid.

6. “The Artist”: I think both fans and detractors have gotten this one wrong. They think it's a bit of lightweight nostalgia, a throwback not only to the silent era but to the next generation of filmmakers, which made great films about the silent era (“Singin' in the Rain,” “Sunset Blvd.,” etc.). But to me there are few films more relevant to the United States in 2011 than this silent, black-and-white, French film. For all its charms and zip and melodrama, it's ultimately about a man made irrelevant by new technology. It's about a man made silent by new technology. And in 2011, after 15 years of entire professions being decimated by the digital revolution, that describes too many of us.

5. “The Descendants”: Everyone says that comedy is tragedy plus time, but in “The Descendants” writer-director Alexander Payne removes time from the equation. A woman—a mother, wife and daughter—is dying in a hospital bed, having spent the last year of her life cheating on her husband, Matt (George Clooney), and we find ourselves laughing out loud. Payne creates comedy out of tragedy as it’s happening. The movie's main characters, Matt and his two daughters—plus all of their cousins, including Beau Briddges' own version of The Dude—are the descendants of the title. They’ve been entrusted with this great wealth and the question is what they do with it. But the dynamic and the dilemma filters through to us in the audience. All of us are descendants. All of us are entrusted with this great wealth. And the question is what we do with it.

4. “Moneyball”: The feeling captured in the opening sentence of my review, written in September, hasn't gone away: I had trouble with the falsehoods but was won over by the poignancy. Slowly I'm forgetting the falsehoods, however, the reduction of the career to one year, and I keep returning to the poignancy: the close-up of Billy Beane (Brad Pitt) as he listens to his daughter singing on her homemade CD with words that fit him. Throughout the movie he wants to be the uberman. He wants to change baseball, and he does, but not the way he envisions, through ultimate victory. He changes it because he hits a mammoth homerun in a losing cause, but the mammoth homerun draws attention. Others steal his stance, his style, and in that way the game changes. In this moment, though, he's not the uberman but the everyman. He's us. Most of us are stuck in the middle; most of us don't know when we hit homeruns, or, if we suspect it, the homeruns go unnoticed and unmentioned. They're before the sparsest of crowds. Most felt “Moneyball” couldn't be filmed because it's about baseball stats, and who beside geeks like me care about baseball stats? But I knew it could be filmed because it's really about underdogs who band together to beat the big boys, the corporation, the evil empire, and that's most of our movies. I just didn't know how they would do the ending. The underdog A's under Billy Beane never won it all; they never even went to the World Series. I thought it was the story's great weakness. In the end, screenwriters Steve Zaillian and Aaron Sorkin and director Bennett Miller make it the film's great strength.

3. “Young Adult”: Mavis Gary is one of the most original characters American cinema has produced in years and Charlize Theron totally embodies her. So why didn't it get out there more? It was written by Diablo Cody and directed by Jason Reitman, the team who gave us “Juno” back in 2007, but this one isn't so traditionally feel-good. Mavis is an awful person (no empathy or tact), involved in an awful enterprise (winning back her high-school boyfriend at the age of 37), and in the end she doesn't change. She stays on the less-righteous, all-American path of perpetual consumerism and loneliness. Most people won't find it touching or amusing but I thought it was both. I found Mavis sympathetic in her situation and entertaining in her response to her situation. When Paige, Patricia and I saw it in a small, downtown theater with maybe a dozen other people in attendance, we were about the only people laughing; but we were roaring. It's that kind of movie. Its ending is so cynical, I felt something like pure joy wash over me. Most feel-good movies make me feel bad because they aren't any good. “Young Adult,” with its awful characters, made me feel great.

2. “Des hommes et des dieux”: “Of Gods and Men” is a monastic movie. It’s filmed as unaffectedly as the Cistercian monks lived their lives in Tibhirine, Algeria, in 1996. It documents their modest activities in a modest manner. We see them carry firewood and clean floors. They pack honey, miel de l’Atlas, and sell it at the local market. They farm, tend to the sick, help procure visas. They study—both St. Augustine and the Koran. They pray and sing hymns and psalms. Mostly they are caught, trapped, between a growing Islamic fundamentalism and an authoritarian military government. They are trapped between the need for safety elsewhere and the need to do good here. What to do? What to do? At one point, the Islamic revolutionary, Fayattia, tells Brother Christian (Lambert Wilson), a tall, bespectacled man who likes to walk in the woods and feel the bark of trees, that he doesn't have a choice in the matter they're discussing. “Vous n'avez pas le choix,” he says. Brother Christian replies:“Si, j'ai le choix.” (Yes, I have a choice.) “Of Gods and Men” is all about the awful, potentially transcendant weight of “J'ai le choix.”

1. “The Tree of Life”: Was there any doubt? It's not only one of the more evocative films about childhood (ball, butterfly, blocks, baby brother arriving and cramping your style); it's not only one of the more honest depictions of coming of age (from fighting father to wishing him dead to becoming him in his absence); it keeps in mind the existential. It doesn't allow us a cultural memory of 10 or 15 or 100 years; it goes back to the beginning of time. It blends religion and science, Job and the dinosaurs. How can bad things happen in Waco, Texas in the 1950s? Where were you when I laid the earth's foundations? Where were you when I allowed entire species to go extinct? The vast background puts the life, and the questions, in perspective. The fundamental dilemma of the movie, and of life (the movie suggests), is between the way of nature and the way of grace. The short cultural memory, the one presented in most of our products, certainly most of our movies, leads to the way of nature: the “I” standing in this spot and pronouncing dominion over this spot. The long cultural memory, blending science and religion, in which the “I” dissolves against the vastness of time and space stretching behind us and ahead of us, leads, not to despair, but to the way of grace. When the world is shining around us. And love is smiling through all things.

WARNING: SPOIL YOU, YOU SPOILING SPOILERS

I believe in Lisbeth Salander.

The movies offer us a new ass-kicking heroine every other week, it seems: Angelina Jolie, Charlize Theron, Zoe Saldana. Even Natalie Portman tried her little hand last year. Even 12-year-old Chloe Moretz.

I don’t believe in any of them. But I believe in Lisbeth Salander.

She’s not fighting men three times her size in hand-to-hand combat. She takes them down with guile and tools and fury and ruthlessness. She either meticulously plans and strikes or just grabs a golf club and strikes.

One of the great moments in the Swedish version of “The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo” (“Män som hatar kvinnor”) occurs near the end, with the golf club, after Lisbeth (Noomi Rapace) rescues a tied-up and tortured Mikael Blomkvist (Michael Nyqvist), and then, on her own, chases down Martin Vanger (Peter Haber), the neo-Nazi serial killer and general sick fuck who was torturing him. Let me repeat that. The bad guy was torturing him and she came to the rescue. Then she didn’t wait for him to recover to go after Vanger. To be honest, he’d just slow her down.

The girl who laid down and died
Here’s how original this concept is. In the 1996 movie “12 Monkeys,” directed by the unconventional Terry Gilliam, Bruce Willis plays a man from a dystopian future sent back to attain an apocalyptic virus in its pure form so an antidote can be made; Madeline Stowe plays the 1990s psychiatrist who initially thinks he’s crazy but realizes he’s telling the truth. Her world will end and almost everyone she knows will die. And they’re chasing the bad guy through the airport when Willis is shot by airport security. What does she do? Does she go after the bad guy who has the virus that will kill five billion people, including probably herself? No. She cries, kneels beside the man, and cradles his dying head in her arms. When the man dies, all movement dies with him—even with the fate of the world at stake.

Barely anyone said shit about this idiocy. It seemed natural to them. Hero falls, girl falls with him. That’s the way of movies.

Here’s what I imagine Lisbeth would say: “Madeline Fucking Stowe.” Here’s what I imagine Lisbeth would say to the movie industry, who perpetuate this kind of storyline: “Fuck you, you fucking fucks.”

So I was worried how Hollywood would handle this aspect of the story. Obviously director David Fincher makes daring movies, but the actor now playing Mikael Blomkvist, Daniel Craig, happens to be the latest James Bond, the ultimate action hero, who rescues women and saves the world. That’s his job. Is it allowable, culturally or legally, to have the current James Bond rescued by a mere wisp of a girl who then tracks down the killer on her own? Because he’d just slow her down?

The girl who does the tattooing
Fincher’s version of “Dragon Tattoo” is like a speed-reader’s version of the Swedish version and it still clocks in at more than two and a half hours; but it’s an improvement in many ways. It gives us a better sense of Lisbeth’s inner life, as well as a better sense of her relationship with Blomkvist and why she becomes distant in the sequels. It also doesn’t stick Harriet Vanger out in the Australian outback; it sticks her right under our noses.

Plus David Fincher’s signature gloom is all over it.

The novel is difficult to adapt cinematically because it really begins with three storylines:

• Swedish industrialist Henrik Vanger (Christopher Plummer) is taunted by the murderer of his beloved niece, Harriet, 40 years after her disappearance.
• Journalist Mikael Blomkvist (Craig) loses a libel suit brought by an industrialist.
• Computer hacker Lisbeth Salander (Rooney Mara) loses her longtime legal guardian for one who demands sexual favors.

The connections between the storylines are initially tangential at best. Vanger investigates Blomkvist, via Salander and her computer-hacking skills, before hiring him to look into the disappearance of Harriet. Then, for almost an hour, Blomkvist and Salander follow separate paths. He traipses about in the cold of the Vangers’ various estates on their private island in Hedestad, digging into the past and searching for Harriet’s killer, while she deals with her new legal guardian, Bjurman (Yorick van Wageningen, the bad uncle of “Winter in Wartime”), a fat man who demands oral sex before allowing her access to her own money. When her computer is destroyed in an attempted subway robbery and she needs to buy a new one, he invites her to his home where he incapacitates her, ties her up and rapes her.

This is another scene I worried about in translation. The Swedish version is pretty graphic. And while the director of “Se7en” can obviously get pretty graphic, I wasn’t surprised, after the drugging and the tying up, that the camera began to pan out of the bedroom and down the narrow hallway, away from the shutting bedroom door. Yes, I thought. Leave the horror to our imaginations.

Which is exactly when Fincher brings us back into the bedroom for the brutal rape scene.

Did it seem more horrific in the Swedish version? Because I wasn’t expecting it or because it was more horrific? I remember Lisbeth limping home afterwards. We’re disappointed in her, this tough, smart girl who allows herself to get into that situation—until she reveals the camera in her bag and acts out her exquisite revenge. Fincher doesn’t give us the limping home; he reveals the awkward moments immediately after the rape. They’re in Bjurman’s place, after all. He has to untie her, after all. We see him slumped in the kitchen nook with something like guilt in his posture. “I’ll drive you home,” he offers, pathetically. When she slams the door, he thinks he’s gotten away with it.

I wonder what Bjurman thinks when Lisbeth calls and agrees to return to his place for more money. That she’s desperate? An addict? That she liked what he did? That his perversion fits into hers? Instead, he’s tasered, tied up, stripped and sodomized. He’s forced to watch a video of the initial rape and threatened with its internet upload if anything ever happens to her. Finally, she tattoos the following on his chest: I AM A RAPIST PIG. “Lie still,” she says, getting out the needle and promising blood. “I’ve never done this before.”

It’s the tattooing that makes the moment indelible. Up until then, her logic is Old Testament: an eye for an eye. But tattooing him adds something. The movie is about awful people who hide in plain sight, and Lisbeth is making sure they don’t hide too well. She’s handing out nametags. She’s branding scarlet letters.

