SPRING PICKINGS

UNKNOWN WHITE MALE (A)

One rainy July morning in 2003, Douglas Bruce finds himself staring out the window of a New York City subway train bound for Coney Island. He has no idea why he is headed there. Nothing about the passing panorama looks familiar -- the names of the stops along the way are meaningless. But imagine his bewilderment, then panic when it begins to sink in that he can’t remember anything at all about his life prior to the moment he “woke up” on that train. He doesn’t even know his name, and he’s carrying no documentation that would reveal it, where he lives, or anything else about him.

The train reaches its final destination, Doug disembarks, then wanders the streets and beaches of the world-famous recreation spot in a state of complete disorientation, desperately trying to figure out who he is and reconstruct what’s happened. Finally, terrified and agitated, he stumbles into a police station for help and winds up in the psychiatric ward of Coney Island Hospital where they tag his wrist with a bracelet reading “Unknown White Male”.

This isn’t fiction, my friends, it really happened, and it gets even more confounding when exhaustive medical tests turn up nothing definitive, either mental or physical, that would account for Doug’s amnesia. A cat scan reveals no neurological damage -- only a tiny tumor on his pituitary gland, which the medics quickly assess as harmless. Blood work is negative for alcohol and drugs. There are a couple of small bumps on his head, but nothing that suggests serious trauma. Doctors are sometimes suspicious of amnesiacs when there is no evidence of brain damage. There is a stigma attached to so-called psychogenic amnesia -- a nagging concern that the patient may be scamming.

But, in Doug, they observe a patient who presents without any of the usual red flags. First of all, he seems genuinely and profoundly flummoxed by his situation, but urgently cooperative. He is clean, exceptionally handsome, well-dressed, alert, articulate, and appears well-educated, with a refined British accent. When they ask him to sign some paperwork, he routinely scrawls out his signature, but it’s illegible even to him. Among the belongings in his backpack are a Latin American phrase book, a vial of pet medicine, a ring of keys, and a small slip of pink paper, on which is written the name Eva Eckhart and a phone number. Paydirt! The anxious voice on the line does sound vaguely familiar to Eva, but she can’t quite place it. She sends her daughter Nadine to the hospital to confront the mysterious caller, and, to the young woman’s shock, the “Unidentified White Male” turns out to be a classmate she has recently befriended. She provides the identity and enough details of his current life to spring Doug from the hospital and get him back home in his loft apartment on the Lower East Side with his two Scottish terriers and a pair of cockatoos.

But there’s still this one elephantine detail -- his vanished-without-a-trace memory. Oh sure, he knows his name now, has been reintroduced to his neighborhood, his animal pals, and Nadine. With more than a little help from other old friends he is meeting for the first time, Doug discovers that he use to be a stockbroker, quite the bon vivant and man about town, and was well enough off at the age of 30 to quit the financial rat race and ultimately enroll in photography school. He and a girlfriend named Magda had ended their eight-year relationship a few months before the amnesia episode, and there’s only fleeting speculation about the break-up’s possible cause and effect.

Now, at 37, Douglas Bruce cannot recall a single event -- not a moment, not a fact, not an image, and, most disturbingly, not a person he ever knew -- from a lifetime of nearly four decades, prior to the morning of July 2, 2003. He has to relearn the streets of Manhattan, relearn and re-experience history, geography, fashion, art, music, movies, the taste of food, Fourth of July fireworks, a snowstorm. At one point, he impetuously dives into the ocean and finds out he can swim, and very well, thank you. In the words of the filmmaker, he is seeing the world with the eyes of a newborn babe, but with the maturity of an adult nearing middle age. Everything is original and fresh -- there are no clichés.

The rest of this extraordinary 80-minute documentary is an emotionally evocative journey of self-rediscovery as Doug takes a friend with a video camera along to Spain for his first visit with father Ivan and older sister Marina. The “reunion” at the airport is surreal as Doug scans the terminal nervously, hoping that his memory will somehow be jump-started when he finally lays eyes on his welcoming kin. Alas, it isn’t, and, instead, they approach him warmly, but gingerly, and the visit proceeds in carefully measured steps. The same cautious, tentative, scene unfolds when he meets up with longtime Brit buddy (and the film’s director) Rupert Murray, who later orchestrates and videotapes a re-meeting with three other mates from college days at a London pub. The interest that once bound these chaps together was their mutual love of the game of West Indian cricket. Now, Doug inquires whether they’re talking about a species of insect or an exotic drink and doesn’t seem particularly rapt when they regale him with stories about their sporting lives together. “They seem like good people,” he says matter-of-factly, after leaving the pub. Of London itself, Doug remarks that his only previous association with the world capitol that was once his home is the opening scene from a recent movie, “28 Days Later.” “What’s the changing of the guard,” he asks as Rupert drives him past Buckingham Palace.

