Movie Reviews - 2011 posts

WARNING: SPOILERS?

It would be nice if kids or teenagers left the Guy Ritchie “Sherlock Holmes” movies wanting to be smarter. These things are roller coaster rides, like any successful Hollywood action franchise, but at least the guy at the head of the roller coaster isn’t a pun-swilling gigantus, like Arnold Schwarzenegger, or an ordinary schmoe yapping out of the corner of his mouth, like Bruce Willis. At least he’s a supersmart guy. So maybe it’ll encourage a few kids out there to be smart or get smart. One can hope.

On the other hand, Sherlock Holmes (Robert Downey, Jr.) and Dr. Watson (Jude Law) have, under Ritchie’s direction, become so glib in their smartness, in their ‘science’ of deductive reasoning, that, halfway through their latest adventure, the horribly subtitled “Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows,” they began to remind me of the satiric 1960s-era Batman and Robin (Adam West and Burt Ward) solving the Riddler’s riddles.

Here’s Batman and Robin from 1966. What has yellow skin and writes? A ball-point banana! What people are always in a hurry? Rushing? Russians! “I’ve got it!” Robin says, snapping his fingers. “Someone Russian is going to slip on a banana peel and break their neck!” “Right, Robin,” Batman replies with gravitas. “The only possible meaning.”

For Holmes and Watson, it’s this dirt on this page, and that wine stain on that page, not to mention such-and-such an inky residue, leading them, of course, to that wine cellar near the printing press in Paris! The only possible meaning.

The movie, while it mostly ignores the Arthur Conan Doyle stories, is bookended by homages. We see Dr. Watson actually writing a Sherlock Holmes adventure, which Conan Doyle’s Dr. Watson did, and in 1891, which is the year Conan Doyle’s first story, “A Study in Scarlet,” appeared in The Strand Magazine. And we get Reichenbach Falls in the end.

But it begins with terrorism. Things are blowing up and the newspapers of the day are blaming the right or left, the nationalists or anarchists, depending; but, Watson writes, “my friend Sherlock Holmes had a different theory entirely.” Cut to: a package changing hands in the dirty streets of London. The last hands belong to Irene Adler (Rachel McAdams), functionary to Prof. Moriarty (Jared Harris of “Mad Men”) and love interest to Sherlock Holmes, who, disguised as a Chinese opium addict, suddenly appears at her side, warning her of unsavory men following her. Ah, but he’s mistaken. They’re guarding her, against him, and she leaves him in their care. Which leads to our first example of 19th-century fisticuffs, or, more precisely, slow-mo and super-deductive 21st-century martial arts madness.

Are we tired yet of Holmes imagining the fight before the fight even though he has no idea whom he’s fighting? Are we tired yet of explosions, of bullets ripping through trains and trees but always missing our lead characters? Are we tired yet of all the anachronisms, of machine-gun pistols and faultless plastic surgery and the general 21st-century superquick pace of movies—zipping from London to Paris to Germany to Switzerland and back to London again? Or is it just me?

The key to the movie is how to keep Dr. Watson involved. He’s about to get married, remember, and does, to Mary (Kelly Reilly), so he should be out of the picture. But Holmes bolts after the ceremony to confront Prof. Moriarty, who has already killed Irene Adler with a rare form of tuberculosis, and who then threatens the newlyweds. “When two objects collide,” Moriarty tells Holmes, “there’s always damage of a collateral nature ... I’ll be sure to send my regards to the happy couple.”

Soon after Watson and Mary board a honeymoon train to Brighton, assassins arrive, bullets fly, and Holmes, watching over the newlyweds, protects Mary, and the movie franchise, by pushing her from the train and into a river, where brother Mycroft (Stephen Fry) awaits in a rowboat to take her to safety. Phew. Thank God she’s gone. We can continue.

To Paris, and gypsies (including Noomi Rapace of “The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo”), and a bombing at the Hotel d’Triomph; then to Germany and a munitions factory and a nasty bit of torture; then to Switzerland and another assassination attempt and the final tumble at Reichenbach Falls.

Moriarty’s plan? Corner the market on munitions and start a war. Yawn. Holmes prevents the immediate war but Moriarty, and we in the audience, and most likely Holmes, know it’s a stopgap. “War on an industrial scale is inevitable,” Moriarty tells Holmes. “All I have to do is wait.” Which is when Holmes reveals he’s gotten hold of Moriarty’s booklet of holdings, and, with brother Mycroft, Mary and the underutilized Inspector Lestrade (Eddie Marsan), depleted it. Cue anger flaring in Moriarty’s eyes. Cue both men imagining the fight before it happens. Cue Holmes seeing his demise. Cue the tumble into the waterfall.

Holmes’ fans know he survives. Back in 1891, Conan Doyle wanted to kill off his famed character, of whom he was tired, but there was such a yap of protest that he brought him back again, with convenient explanations for his survival. So my only question, as I watched a saddened Dr. Watson finish his story of the demise of Sherlock Holmes, typing in THE END, was whether the filmmakers would give hints that Holmes was alive or save it for the second sequel. Neither. They showed us Holmes alive, mischievously adding a question mark to Watson’s manuscript: THE END? Which, I admit, I thought was a nice touch.

But overall the script by the Mulroneys, Michele and Kieran, isn’t as clever as the first, which was written by a gang of four. The characters are now broader, the explosions bigger, the roller coaster ride blurrier. I was bored. Trees getting blown up don’t excite me. Good dialogue excites me.

You know which Holmes excites me? The one from the new BBC series, “Sherlock,” starring—and this has got to be the greatest British name that Charles Dickens didn’t invent—Benedict Cumberbatch. It’s set in modern times. He texts, he’s got a website, and Dr. Watson (Martin Freeman, who played Tim on “The Office”) is a veteran of the Afghanistan war. They bring Holmes to the 21st century. The Guy Ritchie films keep Holmes in the 19th century but lavish him with the flotsam and impatience and violence and general stupidity of ours. They’re about a sequel away from the ball-point banana.

You know how Holmes imagines the fight before the fight? I wish the filmmakers, Guy Ritchie, et al, would imagine the next sequel before the next sequel, see the shoddy result, and do the filmmaking equivalent of tumbling into Reichenbach Falls. The End. No question mark.

WARNING: SPOILERS

Murky.

That’s the word that comes to mind when watching Tomas Alfredson’s “Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy.” The morality is murky, the mise en scene is murky, the code-language is murky. The film is a corrective for anyone who misses the Cold War.

But is the plot too murky? Or truncated? The movie is based upon the 432-page Cold War novel by John le Carré, which was made into a seven-part, five-and-a-half-hour BBC miniseries starring Alex Guinness in 1979. Now it’s down to two hours. In that time, amid much silence, code language, and the cold vacuity of gray-brown institutional buildings, we meet a dozen or more characters, five of whom could be traitors, all of whom are given further codenames, the titular codenames, while being investigated by George Smiley (Gary Oldman), the career spy who is pulled from a forced retirement, and who may be a suspect himself. By the time we get a handle of who’s who and what’s what, it’s time for the big reveal, and we still barely know “tailor” and “soldier,” which eliminates half our suspects. So who could it be? Oh, right. Him. There you go.

Of course the big reveal, for some, is about as much a reveal as who killed Hamlet’s father. The story is so well-known, particularly in Great Britain, that at this point it’s more about form than content: “How is the story told?” rather than “What happens?” And in this, Alfredson (“Let the Right One In”) triumphs. In “Three Days of the Condor,” a 1970s-era CIA director is asked if he misses the kind of action he saw in the intelligence field during World War II. “I miss that kind of clarity,” he responds. “Tinker Tailor” is all about that lack of clarity. It’s about murkiness. Le Carré has already called it the best adaptation of his work.

It begins in suspicion and in the negative. “You weren’t followed?” Control (John Hurt) asks Jim Prideaux (Mark Strong), a former head of the Scalphunters division. “I want you to go to Budapest,” he tells him. “This is not above board,” he tells him.

Apparently a Hungarian general wants to come over but in Budapest things go wrong and Prideaux winds up dead. It’s such a fiasco that Control, Chief of the Circus, which is the nickname of the Secret Intelligence Service, which is more commonly known as MI6, is dismissed, along with his deputy, Smiley. This is handled so subtly that I missed it. Wait a minute, what? “A man should know when to leave the party,” Control says. “Smiley is leaving with me,” Control says. And that’s that. These are men who reveal little, after all, Smiley most of all, so I missed the power struggle in those 14 words. Control is soon dead while Smiley swims with elderly men, head gliding above the water, at Hampstead Pond. At this point, we’ve been given three characters: two are now dead and one is retired. Alfredson giveth and taketh. He leaves us nothing to hold onto. The proper feeling for the rest of the story.

Besides, one of the characters turns out to be not dead, Prideaux, whom we see teaching French in some country school, recruiting a sad, fat kid to be his lookout. Is this a flashback? What is this?

Besides, one of the characters turns out to be not retired. When Ricki Tarr (Tom Hardy), a Scalphunter apparently gone rogue, shows up at the home of Oliver Lacon (Simon McBurney), the permanent undersecretary, with the same news that Control told Prideaux at the open— there’s a mole at the top of the Circus—Smiley is recalled to investigate. He reacts to this news quietly, without emotion, but his words pack a punch. “I’m retired, Oliver,” he tells Lacon laconically. “You fired me.”

But he accepts the job and chooses two men, Peter Guillam (Benedict Cumberbatch) and Mendel (Roger Lloyd-Pack)—impeccable, one assumes—and off they go, slowly and steadily.

Control’s suspicions centered on five men, whom he gave code names from a British children’s rhyme: Tinker, Tailor/ Soldier, Sailor/ Rich Man, Poor Man/ Beggar Man, Thief. (In the U.S., we borrowed the second stanza.) Thus:

• Tinker: Percy Alleline (Toby Jones)
• Tailor: Bill Haydon (Colin Firth)
• Soldier: Roy Bland (Ciaran Hinds)
• Poor Man: Toby Esterhase (David Dencik)
• Beggar Man: Smiley

Alleline, with access to a high-ranking Soviet source, codenamed “Witchcraft,” has now ascended to the top of the Circus. Haydon, best friend to Prideaux, is a ladies man always sniffing after the new secretaries. (He even seduced Smiley’s wife, news that comes to us in pieces.) Bland is blunt, Esterhase a toady. It’s one of them. Or none of them. Since Smiley was not above Control’s suspicion, he’s not really above ours, either.

Other bits come into play. George visits Connie Sachs, a retired Circus researcher, dismissed because of her suspicions of a Soviet defector, Polyakov, whom she sees, in old footage, being saluted during a May Day parade. If he was a soldier, she asks, why hide it from us? But when she brought her suspicions to Alleline, she was told, as Control was told, that she was losing her grip on reality.

After interrogating Prideaux (he hadn’t been killed: merely shot and tortured for months), Peter and Smiley share a bottle of Scotch in a hotel room, talking about Karla, their counterpart on the Soviet side. It's a great scene. Smiley owns up that he once met him, in ’55 in Dehli, after Karla had been tortured by the CIA. “No fingernails,” Smiley says matter-of-factly, holding up his right hand. The assumption was Karla would be killed when he returned to Moscow, so Smiley tries to convince him to stay in the west, and talks about all we have here; then he talks about Karla’s wife, and how she’ll be ostracized once he’s killed, and surely he wouldn’t want that. It’s such a smart scene, and so beautifully acted. Time and again, we see Smiley lose himself in thought, in remembrance. I’ve read that some think Oldman’s performance in the movie is too minimalist, but there’s always something behind the minimalism. It’s not just a blank. And here? Where, tipsy, he’s allowed to show a modicum of emotion? My god. One wonders how actors lose themselves in thought this way. Smiley admits that in trying to win over Karla he’d revealed too much of himself—how much his wife meant to him—while Karla, silent, got on a plane, keeping Smiley’s cigarette lighter: To George, from Ann. All my love. But in revealing nothing, Karla had revealed something. Smiley:

That’s how I know he can be beaten. Because he’s a fanatic. And the fanatic is always concealing a secret doubt.

Then he tells Peter (because he knows?) that Peter will now be a target and better get his house in order. Cut to: Peter breaking up with his boyfriend, then crying to himself when he’s alone. Earlier, Connie Sachs had greeted Smiley with the comment, “I don’t know about you, George, but I feel seriously underfucked.” Smiley himself, of course, is estranged from his wife, who had the affair with Haydon. These are the anti-James Bonds. It’s lonely out there for a secret agent.

Ultimately we get our answer, we find our spy, but the murkiness never goes away. The mole is not Alleline, the obvious choice, but Haydon, the best friend. He seduced Smiley’s wife at Karla’s bequest so Smiley wouldn’t be able to see him clearly. Smart. “Witchcraft” is bullshit. MI6 was played to get to the Americans. Control suspected but the higher-ups, like the permanent undersecretary, liked Alleline’s results and believed what they wanted to believe. It’s the numbers game all over again.

“Tinker Tailor” is a well-made movie for smart audiences. It conjures up the dread, ominousness, and moral ambiguity of the Cold War. It gives us a great lead performance and one of the best acting ensembles in years. But it’s a tough movie to come to cold. I was lost for much of the movie (like Smiley, I suppose), pieced it together only at the end (again, like Smiley), but feel I missed out on all the subtleties in between. I’ll probably go again. It’s a movie worth seeing but probably more worth seeing twice.

WARNING: REVIEW WITH SPOILERS

“Friends with Benefits” wants to comment upon the problem with romantic comedies while delivering a better romantic comedy. So Jamie (Mila Kunis) yells at a poster of recent rom-com queen Katherine Heigl, calling her a liar for the upbeat endings of her movies, but this movie still gives us an upbeat ending. So Dylan (Justin Timberlake) mocks the obviousness of the genre’s original soundtrack music when the indie-pop soundtrack of this film is equally obvious.

Those other rom-coms are fake, this rom-com is saying. We’re real.

But it’s not.

Dylan’s New York apartment alone pissed me off. He’s an LA dude, headhunted by Jamie for GQ magazine to be its art director in New York. When he shows up, there’s a new apartment waiting for him: spacious, impeccably designed, wide glass-door refrigerator, stunning view of the city.

Really? On an art director’s salary?