The girl who is offered a purpose in life
What to make of the Vanger family tree? It’s a backstory better suited to novels. Henrik’s brother, Harald, is a Nazi who still lives in Hedestad, as does his daughter Celia (Geraldine James), while another daughter, Anita (Jolie Richardson), lives in London. Harriet’s father, Gottfried, also a Nazi, died the year before Harriet went missing, while Harriet’s brother, Martin (Stellan Skarsgård), now runs the company. “I’m quickly losing track of who’s who here,” Blomkvist says. Amen.

Of this crew, Martin is the one we see most often, and who’s played by the best-known actor, and who seems a decent sort. Which means, of course ... There’s a dinner over at his place with Celia and Blomkvist, and it’s one of the few moments where the harsh, Northern lighting of Sweden, which Fincher revels in, gives way to a softer, warmer lighting. It feels almost cozy in Vanger’s place—particularly with the harsh weather outside. One can even hear the wind howl. Or cry? Like a distant scream? It’s a subtle bit but people who know the story know it’s not the wind.

Blomkvist does well digging into a 40-year-old, missing persons case. The day Harriet disappeared there was a parade in town, and there’s a picture for the local newspaper of Harriet in the crowd. Blomkvist goes to the paper, retrieves the rest of the photos, digitalizes them, and creates a crude film in which it’s apparent that Harriet sees something, or someone, that stuns her. Another girl is taking her own photos behind Harriet. Might she have taken a shot of what Harriet saw?

The old inspector on the case is still alive. He tells Blomkvist that Harriet’s case is his “Rebecca case,” which is an unsolved murder case. There are several of those. There’s also a list of names and numbers written in the back of Harriet’s Bible: “Magda 32016” and “BJ 32027” and the like. Eventually the web becomes wide enough that Blomkvist feels the need for a research assistant.

Two reaction shots from this movie stay with me. When the Vanger family lawyer, Dirch Frode (Steven Berkoff), suggests to Blomkvist that they hire the girl who did the background check on him, Blomkvist responds, “The what?,” with a mixture of surprise and annoyance. He’s used to being the investigator, not the investigated. That’s the first one. Then when Blomkvist goes to recruit the girl, which finally brings our disparate storylines together, Lisbeth is wary of him until he says the line: “I want you to help me catch a killer of women.” Her reaction isn’t the blank one in the Swedish version. It’s the look of someone who is finally offered a purpose in life.

The girl who can hack into your soul
Now that I think about it, there’s a third reaction shot I love. It’s earlier in the movie. Lisbeth is meeting her boss, Armanasky (Goran Visnjic), and Frode, in a conference room in a corporate high-rise, where her mohawk, tats, boots and attitude don’t begin to fit. She asks, without worry, sitting at the other end of the long, gleaming conference table, if something was wrong with her initial report on Blomkvist. There wasn’t. They just want to know if there was anything she chose not to include. She turns away, offering her profile, and that great swoop of a mohawk, before adding,  “He’s had a long-standing sexual relationship with the co-editor of his magazine.” Pause. “Sometimes he performs cunnilingus on her.” Pause. “Not often enough, in my opinion.” By now she’s staring back at them, chewing her gum, gauging their reaction. Frode, a proper gentleman, looks away. “No,” he admits, “you were right not to include that.”

This raises a point. Once they see how good Lisbeth is, why don’t they just hire her as their investigator? Remove the middleman by hiring the middleman. As good as Blomkvist is, he’s still 20th-century: forced, like all of us, to rely upon interview and instinct to uncover the truth. Lisbeth is 21st century. She can hack into your computer and see your soul. I love the bit where Blomkvist attempts to show her something on his computer, and her impatience with his tentative movements is palpable. It’s all she can do not to grab the mouse and drive.

As for how Hollywood handles the golf-club scene? The breadth of the investigation forces hero and heroine to split up—a trope that, in thrillers, usually plays to the detriment of the heroine. Not here. Alone in Martin’s house, Blomkvist figures out Martin is the longtime serial killer just as Martin comes home. But he manages to get out of the house. Then Martin sees him and calls out to him and invites him in for a drink. Later, when he has a gun on him, when he’s about to torture and kill him, he asks why he accepted the offer, knowing what he knows, then answers his own question. “The fear of offending is stronger than the fear of pain,” he says, amused by human nature. He taunts him about Lisbeth: “I like that one. I can’t thank you enough for bringing her to me.” He’s in the process of suffocating Blomkvist when Lisbeth arrives, swings the nearest weapon, a golf club, and takes off half of Vanger’s face. Vanger flees and Lisbeth attends to Blomkvist for a second before asking a kind of permission: “May I kill him?” she asks. I forget if she waits for a response. Probably not. It would just slow her down.

The girl who rides off into the sunset
Was it worth it? Making this U.S. version so soon after the Swedish version? Fincher’s a better director, no doubt, and the acting is a little better. The script is tighter but misses the creepier elements of the serial-killer investigation. The bit with the cat is a good addition, but... I don’t quite see the point, to be honest. Other than to get Americans, who don’t read subtitles, to see the fucking thing.

As for what happened to Harriet Vanger? It’s not Martin. When he had the upper hand, he confessed to everything but not that. So there’s more unraveling to do, another half hour, really, and Fincher almost, almost, goes the route the novel went. When Harriet turns up alive—in Australia in the Swedish version, in London under her cousin’s name in the U.S. version—and we realize that she did this to save herself from her awful, abusive brother, my reaction was something like disappointment. Wait, I thought. She knew what her brother was and yet let him do what he did for 40 years?

That, it turns out, is Lisbeth’s reaction in the book:

   “Bitch,” she said.
   “Who?”
   “Harriet Fucking Vanger. If she had done something in 1966, Martin Vanger couldn’t have kept killing and raping for thirty-seven years.”

The Swedish version ignored these lines—they didn’t want to disturb the happy reunion between Henrik and Harriet—while Fincher merely alludes to them. “Harriet Fucking Vanger,” Lisbeth says at one point. But she doesn’t go further. Too bad. That’s key to me. Harriet Vanger is pretty but passive. She warns no one, passes out no nametags. She’s no hero. Most heroes, our stories tell us, are men. Most heroes, our stories tell us, save the day and ride off alone in the end.

One out of two.

WARNING: TOP-OF-THE-HEAP SPOILERS

In “The Unbearable Lightness of Being,” it took Daniel Day Lewis four words to get women into bed: “Take off your clothes.”

Piker. It often takes Brandon Sullivan (Michael Fassbender), the protagonist of “Shame,”  no words. He’ll just look at a pretty girl on the subway, suggest with his eyes, smolder a bit, wait for the tension to mount, and she’s ready. He’ll sidle up to his hyperactive boss, David (James Bade Dale of “The Pacific”), who’s trying to make the pretty one at the bar, say one or two words, and suddenly she’s casting him the kind of glances most men don’t receive in a lifetime.

Normally such a character would be wish fulfillment. Not here. Fassbender, impeccably groomed, is in almost every shot of “Shame” but it’s writer-director Steve McQueen’s movie. He sets the tone, which is moody, atmospheric, full of dread. Every day for Brandon is another day of desperately needing sex but desperately not needing the contact that goes with it. There’s something inside of him that can’t be fulfilled. In this, he’s like all of us, but his need is greater and the moments he’s satiated shorter. The title of this movie could be the title of McQueen’s first movie: “Hunger.”

“Shame” is more portrait than story. It’s a snapshot from a life. Brandon has a business-type, investment-type job in New York, which he apparently does well even though he’s rarely thinking about. He’s a sex addict so he’s always thinking about his next fix. In the toilet stall at work? In his bathroom at home? Via online pornography, magazines, DVDs? With Prostitute A, B, or both? With this girl at the bar or that girl on the subway? At that straight club? At that gay club?

There’s a cool exterior to Brandon, an unknowability and mystery that’s obviously appealing. Who is that man behind the scarf? But the cool exterior hides ... what? His sexual need and what else? A few books line the shelves of his high-rise condo, including, I was happy to see, Don DeLillo’s “Underworld”; but one can’t imagine him reading it. How could he sit still that long?

His careful routine, the veneer of respectability hiding his monstrous shame, is upset when his sister, Sissy (Carey Mulligan), shows up at his place. She’s a free spirit, a singer at posh bars, and later we hear her rendition of “New York, New York,” the triumphant ode to Manhattan that’s played after every Yankees victory; but she delivers it slow and sad, from the perspective of someone who isn’t A-number-1, top of the heap. It’s a beautiful moment in the movie, one of several moments Mulligan gives us. I still think of the way she bounces with delight on the subway platform after Brandon agrees to hear her sing. She wants to be part of his life—that’s her need—but it conflicts with his need. At one point, she alludes to their fucked-up childhood, and one wonders if there’s more there than the usual fuckedupness; if there wasn’t abuse of some kind. But we never get specifics. We get vapors.

She sleeps with his boss, his married boss, at Brandon’s place, and he can’t deal with it and goes running. She hangs too close to the tracks on the subway platform and he pulls her back. They’re both self-destructive but hers is sloppy and showy—there are scars on her wrists—and his is secretive and shameful and infecting every aspect of his life. She wants to pull him into the light but he reacts with anger. “I’m trying to help you,” she says. “How do you help?” he responds through clenched teeth. “You come here and you’re a weight on me.” After the movie, Patricia said he reminded her of me in this moment. That’s one thing I have in common with Brandon. We both feel easily trapped. We both live life in the exit row.

He makes a feint at respectability. He goes on a date with an attractive co-worker, Marianne (Nicole Beharie), and reacts to the dinner conversation as if it’s all new and amusing to him. A back and forth ... with words? He admits his longest relationship was just four months. He admits that that’s how he likes it. She doesn’t flee. Maybe, after the usual, first-date bullshit, this straightforwardness is refreshing. Maybe it’s the scarf and the Ewan McGregor smile. All those small charming teeth.

Was he always interested in Marianne as more than just another lay? Or did that idea only emerge when Sissy found him jacking off in the bathroom and found live sex girls on his home computer? After that, he tries to get rid of it all—the magazines, the DVDs, the computer itself—as if getting rid of the evidence of his need will get rid of the need. He wants to be clean again and he sees Marianne as the path to cleanliness. But when they finally fall into bed together he can’t get it up. For a moment we think this is his fate—to overdo it and then be unable to do it—but after she leaves we get a quick cut of him banging a prostitute in the same room, so that’s obviously not the problem. The problem is the cleanliness and the respectability. He can’t have it with any kind of meaning. He can only have it in a way that leaves him unfilled and seeking it again. It’s as if the disease is protecting itself from him. His disease needs to keep him hungry. It’s saying: You’re married to me.

“Shame” is a snapshot from a life because there’s no real resolution. There’s not even a program he enters. That would be too afterschool special. There’s just need and heartache and awful need again. Sissy tries to kill herself but she’s tried to kill herself before. Brandon binges on sex but no doubt he’s binged before. It leaves him exhausted and crying but the thing inside him won’t come out. Sexaholism used to be a punchline to me—who isn’t addicted to sex?—but Steve McQueen shows us the difference as well as the similarity. The difference is in volume and the similarity is in almost everything else. The similarity is in trying to get this thing out of us. The similarity is in the lack of resolution or resurrection. In the end, Brandon is back on the subway, and there’s that girl again, and now she’s ready; and the hunger is always ready.