Murray also films Doug’s visit to a warehouse storeroom in Paris, packed with possessions of his from childhood and later, left behind in his late mother’s charge when he moved to the States. Books, artifacts, photographs, souvenirs -- the stuff that harkens back to a previous life. But nostalgia is anathema to amnesiacs. Doug examines them carefully, dutifully, almost clinically, with intellectual curiosity but emotional indifference.

In fact, what is most remarkably bittersweet about these reassociations with family, friends, and tangible acquisitions and accumulations from a life unremembered -- singularly most significant about this man’s rebirth in the middle of adulthood -- is that even though he looks like Doug, talks like Doug, and walks like Doug, the amnesia ordeal has reshaped his character and personality and reordered his values in not-so-subtle ways. All agree that where once he was impetuous, mischievous, edgy, sharp-tongued, even arrogant, and reckless with money -- candidly documented in amateur video shot when Doug and his mates were on holiday in Barbados and Bolivia years before -- the amnesiac Doug is more sensitive, focused, insightful, reflective, philosophical, and emotionally accessible. “He’s lost all his cynicism and sarcasm,” observes one of his London cronies. His younger sister Christina cites a “loss of ‘spark’,” and she was the first to notice his disinterest in his childhood, despite being his late mother’s “golden boy”. His photography instructor is quite outspoken about Doug’s transformation. First, he marvels how his student relearned the first two years’ curriculum in only two months, in order to qualify for admission into the third year. Then he extols Doug’s heightened creative sensitivity and artistic maturity. Pointing to one of Doug’s latest images, the instructor does not suppress his candor: “He could never have made that picture before ‘the accident’.” “The accident” is how people reference his occurrence of amnesia.

As more time has elapsed since his memory left him -- two years by the time “Unknown White Male” was completed last year -- Doug appears less and less interested in getting it back. With Murray and pal Pete, he watches video clips of the old Doug with embarrassed amusement. His older sister Marina can understand his growing indifference to retrieving his first three-dozen years. “This has given him the opportunity to reinvent himself”, she says wistfully. Younger sister Christina wants to believe otherwise. “He remembers a little,” she insists, but doesn’t elaborate.

If you feel I’ve given away the store by recounting so much of Doug’s ordeal and its aftermath here, and what more can be gained from seeing it with your own eyes, let me assure you that most of the impact and enticement of “Unknown White Male” derives from its expressively rich visual content. We hear so much these days -- with cameras embedded in cell phones, etc. -- about invasive media technology and breaches of our private space. And yet, a story like Doug Bruce’s could never have been told if amateur cameras hadn’t been merrily and summarily rolling both before and after his onset of amnesia. Doctors, sensing his case was rare, perhaps even seminal, videotaped interviews with a coherent, but visibly distressed Doug during his first few days at Coney Island Hospital. Once he was released and on his own to rebuild a life from the foundation up, Doug and his friends made sure each milestone in that reconstruction -- and there were so many -- was caught on camera. And it doesn’t hurt the narrative that Doug’s family and friends -- testament to their great affection and respect for the man -- have invested themselves so caringly in his new life and were so eager to be seen and heard reminiscing about the old Doug, again with the aid of revealing footage, and reconnecting with the new Doug, even as they admit to feeling apprehensive and off-balance about the whole “getting to know you all over again” process. Most of them are refreshingly forthcoming and candid, and highly appealing and interesting in their own right. And then there’s Doug himself -- charismatic and magnetic both before and after the permuting episode, but kinder, gentler, and more sensitized in the new edition, cleansed of guile, artifice, and worldly veneer. At the point in the film where Murray is preparing to visit Doug for the first time since “the accident,” he wonders out loud, “will he still like me?” Later, others echo the same concern. But, after watching the reunions unfold, the audience is left to wonder, “will they still like him?”