I happened to be watching this thing with a woman who was art director of Newsweek magazine from 1985 to 1995—back when, you know, magazines meant something—so I asked her. Did she live like that? Did she live close to that?

“You live that way in New York if you’re, like, a gazillionaire,” she said.

The beginning alone pissed me off. Not the beginning-beginning, when we see Dylan talking on his cell, late for a date, and we see Jamie talking on her cell, waiting for her date, and we think they’re talking to each other when really she’s waiting on Andy Samberg in New York, who’s about to break up with her, and he’s late for Emma Stone in LA, who’s about to break up with him. That was a good bit.

No, it’s when he flies to New York, headhunted by her, and she meets him at the airport, takes him to GQ, waits for him outside, takes him out for drinks, takes him to her secret spot in Manhattan—the roof of a building, which is her mountaintop, she says, her place of solitude—and then into the middle of a flash mob in Times Square, singing (for him?) “New York, New York.” After all that, he finally decides to take the job.

In other words, in the middle of a global financial meltdown, where most people are either underemployed or unemployed, we get to watch this little shit get wined and dined to take a high-paying job at a well-known publication in the most dynamic city in the world so he can live in this insane apartment where he gets to fuck Mila Kunis on a regular basis?

The early back-and-forth between Jamie and Dylan is awful. She’s from New York, see, so she’s blunt and a power walker, and he’s from LA, see, so he’s polite and waits for streetlights. She’s dynamic, he’s blank. Many things about her say “headhunter.” Not much about him says “art director.” It says “former boy-band member who’s a dynamic performer and can act a little but not well enough to make you believe he’s an art director for a magazine.”

They work out the deal—the friends-with-benefits deal—on the couch. Twenty years earlier, NBC aired an episode of “Seinfeld,” called “The Deal,” in which Jerry and Elaine worked out a FWB deal on the couch. They came up with a set of rules so they could have “this” (the friendship) as well as “that” (the sex). It was a funny episode. It felt true. And it lasted a half hour—twenty minutes with commercials. “Friends with Benefits” takes 90 minutes longer to deliver something much less funny and much less true.

Other characters show up about a half-hour in. Thank God. Jamie’s mom (Patricia Clarkson) is man-hungry and flakey. Dylan’s dad (Richard Jenkins) has early-stages Alzheimer’s and Dylan is often embarrassed by him—which he’ll overcome in a big way in the third act. Dylan has a nephew who does elaborate magic tricks that don’t quite work. Shaun White makes unnecessary cameos. It’s boy meets girl, boy fucks girl, boy befriends girl, boy insults girl, boy gets girl back in the final reel through his own flash mob singing the song he’s sung throughout the movie, “Closing Time” by Semisonic. I like that song (“Every new beginning comes from some other beginning’s end”) but here it helps Jamie and Dylan get together. Happily-ever-after is implied. It’s the movies, where every new beginning leads to the same effin' Hollywood end.

WARNING: SPØILERS

Early in the French-Finnish film “Le Havre,” the main character, Marcel Marx (André Wilms), is sharing drinks with Yvette (Evelyne Didi ), the owner of “La Moderne,” a small neighborhood pub. He’s telling her about his wife, Arletty (Kati Outinen), who was recently diagnosed with cancer. It’s bad, this cancer, but Marcel doesn’t know that. Arletty convinced her doctor to tell him otherwise. So on this night, a free drink in hand, Marcel has some relief. “Benign,” he says of the cancer with a smile. “Completely benign.”

Those were my thoughts about “Le Havre.” The film is benign. Completely benign.

Too benign.

Marcel, a handsome man in his 60s, ekes out a living as a shoeshine in the French port city of Le Havre. As the film opens, people flood out at a subway stop and past two shoeshines, Marcel and Chang (Quoc Dung Nguyen), who look down at everyone’s shoes, hoping for the dress variety but generally getting the sloppy shoes most of us wear. Then a shifty-eyed man in a suit, with dress shoes and a briefcase handcuffed to his wrist, arrives. He stops to get a shoeshine from Marcel, less because he wants one than as a distraction against those who are pursuing him. Doesn’t work. They gather. He sees them here ... and there. When he bolts, they follow. Most movies would follow as well, since most movies are about such things; but Finnish director Aki Kaurismäki (“The Man Without a Past”) stays on the men who shine shoes. He stays with the down-but-not-quite-out in this port city equidistant between Paris and London.

Marcel is a bit of rascal who steals bread, lets bills linger, but has the charm to get away with it. His wife awaits his return, then sends him off for an aperitif while she cooks, then shines his shoes while he sleeps. They keep what savings they have in a small tin box. The next day he does it again. It’s a hand-to-mouth existence, but, since this is France, what goes into the mouth is pretty good.

Meanwhile, a port nightwatchman making the rounds taps onto a large cargo container and hears a baby cry. Authorities are alerted, including Inspector Monet (Jean-Pierre Darroussin). They expect dead bodies but when the container is opened an entire west African family is nonchalantly living there, including Idrissa (Blondin Miguel), who, seeing his chance, stands, waits a bit, looks at an elder, who nods, then makes a dash, or a kind of half-jog to the front of the container, where he stops, confronted, or not, by three or four cops. They all stare at each other with blank expressions. Then Idrissa makes a dash, or a kind of half-jog, down a row of containers to safety. No one tries to stop him, although one cop pulls a gun and aims it before Inspector Monet tells him to put it away.

It’s a pivotal scene for content as much as tone. But what to make of the tone? Some might be amused by its purposeful inauthenticity. They might like the stiffness and amateurishness of it all. It might remind them of Wes Anderson x 10. Me, I saw little charm and less amusement.

These two characters, Idrissa and Marcel, cross paths, of course. As the newspapers splash scary headlines about the escaped youth, wondering if he has links to al Qaeda, Marcel shelters him. When the police close in, the neighborhood shelters Marcel. When $3,000 is needed to smuggle the kid to London, where his mother works in a Chinese laundry, Marcel convinces local rock star, and homunculus, “Little Bob” (Roberto Piazza), to throw a charity concert. The rest of the money Marcel pulls from the small tin box. When Inspector Monet figures out everything, he, too, turns out to be benign, and misdirects the other cops to allow Idrissa’s escape. The world’s a nice place. The common people—except for a nasty neighbor—stick together.

All of these good deeds do not go unrewarded, either. Yvette makes a recovery that astounds her doctors and returns home with Marcel. “Look Marcel,” she says. “The cherry tree blooms. I’ll make dinner right away.” The End.

“Le Havre” made me laugh a few times. I like the names, the homage, Kaurismäki chose for his characters. Marcel for Marceau or Carne? Marx for Groucho, Harpo or Karl? Arletty obviously for the great French actress. Yvette for Mimeux? Even Marcel’s dog, Laika, is named for the Russian dog who was shot into space in the 1950s, and whom Ingemar eulogizes throughout Lase Hallstrom’s great film, “My Life as a Dog.”

But the film does nothing for me. It feels fake in tone and fake in content and fake in lesson. What’s the point of it? It’s been called “Keatonesque,” after Buster, but Keaton was the deadpan comedian amid great turmoil, which he often unknowingly caused. Here, Marcel is the lively character, the charmer, amid a deadpan world. Can you celebrate life by staring at it blankly? I think not, but Kaurismäki seems to think so.

Fans of “The Man Without a Past” should know: I didn’t like that one, an Academy Award nominee for best foreign language film, either.

WARNING: There are SPOILERS coming—the likes of which none of us have ever SEEN!

Why not “Shelter”? Why not “Storm”? Isn’t that more direct? What do you get when you add that clunky verb to the title?

You get the imperative. You get a warning. But who’s giving the warning, who’s receiving it, and what are we being warned about?

Curtis (Michael Shannon) is a blue-collar worker in Elyria, Ohio, with a beautiful wife, Samantha (Jessica Chastain), and a three-year-old, deaf daughter named Hannah (Tova Stewart). For a Michael Shannon character, he's fairly normal. We see him sign “I love you” to her in the morning. We see him come home late at night and stand by her bedroom door as she sleeps. “I still take off my boots to not wake her,” he tells his wife when she comes up and puts her arms around him. Life is still a struggle. Samantha sews to make extra money. Hannah isn’t playing with other children. But it’s not bad. “You got a good life, Curtis,” his friend and co-worker Dewart (Shea Whigham, a fellow “Boardwalk Empire” actor) tells him. “I think that’s the best compliment you can give a man.”

Then Curtis begins to have bad dreams.

The dreams take the same form. A storm is coming and it begins to rain. But it’s not water—it has the consistency of motor oil—and Hannah is imperiled and/or Curtis is attacked. In one dream his dog gets him. In another, it’s Dewart. People attack them in their car and carry Hannah away. They attack them in their home and all of the furniture levitates. One morning, he wakes in a sweat. Another, he wets the bed. He hides all of this from his wife. She assumes he has a cold.

He begins to act badly. His dog has always been a beloved indoor dog but now Curtis sets up a small wire-mesh fence around the doghouse outside and sticks him there. “Sorry about this, buddy,” he says. He opens up the old storm shelter in the backyard, goes inside and breathes as if he's home. At the library he checks out books on mental illness—his mother first suffered from paranoid schizophrenia in her 30s, and he’s now 35—but on the way home he buys huge quantities of canned goods.

He keeps doing this kind of left hand/right hand thing. He seems to realize his paranoia is a consequence of his mental illness, and sees a therapist, and takes pills, etc., to be cured of it; but he still acts on the paranoia. Things must be done to get ready. So he and Dewart borrow equipment from work to dig a huge hole in the backyard to expand the shelter. He takes out a risky bank loan to pay for the expansion. “Are you out of your mind?” his wife asks.

Initially, the sleeping pills help. He wakes up, no bad dreams, white curtains billowing. But he’s merely chased the bad dreams into daylight. At work, under blue skies, he hears thunder that Dewart doesn’t. Driving home from a sign-language class, wife and daughter asleep in the back, he stops the car on the side of the road and watches a lightning storm light up the horizon. “Is anyone seeing this?” he wonders.

Just him.

We assume the problem is compounded by his lack of communication. “If only he’d talk to his wife,” we think. He does and it doesn’t help.

When he isolates himself from anyone he dreams about—giving away his dog to his elder brother, talking the boss into taking Dewart off his crew—we wonder what would happen if he dreams about Samantha. Then he does. That morning he flinches away from her touch. A second later, he sees the boss in the backyard, looking over his expanded storm shelter, and panics. Samantha had managed to get their daughter an operation for a cochlear implant, and when she’s told that her husband’s insurance will pay for most of it, that he’s got good insurance, it’s like a rumbling of thunder in the distance. We know he’ll lose it. And he does. The operation is still five weeks away when the boss shows up, alerted by Dewart over the equipment “loan,” and fires him. There’s a great economical scene when Curtis drags himself back into the kitchen, where his wife is doing dishes. “I’ve been fired,” he says. She stops, doesn’t look at him, her back up. “What about the health insurance?” she asks. “I got two more weeks,” he answers. She walks up to him, slaps his face, takes their daughter on her hip, opens the side door, opens the screen door, leaves. The choreography alone recommends the scene.

At this point in the movie, we have two possibilities: Curtis is right and vindicated or he’s wrong and nuts. Generally, I'm not a fan of either/or movies.

This sense of limited choices is crystallized—gloriously, I should add—when Samantha insists they go to a Grange Hall function and eat lunch with their neighbors. They get nods, smiles, paper plates with chicken and baked beans. But Dewart is there, still angry over the betrayal, and he starts a fight with Curtis. But it’s Curtis, tall and lanky, who ends it with a kick, then stands and upends their long, fold-up table. And suddenly he's shouting at his neighbors like a Pentecostal preacher:

There’s a STORM coming! The likes of which none of us have ever SEEN! And not a one of us is prepared for it yet!

Up to this point, Curtis has been bottled up, and we’ve been bottled up with him, so the outburst itself is like a long-delayed storm. If he’s told anyone about his dreams, he’s mentioned them in mumbles, embarrassed, full of doubt. In this scene, doubt is removed. He sounds like a prophet. Or a crazy man. We wait to find out which.

We don’t wait long. That night he has another bad dream ... until Samantha wakes him because a real storm is bearing down on them. They grab their daughter and make for the shelter, where, inside, they huddle wearing gas masks and oxygen tanks, expecting the worst. After sleeping, their opinions diverge. Should they go outside? “What if it’s not over?” he asks, doom in his voice.

Oddly, I began to flash to a bad 1999 comedy, “Blast from the Past,” in which Christopher Walken plays a man in the early 1960s so paranoid about the Cold War that he builds an extensive bomb shelter in his backyard, down which he takes his family during the Cuban Missile crisis. They live there for 35 years. I’ve long thought that Shannon should play Walken’s son in a movie—there’s not only a physical resemblance but both men play determinedly off-kilter roles—and he does, in a sense, in this one. Thankfully, it’s in a better movie. It’s also a stunning performance by Shannon, who’s getting Oscar buzz.

But again, we're down to an either/or proposition. Either they stay in the shelter forever, perhaps even die there, or they go outside where the world is either ruined or being cleaned up after a nasty summer storm. It takes cajoling from Samantha to get them out. “This is what it means to stay with us,” she tells him. “This is something you have to do.” So he does. He opens the storm doors, shutting his eyes tightly on his imagined apocalypse ... only to open them on neighbors and workers cleaning up fallen branches and power lines after a bad summer storm.

Sitting in the audience, I was reminded of all the hand-wringing and apocalyptic-warnings of the U.S. after 9/11. What do you do with the thing you fear the most? Do you let it control you—this thing you can’t control? Do you take the family into the storm shelter, real or metaphorical, and hole up there? Or do you live your life? Most movies, and not just horror movies, teach us to fear, and “Take Shelter,” I felt, was teaching us the opposite. Its message was Rooseveltian: It was our fear we needed to fear. It took a tortured path, through an atmospheric, often painful movie, to this realization. But realization came.