WARNING: EAT MY SPOILERS

In “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner,” Katharine Hepburn does it to Virginia Christine. In “Mississippi Burning,” Gene Hackman does it to Brad Dourif. In “The Help,” it’s Allison Janney to Bryce Dallas Howard. They’re the somewhat-enlightened white people who berate the less-enlightened white people in movies about civil rights. They’re the white people who make the white people in the audience feel good about themselves.

Apparently Jim Zwerg wasn’t enough.

The Janney moment occurs near the end of “The Help” and it’s a wholly unnecessary scene in which Charlotte Phelan (Janney), mother of the film’s protagonist, Skeeter Phelan (Emma Stone), does a 180. For most of the movie, she’s had one goal: marry her daughter off. “Your eggs are dying,” she says early on. “Would it kill you to go on a date?” At the 11th hour, suddenly she’s OK with her daughter being the way she is and getting a job in New York and being a modern woman and all;  and she apologizes for the way she’s been for most of the movie and most of her life: cowardly and overly concerned aboout societal matters. And to make it up to her daughter, she berates the movie’s villainess, Hilly Holbrook (Howard), a classic “mean girl” from one of the most connected families in Jackson, Mississippi, in language that will end any connection between their families. “Get your raggedy ass off my porch!” she says.

We’re supposed to cheer. Some people probably did. The bad person has been told off, and Allison Janney, whom we loved on “West Wing,” is someone we can love again. And we get that nice mother-daughter feeling going.

Years ago, “In Living Color” did a spot-on satire on Hollywood movies about civil rights. It was mostly lampooning “Cry Freedom,” I think, and a bit of “Mississippi Burning,” both of which focus on well-meaning whites and the problems they encounter (losing jobs and homes, etc.) as they stand up to racism. The black folks around them are being beaten and killed, sure, but it’s the white folks we worry about because it’s the white folks we focus on. Black folks are non-entities: walk-ons in their own story.

“The Help” is an improvement on this kind of historical myopia since it actually gives half-time to its title characters. Okay, 45 percent.

It’s 1962 and Skeeter Phelan is returning from college to her hometown of Jackson, where she lands a job ghosting a household-advice column for The Jackson Journal. (Aside: The actor who plays the editor, Leslie Jordan, steals the scene; he’s so authentic I assumed he was a local.) Catch: Skeeter doesn’t know from household advice; she was raised by a beloved maid, Constantine (Cisely Tyson), who has mysteriously disappeared, and initially she has nowhere to turn. But eventually she relies upon the people who do know housework: the black maids who bus in from the outskirts, and raise the kids and cook the meals and clean the floors of the white folks in town. From this initial contact, she gets an idea for a book. What is it like to raise a child who then becomes your boss? What is it like to leave your own child to care for another? Her editor in New York, Elain Stein (Mary Steenburgen), who has suggestions of a “Sex and the Single Girl” lifestyle in her few moments on screen, is open to the idea, but doubts she’ll get any Southern black maid to trust her and talk. It’s the North reminding the South how the South lives.

Even so, one voice slowly emerges: Aibileen Clark (Viola Davis), who works for Hilly’s friend, Elizabeth (Ahna O’Reilly), raising the little girl that Elizabeth can’t or won’t. You could call Aibileen the soul of Skeeter’s book just as she is the soul of the movie. Davis is able to portray a bone-deep sorrow few actors can. She has a dignity about her but it’s never the proud, Hollywood kind meant for oppressed minorities. In the roles I’ve seen her in—“Doubt,” “Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close” and this—her characters are often skittish and distracted, as if  they were thinking of other, sadder things. Most likely they are, since the movies are never wholly about them. The things she’s thinking about are the things Hollywood doesn’t portray: her life. But through Skeeter’s eyes, we do get a portion of that life.

If Skeeter is a progressive in racial matters, Skeeter’s childhood friend, Hilly, is the regressive. At a time when the civil rights movement is gaining strength, with marches in Albany and Birmingham and Washington D.C., she’s lobbying for a state law requiring separate bathrooms for black maids. “They carry different diseases than we do,” she says.

Hilly’s fears and prejudices lead to the ultimate in just desserts. When she fires her maid, Minny Jackson (Octavia Spencer), for using the family toilet on a rainy day, then talks trash about her so she can’t get other work, Minny returns with a peace offering: a chocolate pie. But it’s not a peace offering because it’s not wholly chocolate. Hilly, who didn’t want to put her ass where Minny put hers, winds up eating ... no nice way to say this ... Minny’s shit. Literally. Minny planned on keeping this fact a secret, but Hilly is so awful, and Minny so volatile, that they have the following exchange:

Minny: Eat my shit.
Hilly (shocked): Excuse me?
Minny: I said eat... my... shit.
Hilly (still shocked): Have you lost your mind?
Minny: No, ma’am but you is about to. Cause you just did.

One wonders to what extent a black maid could say “Eat my shit” to a white woman in early 1960s Mississippi, let alone make it literally come true, without losing more than an income. The movie suggests that Hilly is so embarrassed by the incident that she’ll do anything to keep it under wraps. But wouldn’t she want revenge? And if she couldn’t tell the truth, what’s to stop her from makin’ up a little ol’ fib? She’d hardly be the first Southern belle to do so.

(Aside I: When did Bryce Dallas Howard become the villainess de rigueur of Hollywood? Not only Hilly here but the worst girlfriend in the world, Rachael, in “50/50.” Who knew the daughter of Ron Howard, Hollywood’s Mr. Nice Guy, had it in her?)

(Aside II: Does anyone else think of this movie as the battle of the Gwen Stacys? Howard and Stone, squaring off here, have both played Spider-Man's girlfriend: Howard in a bit part in “Spider-Man 3,” and Stone as the main squeeze in “The Amazing Spider-Man” this summer.)

(Aside III: OK, nerd hat off.)

Post-pie, Minny finds work on the outskirts of town with an ostracized white girl with a heart of gold. Celia Foote (Jessica Chastain) is from Sugar Ditch, Miss., and is viewed as white trash by the girls in town, particularly Hilly, who once dated Celia’s husband, Johnny (Mike Vogel). Basically Celia is too dumb to be racist, to know all of the things you are supposed to do or say, or not do or say, with the help, and this, combined with a childlike enthusiasm, makes her adorable. She’s the other good white girl in town, and Minny teaches her how to cook, clean, sass other women. Apparently she knew none of these things. One wonders what she was she doing for the first 20 years of her life.

Meanwhile, Yule Mae Davis (Aunjanue Ellis), Minny’s replacement in the Holbrook household, asks Hilly for a $75 loan so she and her husband can send both of their kids to college. OK ... Where to start with this? She asks Hilly for a loan? To send two kids to college? At a time when it took the National Guard to send James Meredith to the University of Mississippi? And she’s shocked when Hilly says no?

Later, while vacuuming, she finds Hilly’s engagement ring behind a couch, pockets it, pawns it, and is eventually arrested. This is the awful, unjust incident that sends all the other black maids in Jackson into the arms of Skeeter and into the pages of “The Help”: the fact that someone who stole something got arrested for it.

But never you mind. The book becomes a huge success, the maids get royalties, Skeeter gets a job in New York, and Hilly, awful Hilly, gets hers. Everyone—from Charlotte to Aibileen—tells her off. It’s a happy ending. How could it be otherwise? It’s now Mississippi 1964. What could possibly go wrong?

SPOILERS: HERE I COME

Mavis Gary is one of the most original characters American cinema has produced in years and Charlize Theron totally embodies her. So where’s the buzz? The film, and Theron, had caché among critics last summer but landed with hardly a noise in December. Maybe Paramount pushed it poorly; “Young Adult” has never appeared in more than a thousand theaters. Maybe critics haven’t shouted loudly enough. Some of them seem put off by the film’s dark humor, too. Is the audience as well? When Patricia, Paige and I saw the movie in a small, downtown Seattle theater with two dozen other people, I got the feeling we were the only ones laughing.

But man were we laughing.

The Concept
A writer of a series of young adult novels centering around the solipsistic machinations of high school girls, Mavis lives in a high-rise condo overlooking the Mississippi river in downtown Minneapolis. Nights are for drinking (and one-night stands), mornings are for hangovers (and regret), afternoons are for coffee with friends, or cadging bits of overheard dialogue from teenage girls—such as the Office Depot clerk who mentions her “textual chemistry” with a boy, which Mavis then includes in her next book.

But the routine is getting old, a new “Waverly Place” book is due, and after staring at the blank page of “Chapter One” in her computer she distracts herself with email. Along with the usual spam and Facebook crap, there’s a message, “Look who’s arrived!,” with a picture of the new baby of Buddy Slade (Patrick Wilson), Mavis’ high school boyfriend, who still lives in her hometown of Mercury, Minn. And it dawns on Mavis: this is the solution to her misery. Not to have a baby of her own but to win Buddy back. She’s 37 but it’s as if she’s still involved in the machinations of high school girls. It’s as if she never grew up.

That’s the film’s tagline, by the way: “Everyone gets old. Not everyone grows up.” Why doesn’t Mavis?

When We Grow Up
You can blame what she calls “Y.A.,” the young-adult novels she’s been writing for ... 10 years? Fifteen years? They’ve stunted her. Her imaginative world has never left high school.

You can blame her beauty, which is otherworldly (this is Charlize Theron, after all), and which, even at 37, allows her to get away with shit mere mortals can’t. “Guys like me are born loving women like you,” says Matt Freehauf (Patton Oswalt), one of the guys she ignored in high school, when she returns to Mercury. It’s not necessarily a compliment. To either one of them.

You can blame alcoholism. More on this later.

Mavis may also be a victim of the American myth of “getting out,” embodied, most notably, in the early songs of Bruce Springsteen: It’s a town full of losers and I’m pulling outta here to win, etc. This is exactly what Mavis did. She saw Mercury as a town full of losers, so she pulled out of there to win. She made it all the way to the big city, to Minneapolis, but discovered another dead end. It’s a familiar story: She escaped Mercury but can’t escape herself. The look of disgust on her face isn’t just for what she sees around her—the sad little malls, the sad little people—but for the sad little person inside her.

She knows this, too, deep down. She’s not dumb. The opposite. “Young Adult” is a movie about delusions, and Mavis’ are whoppers, but she maintains them through her own deeply skewed internal logic. She maintains them because she can argue so well.

When Matt reminds her that Buddy Slade has a wife, she counters, “No, he has a baby. And babies are boring.” When Buddy says he feels like a zombie from all the sleepless, new-baby nights, she seizes upon it. “It’s a pretty strong statement to make,” she tells Matt later. “A zombie is a dead person, Matt.” Finally when she makes her play, and Buddy, astonished, tells her, “I’m a married man,” she responds sweetly, as if they were talking about an addiction, “I know. We can beat this thing together.”

It’s hilarious and awful and delusional, but what she’s offering is actually enticing— and not just because Charlize Theron is offering it. Family means responsibility, which means roots, which means being stuck in one spot for the rest of your life. It’s a trade-off everyone makes. Mavis is offering Buddy what age and responsibility tend to restrict: possibility and freedom.