If truth really is stranger than fiction, “Unknown White Male” is one of the most chilling, humanly compelling examples ever recorded on film -- simply because it suggests the possibility, however remote, that any one of us could, without pretext, precondition, or warning, have every vestige of our lives to date eradicated and come face-to-face with the enormity of starting all over again from square one -- albeit with the rosy prospect of an unblemished slate and no emotional baggage to haul around. On the surface, it may seem a silver lining for anyone who has mused melancholically, “if I had that to do all over again.” But what if your memory returns? Will storm clouds settle in and start raining on your new parade? Doug’s girlfriend of 11 months (at the time the film was completed) Narelle tries not to think apprehensively about the return of his memory -- a turnabout the medical community still thinks, even after two years, has a 95% chance of occurring -- and the implications that might have on their togetherness. Neither she nor Doug is on record as hoping against that scenario -- it might seem improper and in opposition to the natural order of things to say so out loud. But, from all appearances, Doug’s new life couldn’t be more productive and fulfilling. And what he doesn’t know about his past -- both good and bad -- isn’t hurting him one bit.


CACHE (HIDDEN) (C+)

Georges Laurent (Daniel Auteuil), who hosts a literary criticism program on TV (imagine!), and his wife, Anne (Juliette Binoche), a publisher’s assistant, live what appears to be the quintessential good life in a fashionable Paris neighborhood. They have the requisite sullen, borderline disagreeable teen-age son, Pierrot (Lester Makedonsky), who spends as much time as possible out of the house and in the company of similarly malcontented and adult-disassociated schoolmates from families of means.

Invading this intellectually motivated, self-satisfied, more or less smooth functioning, upper middle-class household is a series of videotapes, dropped on the Laurents’ doorstep, that, by themselves, make it implicit that the family’s comings and goings are being closely monitored. The camera, it would appear, is set up perhaps a hundred yards from their building, at a vantage point in the middle of a street that should place it in plain sight of passersby -- but somehow doesn’t. That would be disquieting enough, but each tape is wrapped in a crude, childlike drawing depicting bloody imagery and a thinly-veiled threat.

At first, Georges and Anne are equally perplexed and unnerved, though he more than she is reluctant to get the authorities involved. He keeps citing the lack of a tangible crime. But when a subsequent tape arrives at Georges’ TV station, putting his job in peril, and another arrives showing the route to a tenement building in a run-down arrondissement, Georges decides to get more proactive, even tells Anne he thinks he knows who the perpetrator is. When, like any spouse would, she asks just who that might be, Georges buttons up and insists on handling it his own way. Anne goes ballistic; she suspects, and rightly so, that he’s been hiding something from her.

In the midst of deepening turmoil, the result of still more stealth footage, with the camera planted squarely in front of his childhood home in the country, Georges pays a visit to his ailing mother (a delicious cameo by iconic actress Annie Girardot) ostensibly to check on her health (and, as an aside, whether she or anyone else at the farm noticed a spying videocam on the property). Her instincts tell her that her son is profoundly troubled, but, alas, he won’t level with her, either. Instead, he uses as an excuse to jog her memory a recurring dream of his about an incident from his childhood involving another boy, but she seems annoyed by the recollection and disinclined to talk much about it, and he leaves without clarifying the particulars of the incident he really came after, particulars he had hoped would assuage guilt tucked in his subconscious all these years.

Those particulars, tensely and ignominiously tied to the French-Algerian war, its repressive aftermath, and a collective French denial of its complicity in that repression, set the dark and, ultimately, ugly course the rest of “Cache” travels. The conflict between husband and wife deepens in direct proportion to Georges’ isolating emotional reclusiveness and his dogged secrecy in unraveling the mystery all by himself, and their son feels more and more marginalized as his parents grow apart. Just when the plot boils over with an astoundingly shocking scene, and a resolution of the ordeal seems close at hand, the film goes off on a baffling tangent, in which relationships between people appear to become even more clouded and clandestine as that persistently probing videocam rolls on, as do the closing credits.

“Cache” is a first-rate thriller for an hour plus of its 117-minute running time, inhabited by a fully engaged and committed cast, featuring taut direction by Michael Haneke (The Piano Teacher) that keeps the audience on tenterhooks. Then Haneke, who also wrote the screenplay, strays into sociopolitical territory, and the film’s come-home-to-roost, cause-and-effect psychology begins putting a hefty strain on my credulity. Despite my happy-ending movie roots -- I was a child of the 40’s -- I’m not a stickler for neat-and-tidy closure. Open-endedness is fine with me, as long as I can conjure up a few plausible outcomes -- even settle on one that particularly suits my fantasies and frames of reference. But Haneke’s last two scenes throw so many raw vegetables into a long-simmering and flavorful stew that’s about to be served to seated guests, that the plated result is unchewable and indigestible -- an outcome totally unpalatable.