Then it went. Curtis sees a psychiatrist, not just a therapist, who recommends distance from the storm shelter, the thing Curtis thinks will keep him safe. So off they go to the beach. What beach? I assume along Lake Erie. There, Curtis and his daughter build sand castles, those careful constructions designed to get wiped away, and he seems to be enjoying himself. Then Hannah points toward the water. He’s slow to respond, but when he does it’s with a mixture of shock and recognition and vindication, and he slowly stands; and in their beach house, Samantha sees it, too, and goes outside as the rain begins. But it’s not rain. She rubs the dirty substance between her fingers, as Curtis did in his dreams, and he looks back as if to say, “See?” She nods. She knows now. And only then does writer-director Jeff Nichols pull back so we can see what they see: a huge storm over Lake Erie, with multiple tornadoes bearing down on them, the likes of which none of us have ever seen.

That’s the end. That’s the image we take with us from the theater.

Afterwards, the four of us—Patricia, Vinnie, Laura and I—had dinner in Wallingford and talked about the movie. Vinnie couldn’t abide the new ending; he wanted the old ending. He only perked up slightly when I mentioned that the new ending could still be a dream, Curtis’ dream, or maybe even Samantha’s. Maybe she was in on it with him now. But that hardly resonates, does it? To me, if the ending is a dream, it makes the movie worse.

But what to make of the new ending? Curtis, instead of being a loon, a mild schizophrenic, is in fact a prophet; and the movie, instead of a mild warning against fear, is a stern warning to fear. The title, in this respect, could be part of that warning. “Take Shelter” isn’t just what Curtis does, it’s what Nichols is telling us to do. He’s telling us a storm is coming the likes of which none of us have ever seen. One assumes he’s talking about global warming/climate change. You could argue that “Take Shelter” is the most powerful movie about climate change ever made because it isn’t about climate change until the very end. Until it’s too late. “Is anyone seeing this?” Indeed.

Unless you choose to see the storm as a metaphor. In which case it could be about ... anything: corporations, terrorism, Sarah Palin, Barack Obama. Prophets of the world unite! The only thing we have to fear is... the end of everything we know and love. And it’s right around the corner.

WARNING: SPOILERS

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, and we find ourselves laughing out loud. Payne creates comedy out of tragedy as it’s happening.

Fifteen minutes in, I admit, I thought Payne was flubbing it. I thought the critics who were touting “The Descendants” as a best picture contender had blown it. Then the movie began to work and didn’t stop.

Matt King (George Clooney) is a self-professed “back-up parent” in Hawaii who suddenly has his hands full when his wife, Liz (Patricia Hastie), suffers a head injury during a boating accident and goes into a coma. Meanwhile, his 10-year-old daughter, Scottie (Amara Miller), is sending nasty text messages to friends. When he goes to retrieve his 17-year-old daughter, Alexandra (Shailene Woodley), from the Hawaii Pacific Institute, a kind of summer reform school, he finds her drunk and playing midnight golf and unsympathetic about mom in the hospital. “Fuck mom!” she shouts.

At which point, Matt, in voice-over, wonders how he always winds up with such self-destructive women.

If there’s an oddity to the movie—beyond the removal of time from the comedy/tragedy equation—it’s that almost everyone seems to think Liz will wake from her coma. After 21 days of nothing, they all seem to assume she’ll be fine. The guy who was driving the boat when she had the accident, Troy (surf champ Laird Hamilton in a surprise, low-key cameo), says he visited her, prayed with her, and saw her hand move. Her best friend Kai Mitchell (Mary Birdsong) puts make-up on her. Both children act as bratty as ever, as if mom is simply on vacation.

By this point, though, Matt knows Liz won’t wake up, and, per her living will, she will soon be taken off life support, and it’s up to him to break the news to everyone. The first person he tells is his 17-year-old, Alex, who is too busy talking on her cell and complaining about the leaves in the backyard pool to listen to him. So he tells her while she’s gliding along in the pool. For a second, she looks stunned; then she dives beneath the surface and her face crumples and she swims powerful strokes as if to get away from the bad news. When she surfaces she’s gone maybe five feet. “Why did you tell me in the goddamned pool!” she cries. It’s a great scene with a great actress. Who is this? I thought.

Matt screws up the second telling, too. Alexandra has just given him tit for tat—her bad news for his. “You really don’t have a clue, do you?” she asks, then drops the news that will propel the rest of the movie: “Dad, Mom was cheating on you—that’s what we fought about.” The family lives in Hawaii, and Clooney spends most of the movie in baggy shorts and shirts and sandals. Even his face has a kind of bagginess to it. He’s still movie-star handsome but there’s a layer of puffiness there that you won’t find in “Ocean’s Eleven” but probably see every morning in the mirror. After Alex drops her news bomb, Matt, in a kind of daze, struggles to put on his sandals, then does a kind of run/shuffle for blocks. It’s quite funny, but so inappropriate that one doesn’t feel like laughing. Yet. Is he, like Alexandra, simply running away from bad news? Is he running to the house of the man who cuckolded him? Neither. He winds up at the Mitchells, Kai and Mark (Rob Huebel), who are in the midst of their own absurd argument about cocktails (nice touch) to find out what they know about the affair. Turns out they know it all. Kai continues to defend Liz, how she was lonely, etc., but Matt isn’t having it, and he angrily breaks the news. “You were putting lipstick on a corpse!” he shouts, which causes Kai to break down. Something about her crying, as with his running, tickles us, and, though it was still quite inappropriate, I burst out laughing. The gates were open—for both Matt and me. He was free to find out about his wife’s lover and I was free to laugh.

Good thing. The movie keeps getting funnier. It also gets more poignant.

Matt has three tasks: 1) to find his wife’s lover, Brian Speer (Matthew Lillard); 2) to tell Liz’s loved ones that she’s dying so they can say their good-byes; and 3) and to preside over the sale of a huge tract of undeveloped land that his family has owned for generations. The buyers are either a Chicago developer, who put in the highest bid, or a Hawaiian developer, who will keep the money in Hawaii. Various cousins in baggy shorts, shirts, and flip-flops, all of whom will come into millions, as will Matt, have their say—including Beau Bridges as Cousin Hugh, seemingly channeling his brother Jeff’s Dude. Some of the cousins don’t want to sell at all.

Of these three tasks, the third task provides some background on Hawaiian history, and gives us some spectacular shots of undeveloped coastal land, but it’s not particularly intriguing. The second task is a tough one, and poignant, and will resonate with most moviegoers, but dramatically it’s a dead end. It’s the first task that drives the movie.

When Alexandra questions why he’s seeking his wife’s lover, Matt merely seems confused. “I just want to see his face,” he says at one point. To punch him? To tell him the bad news so he can say his good-byes as well? Matt doesn’t know himself, so the movie doesn’t know, so we don’t know. What will happen when they meet? Will it feel true? Will it resonate? Can it do both? The possibilities aren’t multiple choice and the impulse is universal because Matt doesn’t know what drives him.

On this task and others, Alex insists upon coming along, which means Scottie has to come along. The fourth member of their group, or troupe, as in a comedy, is Alex’s friend Sid (Nick Krause), a laid-back dude, part-stoner, part-stupid, with a blissed-out face and a wide smile. When he first meets Matt, he hugs him.

Sid (smiling): What’s up, bro?
Matt (not): Don’t ever do that again.

When Matt breaks the bad news to Liz’s father, Scott (Robert Forster), Sid doesn’t know enough to stay in the background. The mother, Alice (Barbara L. Southern), teeters out, and it’s apparent she’s not all there. Alzheimer’s, one assumes. She doesn’t know her son-in-law, she doesn’t know her grandchildren. When Scott talks about visiting Elizabeth in the hospital, she thinks he’s talking about Queen Elizabeth and gets excited, causing Sid to laugh out loud. Confronted, Sid compounds his error by continuing to smile and insisting that Alice must be joking. Right? “I’m going to hit you,” Scott says matter-of-factly, and then: Pow! Next scene, Sid isn’t smiling. More laughter.

But there’s redemption in “The Descendants,” too. On another island, in pursuit of Scott Speer, Matt can’t sleep, Sid can’t sleep, and they have a midnight talk in the living room. Sid insists he’s smarter than Matt realizes. “You are about a hundred miles from smart,” Matt answers. But as the talk deepens, we learn, with Matt, that Sid’s father recently died. At first, Sid says this with a shrug that attempts nonchalance. Then he owns up. “November 24th,” he says. “Drunk driver. Actually, both drivers were drunk.” Up to this point, Sid has been a picked-upon figure, comic relief, yet he’s never used his own recent tragedy as a means to sympathy, or as a kind of justification for boorish behavior (“Hey, my own dad died, too!”), or as a way to muscle in on the Kings’ tragedy. He allows their tragedy to be itself. He may not be smart, but he’s something.

So is Scott. In the hospital room, he lambastes his son-in-law for his stinginess. (In an earlier scene, Matt, in voiceover, mentions that he, like his father, never spent what he didn’t make himself. “Give your children enough to do something,” he says, “but not enough to do nothing.”) Scott thinks if Matt had just bought Liz a better boat, she’d be alive. He’s angry about it. He calls Matt names, and calls Liz a faithful, devoted wife who deserved more, and for a moment Matt rises up, about to shatter his father-in-law’s illusions. The he calms down and says, “Yes, she deserved more,” and leads the kids out into the hallway, where Sid says, “That guy is such a prick! Was he always like that?” Even as Matt admits as much, he sees, and we see, through the door, Scott, burdened with a wife with Alzheimer’s, saying good-bye forever to his beloved daughter. A prick, yes, but a loving man who is losing everything. We all have that which humanizes us.

Does Brian Speer? That’s the question for most of the movie. Liz, in love, wanted to leave Matt for Brian. Is he the “more” she deserved?

Information comes in pieces. Matt discovers Brian is renting a cottage from one of his cousins. Then he discovers Matt has a wife, Julie (Judy Greer), and two boys. Then he discovers that when the sale on the undeveloped land goes through, Brian, brother-in-law to the Hawaiian developer, will make millions selling it for him.

Is that why Brian was sleeping with Liz? To get close to Matt and his deal?

Matt doesn’t find out until he gets close to Brian, on the cottage porch, where he tells him, “Elizabeth is dying. Oh yeah: Fuck you.”

Inside, they have this nice exchange:

Brian: It just happened.
Matt: Nothing just happens.
Brian: Everything just happens.

He wasn’t using her to get to Matt. But did he love her? When Matt asks him directly, Brian hesitates; and in that hesitation Matt has his answer. Brian was never going to leave his wife and family for Liz. He was just fucking her. It’s an answer 100 times sadder than if he’d broken down and cried. It speaks to Liz’s self-delusion and loneliness. Later, when Matt agrees with Scott that Liz deserved more, he means not just more than himself but more than Brian Speer.

The news also allows Matt to find it in himself forgive Liz.

Three times during the movie he speaks to her comatose figure . The first time it’s practical and family-related. “Please, Liz, just wake up,” he says, his hands full with girls he can’t control. “I’m ready to be a real husband and father.”

The second time, after he finds out about the affair, he lets loose his anger. “Who are you?” he shouts. “The only thing I know for sure is you’re a goddamned liar!”

The final time, after this bargaining and anger (mixed with denial and depression), we get acceptance. We get forgiveness and love. He kisses her parched lips. “Good-bye Elizabeth,” he says. “My love, my friend, my pain, my joy. Good-bye, good-bye, good-bye.”

We think that’s the ending—and it would be a good ending—but we continue on to a scene where Matt and his two girls silently release Elizabeth’s ashes into a Hawaiian bay, possibly where the accident occurred, then place leis on the water, which we see from below.

We think that’s the ending—and it would’ve been a good ending—but we get another scene. Scottie’s on the couch watching “March of the Penguins,” narrated by Morgan Freeman. Matt joins her with two bowls of ice cream, strawberry and mocha chip. They share a blanket. Is it the same blanket Liz used in the hospital? Alex joins them, and, without smiles, with eyes fixed on the TV, all three share bowls of ice cream and the blanket. Earlier in the movie, Matt compared a family to a Hawaiian archipelago: connected, but separate, and forever drifting apart. Here, for an ordinary moment anyway, we see them together. We think that’s the ending, and it is, and it’s a good ending.

What I’ve relayed isn’t exactly funny but the movie is. The script helps. The character of Sid helps. The character of Scottie, creating her “sand boobs” helps.  George Clooney helps. A bit too much? At times, he plays it a bit “O Brother, Where Art Thou?”—as in this scene where he first spots Brian’s cottage:

Shailene Woodley, who isn’t funny, is a revelation. There’s not a false note in her performance. Is there buzz for a supporting actress nom? One hopes.

As for the land deal? Matt, as sole trustee, ultimately nixes it, screwing over Brian Speer, but one wonders if it’s a necessary subplot. You could cut out the whole thing and the main storyline wouldn’t change. At the same time, you’d lose something ineffable. Part of it is Hawaiian history, as I said, and part of it is the movie’s title. But it’s more. Yes, these are the descendants, this King and his two girls, and all of their cousins; and they’ve been entrusted with this great wealth; and the question is what they do with it. Most of us aren’t going to come into millions, like the Kings, but the dynamic, the dilemma, the perspective, still resonates, because it’s universal. All of us are descendants. All of us are entrusted with this great wealth—the wealth of the world. And the question is what we do with it.

WARNING: CLANDESTINE SPOILERS

For most of its 50-year history, 3-D movies have been famous, or infamous, for propelling cinematic objects at its audience. Martin Scorsese turns this idea on its head. He begins “Hugo,” his first 3-D movie, as well as his first children’s movie, by propelling his audience at cinematic objects.

We begin with an extended shot inside of the Montparnasse train station in the 14th arrondissement of Paris in 1931. It’s crowded, as train stations are, but the camera keeps moving through hordes of people getting on and off the train. If the tendency in a traditional 3-D movie is to duck out of the way of thrown objects, the tendency here is to bob and weave through the crowd. It puts us in the scene. It feels like magic.

Magic is key to “Hugo” and—Scorsese would argue—to cinema. Maybe we don’t always feel it now. Maybe we’re all a little too jaded in the 21st century with our iPhones and iPads. So Scorsese takes us back to a time when we didn’t need 3-D technology to flinch away from something onscreen—we did it anyway,  in 1895, with the black-and-white, 48-second film “Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat” by the Lumiere Brothers. He reminds us that movies were not only magic but created by magicians; that books were once precious, and thus magic when in your hands; and that being whole in body and spirit after the Great War and during the Great Depression was so rare it was a kind of magic, too.