It’s a Shame About Mavis
Even so, every one of her scenes with Buddy is excruciating. During her road trip to Mercury, she rewinds the same ancient mixed tape, the one that reads MAD LOVE, BUDDY on the spine, so she can listen, over and over, to “The Concept,” an awful, early-’90s college-radio song by Teenage Fanclub. It’s their song. Yet when Buddy’s wife, Beth (Elizabeth Reaser), drumming for the all-mom band “Nipple Confusion” at the bar, Champion O’Malley’s (“Where everyone’s a winner”), launches into the band’s opening song, it’s, yep, the same song. One senses that this is now a song Buddy shares with Beth—as he shares a life with Beth. Mavis senses this, too, and for a second she pulls away in anger and disappointment. For a second, there’s clarity. Then she looks over at Matt. He’s eyeing her sympathetically, feeling sorry for her, which, to Mavis, is the exact opposite of the way the world is. She feels sorry for them, not the other way around. So she narrows her eyes and leaps back in. She leans close to Buddy, and shouts, happily, over the music, “I think this song was playing the first time I went down on you!”

She’s delusional about her career, too. A few years earlier, she was written up in the Mercury paper: a “local girl makes good” kind of thing. But in an exchange with a clerk at a local bookstore, it comes to light that: 1) she doesn’t get true author credit on her books; the Waverly Place series creator, “Jane Mac Murray” (the F.W. Dixon of Y.A.), does; and 2) the series isn’t popular anymore. What her publisher wants from her is the last book in the series so he can end it. After which Mavis will have ... what exactly? Not much. She’ll have spent a dozen years writing someone else’s books.

Most importantly, she’s delusional about the way people view her—particularly the people of Mercury. She assumes envy: for her looks, for her career, for the fact that she got out of Mercury in the first place. This envy sustains her. But after Buddy rejects her advances at the baby-naming ceremony (“You’re better than this,” he says with finality), she has a climactic scene with Beth and guests out on the front lawn, in which she spews a rambling, drunken, expletive-laden diatribe against the entire town. Then she beseeches Buddy: “Why did you invite me?” Meaning: Why am I here if you didn’t want to change your life for me? And that’s when her world gets upended. Buddy tells her he didn’t invite her; Beth did. She felt sorry for her. They all do. That look Matt shot her at Champion O’Malley’s? That’s how they all feel. It’s obvious she’s having some kind of mental breakdown. Hey, they just want to help.

Low
There’s been talk of a supporting-actor nomination for Patton Oswalt, but I don’t see it, to be honest. He good, but he doesn’t blow me away the way that Charlize Theron blows me away. The range she displays—from full-on bitchery to abject, near-naked vulnerability—is stunning.

But I do love their scenes together. They have chemistry, and sharp conversation, and both are blunt in a way that the nice folks of Mercury are not. In high school, they had lockers close enough to each other that he remembers the heart-shaped mirror inside hers; but she only remembers him as “the hate-crime guy,” as a victim of a brutal, homophobic jock attack in the woods, which garnered national media attention until it came to light that he wasn’t gay after all. Since it was no longer a “hate crime,” just a horrendous one, it was no longer a story, and the press stopped caring. But Matt carries the reminders. He still walks with crutches. He pisses sideways. He’s a shattered physical reminder—to us—how awful high school was; and he’s a verbal reminder–-to Mavis—how awful she was. He mentions the heart-shaped mirror inside her locker. “I think you looked at that mirror more often than you looked at me,” he says.

After the front-lawn debacle, Mavis flees to Matt’s house, which he shares with his sister, Sandra (Collette Wolfe); and as she stands there, vulnerable, askew, fruity beverage spilled over the front of her frilly white dress, he tries to break down her quixotic quest. Why Buddy? he asks. He’s a good man, she responds; he’s kind. “Aren’t other men kind?” he asks. She restarts: “He knew me when I was at my best,” she says, meaning high school. “You weren’t at your best then,” he says. “Not then.”

It’s a great scene. Mavis idealizes her high school years but Matt implies she’s better now, and I tend to agree. Throughout the movie, there’s little that is sympathetic or representative about her—she’s an awful person on an awful mission: a “psycho prom-queen bitch,” in the words of one of Beth’s friends—but there is something representative about her situation. Life didn’t pan out for her. That’s most of us. She lives alone. She’s lonely. Like many. Like Matt. You could say the very thing she’s holding onto—the image of her perfect, high-school prom-queen self—is the very thing she needs to let go if she’s going to have any chance at happiness. And she does. She finally breaks down, and falls into Matt’s arms and into his bed. The whole thing is clumsy and human and thus has a kind of beauty; and when she wakes up the next morning, with Matt’s arm flopped across her waist, echoing the one-night stand Mavis had at the beginning of the movie, we wonder, “What now?”

In Leonard Cohen’s “Anthem,” the chorus goes:

Ring the bells that still can ring
Forget your perfect offering
There’s a crack, a crack in everything
That’s how the light gets in

So we’re wondering. Has Mavis forgotten her perfect offering? Has the light gotten in?

Achin’ to Be
Upstairs in the kitchen, she runs into Sandra, gets a cup of coffee, and breaks down further. She’s an open wound now. The walls that protected her are finally gone.

Would “Young Adult” have been as good a movie if it had continued in this direction? I doubt it. The way it ends feels exactly right to me. It feels like a continuation of an earlier, key scene when Mavis, at her parents’ house, wonders why her mother still hangs the wedding photo of Mavis and her ex-husband. Mavis has excised that failed marriage from her life and her mind. It’s part of her non-perfection. But her mother, Hedda (Jill Eikenberry), has her own illusions to maintain—Mavis’ room looks exactly like Mavis left it two decades ago—and, as they sit at the breakfast table, Hedda makes excuses. There’s a pause. Then Mavis offers a non sequitur.

“I think I might be an alcoholic,” she says.

Wow, I thought. But the confession goes nowhere. Her parents deflect it away. Maybe it’s too much reality for them. Maybe they’re unaware of who their daughter really is. Maybe it’s a “not nice” conversation to have at the breakfast table, and this is a nice town, after all, where everyone’s a winner, and so the moment passes—a moment that could’ve been the first step on Mavis’ road to recovery.

Something similar happens at the Freehauf breakfast table. Mavis is breaking down and opening up. She says she doesn’t feel fulfilled. She hates her life. “I need to change, Sandra,” she says. Then Sandra responds:

“No, you don’t,” Sandra says.

Sandra, it turns out, is a Mavis wannabe. She’s the less pretty girl who wants to be the very pretty girl, or at least hang with her, which is what she’s finally doing. Mavis Gary is in her kitchen! She wants to get out of Mercury, too, the way that Mavis did. She still believes in the Springsteenian myth of the town full of losers. “Everyone here is fat and dumb,” Sandra says. “They don’t care what happens to them because it doesn’t matter what happens to them,” she says. “Fuck Mercury,” she says.

Mavis’ reaction? A kind of whoosh. A long exhale. “Thank you,” she says. “Whoa.” Her worldview, upended the day before, is back in place. She doesn’t need to change. It’s the town that’s screwed up. The ironic kicker is that when Sandra asks to come with her to Minneapolis, a trip she hasn’t had the courage to make on her own, Mavis, restored to herself by Sandra, and feeding off of envy again, is sweetly condescending. “You’re good here, Sandra,” she says.

I.e., with the losers in this town. Where everyone’s a winner.

Free to Be, You and Me
Throughout the movie, in fast food joints and park benches, Mavis has been writing her final “Waverly Place” novel, about Kendall and her high school battles, which mirror Mavis and her current battles. One wonders how the novel might’ve ended if Sandra hadn’t opened her mouth. Instead, the Buddy figure in the story winds up dead, “lost at sea,” we’re told, while Kendall, glorious Kendall, graduates high school and leaves town knowing her best days are ahead of her. She leaves town thinking what Mavis probably thought 20 years ago when she left Mercury: “Life: here I come.”

That’s the last line. In the movie theater, I couldn’t stop smiling.

Most of us go to the movies for wish fulfillment. We want to maintain our illusions—that good conquers evil and love conquers all—but by having Sandra bolster Mavis’ illusions, screenwriter Diablo Cody and director Jason Reitman, the team who gave us “Juno,” refuse to bolster ours. We want to believe in self-help notions of progress and betterment, and dramatic notions of resurrection after a fall, and “Young Adult” doesn’t play this game. Mavis’ delusions, close to being killed, are actually made stronger by the end. And over the closing credits we hear Diana Ross sing the following:

Well, I don't care if I'm pretty at all
And I don't care if you never get tall
I like what I look like, and you're nice small
We don't have to change at all

It’s from the quintessential album of 1970s-style possibility and betterment, “Free to Be, You and Me.” But what’s the promise of that last line? The one thing that can’t be promised. The song’s implication is that, though we change, we can still hold onto the best, unchanging part of ourselves—the part of me that likes you, and the part of you that likes me. It’s a sweet thought, but it’s also the thought that propels Mavis on her psycho-bitch misadventures. What is Mavis saying to Buddy throughout this film if not what Diana says at the end of the song? “I don't want to change, see, because I still want to be your friend—forever and ever and ever and ever and ever.”

I assume all of this is too cynical for most moviegoers. I assume that’s why the movie hasn’t done better. To me, it felt like a breath of fresh air. To me, after the supercharged lies of most movies, it felt a little like life.

WARNING: SPOILERS

Horseshit.

That’s what I kept thinking while watching Steven Spielberg’s “War Horse.” I sat in the theater, twisting in my seat, unable to believe how bad it was. Have I changed that much? Has Steven? Does he need a good screenwriter nowadays—Tony Kushner in “Munich,” say—to keep his worst instincts in check? He didn’t get that here. Instead he got the guy who wrote “Billy Elliott” (Lee Hall) and the guy who wrote “Love Actually” (Richard Curtis) and together they made mythic mush. They made sure no stock character went unstocked, no melodramatic moment was not without its further melodramatic pause, and no sun set that didn’t set on the title character. Robert Redford in “The Natural” only wishes he could’ve been suffused with this much magic-hour light.

“War Horse” is basically “Black Beauty” for boys. The horse, beloved by his first boy, Albert (Jeremy Irvine), who names him Joey, is nonetheless, through poverty and tragedy and war, passed from one owner to another, from one story to the next, until he winds up back ... back home. Where he gets to pull a plow up a hardscrabble, rock-strewn British mountainside. I guess we all have our definitions of home.

“This is a stubborn one, hey?” the vet says as Joey is being born. So he is. But with a calm voice, a gentle hand, and a ready demonstration, he’ll go above-and-beyond for you. And he’ll show that bastard landowner, that bastard Major, those bastard Huns, what a little old-fashioned gumption can do.

Do directors have the maxim, “Make the movie you want to watch”? I think Steven’s done that here. More’s the pity. He’s made a movie that’s part John Ford and part “Saving Private Ryan,” with all the hokiness the former implies and all the grittiness the latter implies, and the two don’t mix. The John Ford hokum was tough enough to take in a John Ford movie.

Steven, particularly in the early, pre-war scenes, keeps giving us that John Ford shot: from below, with boldly drawn principles in the foreground, behind a canvas of blue sky and puffy clouds.

Sometimes we get a Fordesque sense of the curvature of the highlands in Devon, England. It’s as if we’re about to walk off the ends of the earth—which, you could argue, is what happens to Albert and Joey. It’s a good shot but it’s somebody else’s shot. When did Spielberg feel the need to make other’s people movies?