ASK THE DUST (C+)

Thirty-two years ago, Robert Towne wrote a sizzling, labyrinthine screenplay about corrupt politics, colliding ambitions, and murderous power plays in 1930’s Los Angeles, having to do with the illegal diversion of water from the Colorado River to irrigate arid lands bought on the cheap so they could be resold at obscene profits when the soil became tillable. Spicing up the conspirational shenanigans were plot-thickening infusions of false identity, adultery, and incest. Private detective J. J. (Jake) Gittes, played by Jack Nicholson, was hired to tail the adulterer, but, in the process, almost bit off more than he could chew (nearly losing an ear in the process).

The film, “Chinatown”, reaped 10 Academy Award nominations back in 1974, including one for Best Picture, but only managed to capture a single Oscar statuette -- that for Towne for Best Original Screenplay. Then, just last week, the Writer’s Guild of America published its ranking of the 101 greatest screenplays of all time, and “Chinatown” finished a lofty third, behind only “Casablanca” and “The Godfather”, and ahead of “Citizen Kane” and “All About Eve”, which came in fourth and fifth, respectively. And Premiere Magazine, in its March issue featuring what it’s editorial staff thinks are the 100 finest film acting performances of all time, slotted Faye Dunaway’s “Chinatown” character, Evelyn Cross Mulwray, in 36th place. The movie itself has achieved legendary status in the annals of filmmaking.

The timing of the WGA and Premiere Magazine pronouncements was provocative because Towne’s latest screenplay is currently being showcased in another movie about Depression-era Los Angeles that he has also directed. It’s called “Ask the Dust” and it’s based on John Fante’s 1939 novel of the same name, the third and most successful in a series of semi-autobiographical tales involving Fante’s alter ego -- a roguish aspiring writer from Colorado named Arturo Bandini (Colin Farrell). Bandini arrives in the City of Angels in his mid-20’s and at the height of the Great Depression, fiercely determined to write the proverbial great American novel and, coincidentally, fulfill his fantasy of snagging the affections of a blue-eyed blonde beauty -- plucked presumably from the legions hoping to find gainful employment and celebrity in one of the town’s dream factories.

Bandini takes a room in a fleabag hotel called the Alta Loma, in the Bunker Hill neighborhood just off downtown. The proprietress, a sassy matron named Mrs. Hargraves (the inestimable Dame Eileen Atkins), gives him the third degree about his last name and its ethnicity and is adamant that she never rents to Mexicans or Jews. “Ask the Dust” is thickly overlaid with references to racism and ethnic prejudice -- and we discover, perhaps too late in the film, that much of Bandini’s flippant, confrontational bravado, as well as his tendency toward self-deprecation, is compensatory and rooted in the anti-Italian taunts he heard and abuse he took back home in Colorado. Despite the spring and strut in his step and his cocky, dapper Dan affect, Baldini, a babe in the woods, doesn’t know squat about romancing women. That inexperience plays into his self-doubts as a writer, his naive concept of whom should be a man of the world.

But Baldini perseveres, even when he’s literally down to his last nickel and subsisting on a diet of oranges and coffee. He soon finds a mentor and friend in H. L. Mencken, the aserbic journalist, critic, and social and political commentator, who publishes a couple of Bandini’s early short stories in The American Mercury magazine. And he meets a pouty, opportunistic waitress named Camilla Lopez (Salma Hayek) and an effusive, enigmatic, and disfigured housekeeper named Vera Rifkin (Idina Menzel) -- a Mexican and a Jew, no less, and neither a blue-eyed blonde -- with whom he undertakes relationships that are impulsive, ambivalent, and volatile. Both alliances end prematurely and tragically, but we’re led to understand that Bandini has reaped experiential benefits, and from his pain has accrued some of the worldly insight and creative urgency that will serve him well as a writer.

But my suspicion is that the scope of Fante’s original novel was too wide for the film’s comparatively modest budget (Tom Cruise is among those who put up the money), and a cast of gifted actors is largely wasted on a sketchy narrative that never congeals and characters we don’t really get to know because situations and scenes are so loosely, and sometimes incoherently, strung together. There’s the character of Hellrick (Donald Sutherland), the roomer next door, an erudite but seedy and scheming alcoholic who intrudes on Bandini’s space at will, mostly to beg, borrow, and barter, waxing pseudo-intellectually all the while.