(Remember that train arrival, by the way. It returns.)

“Hugo,” I should mention at the outset, is completely charming, hugely entertaining, and genuinely educational. Almost everyone who sees it will be educated. Even I, at 48, was educated.

The title character, Hugo Cabret (Asa Butterfield), is a 10-year-old orphan who lives inside the clockwork at the Montparnasse train station. He life is both dodgy and an adventure: He steals to eat, steals equipment to fix the clocks, and is forever on the run from the Station Inspector (Sacha Baron Cohen) and his growling Doberman Pinscher. We can’t help but wonder how he got there. And why he stays there.

From behind the clocks at the station, he peers, generally out the number “4,” at the goings-on of the station: the attempts of Monsieur Frick (Richard Griffiths) to woo Madame Emille (Frances de la Tour); the attempts of the Station Inspector, with his squeaky metal leg, to merely speak to Lisette, the flower girl (Emily Mortimer), or to capture another urchin and send him off to the orphanage. He sees the monumental Monsieur Labisse (Christopher Lee) sitting inside his book shop and the quiet Georges Méliès (Ben Kingsley) dozing in front of his toy/repair shop with a tool nearby. Which is when he makes his move.

Bad move. Méliès was merely laying a trap for him, this boy, this THIEF, who had already stolen half of Méliès’ tool collection. He demands that he empty his pockets. But Hugo’s pockets merely contain bits and pieces: flotsam. Plus a notebook with words and diagrams and drawings. When Méliès sees it he gasps in recognition before turning even frostier. Hugo pleads with him to give it back but the next day Méliès shows up with ashes wrapped in a handkerchief.

The notebook, which isn’t really destroyed, is one of the few mementoes Hugo has of his father (Jude Law), a clock keeper and repairman. In a brief flashback, we see the father buy an automaton from a museum and attempt to fix it—to bring it back to life. Then he dies in a sudden fire and Hugo is adopted by his drunk Uncle Claude (Ray Winstone); he is taken to the Montparnasse station and put to work. Then Claude, too, disappears. (He drowns, we find out later, in the Seine.) But Hugo keeps working. He keeps all the clocks going so no one will investigate, find him alone, and put him in an orphanage. You could say he’s a boy trapped in time.

After the scene with the ashes, Hugo’s spirit is revived by Méliès’s goddaughter, Isabelle (Chloë Grace Moretz), another orphan, but a happy one with a home. She’s a precocious lover of books and words (“clan-des-tine”), who talks up fantasy worlds such as Oz, Neverland, and Treasure Island. But she wants an adventure of her own and she sees Hugo as the key. One day he offers her one: He takes her to the movies. Specifically, he sneaks her into the movies.

Isabelle: We could get into trouble...
Hugo: That’s how you know it’s an adventure.

Before they’re tossed out, they see Harold Lloyd dangling from a clock tower in “Safety Last,” an indelible cinematic image, and one Hugo will repeat before the movie is over. Afterwards, she tells him Papa Georges doesn’t allow her to go to movies, though she’s not sure why, and he tells her how his father loved movies, and once saw a film where a rocketship went right into the eye of the moon. The father said it was like seeing his dreams in the middle of the day.

Their adventure, and friendship, deepens, and he show her where he lives. “I feel like Jean Val Jean,” she says, of the steamy metal works, where, behind the scenes, Hugo has been attempting to do what his father couldn’t: fix, or bring to life, the automaton. He believes if he fixes it, he will receive a message from his father. One thing stands in his way: a keyhole in the shape of a heart.

Somehow Isabelle has that key.

The automaton is poised to write, and, wound up, that’s what it does. Unfortunately what it writes is gobbledygook: a “c,” a “4,” an “r.” When it stops, it’s Hugo who breaks down. He cries and confesses that in his heart he thought if he fixed the automaton his father would come back to life.

Which is when the automaton begins writing again, faster and faster, and it becomes apparent that it’s not writing at all. It’s, as Hugo says, drawring. What does it drawr? A rocketship in the eye of the moon.

This does seem like a message from Hugo’s father. But at the last instant, the automaton adds a final touch—a name: Georges Méliès.

I assume a few people in the audience will know the answer to this mystery. They’ll know that Georges Méliès, a former magician, was an early innovator of cinema who created hundreds of films in the 1900s and 1910s, including “Le voyage dans la lune,” with the rocketship in the eye of the moon. He also created the automaton. Those who don’t know his cinematic background will enjoy uncovering the mystery along with Hugo and Isabelle, who are schooled by Prof. Rene Tabard (Michael Stuhlbarg), an early film historian, and all three will attempt to reunite the volatile Méliès with his past—to fix him, in Hugo’s words—all the while outrunning and outsmarting the Station Inspector and his Doberman Pinscher.

That’s basically the rest of the movie and you can guess how it goes. “Happy endings only happen in the movies,” Hugo says earlier. And he’s right. At least here.

I could go on. The art and set direction of “Hugo” are incredible—those great puffs of steam behind the works—and the acting is wonderful: from big people with small roles to small people with big roles. Chloë Grace Moretz makes anew the smart girl with the precocious vocabulary, and Asa Butterfield, with his intense blue eyes, wears pain the way other actors wear a scarf. You feel, even in happy moments, it never quite leaves him. Sacha Baron Cohen, meanwhile, gives us a villain who is actually sympathetic (and still comic), while Michael Stuhlbarg brings his innate gentleness, previously cloaked in a schlemiel (“A Serious Man”) and a gangster (HBO’s “Boardwalk Empire”), to a true gentle man.

Even the source material is rich. “Hugo” is based upon the 2007 children’s book “The Invention of Hugo Cabret” by Brian Selznick. Initially I wondered if all the movie history was in the book, or if Scorsese, with his love of film and film history, added it. But it’s not only in the book, it's in the author. Brian Selznick, born in 1966, is first cousin twice removed to David O. Selznick, the producer of “Gone with the Wind.”

All of which is fascinating. But what I want to talk about is Hugo’s dream.

After the above scene with Isabelle and the automaton, Hugo sees Isabelle’s heart-shaped key on the train tracks in the station. He looks up, he looks down, then leaps onto the tracks. He fingers the key. He sees it as the answer. But at that moment a train is arriving and Hugo, lost in thought, doesn’t see it coming until it’s too late, until the train leaps the tracks and careens through the station and bursts through a wall and falls onto the ground outside, a story below. Which is when Hugo wakes up.

As he’s feeling himself to make sure he’s all there, he begins to change. His flesh becomes metal, and his torso becomes ribs of metal, and his face turns into the calm, expressionless (but somehow very expressive) face of the automaton. Which is when he wakes up again. A dream within a dream.

Each dream takes less than a minute but initially I felt a little cheated—as I often do with dreams in movies. But I gave this one a pass. I remembered the line “Movies are like dreams in the middle of the day” and thought this scene was building on that theme.

It was. And more.

Later in the film, at its climax, Hugo is taking the automaton to Georges Méliès but is finally caught by the Station Inspector; and in their struggle, the automaton goes flying in the air and lands on the train tracks... just as a train is coming. As the automaton is the key to everything, Hugo leaps onto the tracks to save it. But this is where his courage leaves him. He embraces the automaton but can’t move. He’s as frozen as the automaton. It’s up to the Station Inspector, acting as deus ex machina, the redemptive engine of himself, to pull both boy and robot to safety.

You think back to the dreams: The key is on the tracks; the boy and automaton are one.

But there’s more. Remember the Lumiere Brothers’ “Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat,” which Hugo and Isabelle see while researching early film history? The people cowering from the oncoming train on the movie screen? That’s like this scene. That’s like his dream. The train on the screen leaps into Hugo’s dreams and reality.

But it wasn’t until I got home and researched the Gare Montparnasse that I found the true coup de grace. Because in 1895, the same year as “Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat,” a train did jump the tracks at the Gare Montparnasse; and it did careen through the station and burst through a wall and fall onto the ground outside, a story below. There’s a famous photograph showing that fallen train.

This is deep resonance. We get echoes upon echoes, involving dreams, history, film, and film history. The movie keeps doing this, too: the ashes of Hugo’s notebook; the ashes his father came to; the ashes Méliès’ early films were reduced to. On and on. The movie resonates so much it has a beat, a pulse. It’s alive.

WARNING: SPOILERS

Saying “Transformers 3” isn’t as bad as “Transformers 2” is like saying the cold that put you in bed for a week wasn’t as bad as the pneumonia that put you in bed for a month. You still wouldn’t want to wish either on a friend.

“Transformers” movies have dominated the box office for four years now. The first, in 2007, grossed $319  million domestic and $709 worldwide. The second grossed $402 million domestic and $836 worldwide. This one grossed $369 million domestic and $1.12 billion worldwide. It’s hard for me to type sadder numbers.

Let’s step back a moment. What are we talking about with these movies? What are they about?

They’re about mechanical creatures, some giant, some small, who can transform into any mechanical thing on Earth: semi-truck, flat-screen TV, whatever. The good ones (Autobots) want to protect Earth; the bad ones (Decepticons) want to take it over. A few people, led by everyman Sam Witwicky (Shia LaBeouf), attempt to help the Autobots.

What else?

In each movie, Witwicky has an insanely hot girlfriend: Megan Fox in the first two movies, supermodel Rose Huntington-Whiteley in this one. It’s the unlikeliest of matches, particularly if like lightning it strikes twice, but then none of the movie is logical. The hot women are there to draw more of the teen-boy crowd, or more of the boy-man crowd, who like to look at giant robots battling and pretty women pouting. In this one, Carla (Huntington-Whiteley) first shows up, filmed from behind, wearing panties and a man’s dress shirt like in that 1980s Brut cologne commercial. (“Honey, I was just thinking about you.”) Director Michael Bay gets even less subtle in a scene where Witwicky meets Carla’s boss, Dylan Gould (Patrick Dempsey), a rich, handsome somethingorother, who will become the movie’s chief villain, in league with the Decepticons. Dylan is showing off one of his vintage automobiles to Witwicky and commenting upon its curves, which he calls sensual. In a typical scene, Dylan would look Carla up and down as he did this. That would be the asshole thing to do. Here Bay does it himself. While Dylan talks, Bay’s camera pans up Huntington-Whiteley’s body. Making Bay the asshole? Making the audience the asshole? I wish it were a comment on our loutishness but it’s just another example of our loutishness—or Bay’s. Why not an up-the-skirt shot while he’s at it? Or is he saving that for “Transformers 4”?

What else?

The giant robots are from a distant planet in a distant time, but on Earth, they’ve adopted well to not only 20th and 21st century technology (cars; flat-screen TVs) but 20th and 21st century pop culture. Some speak with British accents, some with Scottish brogues, some trash talk American-style. They know “Star Trek,” “We are Family” and “Missed it by that much.” The comic relief ones anyway. The main transformer, Optimus Prime, has a bland, stentorian voice, pronouncing the blandest of sentiments (“It is I, Optimus Prime!”) as if he were the hero of a 1950s television show, or, more to the point, a voice a kid might imagine when playing with his toys.

Because that’s what these things are: toys. Before he became a right-wing nutjob, Michael Medved wrote a book called “The Golden Turkey Awards,” in which he gave out awards, Golden Turkeys, to the worst of the worst in movie history—Worst actor, Richard Burton, for example—but my favorite Golden Turkey was for worst credit line. In an early, silent version of Shakespeare’s “The Taming of the Shrew” we got this credit line: “Additional dialogue by Sam Taylor.” To which Medved wondered: Additional dialogue? To Shakespeare?

I thought of this during one of “TF3”’s opening credits: “In association with Hasbro.” Hasbro. Creator of Mr. Potato Head and the Easy-Bake Oven. We’re playing with toys here. No, not even. We’re watching others, rich folks, play with toys. We’re paying money to watch rich folks create stories out of 30-year-old toys. We’ve spent nearly $3 billion on this, just in theaters, thus far.

So what’s the plot of this one? Apparently the Prime before Optimus, Sentinel Prime (voice: Leonard Nimoy), in the last days of the Autobot-Decepticon War, attempted to escape with a device that might’ve won the day for the Autobots. But he was shot down, drifted in space for a while, then crashlanded on our moon circa 1958. Just in time for the space race.

Actually, he was the reason for the space race. That’s why JFK, sneaky bastard, gave his “We choose to go to the moon in this decade” speech. We needed to beat the Russians there so Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin (sneaky bastards) could explore that alien space ship and get what they could. So we did. So they did.

That’s our history-skewing backdrop. Eventually we get to Sam Witwicky, the everyman protagonist nobody cares about. He’s living in a beautiful well-lit apartment in D.C. with a supermodel girlfriend and a couple of small, comic-relief Autobots, but he’s got nothing but complaints. Three months out of college and he can’t find a job. Carla teases him about this. His comic-relief parents, when they show up, tease him about this. He doesn’t think it’s funny. “I saved the world twice and I can’t even get a job!” he says. He’s got a medal from Pres. Obama (handed to him dismissively), but no one is impressed. It’s all still top secret. Plus he can’t blame his inability to find work on the Great Recession since the “Transformers” movies are all about escapism and the Great Recession is exactly what we’re trying to escape. Might as well have Fred Astaire dance in hobo rags during the Great Depression. (“Easter Parade” was in ’48.)

Here’s a suggestion: Sam might want to temper his job-interview personality. Basically he brings his saving-the-world intensity to the job interview. He puffs up, talks big, offers nothing. It might help, too, if he could remember the name of the job interviewer. But who can blame him, right? It’s a Japanese name and those Japanese names sure are weird and funny.

Mostly, though, Sam just wants to matter again.

Hey, why doesn’t he join the military? Doesn’t he see himself a soldier? Isn’t the film’s most memorable line something Charlotte Mearing (Francis McDormand), Director of National Intelligence, tells him to get rid of him? Doesn’t she say, “You are not a soldier. You are a messenger. You've always been a messenger”? So why not show her, damnit, and become a soldier for real?

Because it would upset the balance of the movie. Everyone is a type here. Mearing’s a bureaucrat (and wrong), the soldiers are soldiers (and move heroically in slow motion), and Witwicky is the intense everyman with the hot, hot girlfriend who gets mixed up in this shit. He can’t go beyond the bounds of his narrow character any more than Optimus Prime can sing like the Pointer Sisters.