The story: Joey is a horse trapped by the foolish circumstances of men—a drunk tenant farmer; both sides of a horrific war—but saved by a few gentle souls: first Albert, then Capt. Nicholls (Tom Hiddleston), who hasn’t realized how mechanized war has become. He thinks the cavalry still matters. There’s a nice set piece, a charge of the foolish brigade, in which the British, swords pointed forward, surprise and overrun a German army encampment and chase them into the woods ... where machine guns await to slaughter them. It’s supposed to be a surprise, these machine guns, but anyone who knows anything about history is wondering why they haven’t shown up yet. The surprise is that the cavalry made it that far. The further surprise is that when Spielberg does his “Gone with the Wind” pullback shot of all the dead officers and horses, there’s no messiness to it. They dot the landscape, equidistant from one another, like designs in a patchwork quilt. It’s almost pretty.

In this manner Joey winds up behind enemy lines and in the benevolent hands of the stars of recent indie or foreign movies: Gunther (David Kross, the reader of “The Reader”), who is shot for desertion; and Grandfather (Niels Arestrup, the Corsican gangster of “Un Prophete”), who lives ... in Holland? In Alsace? He has a windmill but speaks French. He also has a granddaughter, Emile (Celine Buckens), who is supposed to be sickly, brittle-boned or something, but seems the picture of health. She seems Elizabeth Taylor in “National Velvet.” Until the Germans arrive and rape her and take the horse.

Kidding. They just take the horse.

His new benevolent handler, Friedrich (Nicolas Bro), takes a second to admire him before adding ominously, “It’s a pity they found you.” Then we get a pullback to a collection of weak, decrepit horses, then a further pullback to a pit of horses that have literally been worked to death pulling heavy artillery up muddy hills. It’s a kind of horse holocaust, recalling “Schindler’s List,” but it leads to the film’s most risible scene.

Throughout his time in continental Europe, Joey has had a companion, a tall black horse named Topthorn. Early on, Joey teaches Topthorn how to take the harness, thus saving his life. And when the lead horse pulling German artillery finally succumbs, and is shot, the German commander demands that Topthorn replace him. But Topthorn is partially lame and won’t last long, so Friedrich offers up Joey instead. He’s overruled. But not Joey. He rears up, bucks off his holder, gallops to the front of the line and makes such a show of things that the commanders acquiesces. Joey sacrifices himself for Topthorn! Then he looks back at Topthorn and gives him a nod as if to say, “I got your back, mate.” It was so absurd, several people in the theater laughed out loud.

Worse? It’s a meaningless sacrifice. Despite his principled stand, Joey never becomes starved and decrepit like the other horses, he remains strong and magnificent. It’s still Topthorn who succumbs; and it’s Joey who’s set free in the chaos of battle. But there is no “free” in war. After a nighttime gallop through the German trenches—a good, harrowing scene—Joey becomes entangled in the barb wire of No Man’s Land, and, thus trapped, lies down. To die?

By this time it’s 1918. We’ve already cut away from Joey so Spielberg can show us Albert, now a doughboy, and still carrying around a torch for, and a drawing of, his beloved horse. But it’s an unnecessary cutaway. It’s there so Spielberg can give us his big WWI battle sequence as companion piece to his big WWII battle sequence at the beginning of “Saving Private Ryan.” It furthers Spielberg’s magnificence rather than Joey’s.

Joey entangled in barb wire? It’s how the movie should’ve begun. A British doughboy in the trenches looks through his binoculars and sees something moving in No Man’s Land but can’t quite make it out. Is it a soldier? A Brit? A German counterpart does the same. Both realize at the same time: No, it’s a horse! and the Brit thinks, “I wonder how it got there.” At which point we get flashback to Devon, etc. Or doesn’t Spielberg do flashbacks?

Instead we get this scene chronologically, when the audience knows it’s a horse, knows it’s Joey, and we’re waiting for everyone else in the film to catch up. Both sides try to call Joey to their side, not realizing how entangled he’s become, until, with a “Sod it,” the British soldier (Toby Kebbell) enters No Man’s Land with a white flag, meets his German counterpart (Hinnerk Schönemann), who brings wirecutters and better English, and the two share a kind  of “Joyeux Noel” moment of brotherhood amidst the madness. It’s a nice scene that doesn’t involve too much bullshit.

No, Steven saves the best bullshit for the end.

Albert’s been gassed, see, and blinded (temporarily—it’s Spielberg), and Joey’s been injured and due to be shot, and they’re like 50 yards from each other and don’t even know it. Meanwhile, the Brit doughboy makes Joey’s case, talking up his miraculousness, but the Army Doctor (Liam Cunningham) is busy and  unaccommodating, and Sgt. Fry (Eddie Marsan) is given his orders and raises his gun and points it at Joey’s head. In that moment, before a familiar whistle is heard that startles Joey, that reminds him of Devon, England, a whistle that’s repeated twice more until the crowd of soldiers parts, miraculously revealing Albert, the man we already knew was there, and Albert makes his case that the horse is his, that it has white hooves and a white diamond-shaped mark on its forehead, which can’t be seen for all the mud, but which is slowly, miraculously revealed even though we know that that, too, is already there; before all of this miraculous bullshit, in that cinematic moment when Sgt. Fry raises his gun and points it at Joey’s head, I had but one amused thought:

I dare ya.

WARNING:

“The Artist” is a silent film about the death of silent film. It uses old technology to tell a cautionary tale about those who cling to old technology. It’s part “Singin’ in the Rain,” part “A Star is Born,” and resurrects the international language of film—silence—by starring two French actors in a tale of Hollywoodland USA. It uses the era’s aspect ratio (1.33: 1), its opening-credit title graphics (drop shadows), its tendency toward broadness and melodrama. It is beautiful, funny, and tres, tres charmant.

Is it also a cautionary tale of Hollywood today? It reminds us that in the constant battle between technology and personality, technology tends to triumph. I suppose that’s a cautionary tale for all of us.

George Valentin (Jean Dujardin) is a hammy but loveable silent film star, who, in 1927, is at the height of his powers. His latest, “A Russian Affair,” is being screened before a rapt audience in Hollywood, and he stands backstage looking resplendent in tuxedo and tails. Afterwards, he hogs the stage, does a soft-shoe number, then introduces his fuming leading lady, Constance (Missi Pyle), only after his leading dog (Uggie). Insatiable, he hangs out on the red-carpet for a post-screening Q&A, where a flapperish fan, and budding actress, Peppy Miller (Bérénice Bejo), gets pushed from behind the ropes and into the limelight. She and Valentin share a moment, which winds up headlining Variety the next day: WHO’S THAT GIRL?

It’s a very “Singin’ in the Rain” set-up: Hammy man, shrewish leading lady, peppy upstart. There’s a premier where the hammy man blocks the shrewish lady from the spotlight only to wind up with the peppy upstart. His next film feels like a virtual remake of the first (“The Dueling Cavalier” follows “The Royal Rascal” in “Singin’”; “A German Affair” follows “A Russian Affair” here), suggesting the mass-produced, disposable quality of the genre. Then talkies come along.

The big difference is whom the peppy upstart threatens. In “Singin’” it’s the leading lady, who, with her high, screechy, ditzy voice, can’t make the transition to talkies. In “The Artist,” for more complicated reasons, it’s the hammy man.

The day after the premier, Peppy winds up on the set of “A German Affair” and meets cute with Valentin a second time. He has to dance with her, briefly, for a dinner party scene, but forgets himself as he begins to fall in love. Later, Peppy winds up in his dressing room, smells his jacket, and does a great bit where, her own hand emerging from his jacket, she makes a pass at herself. At this point he enters the room. Rather than make the pass she wants him to make—and he wants to make—he acts the gentleman (he’s married, you see) and gives her industry advice: “If you want to be an actress,” he says, (or mouths), “you have to have something the others don’t.” Then he draws a mole on her cheek.

Cue montage: her rise from chorus line to maid roles to third-billed star to, finally, a starring role in a talkie called “Beauty Mark.” At the same time, he’s eschewed the talkies (“If that’s the future, you can have it!” he mouths), and leaves his secure position with Kinograph Pictures to independently produce a silent adventure film, “Tears of Love,” which happens to open the same day as “Beauty Mark.” He watches it from the exit row of a near-empty theater. Outside, he’s greeted by long lines waiting to see Peppy Miller’s talkie.

Five things ruin him: “Tears of Love” bombs as the stock market crashes as his wife divorces him. That’s three, and he accepts all of them with something like grace. But now he’s broke. But isn’t he still a star? Couldn’t he make the talkies the studio wants him to make? He could but doesn’t. I guess that’s stubbornness, or ego, which would be the fourth thing. The fifth is booze. He drinks himself into oblivion.

It’s a long decline. Too long, really. He winds up in a second-story walk-up. When he runs out of booze, he pawns his tuxedo. Eventually he auctions off everything. “Congratulations!” the auctioneer tells him. “You’ve got nothing left!” We see him watch the new Peppy Miller talkie, “Guardian Angel,” with the rest of the great unwashed, pass out in a bar from drink, then screen his old films alone in his apartment (footage courtesy of Douglas Fairbanks’ “The Mark of Zorro”). Eventually, enraged at his new station in life, he sets fire to his old films but the smoke quickly suffocates him. It’s up to his faithful dog to run down the street and bark at a cop (Joel Murray) to save him. The headlines the next day read: SILENT FILM STAR SURVIVES FIRE. He’s not even a name now. He’s something from back then.

But he’s more to Peppy, who’s been following him all this time (she bought most of the items at the silent auction), and who brings him to her mansion, which looks a lot like his old mansion. She also pitches a talkie starring the two of them to the studio heads at Kinograph. But his downward spiral isn’t over. When his finds all of his old items in a storage room in her mansion, he cries out, returns to his burned-out walk-up, and puts a gun in his mouth. She, meanwhile, races in her car to get to him. Like the barking dog alerting the cop, it’s a great bit of silent melodrama—the cutting back and forth between the two—but then we read the title card, “BANG!,” and our heart sinks. Really? They’re going to do that? Nope. The bang is her. She’s crashed the car into a tree outside his walk-up. He checks out the noise, their eyes lock, they meet, kiss, etc. She saves him, and, as in “Singin’ in the Rain,” musicals save his career. The End.

As I said, it’s a charming movie. It’s an homage to the silent era—as “OSS 117: Cairo, Nest of Spies,” which starred the same stars, Dujardin and Bejo, and was written and directed by the same writer-director, Michel Hazanavicius (Bejo’s husband, bastard), was a kind of homage to, but more critique of, the early, western-imperialist Bond and OSS 117 movies.

At the same time, “The Artist” is more than mere homage.

One of the things the movie does well is play off the concept of silence. The first words we hear, or see, are Valentin’s from “A Russian Affair.” His character is being tortured by some futuristic gizmo and he declares, “I won’t talk! I won’t say a word!” We’re never sure why Valentin’s wife can’t abide him other than her line, “Why do you refuse to talk?” We’re never sure why he doesn’t make the transition to talkies other than his comment, “No one wants to see me speak.” See me speak. Love that.

Then there’s the dream—perhaps the film’s most memorable scene. After being shown sound, the greatest technological change the movies will ever see—a change so stark that everything up to that point, with the exception of a few comedies, will be relegated to the dustbin of cinematic history—Valentin returns to his dressing room. He drinks from a glass, sets it down. It makes a noise. It startles him, and us, and he tries it again. He hears the clock. He hears his dog. He goes outside. Suddenly everyone and everything in the world is making noise—even a feather landing on the ground—except for him. He’s trapped in silence.

So why doesn’t he talk? The easy explanation occurs near the end, when we finally hear him speak. He says, “With pleasure,” but he says it with Dujardin’s French accent: Wis plezhaire. Some may assume this is why he didn’t leap into talkies. He’s French. Except a French accent was hardly a barrier to success back then. Charles Boyer and Maurice Chevalier were both big stars in the early days of Hollywood.