Sammy White (Justin Kirk, from Angels in America and Love Valour Compassion) owns and bartends the drinking and eating establishment where Camilla works and where she and Bandini meet over curdled coffee she’s served him. At first, we are led to believe that they are more to each other than boss and employee, and that Sammy disapproves of Bandini’s overtures to Camilla right under his nose. Next thing we know, Sammy is playing up to Bandini as a fledgling writer needing pointers from a published author -- at the same time imparting man-to-manly advice about the connivance of Mexican sexpots. “You’re too nice to that girl”, Sammy cautions, though he concedes in the next breath that “Camilla’s one pony that’s worth the ride,” as if he’s been riding it. “Ask the Dust” is riddled with the barbs and banter people engage in when they’re hiding behind baggage, or screenwriters indulge in when they don’t have time to flesh out characters. After awhile, the love-hate repartee becomes shallow and tiresome, and the film begins to play like a TV soaper. Towne has Camilla and Bandini get naked together -- twice -- but, in neither scene, do Hayek and Farrell generate much sexual excitement, though Camilla does comment favorably on Bandini’s endowment -- “you’ve got a pretty one,” she coos. We never do get a handle on Sammy’s angle because he all but evaporates about midway through the film, I suspect because of severe excisions made to bring it in at less than two hours.

All the characters of “Ask the Dust” are meant to embody a core theme that Los Angeles attracts restless, eccentric, and unfulfilled souls who come there to live out the remainder of their lives in the sunshine and warmth, on beaches and among palm trees and orange groves, but wind up “(destroying) the perfection of the land” by depleting its resources and marring its landscape, before succumbing themselves to their own excesses or forces of nature like the 6.4 temblor that all but annihilated Long Beach in 1933, an event that, in the film, has a seismic effect on Bandini’s life. In its last 15 minutes or so, “Ask the Dust” leapfrogs across time frames to bring closure to matters, with perplexing and largely unsatisfying results.

Yet, despite its many shortcomings, the movie is interesting as a period piece -- shot almost entirely on an expressly constructed set of L.A. in South Africa -- and as a showcase for talented actors, even if their interactions with one another are sometimes murky because of the screenplay or uninspired because of the director. Farrell, always facile and flawless in American roles and at his best in non-heroic performances, reprises some aspects of his character in “A Home at the End of the World”, particularly when he flashes that “golly gee” grin and looks awestruck and vulnerable at the same time. Hayek’s naturally good at Latino sensuality and gives an intelligent reading of her lines. Idina Menzel would have stolen the show had we seen more of her -- the film really became energized during her scenes.





V FOR VENDETTA (B+)

Essentially billed as a slice of sci-fi futurism, set in mid-21st century Britain, “V for Vendetta”, adapted from Alan Moore’s Gothic graphic novel, plays painfully like a prophetic vision of life in this country once society becomes so crippled by fear and so impassive from ignorance that a despotic regime jumps into the breach and seizes totalitarian power. Do most Americans who see it -- largely under the age of 40, I suspect -- make that connection?

“V for Vendetta”, as conceived by screenwriters Andy and Larry Wachowski and directed by James McTeigue, opens 20 years after the fall of the U.S. from its sole superpower perch. America, politically and fiscally bankrupt, its infrastructure in shambles, and its midwest gripped by civil warfare, has become irrelevant in the world community. And Britain, panicked and humbled by a siege of state-sponsored biological terrorism some years earlier, a virus that killed tens of thousands, is now ruled by a fascist government headed by a ruthless chancellor named Adam (John Hurt).

Enter an irrepressibly charismatic, maniacally motivated vigilante known as “V” (Hugo Weaving in a Guy Fawkes mask and get-up) who is hell bent on bringing down the evil empire. Fawkes, legendary for leading a group of co-conspirators in an unsuccessful plot to blow up the Houses of Parliament back in 1605, serves as V’s inspiration, and he begins his campaign of counter-terror by blowing up Old Bailey -- London’s central criminal court -- to the tune of the 1812 Overture, and seizing the state-controlled, propagandizing airwaves, beseeching his countrymen to rise up and overthrow Adam and his iron-fisted deputies.