Meanwhile, an investigation at Chernobyl turns up a slithery Decepticon named Shockwave (voice: Frank Welker), which leads to the uncovering of the NASA cover-up, and the Chernobyl cover-up (also caused by Transformers), and a demand from Optimus Prime to retrieve both Sentinel Prime and the advanced Autobot technology from the moon.

Except this is all a plot by an injured Megatron (voice: Hugo Weaving), hanging out at the foot of Mt. Kilimanjaro, to regain power. From this we get betrayals human (Dylan Gould) and Autobot (Sentinel Prime). Sentinel Prime then addresses the U.N., demanding that all remaining Autobots (but not Decepticons) leave Earth. Within 24 hours, Congress, cowardly as ever, succumbs to these demands and the Autobots are forced to leave. Their ship is then shot down by the Decepticons, leaving a trail of smoke reminiscent of the Challenger disaster. At which point, the Decepticons take over the world, or at least Chicago, and set up the advanced Autobot technology in order to transport their dead planet, Cybertron, into our solar system. But against all odds, Sam Witwicky and a rag-tag team of mercenaries go in, along with Special Forces, along with, eventually, the Autobots—who were never killed, who faked the launch—and eventually the good guys, who stand for freedom, beat the bad guys, who stand for tyranny, and Sam and Carla run to each other and kiss. It’s up to Optimus Prime to deliver the movie’s last thrilling lines:

In any war, there are calms between the storms. There will be days when we lose faith, days when our allies turn against us. But the day will never come that we forsake this planet and its people.

It’s toys. Sam is the boy playing with his Transformers and G.I. Joes and army men. The buildings are Legos. Carla is his sister’s Barbie. The bureaucrats are whatever: Troll dolls. And Sam makes them all fight and makes the buildings topple. He provides sound effects. Pkschuh! He provides the dialogue. Which explains a lot.

Except it’s not so innocent. There’s a sheen of adult (right-wing?) paranoia and loutishness on top of this childplay.

Question: Who do we trust in these movies? What groups or institutions?

Parents? They’re daft and comic relief.

Government? Bureaucrats are always wrong.

Businessmen? Assholes.

The U.N.? It allows villains to speak there.

Congress? It’s weak, betrays friends, and capitulates on a dime.

Presidents? JFK was a liar and Obama was dismissive.

The Apollo program? It began as a lie and it ended as a lie. Buzz Aldrin even shows up to lie to us some more. Saddest guest appearance ever.

No, it’s just one group we can trust: Soldiers. That’s it. Army men. They’re the only ones. You can even trust them with your hot, model girlfriend and they won’t look at her twice. They’re that trustworthy.

This is a worldview so infantile and paranoid it borders on the psychotic.

“Star Wars” was infantile (good vs. evil, etc.) but it was also expansive. It opened up a universe to Luke Skywalker and us. You found friends everywhere. And the force was with you.

“Transformers” is infantile but shuttered. Everyone you meet is a jerk, an ass, an idiot or in league with your enemies. You trust army men and Optimus Prime and that’s it. Because no one is with you.

And somehow this thing has grossed $3 billion worldwide.

“We were once a peaceful race of intelligent mechanical beings,” Optimus Prime tells us at the beginning of “Transformers 3.” “But then came the war.”

We were once a race of semi-intelligent human beings, I thought at the end of “Transformers 3.” But then ... But then ...

WARNING: THE FBI ALWAYS GETS ITS SPOILERS

Biopics are tough. Take a life that has no discernible story arc, create one, and stuff it into two hours of movie time. Fun.

“J. Edgar,” written by Dustin Lance Black and directed by Clint Eastwood, doesn’t do a poor job of it, but it does a familiar job of it. We get the famous figure at the end of his life reflecting on the life. As in “Chaplin,” the intermediary is the biographer, or, in J. Edgar’s case, the biographers. Black also adds a twist at the end but I wish it were more of a twist. I wish it reflected on the entire life, the entire memoir, rather than a small portion of it.

First, let me say I was fascinated by the early stuff: Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer’s home being bombed by anarchists in 1919 and the “Palmer Raids” in response, and the general fear of Bolsheviks and anarchists along with the deportation not only of foreigners but of U.S. citizens like Emma Goldman (Jessica Hecht). It’s a time period we don’t see much in the movies, yet it felt familiar to me. It’s the same arguments, the same overreactions, we’ve had since 9/11. You get the feeling that what Hoover tells us in voiceover at the end of the movie—“A society unwilling to learn from the past is doomed; we must never forget our history”—is precisely what Clint Eastwood is telling his audience. Learn you history, punks.

In 1919, J. Edgar Hoover (Leonardo DiCaprio) is a prim, proper, legal functionary within the Bureau of Investigation, who, as he survives the various scandals of the Harding-era Justice Department, including the Palmer Raids, rises to power. In 1921, he is appointed deputy head of the Bureau. In 1924, he becomes its acting director. Finally, under Calvin Coolidge, he becomes its director—the sixth in the Bureau’s short history. (It was created in 1908.)

There’s a good, paranoid sense we get from DiCaprio’s Hoover. He assumes he’ll be bounced from his post at any minute—as easily as he bounces others—and thus scrambles to hold onto power. Should this have been underlined more? This fear of others doing to you what you do to others? The Golden Rule turned on its head? Hoover worried about being fired on a whim because he fired others on a whim. He knew the value of loyalty because he was disloyal. He sought the awful secrets of others because he knew the awful power of his own secrets. He was paranoid and combative because he assumed the world would act as unscrupulously as he did, which is why, in the end, he beat it. Because the world wasn’t as unscrupulous as he was. He had it at an advantage.

And didn’t. He was a closet case, trapped in homophobic times (OK, more homophobic times), without even a sympathetic family to fall back on. When he objects, later in the film, to having to dance with actresses like Ginger Rogers and Anita Colby, his mother (Judi Dench) reminds him of a neighborhood boy, “a daffodil boy,” she calls him, who killed himself after his secret came out. “Edgar,” she says, “I’d rather have a dead son than a daffodil son. Now I’ll teach you to dance.” It’s a sad, effective scene.

Hoover does have a long-time companion, Clyde Tolson (Armie Hammer), a law school graduate who quickly becomes the No. 2 man at the FBI, even though he mostly helps Hoover, a) keep an even keel, and, b) with his clothes. There’s an odd moment at Julius Garfinkel & Co., a D.C. department store. The store’s clerks inform Hoover his credit is no good since someone named John Hoover has been bouncing checks, leaving the Director of the Bureau of Investigation sputtering that he is himself and not someone else. Funny stuff. At which point Clyde vouches for him and a new line of credit is established. Giving up both “John” and “Johnnie,” he signs his name, momentously, J. Edgar Hoover. Ah! The legend being born. Unfortunately, the careful viewer will have noticed, in an earlier scene, a desk nameplate already reading “J. Edgar Hoover.” But Eastwood needs to film his momentous moments.

From there, it’s battling both gangsters and Hollywood’s glorification of gangsters. Hoover turns James Cagney, the charismatic bad guy of “The Public Enemy” in 1931, into the charismatic good guy of 1935’s “G-Men.” He pushes for labs, and forensic science, and the creation of a national database of fingerprints. He federalizes the bureau and lobbies Congress to make kidnapping a federal offense so he can involve the bureau in the Lindbergh baby kidnapping. He sells his agency—putting “Junior G-Man” badges in Post Toasties cereal and pushing for “Junior G-Men” comic books—while demoting anyone who steals his spotlight, such as Melvin Purvis, one of his best agents. Was this the first governmental mass-media campaigns in the U.S.? Was it propaganda? One gets the feeling an entire movie could be made about this issue alone. One wants a first-rate documentarian to take a stab at J. Edgar Hoover’s century.

Eastwood’s stab feels ... weak and misdirected. We’re watching two storylines here: The aged Hoover in the 1960s, on a mission to discredit Martin Luther King, Jr., detailing his own early history as justification. As the story he’s telling moves from the 1920s to the 1930s, so 1960s Hoover moves through various events of that tumultuous decade: JFK assassination, MLK Nobel Prize acceptance, Nixon inauguration. We assume the two stories will meet—we’ll get the 1940s and ‘50s—but the past, oddly, never gets out of the 1930s. We hear nothing about WWII, the creation of the CIA, and the rise and fall of McCarthyism. That’s a big gap. That’s too much history, dismissed.

DiCaprio, who does a good job, is still an odd choice. Over the years, Hoover has been played by Broderick Crawford, Ernest Borgnine, Vincent Gardenia, Ned Beatty and Bob Hoskins, actors with weight and heft and bulldog faces. Even a 1987 TV biopic, which covered Hoover’s early years as “J. Edgar” does, cast Treat Williams, who is dark and bulldogish, in the role. DiCaprio ultimately seems too light and pretty for the role.

And the point of it all? Clyde Tolson, whose old-age makeup is even worse than Hoover’s, tells his long-time companion that parts of the history he’s been dictating are bullshit. Hoover claims to have captured various gangsters but didn’t. He claims to have arrested Bruno Hauptman but didn’t. His story is false. This is the twist from Dustin Lance Black that I liked, and would’ve liked more if the falsehoods had been spread throughout Hoover’s reminiscences rather than sprinkled into a brief period in the mid-1930s. But one understands why they did it this way. Making the whole thing a lie would’ve risked alienating the audience. Moviegoers may want to see lies but not those kinds of lies. They want to see fiction but don’t want to be told they’re seeing fiction. That would just ruin the experience.

Even so, imagine the lesson. Done right, it could have reminded the audience to be wary of storytellers—not just Hoover telling his story but Eastwood telling Hoover’s. Truth, after all, is one of the first things to go in a Hollywood biopic. “J. Edgar” may be a movie about an unreliable narrator, but the movies themselves, from “Birth of a Nation” to “JFK,” are our greatest unreliable narrator.

WARNING: There are three ways to review a movie: Be first, be smarter, or use SPOILERS.

Let’s talk irony.

“Margin Call” is about the immoral (or at least amoral) actions of a group of executives at a powerful, Goldman-Sachs-like New York investment bank, who realize, during a 36-hour period circa 2008, that if stock market trends continue the losses on their books will be greater than the entire value of their 107-year-old company. So during several hushed, middle-of-the-night meetings they must decide what to do.

The employee who created the program that reveals this gap is risk management executive Eric Dale (Stanley Tucci), but—and here’s the first irony—he was fired, along with 80 percent of his floor, at the beginning of this 36-hour period. He’s been with the company 19 years, but someone taps on his door, and he’s taken to an office where two young women, HR folks, express condolences and lay out a severance package. After it’s done, they nod toward a burly security guard by the door. “This gentleman will take you to your office so you can clean out your office,” one says. Then he’s walked out the building as if he’s a common criminal.

This is the thought that scene is intended to evoke: “Awful!”

This is the thought it evoked in me: “Pikers!”

A month earlier, my domestic partner, Patricia, had been fired from Microsoft after 10 years on the job. She did good work, put in long hours, but her boss, two years ago, slowly began to squeeze her—making impossible demands, holding back on approval for projects and then blaming her for not meeting milestones—until, at her annual review this September, she was let go. That was the injury but here are the insults: 1) She received no severance package; and 2) she was escorted, not back to her office, but to HR, where she was told not to contact anyone at Microsoft except HR. Then she was escorted from the building. A week later, the personal items from her office finally arrived. She didn’t even get to box them up herself. Her personal items included an unopened 10-year anniversary gift/card she’d received from Microsoft last spring. “On your tenth anniversary, we would like to thank you for your incredible commitment to Microsoft,” the card read. It was signed: “Steve Ballmer.”

That’s the big, unintended irony of the opening scene. Hollywood thinks it’s showing us an immoral act from a soulless institution, but the soulless institutions of the world have already shown us much, much worse.

“Margin Call” is a smart, relevant, powerful film that is also curiously isolated. The terms we’re used to hearing about the global financial meltdown—“toxic asserts,” “mortgage derivatives,” “subprime mortgage loans”—are rarely enunciated. The reasons Eric Dale and 80 percent of his floor are let go at the beginning of this 36-hour period are never mentioned. Things just happen. If you didn’t know any better, you’d think the global financial meltdown began here, with this 107-year-old investment bank, rather than with policy decisions dating back to at least 1999 and probably earlier.

The movie is so compact in terms of time and place that I thought it was based upon a play: off-Broadway, I imagined, fall 2009. It’s actually an original screenplay by first-time director J.C. Chandor, who, at times, feels like he’s channeling David Mamet with his blunt, vague dialogue. (First words: “Is that them? ... Are they going to do it right here?”) His characters remind me of characters from a play, too. 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.

It’s a simple story. Eric Dale is fired, Will Emerson commiserates in his way (without outward sympathy), while Peter Sullivan (Zachary Quinto), who worked under Dale, offers him an awkward, heartfelt farewell by the elevator. At the last instant, probably because of this show of heart, Dale gives Sullivan a zip drive. “I was working on something but they didn’t let me finish it,” he says. As the elevator doors close, he adds, “Be careful.”

That night, after his regular work, and while his colleagues are decompressing at a Manhattan bar, he begins to fiddle with the model. He punches in numbers. What they reveal is so awful he phones his friend, Seth (Penn Badgley), to bring in their new boss, Will, who brings in his boss, Sam Rogers, who alerts executives Jared Cohen (Simon Baker) and Sarah Robertson (Demi Moore), the woman responsible for Eric Dale being fired in the first place. When they get the news, they call in the bank’s CEO, John Tuld (Jeremy Irons), who arrives, like a deus ex machina, in a helicopter that lands on the roof. But he’s not a deus ex machina. “The cavalry has arrived,” one man says. But he’s not the cavalry, either.

Chandor is good with moods: the hushed, ominous wait at 2 a.m., which Tuld cuts through with his 3 a.m. arrival and his no-bullshit questions and his ultimate decision to kill rather than be killed, to SURVIVE, as he says, which leads to 4 or 5 a.m. bleariness as you wait out the dawn, and the day, and the only questions that remain: Will we do this thing? Can we do this thing? Eric Dale is searched for (in Brooklyn), Jared Cohen tries to pry Will away from Sam (and fails), and different people have quiet conversations in which philosophies are revealed; but ultimately we’re just waiting to see if the company can survive, and, if it can, what this means.