Besides, this explanation feels reductive. It makes Valentin’s dilemma small and personal when there’s something truly universal in it. Valentin is a man trapped in old technology. He’s made silent by new technology. We’ve all been there—or will be there. New technology comes along and an entire profession is told, “We don’t care what you have to say anymore.”

Charming? Oui. Homage? Oui. Relevant? Oui aussi. Pour tout le monde.

WARNING: TRAILERS. I MEAN SPOILERS.

Was any 2011 film more ill-served by its trailer than Gavin O’Connor’s “Warrior”?

Here’s the trailer:

A few months ago I was at a theater where this played; and when the ringside announcer cries, “This is impossible! The two men fighting for the championship ... are BROTHERS!?!,” several people in the crowd laughed out loud and shouted sarcastically at the screen. Worse than the awfulness of the line itself—how it dumps in your lap the very thing that needs to be built up slowly (the impossibility of the story)—it’s a third-act revelation. The people who created the trailer are letting us know everything that’s going to happen in the movie except for who wins that final fight: the military brother or the schoolteacher brother. Which you can guess if you factor in Hollywood’s underdog tendencies.

So I wrote off the film. As did most of us. It opened the weekend of September 9th and grossed $5 million. Its total domestic take was not quite three times that number, $13 mil, meaning word-of-mouth wasn’t great. By the end of October it was gone.

Then last Sunday the New York Times critics picked their Oscar nominees and there it was. Both A.O. Scott and Manohla Dargis chose Tom Hardy, the military brother, among their best actor nominees. Scott included the film among his five best picture nominees.

Best picture? The “brothers fighting for the championship” movie?

I had to see it.

Its value, I’d argue, lies somewhere between what Scott says and the trailer implies. It’s a formulaic fight film, yes, but it’s got a personal touch. It builds slowly. It’s about relationships: the drunk father and his two unforgiving sons. It aspires to John Avildsen’s “Rocky,” which, remember, won best picture in 1976. Hardy is a good actor. 

But best picture?

It begins with its best scene. Paddy Conlon (Nick Nolte, of course), a former fight trainer and alcoholic, a thousand days sober, returns home at night to find a young man sitting on his front stoop with a brown paper bag around a bottle. “Tommy?” he says in that Nolte growl. It’s his son, estranged. He hasn’t seen him in ... 10 years? More? Not since the mother left with Tommy and headed west and wound up in Tacoma, Wash., where she died of cancer and he joined the military. Now he’s back from Iraq, going by his mother’s maiden name, Riordan, rather than Conlon. He seems to want something from the old man, too, but can’t forgive him. He slumps through the old man’s small, Pittsburgh apartment like a tinderbox, looking at pictures, asking questions, ready to explode. He doesn’t. He just smolders.

In Paddy’s apartment, Tommy also sees photos of his older brother, Brendan (Joel Edgerton), now married to Tess (Jennifer Morrison), the smoking hot neighborhood girl, and working as a high school physics teacher in Philadelphia, and that’s where the film goes: to Brendan teaching his students, who call him Mr. C., and Brendan patiently letting his daughters paint his cheeks “like a princess,” and Brendan pumping iron in the gym prior to leaving for his second job as a bouncer. Except he’s not a bouncer. He’s making money as a Mixed Martial Arts fighter in parking lot rings next to strip clubs. Turns out he was once a professional MMA fighter, trained by the old man, but his strip-club fighter is a little like Rocky Balboa’s with Spider Rico: a victory, sure, but hardly impressive.

Certainly not as impressive as when Tommy visits his local gym, and, in a sparring match, beats down the local golden boy, “Mad Dog” Grimes (Erik Apple) in 20 seconds—which is filmed by one of the locals and becomes, as they say, “a YouTube sensation.”

For his strip-club fighting, Brendan is suspended from teaching without pay. Unfortunately, the local banker tells him he’s underwater on his mortgage and if he can’t come up with the payments the bank will repossess. He only has a few weeks. That’s why he was fighting in the first place.

Hey, turns out there’s a MMA big tournament in nearby Atlantic City: 16 fighters, single-elimination, $5 million winner-take-all purse. Tommy’s YouTube video helps him make the cut, while Brandon, whose suspension for MMA fighting pushes him toward MMA fighting, trains with a top-notch local, Frank Campana (Frank Grillo); and when Frank’s boy, Marco Santos (Roan Carneiro), goes down, Brandon asks for his slot. Frank gives it only reluctantly.

At this point, nobody outside of them and us knows Tommy and Brendan are brothers. They have different last names, after all. All that’s known about Tommy is the YouTube video, along with another video, in which, seen via helmet cam, Tommy pulls the door off a tank to rescue several soldiers in Iraq. To be honest, we don’t know much more. We see him talk to a girl in Texas, the widow of a friend, a Marine. That’s about it. We know he doesn’t forgive his brother for choosing the father (or the local girl) over him and his mother. We know he doesn’t communicate well and forgives even less. We know he smolders until heat waves emanate off him.

In the elimination rounds, Tommy clobbers his opponents in seconds while Brendan gets clobbered for two rounds only to win with a come-from-behind tap-out in the third. Then it’s just them.

It’s at this point, right before the championship match, that the media figures it all out. Hey, Tommy is Tommy Conlon, the son of the man who’s training him, and the brother of Brendan Conlon, the man he’s fighting for the championship. Wow! (Which raises a point: Why did no one in the media, or in PR, realize that the trainer of one fighter was the father of another fighter? Why wasn’t that a story before Tommy’s lineage became known?)

The bigger reveal is that Tommy’s AWOL. He fled after a friendly-fire incident in which he and his buddy, the husband of the woman in Texas, were shot by U.S. planes. His buddy was killed. He’s fighting for her. He wants to get money to her. That’s just the kind of guy he is.

Forget for a moment the implausibility of it all—the “this is impossible... two brothers” line from the trailer. What else rings false about the movie?

We know why Brendan fights. He needs to save his house. But why does Tommy fight? For the widow in Texas? Surely he knows he’ll be exposed by a national tournament in Atlantic City. It’s a wonder he even makes the cut in the first place. Yes, a wonder.

But it’s the bit about Brendan’s house that really gets me. The bank is going to foreclose on him in a matter of weeks? What super efficient bank is this? It takes most banks months, possibly years, to actually foreclose in this economy. Plus the fact that he’s underwater on his mortgage means nothing if he wants to stay there, right? How does the shifting value of the house make the current payments harder? Does he have an adjustable rate mortgage? And wouldn’t current low interest rates help him in this regard?

Admittedly, both leads—Hardy from England and Edgerton from Australia—are good at playing Americans, but there’s too little behind Edgerton’s eyes and too much behind Hardy’s. In this way, Hardy is both reserved and over-the-top: a neat trick. To be honest, the actor who impressed me most was Frank Grillo as Frank Campana. At first I assumed they’d grabbed a real-life MMA trainer from somewhere, maybe the guy who was their technical consultant, because he seemed so real; then Grillo begins to project things that no walk-on, no non-actor, can. It’s a great supporting performance.

So no best-actor nom for Hardy from me. Best picture? Not even close. A.O. Scott’s got rocks in his head.

But the movie is still better than its trailer implies.

WARNING: SPOILERS

Turns out super agent Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise) likes to do the same thing I like to do after a hard day’s work: hang out at the pier in downtown Seattle and drink a beer or two with friends. Of course he’s just eliminated a few bad guys to maybe save the entire planet while I’ve just eliminated a few bad words to maybe save an article, but we’ve all got our jobs, right? Besides, he’s not really hanging out in downtown Seattle; he’s in Vancouver, B.C., which has played the role of Seattle more often than Tom Cruise has played Ethan Hunt. More poorly, too. Water taxis my ass.

This is the fourth installment of the “M:I” series, based upon the 1960s TV series with the kick-ass theme music, and they’ve all been pretty good. Each has had its stellar director: 1) Brian De Palma, 2) John Woo, 3) J.J. Abrams,  and now 4) Brad Bird. Each has had its incredible stunt. And each has been forgettable.

There’s a mission. Does it go awry? Is Ethan accused? There’s a chase scene on foot through a crowded third-world market. There’s a girl. Is she in danger? Can she be trusted? Can anyone on the IM Force be trusted? Ethan’s been betrayed before, remember: by Jim Phelps (Jon Voigt) in the first, Sean Ambrose (Dougray Scott) in the second, and ... was it John Musgrave (Billy Crudup) in the third? Does it matter?

Evil Swedish genius
The good news is there’s no mole within the Impossible Mission Force this time around. Score one for employee screening. Agents have secrets, sure, but no one’s selling out to America’s enemies. They’re a team finally.

The better news is this team and its enemies seems assembled from the 2009 Spirit Awards. They grabbed Jeremy Renner, who was disarming IEDs in “The Hurt Locker” that year, to play William Brandt, the analyst with a sad secret. They took the gorgeous inner-city schoolteacher from 2009’s “Precious,” Paula Patton, for their Jane Carter, the agent whose last bungled mission led to the death of her lover. Finally, Michael Nyqvist, the first Mikael Blomqvist of the “Dragon Tattoo” movies, which was released in 2009, gets to play Kurt Hendricks, the evil Swedish genius who wants to start a global nuclear war as a way to cleanse the world’s palette.

Evil Swedish genius. When was the last time anyone had to use that phrase?

So, yes, there’s a mission, and, yes, it goes awry. The IM team is supposed to steal Russian nuclear launch codes, or something, from the Kremlin, but Hendricks gets there first, then blows up the Kremlin. The IM Force is implicated, and thus disavowed, and then their secretary (Tom Wilkinson) is shot in the head by Russian police, so they have to save the world without the usual bells and whistles—although the bells and whistles they wind up with are pretty damned good.

Yes, there’s a great stunt: a Spider-Man climb using sticky gloves (blue is glue, red is dead) up the side of the tallest building in the world, Burj Khalifa in Dubai, 163 stories tall. Just removing the glass window that allows Ethan outside causes vertigo in comic-relief agent Benji Dunn (Simon Pegg). In us, too, when director Brad Bird gives us a peek over the edge.

Yes, there’s a foot-chase through an international market, also Dubai, with Cruise running in that peculiar upright motion of his; and, yes, there’s a mission in a swanky hotel, in Mumbai, India, that allows for tuxedos and cleavage, and, yes, a final fist fight between hero and villain amidst raising and lowering automobiles in a Mumbai garage as the fate of San Francisco, and possibly the world, hangs in the balance. It’s got all that.

But what makes this “M:I” movie work for me is the opposite of the old antiperspirant slogan: we get to see ’em sweat.

My favorite moment is a throwaway. The Kremlin’s been blown up and Ethan’s caught up in it. He sees the explosions, he begins to race away, but unlike in most movies, it catches him and the screen goes black and silent. Then he wakes up in a Russian hospital with one wrist hooked to an IV and the other handcuffed to his hospital gurney. A Russian cop, Sidorov, (Vladimir Mashkov), attempts to interrogate him but a nurse wheels him away. In the process, Ethan gets hold of a paper clip. Sidorov follows, has a brief conversation with a subordinate, and when he turns Ethan’s gurney is empty. Shocked, he looks out the window and finds Ethan, despite being banged and bruised and shirtless, way out on the ledge, and eyeing a trash bin three or four stories below. In most action movies, Ethan would just make the jump and continue on his way. Here, Sidorov sees Ethan’s potential escape route, judges its impossibility, and, when their eyes meet, shrugs and nods toward the trash bin in a kind of “Go ahead” gesture. I laughed out loud.