On the very night he reduces Old Bailey to ashes, V, as nonchalant and nimble as he is nasty, rescues a young woman named Evey (Natalie Portman) from a pair of secret police thugs ostensibly on the beat to enforce a late-night curfew. Grateful for his intervention and charmed by his outrageous daring, his impressive combat skills, and his taste in music -- Julie London’s “Cry Me a River” and the Jobim, Gilberto, Getz collaboration on “The Girl from Ipanema” are mainstays on the Wurlitzer juke box in his atmospheric subterranean apartment --Evey gradually allies herself with V. It turns out her parents were enemies of the government in power, and she has a personal stake in its ultimate dismantling. The outcome shall remain the object of your discovery, should you be inclined to rent or buy the DVD once it hits store shelves in a couple of months. Suffice it to say you’ll be contemplating the film’s catchy tagline -- “remember, remember, the 5th of November” -- long after the end credits roll.

McTeigue directs with flourish and fanfare, as befits V’s character, his passionate cause, and his modus operandi, but is judicious with the violence and the computer graphics. Weaving never overplays V’s eccentricities and uses his gorgeously resonant voice to effect an intelligent balance between the character’s fierce and fanciful natures. This is one of Portman’s strongest performances to date, building her character from one of timid compliance to committed rebellion. Hurt is unrelentingly loathsome as the chancellor Adam. Rounding out the rest of the stellar cast are Stephen Rea, Stephen Fry, and Rupert Graves.

“V for Vendetta” won’t win any major awards, but it’s handsomely mounted, roundly entertaining, and a virtual banquet of thought-provoking concepts and scenarios -- most of them chillingly plausible given clashes of ideologies and abuses of power around the globe and very close to home.

THANK YOU FOR SMOKING (B+)

As I suspected, the trailer for this high-energy parody of industry lobbyists and D.C. politics, contains many of the film’s snappiest snippets of dialogue. It’s difficult to sustain the pace and perversity for 92 minutes, but writer and director Jason Reitman (Ghostbusters II, Dave) pulls it off almost flawlessly, thanks to as talented a cast as any filmmaker has a right to assemble, intoning his brilliant one-liners with perfect timing, and cadence, and facetious eloquence.

Aaron Eckhart (In the Company of Men, Erin Brockovich, Nurse Betty) leads the pack -- pun intended -- as Nick Naylor, VP and chief tobacco lobbyist for the Academy of Tobacco Studies, a smooth-talking spin control specialist who thinks and articulates on his feet with lightning speed and razor-sharp wit. As he imparts to his 12-year-old son Joey (Cameron Bright), who he’s indoctrinating to be a chip off the old block, “if you argue correctly, you’re never wrong.” Daddy’s job, he explains to his precocious and attentive offspring, “requires a (certain) moral flexibility.”

Despite the convoluted absurdity of Naylor’s hypotheses and rebuttals, this self-styled “merchant of death” is as irresistibly likable as he is devastatingly persuasive. Without resorting to bombast or bullying, he mows down every argument against the lethal dangers of smoking with glib rationales that all but paralyze the arguer. To the senatorial aide who has rounded up a young cancer patient named Robin, prematurely bald from rounds of chemotherapy, as a case in point on the ravages of smoking, Naylor counters with “how on earth would big tobacco profit from the loss of this young man? It’s in our best interests to keep Robin alive and smoking,” he exhorts. Introducing himself to his son’s class at St. Euthanasius Elementary School, Naylor describes his work -- “I talk for a living; I speak on behalf of cigarettes.” A little girl in the first row pipes up, “my mommy says cigarettes kill.” Naylor doesn’t skip a beat. “Is your mommy a doctor,?” he inquires gratuitously, and she backs off with a barely audible “no.” “Well then,” he shrugs, “she doesn’t exactly sound like a credible expert, now does she?”

Naylor’s counterparts at the other branches of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms are equally inflated caricatures inhabited by Maria Bello as Polly Bailey, a quasi-vamp who’s never seen without a glass of inebriant in her hand, and David Koechner as loose cannon Bobby Jay Bliss, whose itchy finger is never far away from an accessible trigger. This trio of lobbyists get together frequently over lunch to banter back and forth about the relative lethality of their stocks-in-trade, bemoan their common enemies, and brainstorm PR strategies.

William H. Macy is the altruistic and self-righteous Vermont senator Ortolan K. Finistirre, who is spearheading the investigation into big tobacco. Clad in tweeds, shod in Birkenstocks, his desk lined with variously shaped and sized maple syrup containers, the esteemed lawmaker who hails from the state “where the cheddar is better,” gets skewered by Naylor in cross-examination when the lobbyist cites cholesterol as the nation’s number one killer and impugns cheese as the great clogger of arteries.