It’s a Goldman Sachs moment—knowingly selling toxic assets—and Sam rallies the troops to do this, just as he rallied the troops after the mass layoffs the day before. What he said about their fired colleagues on day one, in fact, could apply to the toxic assets at the end of day two: “Now they’re gone. They’re not to be thought of again ... You are all survivors.”

It’s merciless but true. The company takes what would’ve killed it and lets it loose in the economic ecosystem, where, even in diluted form, it will kill others. Maybe you.

As they do this, they affix blame elsewhere. Here’s John Tuld to Sam:

You and I can't control it, or stop it, or even slow it, or even ever-so-slightly alter it. We just react. And we make a lot money if we get it right and we get left by the side of the road if we get it wrong.

Here’s Will Emerson to Seth on the drive back from Brooklyn:

The only reason that [most people] get to continue living like kings is cause we got our fingers on the scales in their favor. I take my hand off and then the whole world gets really fuckin’ fair really fuckin’ quickly and nobody actually wants that. They say they do but they don’t. They want what we have to give them but they also want to, you know, play innocent and pretend they have know idea where it came from. Well, that’s more hypocrisy than I'm willing to swallow. So fuck ’em. Fuck normal people.

Others can’t affix blame elsewhere. At the end of the day, Sam, the good soldier, looks weaker from the purging and tells Tuld he wants out. He says he’s tired of the game. He says he should’ve gone into ditch digging. How far have we fallen when Kevin Spacey plays our moral exemplar?

Ditch digging, ironically, is where we last see him: digging a hole in the front yard of the home he used to share with his ex-wife, to bury their old dog, who died of a tumor as Sam was rallying the troops. It’s one of the few moments in the movie where we’re not in a corporate high-rise so it feels a bit out of place. It’s dirt and grass rather than steel and glass. And yet it feels exactly right. It feels like the last few years. Something beloved is being buried in a place where we no longer live.

WARNING: SPOILERS IN THE ATTIC

I first read “Jane Eyre” while living at the Florence Court Apartments during my days at the University of Minnesota in the mid-1980s. It was an assigned text for 19th Century British Literature. The copy I bought, at a used bookstore in Dinkytown, included black-and-white sketches, possibly by F.H. Townsend, which may or may not have spurred me to begin reading it early, but I did, before the class had even begun, one night while my roommate, Dean, was out partying or visiting family. I was alone, in other words, when I first read about the strange happenings at Thornfield Hall: the night-time fires, and the strange visitation of a ghost, or a vampyre, with its long straggly hair and discolored, savage face (“the lips were swelled and dark; the brow furrowed: the black eyebrows widely raised over the bloodshot eyes...”), and it created such a mood in me that I was actually spooked, in the frightened but thrilled way one gets from reading ghost stories alone in bed at night. I kept thinking that if I looked over at the window, which looked out over 10th Avenue, I would see a discolored, savage face there. I wanted Dean to come home.

This is what’s missing from Cary Fukunaga’s adaptation—the 22nd—of Charlotte Bronte’s beloved novel “Jane Eyre.” The movie is beautifully photographed (by Adriano Goldman), it’s wonderfully acted (by Mia Wasikowska and Michael Fassbender and Judi Dench), and the romance between Jane and Mr. Rochester is palpable and thrilling. But it’s never particularly spooky. When the big reveal occurs, it’s rather matter-of-fact. Oh right. Madwoman in the attic and all. Sad. It’s as if Jane Eyre herself, with all of her common sense and forthrightness, is directing the thing.

The movie begins with Jane wandering the moors of England, alone and distraught, an event that I, for the first 10 minutes of movie time, misplaced. I assumed it was after Lowood but before Thornfield Hall, but it’s after Thornfield. Jane is fleeing Rochester after the revelation, on the day of their wedding, that he’s already married to the madwoman in the attic, the setter of fires.

Good way to begin. This is Jane’s metaphoric death, from which she remembers her life, and from which she’s resurrected by St. John Rivers (Jamie Bell) and his sisters.

The Rivers residence is the fourth place we’ve seen Jane live. You can chart them thus:

But look at it again. Her youth is dominated by women who do not care for her but whom she endures until she is forced to leave them. Her adulthood is dominated by men who care for her but whom she flees—because the first is married and the second is not the love of her life. The women tear her down and the men build her up. Somehow it’s a feminist story.

I know. It is. Jane, as girl and woman, takes the world only on her terms. She refuses to compromise—with the horrible worldview of Mrs. Reed, with the circumstances of Mr. Rochester, with her lack of feelings for St. John Rivers. In this manner she wins everything. She gets wealth (from a distance relative), the man she loves (Rochester, diminished and thus controllable), and even a kind of deathbed mea culpa from the horrible Mrs. Reed. No wonder women have loved this story for 150 years. “The Color Purple” is kind of a black, American version of “Jane Eyre,” isn’t it? Except Alice Walker’s novel is truly feminist: The men tear down Celie while the women build her back up.

It struck me, watching this version of “Jane Eyre,” how calm and logical Jane is when faced with disreputable behavior—the horrible lies of Mrs. Reed; the early, teasing truculence of Mr. Rochester; the demanding, bitter love of St. John Rivers—but this didn’t remind of life as we live it. It reminded me of the way people tell their own stories: How incredibly calm and logical they always are; how huffy and obstinate their opponents remain. “Jane Eyre” is, in fact, told in the first person—Jane is telling her own story—so how much should we believe? And has anyone written a revisionist take from, say, St. John Rivers’ perspective? Or John Reed’s? “As soon as my cousin, Jane Eyre, moved in with us, our world began to crumble.”

Cary Fukunaga’s film version is still recommended. It looks beautiful, it sounds smart, it feels 19th century. An example of the great dialogue:

Rochester: I offer you my hand, my heart. Jane, I ask you to pass through life at my side. You are my equal and my likeness. Will you marry me?
Jane Eyre: Are you mocking me?
Rochester: You doubt me.
Jane Eyre: Entirely.

Just don’t expect spooky.

BEWARE: THE SPOILERS OF OCTOBER

“The Candidate,” the seminal political movie of the 1970s, is about the corruption of a true believer, the titular candidate, Bill McKay (Robert Redford), who goes from idealistic grassroots activist to U.S. Senator-elect mouthing the ominous words, “What do we do now?,” as if he no longer has a mind of his own.

Half an hour into “The Ides of March,” the seminal political movie of 2011, I thought writer-director George Clooney was turning this idea on its head. His presidential candidate, Gov. Mike Morris (Clooney), holds firm to his principles, refusing to accept a quid-pro-quo agreement with Sen. Thompson (Jeffrey Wright), whose leftover delegates from his own failed campaign would give Morris the nomination, even as his campaign managers, Paul Zara (Philip Seymour Hoffman) and Stephen Meyers (Ryan Gosling) urge it.

“I said I wasn’t going to make those kinds of deals,” he says to his men.

But “Ides of March” is also about the corruption of a true believer. This time, though, the true believer is the idealistic campaign manager rather than the candidate.

Stephen Meyers, Gosling’s character, believes in Morris. “He’s the only one who’s actually going to make a difference in people’s lives,” he tells New York Times reporter Ida Horowicz (Marisa Tomei).

Stephen is also smart. The opposition campaign manager, Tom Duffy (Paul Giamatti) sees his smarts, wants it for his guy, and invites Stephen to a sit-down. Flattered, Stephen shows up, but nothing comes of it. Except everything. Because Stephen tells Paul, Paul tells The New York Times (Ida) so that he can then fire Stephen for being disloyal enough to accept the sit-down in the first place. Tom Duffy knew this. He foresaw it all. He calls it a win-win. “The moment you sat down in that chair,” he tells him later, “I won.”

Worse, now Duffy doesn’t even want him. He’s damaged goods. Stephen was this close to the White House, with a candidate he believed in, and now it’s all gone.

Except there’s a competing storyline. A pretty intern (Evan Rachel Wood), 20, flirts with Stephen, 30. She talks campaign, always with a frisson of sex underneath, and teases him about his exalted status as assistant campaign manager versus hers as lowly intern. After handing out cellphones to the staff, for example, and after a bit of frisson, he asks for her phone number. She tells him it’s already programmed into his phone.

She (helpful): Under Mary.
He (assuring): I know your name is Mary.
She (laughing): My name is Molly.

Molly is a great character and Wood inhabits her. (Is anyone talking best supporting actress nom yet?) She’s smart, sexy and forward. Gosling’s Stephen is smart, sexy and reserved. Their scenes together pop.

On their second night together, his cellphone rings at 2:30 a.m. but the caller hangs up. Only then does he realize it was her cellphone. He thinks about it (“Who would be calling at 2:30 a.m.?”), then teases her about it (“What man does she have stashed somewhere?”). He’s not really jealous. He’s smiling and joking around, and, over her protests, calls the dude back. Then he freezes.

It’s Gov. Morris. Worse, she’s pregnant.

Initially I thought it a bad idea. “Really?” I thought. “The Democratic candidate is sleeping with the intern? Can’t we get past that story?”

At the same time, it’s intriguing in this way: What will Stephen do with the information? His man is now tarnished. Will he, the true believer, abandon him? Go over to the other side? Nope. He plays the good soldier. He gets the money for the abortion, drives Molly to the clinic, then leaves her there for a pow-wow with Paul.

Who fires him for the sit-down with Tom Duffy.

Perfect. “OK,” I thought. “Now what will he do with the information?”

Step by step, the movie keeps getting more interesting. Morris, after all, isn’t the only too-good-to-be-believed character. Stephen is, too. He’s the guy who’s doing the thing for the right reasons. We assume that’s who he is. But that’s not who he is. He wants to believe in his guy but he also wants to be in the White House. He doesn’t want to go back to a consulting firm on K Street. So after driving around all day—and forgetting or not caring enough about Molly at the abortion clinic—he shows up at Sen. Pullman’s headquarters, where Duffy lets him know he’d been played and refuses to take him on.

Think about it. You're powerless and jobless, and yet you have access to the most powerful information in the world. So how do you turn that information into power and access?

We get a standoff. Stephen doesn’t want to reveal the info without the job, and Duffy doesn’t want to give him the job without the info. In the end, Duffy assumes he’s bluffing and walks away. He leaves on the table the very information that would’ve put his man in the White House.

Brilliant.

Then it happens. Stephen goes to Molly’s hotel room but the police are already there. Because she’s dead. Mixture of alcohol and drugs. Accident? Suicide? He sees her cellphone on the bed, with its record of phone calls from Gov. Morris. Does he take it?

In the audience, I immediately deflated. I thought, “Wrong move.” Maybe I was too enamored of Molly and Evan Rachel Wood to let her go. Maybe Molly Stearns didn’t seem like someone who would either purposefully or accidentally OD. She seemed stronger than that. Her death felt false and unnecessary. It felt too much.

But it sets up our end. Stephen blackmails Morris to get back on the campaign. He gets Paul fired, gets Paul’s job, gets the quid pro quo with Sen. Thompson, which will put Morris, his man, but a man he no longer believes in, in the White House.

But at what cost? Stephen, never particularly warm, is now cold. He’s Ryan-Gosling-in-“Drive” cold. He’s lost himself. Paul had told him, as he was firing him, that without loyalty, “You are nothing, you are no one,” and that’s what Stephen is now, nothing and no one, and at the end we get a close-up of him, about to go on a cable news show, listening to Morris talk about “honesty” and “integrity” and all the things the campaign no longer stands for. The corruption of the true believer is complete.

Well done. Smart. Just the one false note with Molly's death.

But deep? If I could talk to George Clooney I would ask him the following: Do you feel that to succeed in national politics one has to become as ruthless as Ryan Gosling becomes in your movie? Is this true in any business? Is this true in Hollywood? Do you feel, as you’ve risen in Hollywood, that you’ve become more ruthless and corrupt? Or are movies like “The Ides of March” mere palliatives for all of the folks in the audience who can console themselves that while they may not be successful like that at least they’re not corrupt like that? They still have their souls.

None of this, by the way, is new material for Clooney. From my review of “The American”:

The longer Clooney’s been a star in Hollywood, the more he’s played the cool, distant professional in an unethical business who is thinking of escape, of saving what’s left of his soul. Think “Syrianna,” “Michael Clayton,” “Up in the Air” and now “The American.” I don’t want to be an assassin, a fixer, a man who fires people, an assassin. Do we add movie star to the list? Are these roles a cry for help? Maybe it’s George Clooney who is the cool, distant professional in an unethical business who wants to save what’s left of his soul.

Becoming corrupt to achieve success or fleeing corruption to save your soul. I appreciate that Clooney is using his status, his success, to make movies for adults; but surely there’s more to life, and storytelling, than these two options.

WARNING: NO RUNS, NO HITS, LOTSA SPOILERS

I had trouble with the falsehoods but was won over by the poignancy.

The falsehoods begin immediately. The movie opens on Oct. 15, 2001, Game 5 of the American League Division Series between the Oakland A’s and the New York Yankees. A’s lose. But that’s not a falsehood.

A continent away, Billy Beane (Brad Pitt), general manager of the A’s, listens, then doesn’t; listens, then doesn’t. He’s at the park, alone. He’s in the cavernous underground of what was then called Network Associates Coliseum. Does he toss chairs? I forget. He’s a fairly mellow guy compared to the intense, dictatorial Billy Beane that Michael Lewis portrayed in his 2003 best-seller. Is it Pitt? Is it director Bennett Miller? Miller also directed “Capote,” and both are patient movies about cerebral men (Truman Capote; Billy Beane) dealing with vicious killers (Hickock and Smith; the New York Yankees). Call it a theme.

But this change in Beane’s demeanor is not the falsehood I’m talking about.

Billy Beane’s A’s won 102 games in 2001, second-most in the American League, but they’re losing three top players to free agency: closer Jason Isringhausen (replaceable); center fielder Johnny Damon (replaceable); and first baseman Jason Giambi (irreplaceable). All three are signing with teams with more money. Most teams have more money than the A’s. Its 2001 payroll is $33 million, second-lowest in the Majors, while three teams, the Dodgers, the Red Sox (who nab Damon), and the Yankees (who grab Giambi), each spent more than $100 million. “It’s like we’re a farm system for the New York Yankees,” Beane says in the movie.