The movie has a few such moments—the opposite of action-hero stoic—and they’re welcome to see. But “Ghost Protocol” is still an action movie and thus mostly forgettable.

Plus the plot, like most action-movie plots, doesn’t really hold up. Before the movie even begins, IMF fakes the death of Ethan’s wife, which provides cover for Ethan’s slaughter of several Serbian assassins, which gets him inside a Russian jail so he can gain intel on Hendricks, whom they’ve already targeted. So why doesn’t he recognize Hendricks when they walk past each other in the Kremlin?

And how about that moment in the end? The IM team is sharing beers in that pier in Seattle, which is really Vancouver, B.C., and Benji looks around at all the people strolling about, including probably me, and wonders aloud over their ignorance. The poor fools, he says, don’t know that they were this close to getting blown up. And they don’t know they were this close to getting blown up because the various governments involved are effectively covering things up and the media is ineffectively doing its job. The missile that landed in San Francisco Bay? Space debris. The Kremlin in shambles? An accidental gas leak. In this universe, both media and government tamp down fear rather than raise it. There’s no Donald Rumsfeld or FOX-News raising threat levels. I suppose what feels false here isn’t that the media is incompetent; it’s that, in its incompetence, it’s anodyne rather than vaguely hysterical.

The true villains
But let’s pretend it’s possible for a Russian sub to shoot a nuclear warhead at a major American city and no one outside of government—such as the scientific community, with access to all the data they have—would figure it out. Who benefits from our ignorance? Government? Media? Put it another way: What would happen if all of those people strolling about in downtown Seattle, including probably me, knew we had been this close to the end? Wouldn’t we suddenly get serious and focused? Wouldn’t the awful cultural flotsam fall away like scales from our eyes, and we would see the world clean and cold? And in our newfound seriousness, wouldn’t we have less time for things like ... oh, I don’t know ... “Mission: Impossible — Ghost Protocol”?

So who benefits from our ignorance? A good argument can be made for Paramount Pictures and Tom Cruise Productions. Someone should send Ethan to investigate.

WARNING: THE PRINCE AND THE SPOILERS

We’re getting more of these, aren’t we? Let’s call them starstruck movies.

They’re not “All About Eve” or “The Artist”—cautionary tales in which a star and an ingénue/flunky become rivals or switch places. No, here, as in “Funny People” in 2009 and “Me and Orson Welles” in 2010, the flunky never rises, and the relationship remains unequal, and eventually—with the exception of “Funny People,” which features a fictitious star—the star leaves the flunky's life, as stars always do. Stars are meant to be seen from a distance, not close up. One can get blinded that way. It's why Colin Clark (Eddie Redmayne) is always blinking his eyes, almost shielding them, in the presence of the titular object of his desire.

So what do we learn from starstruck movies? That the very famous are not like you and me. That they’re often horrible to you and me. But look, look at what they create. Isn’t it worth it? In the end?

Protect/sleep with
Colin, a 23-year-old recent Oxford graduate from money and power, is enamored of the movies and decides he’s going to make it in the movie business “on his own.” So he loads up his sports car, drives to London, and, showing the persistence of a man who is too rich and powerful to have been beaten down by life, hangs around the offices of Laurence Olivier Productions until he’s given small tasks. When Laurence Olivier himself (Kenneth Branagh) shows up, he recognizes Colin, and directs the head of production, his flunky, to find Colin a job. Which is how Colin becomes a “third,” or third assistant director, or, more properly, gofer, on Olivier’s new film, “The Prince and the Showgirl” co-starring Marilyn Monroe (Michelle Williams).

This was Monroe’s serious actress phase. She was already the biggest movie star in the world, which is what she’d always wanted. But (per Bono) it wasn’t what she wanted. Now she wanted to be taken seriously. So she got married to a serious playwright, Arthur Miller (Dougray Scott), started a production company with a serious photographer, Milton Greene (Dominic Cooper), and studied method acting under the ultra-serious Paula Strasberg (Zoe Wanamaker), wife of Lee Strasberg, who ran the Actor’s Studio, where actors such as Marlon Brando and Montgomery Clift were taught how to act seriously. Oh, and she decided to make a movie with Sir Laurence Olivier, generally regarded as the greatest actor in the world.

Problem? Olivier is a classical actor, not method. And the movie they’re making together isn’t a serious film, it’s a light comedy.

Bigger problem? They don’t click.

He’s professional, she’s unprofessional. He’s impatient, she’s confused. He’s ready, she can’t read a line, even during a table read, without conferring with Paula Strasberg. During takes with Olivier and Dame Sybil Thorndike (Dame Judi Dench, who is, as always, delightful), she is forever forgetting her lines. Is she nervous? On drugs? Stupid? Distracted by Strasberg? Confused by method acting? All of the above? The movie never clarifies the issue.

“Use your substitutions and make it work for you,” Paula tells her. “Just be sexy: Isn’t that what you do?” Olivier tells her.

When she begins to hole up in her dressing room, it’s young Colin who’s sent to fetch her; and it’s young Colin, with his innocent, starstruck face, to whom she begins to confide—even as the wall of people surrounding her and protecting her crumbles. Her publicist, Arthur Jacobs (Toby Jones), returns to the states. Her husband, with whom she fights, returns to the states. Who can she choose to help prop up the wall? “Are you spying on me?” she asks Colin at one point. “Whose side are you on?” she asks him at another point. His answer, after a momentary pause, is the one she wants to hear: “Yours, Miss Monroe.”

Off they go. He shows her Oxford (or is it Eton?) and the delighted schoolboys surround her. They visit his godfather, Sir Owen Morshead (Derek Jacobi), the official librarian at Buckingham Palace, and she asks silly, Monroe-esque questions. They have a picnic near a stream and they wind up semi-skinny-dipping. In the water, she kisses him and he looks on, amazed, as if he’s watching it all rather than participating in it. One night she has a breakdown, asks for him, and they wind up spooning in her bed, clothed. He wakes to find her taking a bubble bath and acting coquettish. Acting like Marilyn Monroe.

It’s like a dream—almost literally. I used to write down my dreams, and this is one I had nearly 20 years ago about one of Marilyn’s many would-be replacements:

Madonna came to town.  I was supposed to greet her.  I was her greeter? She was over at my father's house partially undressed and we made out on the couch.  I was worried about her because she seemed so unstable and sad.  I wanted to sleep with her but I needed to protect her.

That’s Colin’s dilemma, too. In a sense it’s every man’s dilemma (the battle between protecting the thing you want to violate) but the movie doesn’t do much with it. The movie doesn’t do much with him. He’s in nearly every scene but we get no sense of his inner life. Is there no roar there? She wants to pretend they’re 13-year-olds on a date. What does he want to pretend?

Her
Worse, the movie thinks it’s presenting a version of Marilyn we haven’t seen before when it’s the Marilyn we’ve seen all too often before: screwed-up and pill-popping and user and used. It focuses on Marilyn, the star, versus Norman Jean, the lost little girl, as if this dichotomy is new. “Shall I be her?” she says at Buckingham Palace. “I’m not her,” she confides to Colin. “As soon as people see I’m not her, they run,” she says. Yet, even in private, she keeps acting like her.

“My Week with Marilyn” isn’t a bad movie but it’s not a particularly interesting one. He’s not that interesting, she’s not that interesting, and, in the process, a not very interesting movie gets made. Oh, but look at her light up the screen, Olivier says after all that trouble. Just look. He’s amazed. The movie is amazed. In the end, the movie is as starstruck about Monroe as Colin is.

WARNING: EXTREMELY LONG AND INCREDIBLY FULL OF SPOILERS

Extremely loud and incredibly close describes most movies coming out of Hollywood but not “Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close.” It’s called that, I assume, because that’s the way Oskar Schell (Thomas Horn), a 10-year-old with inconclusive Asperger’s syndrome, perceives the world. He’s frightened of its noises, frightened of its people, sees dangers everywhere. He’s a worst-case scenario guy—like me, I suppose—but 50 times worse. Walking on a dock: What if he falls through? Walking over a bridge: What if it falls down? Swinging on a swing: What if it breaks?

Of course, he, like most of us, never saw this one coming: What if a group of people purposefully fly airplanes into tall buildings and they come crashing down?

Oskar’s dad, Thomas Horn, Jr. (Tom Hanks), a jeweler, tries to focus his son’s mind by sending him on treasure hunts. He makes up stories. He tells him there was once a sixth borough of New York City but it floated away and the only evidence remaining is somewhere in Central Park—which, itself, was once part of that sixth borough until the people of New York, working together, dragged it to its current location. He’s an ideal dad who practices tae kwan do with Oskar, creates games like Oxymorons—in which the goal is to come up with more oxymorons than your opponent (“Original copy!”)—and encourages Oskar educationally, where he shines, and socially, where he doesn’t.

Unfortunately, on the morning of September 11, 2001, Thomas happens to have a business meeting on the 105th floor of the World Trade Center.

The movie opens to blue; then we see something flapping in front of it. A flag? No. Is that a shoe? Is it a body falling? Is it a body falling on the sky-blue day of September 11, 2001?

Yes.

Most of the action takes place a year later. In voiceover, which is used throughout, Oskar tells us that if the sun blew up we wouldn’t realize it for eight minutes because that’s how long it takes for light to travel to Earth. So for eight minutes, we’d still feel its warmth; we’d still see its light. And that’s how he feels about his father. And he fears that, after a year, his eight minutes are almost up. (This is a beautiful analogy, by the way.) So for the first time since that awful day, “The Worst Day” he always calls it, Oskar enters his father’s closet, which his mother (Sandra Bullock) hasn’t altered. He smells his sweater. He finds old film his grandfather took. And on a top shelf he spies his father’s camera, which, as he pulls it down, also pulls down a blue vase, which falls through the air and explodes on the floor. In it, he finds a small envelope, and inside the small envelope he finds a key. “Black” is written on the envelope. What could it mean? What could it open? What was his father trying to tell him? It’s the final treasure hunt.

After a neighborhood locksmith tells him that every key opens something, Oskar goes in search of that something. He figures “Black” is a name; and in the phone book he finds 472 Blacks, some of whom live together, and decides to ask each of them if they know anything about his father and/or the key. His phobias have intensified since 9/11—tall buildings, subways—so for the first Black on his list, Abby (Viola Davis), in Brooklyn, he steels himself, shakes his tambourine (which he uses to calm his nerves), and crosses the Brooklyn Bridge. She lives in a beautiful brownstone, where it appears to be moving day. She’s distracted, knows nothing about his father or the key, but he barges in anyway, asks for water, asks about an elephant postcard he finds in one of the moving boxes. Turns out she’s not the one who’s moving. A man, whose face we never see, is. It’s her husband and they’re separating. When she breaks down and cries, Oskar offers her this: “Only humans can cry tears, did you know that?” He tells her she’s beautiful. He asks, “Can I kiss you?” When she smiles and says it wouldn’t be appropriate, he asks to take her picture. At the last instant, she turns away, tears streaming down her cheeks. The Worst Day killed his father, which is why he’s there, but for her this is the worst day. What he’s doing feels awkward and awful. It almost feels like a home invasion.

More importantly, throughout, I couldn’t get past this thought: Why not phone?