Robert Duvall plays Doak Boykin, alias “The Captain,” who founded the Academy, invented the cigarette filter, and sips his signature juleps, the secret of which is grinding the mint leaves assiduously to release the menthol. When The Captain learns that Marlboro Man Lorne Lutch (Sam Elliott) is holed up at his ranch dying of lung cancer, he dispatches Naylor aboard Tobacco One, Boykin’s private jet, with a briefcase full of hush money. Naylor has his misgivings about the bribe, and, at first, Lutch is outraged at the implication that his dignity is for sale. But Naylor’s voodoo logic and psychological ploys work their magic once again, as he contrives alternative options that will serve the best interests of all parties involved.

Rob Lowe does a brief turn as an amoral Hollywood bottom-liner tapped by The Captain and Naylor to restore smoking to the movies, to get out the message that “smoking is ‘cool” and sexy. After all, according to Naylor lore, the greatest cinematic love story of them all started with a cigarette -- Bogey and Bacall’s in the noir classic “To Have and Have Not.”

It’s a foxy reporter named Heather Holloway (Katie Holmes) who catches Naylor off guard and gets him in hot water by trading sexual favors for information potentially compromising to the lobbyist and his industry. “I’d like to see where the devil sleeps”, is her come-on as she insinuates her way into the apartment Naylor lets after he and his wife Jill (Kim Dickens) have split. Neither party gets shortchanged by the ensuing tryst itself, but Naylor neglects to declare that tidbits that carelessly slip in the midst of foreplay are strictly off the record. Holloway’s subsequent story causes quite a stir, Naylor even has a tongue-tied moment or two in his defense, but regains his touch in time to save face and give the film a surprising and satisfying ending.

About three-quarters of the way, around the time Naylor visits the Marlboro Man, “Thank You for Smoking” sags a little under the weight of its contrivances and the challenges of maintaining the mockery at a consistently audacious level. For ten minutes or so, the satire becomes a little too methodical. But the film recovers nicely and reaches a conclusion that is innovatively upbeat and humanitarian.


FRIENDS WITH MONEY (B-)

Written and directed by Nicole Holofcener (“Lovely and Amazing” and episodes of “Six Feet Under” and “Sex and the City”) “Friends with Money” is a largely unsatisfying, though skillfully enough executed, film about the peace and contentment money can’t buy and the conflict and frustration it can’t assuage. Some critics call “Friends with Money” a comedy -- these days any film that’s cleverly written and gets spotty laughs is pigeonholed as a comedy. I would call this a rather somber, even dreary film about how people in marriages are faring after the bloom is off the proverbial rose and they’re no longer objectivizing each other sexually. It makes the case that they’d better be best friends or they’re likely to become fierce foes. It’s also about facing middle age with gracious acceptance rather than angry resistance. And a recurring theme throughout is that even people who’ve known each other “forever” judge each other superficially -- because appearances are oh so deceiving.

Three married and variously affluent couples -- Jane (Frances McDormand) and Aaron (Simon McBurney), Christine (Catherine Keener) and David (Jason Isaacs), and Franny (Joan Cusack) and Matt (Greg Germann) are tight with each other because the wives go back a long way. The fourth lady in their lives is Olivia (Jennifer Aniston), who is the leading object of their conjecture, compassion, and gossip because 1) she had to give up teaching and now cleans houses for living (tsk, tsk), 2) she’s chronically unlucky with men and romance -- even stalks an ex, and 3) she’s a pothead or at least perceived to be. She serves a common purpose for the couples -- the female component, in particular: her “predicament” deflects attention away from their own tsuris -- mostly boredom, restlessness, and regressing self-image.

Christine and David are screenwriters who work together at home. Familiarity -- they’re around each 24/7 -- breeds copious contempt. They can’t agree on anything, including the situations and dialogue of the characters they’re writing about, because, frankly, zinging each other has become their favorite sport. They’ve decided to build another story on their house -- a diversionary project -- to give each other more space and take advantage of a spectacular vista; but, in so doing, they’ve incurred the wrath of neighbors whose own views their annex is obscuring.