That’s definitely not a falsehood I’m talking about.

Beane says this as he sits down with his team of scouts, who are, for the most part, daft old men focusing on the inconsequential. This guy’s got a good face, that one’s got a good jaw, the other, nah, not him, he’s got an ugly girlfriend; means no confidence. Beane tries to focus them. “What’s the problem?” he keeps asking. He has to answer his own question. The problem is money. The problem is that the A’s are the runt of the litter. “We are the last dog at the bowl,” he says. “You know what happens to the last dog at the bowl? He dies.”

Good line. Do we credit screenwriter Steven Zaillian (“Schindler’s List”) or screenwriter Aaron Sorkin (“The Social Network”)? Feels like Sorkin.

So Beane tries to get more food in the bowl. He asks the A’s owner for more money. No dice. He asks the Cleveland Indians for this or that player. Fat chance. But he notices the dynamic in the Cleveland GM’s office. Another runt, Peter Brand (Jonah Hill), whispers in one man’s ear, who whispers in the GM’s ear, who makes the decision we’ve already seen cross Brand’s face. Afterwards, Beane tracks Brand down. “Who are you?” he asks.

Brand, it turns out, is a guy who studied economics at Yale. He likes numbers. And he sees the important numbers, called sabermetrics, hidden by a more traditional reading of baseball statistics. These numbers give us a truer reading of the talent of players. The Oakland A’s don’t need to buy players, Brand tells Beane; they need to buy wins, which you do by buying runs, which you do by buying on-base percentage, which is a stat other teams aren’t paying attention to in 2001 and thus can be had for cheap. In essence, Brand tells him the lesson of “Moneyball,” which is the lesson of the stock market, which is where Michael Lewis began his career: Beane needs to buy what is undervalued and sell what is overvalued. In this way, a team with a $33 million payroll can compete with a team with a $110 million payroll.

So what’s the first thing Beane buys? Brand. He makes him assistant general manager. And off they go with their grand experiment.

Nice. But it means this: Billy Beane didn’t know about sabermetrics until the 2001-02 off-season.

That’s the falsehood I’m talking about. It skews everything.

In reality, Beane learned about sabermetrics from the previous A’s GM, Sandy Alderson, who learned about it from Bill James, a security guard out of Kansas who forever changed the way we look at baseball statistics. I became a Jamesian in ’93, late to the game, 15 years late, which is about the time Billy Beane became a Jamesian, too. And by the time he took over as general manager of the A’s, in 1998, he was ready. Within two years, his last-place team with no money was in the post-season. And by the 2001-02 off-season, Beane and his assistant, Paul DePodestra (read: Brand), were so deep into the numbers they could hardly see light. Or maybe they could see nothing but light. Either way, Beane knew.

So: “Moneyball,” the book, is about a guy who, over a decade, revolutionized the way Major League baseball teams are run.

“Moneyball,” the movie, is about a guy who listened to another, smarter guy, for one season, then gets all the credit for revolutionizing the way Major League baseball teams are run.

Doesn’t sit right.

At the same time, it has to be one season, doesn’t it? I wrote as much seven years ago in an MSN piece ranking baseball movies. “It’s better to focus on a season than a career,” I wrote. “Probably because the rhythm of a season is closer to a dramatic arc than the rhythm of a life.”

So Miller and his All-Star screenwriters, Zaillian and Sorkin, focus on the rhythm of a season. And to get everyone in the audience up-to-speed on sabermetrics, they reduce the protagonist, the sabermetrics expert, Billy Beane, to a blank slate regarding sabermetrics. As Beane learns, so do we.

All of which makes cinematic sense.

But if you know the story, it still doesn’t sit right. It’s like watching a movie about FDR in which, during his second term in office, an assistant gives him the bright idea of starting, say, a “New Deal,” to help get America out of the Great Depression. You can’t help but wonder what the cinematic FDR was he doing during his first term.

*  *  *

But what’s done is done, right? Let’s go with it. Onward.

As Brand teaches Beane about sabermetrics (recreating Jason Giambi “in the aggregate”), Beane teaches Brand about the ballsier aspects of baseball and life: how to stand up to scouts and managers; how to ignore the press, which is to say conventional wisdom; how to fire people. Beane is comfortable in the macho world of baseball players because he was once a baseball player himself, which we see in flashbacks with an actor who doesn’t much look like a young Brad Pitt. Beane was a first-round draft choice back in 1980. He wanted to go to Stanford, he would’ve gotten a free ride to Stanford, but the scouts paid attention to him and waved money in front of him and so his life changed. For the worse. Because he wasn’t that good. He wasted 10 years of his life trying to become what they thought he should become. In this way Beane knows more than anyone how wrong scouts can be.

Much of the charm of the movie is in the back-and-forth between the wide-eyed Brand and the amused Beane. Hill is good, better than I thought he would be, but Pitt is a marvel. He’s loose. He’s charming. He seems to be improvising—not sure if he is—and continues the tradition, first noticed in the “Oceans” movies, of forever stuffing food in his face. He seems like he’s having the time of his life playing this role.

Critics, by the way, who thought “Moneyball” couldn’t be made into a movie either didn’t read “Moneyball” or know nothing about movies in general and baseball movies in particular. Yes, the book is about sabermetrics, which is a big word, but it’s also about the triumph of the underdog, which is what most movies are about. It’s about gathering a group of misfits—Scott Hatteberg, a catcher who could no longer throw, and Chad Bradford, a relief pitcher with a goofy, submarine motion—who coalesce into a winning team, which is what most baseball movies are about. (See: “Bad News Bears,” “Bull Durham,” “Major League.”)

And as with most baseball misfit movies, the A’s begin the season poorly—which is true, they sucked for the first two months of 2002—and the sports press, or at least sports talk radio, circles around Beane and his “experiment.” Manager Art Howe (Phillip Seymour Hoffman) isn’t using the team properly, starting the wrong guys and bringing in the wrong relievers, but Beane gets the blame.

This is another thing the movie doesn’t get quite right: how polite and deferential Beane is to Howe. You don’t get that feeling in the book. The A’s in the book, the real A’s, talk about how the organization was unlike any other Major League organization in this respect: It was run by the GM on a day-to-day basis. It was Billy Beane’s show, they said. Everyone knew it. Even Art Howe knew it. Yet in the movie, Beane is polite and deferential to Howe, while Howe is disrespectful to Beane. He doesn’t listen.

So Beane makes him listen. He trades Jeremy Giambi, Jason’s ne’er-do-well brother, to Philadelphia for John Mabry (bad deal), then trades Howe’s favorite first baseman, Carlos Pena, who plays in place of Beane’s guy, Hatteberg (bad deal). So now Howe has to play Hatteberg at first.

In reality, these trades were made months apart. More, Howe didn’t bench Hatteberg. Hatteberg played consistently throughout the 2002 season. His plate appearances by month: 99, 92, 101, 89, 97, 90. Consistent.

But we’ll go with it. Onward.

So Beane makes his trades and the team begins to win: 10 in a row, 15 in a row. What’s the record? 19 in a row. They tie it. This team of misfits that no one thought would go anywhere has actually tied the Major League record for consecutive victories. Can they set the record? Can they win their 20th game in a row?

Let’s talk about that 20th game. I’ll describe the action as we see it in the movie and I want you to find the falsehoods. It’s instructive. We can learn a lot about Hollywood and baseball by figuring out what Hollywood felt it needed to add to increase the drama of baseball.

As the game begins, we see Billy Beane driving away from the park. He never watches the games—they make him too nervous—and besides he has things to do. But then he gets a call from his daughter, Casey (Kerris Dorsey), who is watching the game, and she tells him he needs to watch it, too. It’s amazing, she says. So he turns around, enters the park, and sees the A’s are up 11-0 in the third inning. And they’re playing one of the worst teams in baseball, the Kansas City Royals, a team without money, like the A’s, but without smarts, either. Plus the A’s have their best pitcher, Tim Hudson (15-9, 2.98 ERA), on the mound. Done deal.

But just as he arrives it all begins to unravel. The Royals score five runs in the top of the 4th to cut the lead in half and five more in the top of the 8th. It’s now 11-10 and Beane is no longer watching the game. He’s in the cavernous underground of Network Associates Coliseum, cursing. And in the top of the 9th? With two outs and a guy on second? Closer Billy Koch gives up a single that ties the game.

Awful.

But it’s still a tie game. There’s still a chance. And in the bottom of the 9th, Art Howe points to Scott Hatteberg, the converted catcher whom Billy Beane thought could Jason Giambi at first base, but who isn’t playing this game, and tells him to pinch hit. And he does. And with one out in the bottom of the 9th inning Hatteberg hits a homerun to win this incredible, improbable game, and the A’s, these misfit A’s, set the Major League record for consecutive victories with 20.

Wow.

So where’s the falsehood? The homerun in the bottom of the 9th inning? The fact that it was Hatteberg? That he pinch-hit? That the A’s lost an 11-0 lead to the worst team in baseball only to pull it out in the end?

Nope. The falsehood is Casey calling her father to tell him to watch the game. In reality, at least in the reality of Michael Lewis’s book, Beane was in Art Howe’s office, talking to Lewis, and Beanephoned her to tell her to watch the game, but she wasn’t interested. She was too busy watching “American Idol” to care about her father’s team.

How is this instructive? In this way. Baseball, with its come-from-behind chances and bottom-of-the-ninth-inning homeruns, will always be more dramatic, more improbable, than what the best minds in Hollywood can imagine. That’s why it’s a great game. Meanwhile, whatever the best minds in Hollywood can imagine is lost on most of us, because we’re too busy watching crap like “American Idol.” That’s why we’re a lost cause.

*  *  *

As I’m watching “Moneyball,” as I’m seeing these few falsehoods mixed in with attention to detail and concern for veracity, I keep wondering: How are they going to handle the ending?

I knew the ending. The 2002 Oakland A’s, after losing Jason Giambi, et al., won one more game than the 2001 A’s but still lost in the first round of the playoffs—this time to the small-market Minnesota Twins. Which means the ending is like the beginning. We begin with Game 5 failure and end with Game 5 failure. All that work for the same result. It won’t resonate.

I also knew this: Nothing Billy Beane did during the next 10 years helped his team to the World Series. The A’s, a powerhouse in the early 2000s, haven’t even sniffed the post-season since 2006. They’ve fallen back with the also-rans.

So how do you make this dramatic? How do you make it resonate?

Bad baseball fan. I forgot the first, great rule of baseball drama, which was delineated by Roger Kahn in “The Boys of Summer,” his nostalgic memoir about covering the early 1950s Brooklyn Dodgers. Kahn wrote:

You may glory in team triumphant, but you fall in love with a team in defeat.

It’s the horsehide equivalent of Shelley:

Our sweetest songs are those that tell of saddest thought.

So the A’s lose the 2002 ALDS—a mere, slow-mo blip on the movie screen—just as they lost the 2001 ALDS, and Billy Beane, who struggled so hard to make this work, is left alone with his thoughts. He’d already said that the sabermetrics experiment means nothing unless they win it all. They didn’t so it didn’t. And director Bennett Miller pauses and let’s it all sink in.

Bennett Miller is good at pausing and letting it all sink in.

Not everyone, of course, thinks the experiment means nothing. Sure, there are naysayers out there, people who forget how little Beane had to work with, and who blast the “Moneyball” experiment; but the Boston Red Sox, with money to burn, think Billy Beane is onto something. In fact, they invite him to Boston, give him a tour of historic Fenway Park, the oldest park in Major League Baseball, and offer him their GM position (which he ultimately turns down). They offer to pay him more than $12 million over several years. And Boston’s owner, John Henry (Arliss Howard), tells him the following: “You’re the first guy through the wall. You always get bloody.”

Nice line.

Then Paul Brand meets Beane at Network Associates Coliseum. He takes him to the video room to show him footage of a college player named Jeremy Brown. Both the video room and Jeremy Brown figured big in “Moneyball,” the book, but neither is much mentioned or seen in “Moneyball,” the movie, until this moment.

In the footage, Brown, a fat catcher out of Alabama, gets hold of a pitch and drives it and rounds first base. He’s thinking double or triple. But he’s overweight and not graceful—that’s why the scouts dismiss him, and part of the reason why Beane, who was slim and graceful as a young player, doesn’t—and Brown actually stumbles. He falls flat on his face. Then he struggles, like a drowning man, to get back to first base before he’s thrown out. Which is when the others on the field, holding back their laughter, tell him. The ball wasn’t a double or triple. It went over the wall. And he gets up, dusts himself off, and rounds the bases.

“He hit a homerun and didn’t even realize it,” Brand tells Beane.

Then he pauses, looking at Beane, and a beautiful thing happens. He adds, “It’s a metaphor,” and Beane, half-annoyed, says, “I know it’s a metaphor.”

How perfect is that? Our All-Star screenwriters, by using the personalities of their main characters— Brand, wide-eyed and endearing, but presuming to teach the teacher, Beane, who is savvy and impatient—manage to inform the less-savvy among us the point of the scene without insulting the rest of us. While charming the rest of us.

Afterwards, Beane gets into his car, drives home, and listens to a CD his daughter Casey made for him. Earlier in the movie, when they’re in a music store, she sings him this song. It’s called “The Show,” originally by Lenka, an Australian singer, but its lyrics, not to mention its tone, fit into this story as easily as a hand fits into a baseball glove.

Casey sings:

Slow it down
Make it stop--
Or else my heart is going to pop

Slowing it down is something Moneyball players do with the game. It’s what Scott Hatteberg does with the game. He slows it down. He takes his pitches. He makes the game come to him rather than trying to impose himself on the game.

Casey sings:

I am just a little girl lost in the moment
I'm so scared but I don't show it
I can't figure it out
It's bringing me down I know
I've got to let it go
And just enjoy the show

All the while the camera closes in on Beane—the man who’s lost in the moment, who’s scared and doesn’t show it. He’s the first man through the wall and he’s bloody. He’s hit a homerun and doesn’t know it. And now this simple advice from his daughter: Just enjoy the show. “The Show,” what players call the Major Leagues, and “the show,” what we call the movie, and what we sometimes call life. And the camera closes in on his profile, driving, looking straight ahead, caught in this moment of indecision and tension but possible epiphany and release. And I thought: Please end it here, at this everyman moment, this moment of simple advice possibly listened to for at least this day. And they do. That’s where they end it.