Did I miss something? Are these the Blacks in the phone book without phone numbers? Did his father tell him to never use the phone in his treasure hunts? He certainly has a phone, and he’s an extremely logical kid, and he’s calculated that if he visits two Blacks every Saturday it’ll take him three years to complete his task, whereas, with the phone, he could finish it up in two afternoons, three tops. Instead, every Saturday, off he goes, meeting people and hearing their stories.

This is obviously the point. What matters is the face-to-face interaction. What matters is the journey. But the journey is so illogical, given the storyline, I couldn’t get past it. Oskar, with his Asperger’s mind, wants to think of every person, every “Black,” as a number in a gigantic equation, but after a time he realizes they’re closer to letters, and those letters spell a story, and those stories are messy. He wants a neat answer but everything just gets messier. That’s the point, too, but I still couldn’t get past the illogic. Dude, just pick up a phone.

After a time, Oskar is aided in his search by his grandmother’s renter (Max von Sydow), who showed up three weeks after 9/11, and who is obviously Oskar’s grandfather, Thomas, Sr. As a German teenager, he was caught in the firebombing of Dresden, which strangled all speech from him forever. He has YES and NO tattooed into the palm of each hand—like Robert Mitchum’s LOVE and HATE knuckles in “Night of the Hunter”—and writes everything else down. He also abandoned his family when Thomas, Jr. was young. He was a bad father. Now he’s trying to be a good grandfather.

It’s a relief when he joins the search. It’s tough to occupy the stage alone, and it’s particularly tough for a 10-year-old; and while Thomas Horn does an amazing job for someone who’s never really acted before, who came to fame winning $31,000 on “Teen Jeopardy,” his character, Oskar, is often too precocious to be believed and too annoying to be liked. Kids are often bratty, and Asperger’s kids have their own brand, but there was a tinny quality to Oskar’s flame-outs. When, in voiceover, he lists off all the things that make him panicky, in an increasingly panicky voice, it just doesn’t work. When he tries to tell his story to his grandfather, his secret story, the one he’s been keeping from us about the answering machine and the six voice messages his father left on 9/11,  he gets extremely loud and panicky about it. That, too, feels off.

Eventually, when Thomas, Sr. senses he’s hurting Oskar more than helping him, he abandons the search, and the grandson, as he abandoned the son, but Oskar keeps going. And eventually he finds the answer to the mystery of the key. It’s a good answer because it’s not Oskar’s answer. It doesn’t satisfy him but it satisfies us—in part because we get to watch Jeffrey Wright, the most underutilized great actor in Hollywood, act for a few minutes.

As for the horror of the sixth answering-machine message? It’s both less and more horrifying than we imagined. In content, it’s simply Thomas, Jr., calling again, knowing he’s about to die, and repeating, over and over again, to his son, whom he’d hoped to talk with, “Are you there? ... Are you there? ... Are you there?” It’s a kind of echo, repeated so often, but it also echoes back throughout the movie, since that’s what the son is now doing. Oskar’s search is his own query, his own “Are you there?” to his father.

Why is this horrifying? Because Oskar was there, in the room, listening to his father leave this message, but too panic-stricken to pick up. He asks forgiveness of the adult to whom he confides the story, and of course it’s granted, and Oskar feels relief—it’s a helluva thing for a 10-year-old boy to be carrying around—but afterwards the movie forgets it and I couldn’t. I thought: That’s going to weigh on Oskar more as he ages. He’s going to realize that in his father’s last moments he could have spared him some anguish, could have been that voice, the last voice he communicated with, before he went into the abyss. But he couldn’t and didn’t. It’s not a matter of the need for forgiveness; it’s a matter of overwhelming sorrow that will never end.

“Extremely Loud” is supposed to be a tearjerker so I was surprised it didn’t jerk more tears out of me. It took about 50 minutes, and Sandra Bullock’s “It doesn’t make sense” speech, before I teared up. The second time was during her flashback to 9/11. I guess it was mostly Sandy who made me cry. She’s also the tidiest aspect of the untidy end. Where was the mother during all this? How could she let her son traipse around New York, going into strange homes, in a fruitless search? Isn’t she smarter, more caring, than that? Yes. Yes, she is.

A lot of talent went into this. It was written by Eric Roth (“Forrest Gump,” “The Insider,” “Munich”), directed by Stephen Daldry (“The Reader,” “The Hours”), and adapted from a novel by Jonathan Safran Foer (“Everything Is Illuminated”). Both Hanks and Bullock nail it. The kid mostly works. I never tire of Max Van Sydow or Jeffrey Wright. It’s about the aftermath of an event none of us will ever forget. Yet it doesn’t quite coalesce. The mother’s 11-hour revelation retroactively covers up some of the false notes, but not all of them, and a tinny taste lingers. The movie wants us to believe in something, in all of us messy, multihued people, with all of our sad stories, making our way in the world. It wants to say that we all care about each other. But the world doesn’t care this much. It doesn’t have this much patience with us, no matter how much prep work goes into it. It’s more cruel than this. A warning should be flashed at the start of the film: Kids, don’t try this at home.

WARNING: “LENNY BRUCE IS NOT AFRAID” SPOILERS

Lars von Trier’s “Melancholia” didn’t make me melancholic but it did make me nauseous. I began to feel it halfway through the film, that awful shipboard unsteadiness, that burp that brings up more than a burp and has to be swallowed down and grimaced through, but I attributed it to the stomach flu going around, or some symptom of a thyroid problem I’ve been having lately, or maybe something I ate. Pho? Christmas cookies? Which of you betrayed me? It wasn’t until the next day, after reading the IMDb message board for the film, that I realized it was von Trier and his damned hand-held camera. Of course. Same thing happened to me while reviewing “Dancer in the Dark” in 2000. Douchebag. Get a fucking tripod.

“Melancholia” has two acts of destruction preceded by a beautiful overture of destruction. In part one, titled “Justine,” the wedding reception of Justine (Kirsten Dunst) and Michael (Alexander Skarsgård), at the palatial estate of Justine’s sister and brother-in-law, Claire and John (Charlottes Gainsbourg and Keifer Sutherland), is destroyed due to Justine’s melancholic tendencies. In the second part, (“Claire”), the earth is destroyed when a heretofore unseen planet named Melancholia crashes into us, and, as a young Alvy Singer once said, that’s the end of everything. The overture, backed by the prelude to Wagner’s “Tristan und Isolde,” contains beautiful, slow-motion, stop-action shots of the moment before our doom. None of them, interestingly, correlate to the reality of the second act. They’re just gorgeous dream images from a time when life existed.

So what do the two parts have in common other than character and setting? Is it that Justine’s melancholia is as unavoidable as the planet Melancholia? That all attempts to buck her up are as futile as, say, Claire’s desperate attempt to go into the village as Melancholia looms upon us? Is the second part, in other words, mere metaphor for the first? Or is it mere perspective for the first? “Mere” being the operative word.

The wedding reception begins sweetly. An absurdly long, absurdly white limousine attempts to park in a small space by the woods. Everyone gives it a go—inept driver, amused groom, laughing bride. When bride and groom finally show up at the estate, looking beautiful, they are chastised by two severe-looking people, Claire and John. One wonders who these people are and why they’re such a drag. Don’t you cut bride and groom slack on their wedding day? Isn’t this their day? Aren’t the rest of us poor background players to the main event, which is them?

Few at the reception see it this way. Her employer and his best man, Jack (Stellan Skarsgård, Alexander’s father), who runs an ad company, attempts, right there at the wedding reception, in the middle of a toast, to get her to come up with a tagline for a new campaign, whose photo is based upon the awful, besotted folks in Bruegel’s painting “The Land of Cockaigne.” Her father, Dexter (John Hurt), with rakish charm, holds forth at a table full of “Bettys,” but allows an opening for the mother, Gaby (Charlotte Rampling), to loudly express her distaste for what they’re there to celebrate: love and marriage. “Enjoy it while it lasts,” she toasts the handsome couple. “I myself hate marriages.”

(Irony alert: “Enjoy it while it lasts,” is the tagline for von Trier’s film.)

The groom, Michael, is a non-entity. He’s sweet but can’t hold up the weight of all the awfulness around him. Worse, he has no friends to protect him, just a silent mother and father. Many things are planned—by both the wedding planner (Udo Kier) and Claire (whom we discover, in the second act, has a desperate need to plan the inconsequential)—but Justine either avoids or sabotages these absurdities. Sweetness drains away. All the guests stand around waiting for the cutting of the wedding cake, but Justine is upstairs taking a bath. So is her mother in another room. John, who has paid for the entire affair, gets so frustrated he tosses the mother’s belongings out on the front steps, where they’re retrieved by a servant. Those who stay (the mother), shouldn’t; those who don’t stay (the father), should. Add the groom to the latter group. Justine avoids sex with him only to do it out on the estate grounds with a petty ad-agency functionary whom she despises, and suddenly he’s at the front door with the luggage and the parents. The end comes with neither bang nor whimper. “I guess we’ll take off now,” he says. “Things could’ve been a lot different,” he says. “But Michael,” she responds, “what did you expect?” She is who she is, her family is who they are, you can’t stop their trajectories. The destruction was inevitable. He leaves her, forlorn and beautiful, standing in her wedding dress. The evening is a total disaster.

In part two, we get the real disaster. A nearby planet hidden by the sun, and called Melancholia—possibly because of its tendency to avoid other planets—is, in its erratic orbit, supposed to pass close to Earth. It’s the astronomical/celestial  event of the millennia, and John, at his palatial estate, is excited, but Claire is worried. He warns her to stay off the Internet, where worriers go to worry. Meanwhile, Justine, nearly catatonic with depression, shows up, sleeps for days, then can’t enjoy her favorite food. “It tastes like ashes,” she says of the meatloaf, before breaking down in tears.

Later, we get a better sense of the enormity of her melancholia. “The earth is evil,” she tells Justine, as she anticipates disaster. “We don’t need to grieve for it. Nobody will miss it.” She’s convinced that we’re the only life that exists, and once we go, hallelujah. That’s her attitude. Consider it the opposite of the upbeat attitude of Selma (Bjork) in von Trier’s “Dancer in the Dark.” For Selma, life is brutish and short yet she has a song in her heart. For Justine, life should be better, easier. She’s smart, with access to wealth, and she’s beautiful. (The movie is Rated “R” for “graphic nudity” but, for the scene with Dunst, please make that “stupendous nudity.”)  She has all that but no song in her heart. Just ashes.

As Melancholia gets closer, John continues to get excited, Claire continues to fret, Justine wakes up. We’re stuck with the three of them—a sad fate—because von Trier never leaves the estate. Of course, it turns out that John and the scientists are wrong. Once he realizes it, confirms it, he takes the way out—barbiturates—that Claire prepped for herself, leaving her only fretting. Justine, meanwhile, is amazingly calm, perhaps because this is the ending she wanted or anticipated or is used to. Melancholia has crashed into her may times before, after all; now she simply has company. When the end finally comes, von Trier makes it beautiful. It’s the end of the world as we know it and he feels fine.

It’s tough to express final judgment on a movie responsible for literally making you sick, but here’s a go.

The two parts of “Melancholia” are interesting enough but they’re two still parts. If you’re creating a story about a disastrous wedding, why do a story about the end of the world as well? Perspective? And if you’re creating a story about the end of the world, why focus on this family? Metaphor?

I can posit connections between the two parts, in other words, but overall I feel a bit like Willard confronting Kurtz in “Apocalypse Now”: I don’t see much ... connection at all, sir.