I came to “Moneyball” with a lot of baggage: a fan of the game, a fan of the book, a fan of the theory behind the book. Yes, I had trouble with some of the ways the filmmakers falsified the book. Yes, I felt the misfit theme could have been dramatized better. But Miller and Zaillian and Sorkin took the most difficult part, the inconclusive ending, and made it touching. They made it resonate. They gave us something beautiful to carry with us from the theater. Why can’t more movies do this? Why can’t movie people realize that we don’t want what we say we want. We want this. We want the exact feeling “Moneyball” leaves us with.

WARNING: EVEN ODDS FOR SPOILERS

“50/50” is being promoted as a true-life comedy about cancer.

So far so good.

Will Reiser, a writer for “Da Ali G Show,” and a friend of actor Seth Rogen, contracted a rare form of cancer in his twenties, and in the aftermath realized his experience wasn’t one he’d seen depicted in the usual weepy Hollywood movies about cancer. He survived, for one. He never lost his sense of humor, for another. He never stopped trying to pick up girls, for a third. So why not make a movie out of that?

So far so good.

In the final version, however, his true-life account became populated with unreal people whose sole purpose is to make our sympathetic hero even more sympathetic. The decks are stacked and the story dumbed down and a bit of misogyny tossed in for good measure.

Bummer.

Here’s an example. Reiser’s surrogate, symbolically name Adam Lerner (Joseph Gordon-Levitt), is a writer for Seattle Public Radio (SPR), who learns he has cancer in the following fashion: His doctor (Andrew Arlie) completely ignores Adam sitting in front of him and explains the situation into his tape recorder. Only when Adam begs his pardon and asks what’s going on does the doctor, rolling his eyes, deign to tell the patient what’s going on with the patient’s life. Now I’ve had some bad doctors in my day but never one this bad. The guy’s so uncaring he could be running for president on the GOP ticket.

Adam’s subsequent therapist, Katherine (Anna Kendrick), is the opposite: overly caring. She’s 24 years old, working on her dissertation, unprofessional. Adam is only the third patient of her career, yet he first encounters her while she’s eating lunch in her office, completely oblivious to the fact that she has an appointment with him, the third patient of her career. (They meet cute.) During sessions, she touches him on the arm repeatedly. After sessions, she gives him her cellphone number, then a car ride home, then, eventually, herself. “I wish you were my girlfriend,” he says near the end of the picture, which is what she wishes, and what we wish, and what she becomes. How nice when people get their wishes!

This turn of events, such as it is, is necessary because Adam’s initial girlfriend, Rachael (Bryce Dallas Howard), is the worst girlfriend in the world. She’s a painter of Pollock-y abstractionist work and is often gone at art gallery openings. When she’s home their sex is intermittent and conventional. After he contracts cancer, she refuses to go into the hospital with him (all the negative energy, she says), and after one such treatment, and after he’s bragged about her to fellow cancer patients Mitch and Alan (Matt Frewer and Philip Baker Hall—the best part of the movie), she’s hours late picking him up. We see him waiting by the curb in the dark. Finally, Adam’s mouthy best friend, Kyle (Seth Rogen), sees her at an art gallery with a pretentious artist out of central casting, whom she kisses. This is while Adam is home alone, sick and dying, on the couch.

Earlier this year, in Ron Howard’s “The Dilemma,” it takes an entire movie for a dude to tell his best friend that his girl is cheating on him. It takes Kyle about five seconds. (More power to him.) “I hate you,” he tells her in the big confrontation scene, “I’ve always hated you.” When she complains about how difficult it’s been, and why is it her responsibility anyway to care for Adam, Kyle lets loose a string of unpunctuated phrases that is better than any invective he could concoct: “Because you’re his girlfriend he’s got cancer you cheated on him you fucking lunatic!”

That’s pretty funny, actually. It’s also amusing, intentionally or not, that Rachael is played by the daughter of the director of “The Dilemma.” Unfortunately, we’re not done with Rachael yet.

For some reason, the filmmakers felt Rachael needed to return to get her things. For some reason, they needed to show us that she’s not only subjectively untalented but objectively untalented. So she returns, needy and vulnerable, and wishing to start up again with Adam, because she finally had her big art opening and no one bought anything. No one liked her stuff. But Adam still likes her, doesn’t he? Huh? In this manner, after all she’d done, she tries to insinuate herself back into his life. Which allows Adam to say, “Get the fuck off my porch.” Then he and Kyle, with Roy Orbison’s “Cryin’” playing on the soundtrack, attack her remaining painting with eggs, knives and fire.

Question: Was screenwriter Will Reiser’s real girlfriend during this period so awful? Or was Rachael created to add drama and sympathy to an already dramatic and sympathetic situation?

And couldn’t they have played the whole thing like “Curb Your Enthusiasm”? Made the protagonist “Will Reiser” who works on “’Da Ali G Show’” and contracts cancer, and various things happen to him and his friends, such as “Seth Rogen”? Made it funny and true rather than semi-funny and mostly false?

Even changing locales messes things up. Seattle ain’t LA, particularly when it’s Vancouver, B.C., and particularly when you’re talking about picking up pretty girls in bars. Is the dynamic in LA bars like the dynamic in any other bars around the world? I assume not. I assume pretty girls in LA bars want to be part of the entertainment industry; so if you’re a semi-successful guy in the entertainment industry, if you’re, say, a writer on “Da Ali G Show,” you’ve got an “in” with pretty girls that no other guy in no other bar has. One even wonders if this doesn’t account for the misogyny in many Hollywood projects. Pretty girls in most cities tend to ignore guys like us. Pretty girls in LA tend to use—or be used by—guys like us.

“50/50” gave me a couple of laugh-out loud moments along with a couple of existentially poignant moments. I loved Mitch and Alan around the chemotherapy IVs, as well as Angelica Huston as Adam’s needy, slightly off mother. But for a movie that was created because its story was unique, “50/50” turned out to be surprisingly formulaic.

WARNING: YOU GIVE ME A TIME AND A PLACE, I’LL GIVE YOU SPOILERS

“Drive” is the best Michael Mann movie I’ve seen in years.

Of course it’s directed by Nicolas Winding Refn, an up-and-comer who directed “Bronson” a few years back, from a screenplay by Hossein Amini, who adapted James Sallis’ novel, but Mann’s influence is all over this thing. It’s a bit of the story of “Thief” mixed with the mood of “Collateral.” This is not an insult, by the way. It’s one of the higher compliments I can give.

The movie is a mood alterer. It’s L.A. as dreamworld. The feel you get is of a long drive, where your thoughts just drift away to the hum of the tires on the road. It’s a near silent film with an unexpected soundtrack, an unsettling score, and moments of pure romance and purer violence. Sometimes these moments are right next to each other. The best kiss I’ve seen in the movies in years (in years, ladies) is immediately followed by the hero, the unnamed Driver (Ryan Gosling), stomping on a guy’s head until the guy doesn’t have a head. Literally.

Driver is a man with three car-related jobs: he works in the garage of Shannon (Bryan Cranston), a man past his prime still looking for his big score; he’s a stunt driver in the movies, a gig Shannon set up for him; and he’s a getaway driver for hire, a pure professional with no attachments to his clients. A la Mann.

The first words we hear in the film are his, and they’re both proposal and philosophy:

“You give me a time and a place, I give you a five-minute window. Anything happens in that five minutes, I’m yours, no matter what. I don’t sit in while you’re running it down and I don’t carry a gun. I drive. You understand?”

After those five minutes, he’s gone. You’re on your own.

Do you like those words? Savor them. Because you won’t hear Driver say anything else for another 10-15 minutes of screentime. Driver is so laconic he makes Clint Eastwood’s characters seem like Joe Pesci’s characters.

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.

Basketball is the key to the opening scene. Driver makes the above deal with the Lakers game on television, then waits in his car, big wristwatch on the steering wheel, while his clients rob a building and he impassively listens to both b-ball game and police band radio. Time ticks down. One guy emerges. The car is nondescript, a late-model Impala, but with a race-car engine. Smart, but we figure, despite the subterfuge, despite the attempt to fit in, there’s no point in the race-car engine unless it’s going to be used, right? Sure enough, when the other guy emerges, the alarm goes off, and off they go. The police are tracking them now. Driver tries to blend in with his late-model Impala but they’re after him, on him, more efficient than any police force in the real world. Except instead of the freewheeling ride through the city we expect, with its hairpin turns and squealing tires and car crashes, we remain inside the car for most of the chase while Driver uses his knowledge of the streets of LA to duck under canopies and hide in shadows. The basketball game is still on—Driver must be a huge fan, we think—and at a stoplight, with a cop car directly opposite him, he actually turns up the volume. Because he knows the chase is over and he can relax now? No, because the Lakers game is ending and the Staples Center is nearby, and Driver drives into its garage, parks, puts on a Lakers cap, and walks out, past the cops, with the rest of the crowd. Clean.

So that’s our guy. He’s a great getaway driver, he’s a great stunt driver—we see him do a rollover, wearing some kind of creepy, protective latex mask that makes him look like the Toxic Avenger—and he’s the best mechanic Shannon has ever seen. But he’s not a story. Not yet.

Two things happen to make him a story. Shannon convinces a local mobster, Bernie Rose (Albert Brooks), to bankroll a racecar with Driver as his driver; and Driver develops a relationship with his neighbor Irene (Carey Mulligan).

Neither thing actually comes to fruition—Driver never drives for Bernie and he and Irene never truly hook up—but both things still intersect in a way to create the story.

The movie keeps going in unexpected directions. Driver and Irene slowly and silently build their relationship, and, while romantic, it’s platonic. Is he going to kiss her here? No. Is he going to say something there? No. He shifts his toothpick from behind his ear back to his mouth and leaves. But he’s got a nice relationship developing with her son, Benicio (Kaden Leos), and behind the quiet between Driver and Irene one can feel the pressure—romantic, sexual—building. It’s in their looks and the music and the mood. Except it turns out she’s married. Her husband, Standard (Oscar Isaac), is in jail. Then he’s out. There’s a welcome-home party and a confrontation with Driver in the hallway. Standard senses all that pressure within Irene, and he senses his son’s affection for Driver, and he doesn’t like either; but Driver, in his impassive, nearly autistic way, defuses the tension. Of course we know the tension will only mount again, right? Because Standard is the unwanted guy now—certainly by us, and probably by Irene and Benicio—and he won’t take it lying down.

The next time Driver sees him he’s lying down, in their underground parking garage, his face bloodied and bruised. Benicio is cowering near the elevator, an unused bullet in his hand. Placed there as a warning by the guys who bloodied Standard.

We get the story. In prison Standard had to pay protection money and now they want more. Two thousand? Twenty? Does it matter? What they really want is for him to rob a pawn shop in broad daylight. Irene remains innocent of it all—she thinks drunk kids beat up Standard—and the bad guys are closing in, so Driver does the decent thing: He decides to help out his rival to protect Irene and Benicio. He agrees to drive for him.

The job goes awry, of course, Standard is killed, and Driver and the bagman, Blanche (Christina Hendricks, surely no man), hole up in a dive motel. They were supposed to get away with 40K, they wound up with $1 million, but the TV news reports no money was stolen. Driver knows something’s up, he knows Blanche knows, and he forces her to give up information and take him to the people responsible. But too late. The gangsters are already outside the motel.

It’s an interesting moment. Driver is out of his element—he’s not in a car—and, as per his philosophy, he doesn’t carry a gun. He’s trapped. He’s like us.

But he’s not. Instead he turns out to be methodically, impassively brutal, and he’s the only one who leaves the motel room alive. His blood-splattered face here reminds me of Martin Sheen in “Apocalypse Now.” His racing jacket, which will get progressively stained, reminds me of Bruce Willis’ T-shirt in the original “Die Hard.”

The heist was planned, it turns out, by Nino (Ron Perlman), a gangster compatriot of Bernie, and the man who crippled Shannon years back, in order to rip off east coast mobsters who were stashing money at the pawn shop. But now it’s all turned bad. Driver wants to give the money back but Nino is too stupid to accept it:

Nino: What do you get out of it?
Driver: Just that. Out of it.

Except there is no out of it. We’re in “Godfather III” territory now. Driver keeps going up the chain of command to extract himself; but the higher up he goes, the worse it gets.

Did anyone else think Gosling sounded like a young Mickey Rourke? That kind of low-level cool but without the rakish charm? His Driver is sad-eyed and mechanic. When he finally kills Nino in the nighttime California surf, he’s almost like an automaton. He’s like Death, approaching slowly and steadily and inevitably. Say it: He’s the Terminator, and the movie is another action-hero/revenge flick but filmed for the art-house crowd. It’s designed to disturb as well as give pleasure. It creates doubt about our wish-fulfillment fantasies rather than certainty. Enough doubt? Feel free to discuss below.

To the kiss—the best kiss I’ve seen in years, ladies. I almost don’t want to talk about it because its power lies, in part, on its unexpectedness. But it’s too good not to talk about.

In their apartment building, Driver, Irene, and a third man ride the elevator to the parking garage. The third man is a hit man for the mob, which we know, and which Driver suspects, and of which Irene is, of course, innocent. Refn allows the music and tension to build. Then, in slow mo, Driver sweeps Irene to the side. In anticipation of launching an attack? No. To kiss her for the first time. Earlier in the movie, Refn built up the anticipation of romance only to forgo it. Here, he builds up the anticipation of violence only to relieve the previous romantic tension. For a second anyway. Driver, for all his near autism, turns out to be a far-seeing man. He knows the appearance of the mob at his place means his name is known, and greater involvement with Irene will only threaten her, so his kiss is both a kiss hello and a kiss goodbye. It’s the kiss that’s supposed to sustain him through everything he has to do to keep her safe. To sustain him through the rest of his life. But we’re romantics in the audience. We hope the kiss means something else. We want it to go on. And just when think it might go on is when Driver turns and relieves the tension over the impending violence.