Jane, who designs dresses, and Aaron, who invents organic bath products, get along okay on the surface, but she’s an anger queen, with embarrassing public displays, who’s pessimistic and blue about advancing age (she’s only 43, for Christ’s sake) -- her depression reflected in her refusal to wash her hair (“It’ll only get dirty again.”). Hubby Aaron seems to have a sunny enough disposition in a slightly fey way, partly because he’s met another Aaron with whom he has a lot in common and spends increasing amounts of time. Olivia thinks Jane’s Aaron is gay, though that hypothesis is never really substantiated.

Franny and Matt are the richest of the three couples, though I can’t remember now where their money comes from, and it doesn’t matter anyway. The only issue they seem to have between them is her concern about how much he spends on their kid’s shoes. They don’t have sex much anymore, either, but seem to have reconciled themselves to the fact that the novelty has worn off. They’re still touchingly in love and lovingly in touch.

Where does this all go? Well, Olivia’s life as a dysfunctional domestic takes a very curious turn, with the unlikeliest of liaisons. The ending is without crescendo or definitive outcome, its understated irony slow to sink in. But there is the delicious possibility that roles are about to be reversed and poetic justice is about to be served.


UNITED 93 (A)

No need to recount the plot here-- it should be common knowledge to any conscious human with a brain and a pulse born before 1990. The story of the only hijacked airliner that didn’t reach a terrorist target on 9/11 is so intensely graphic, so visceral, so convulsive, so heartbreaking, and so infuriating that I actually left the theater with my head throbbing, my heart pounding, and my stomach in knots. No film in my recollection -- not even “The Deer Hunter” or “The Silence of the Lambs”, both of which were upsetting enough -- has ever had me in such a state.

“United 93” features a cast made up entirely of relatively unknown but exceptionally gifted actors and a supporting ensemble of real-life personalities -- pilots, control tower personnel, FAA operatives, etc., who were directly involved with sorting out and piecing together the horrific events of 9/11. The filmmakers, notably writer and director Paul Greengrass (The Bourne Supremacy, Bloody Sunday), opted not to populate the movie with Hollywood “names” in order to maximize box office. (By contrast, Oliver Stone’s “World Trade Center”, scheduled for release in late summer, will have a star-laden cast led by Nicolas Cage.) The absence of distracting celebrity images is what gives “United 93” its indelible stamp of authenticity -- ordinary people caught up in an extraordinary, history-making catastrophe. We have the sense that this is docudrama, and we’re witnessing the doomed flight and unfolding scenarios on board in real time. Despite its grueling emotional content and the raw nerves it inevitably touches, “United 93” does not pander to gore-a-holics, nor is it politically strident or ethnically judgmental.
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Among the non-actors, Ben Sliney, National Operations Manager for the FAA in Herndon, Virginia, has by far the biggest role, and he’s more than up to the challenge of recreating his reactions and actions as, one by one, the incredulous agency loses communications with cockpit personnel and airliners disappear from its radar screens. It is Sliney who ultimately recognizes the pervasiveness of the plot and issues the courageous order to ground every domestic flight and turn back all international airliners headed toward the U.S. Ironically, September 11, 2001 was Sliney’s first day on the job.

A chilling coincidence, or perhaps directly tied to terrorist planning, is the fact that weather conditions on 9/11 were unusually favorable, in that the entire country along coast-to-coast flight paths was under clear skies. The terrorists’ timetable for coordinated attacks depended upon on-time takeoffs. When the departure of United 93 out of Newark, New Jersey, was delayed 15 minutes by heavy traffic, its four aspiring hijackers had sweaty palms and brows and were sharing anxious glances because they knew that by now a plane or two had already struck the World Trade Center, and soon the entire nation would be on high alert.

“United 93” is a stunning film in every aspect of the craft -- the camera work is astonishing -- and every nuance of the word. It is, of course, an inspired tribute to the ingenuity, courage, and resolve of the passengers on board, but, to its credit, it does not succumb to portraying the hijackers as cartoonish demons. Religiously zealous, yes, resolute and unyielding, yes, but towards the end of the flight, they appear just as overwhelmed and distraught themselves by the enormity of their mission, its cataclysmic implications, and their imminent demise. No one knows precisely what happened on Flight 93, but Greengrass’s accounting, based on cell phone conversations and sounds from the cockpit, is as intelligent a supposition as we’re likely to get.

The film’s end credits are testament to the fastidious research of the filmmakers. With that in mind, what is most revelatory about “United 93” is the shocking ineptitude of the U.S. military in responding to the attacks. Noone in the established chain of command could be reached to authorize deployment of interceptor planes, and noone else wanted to take responsibility. The command post was the scene of confusion and paralysis. A half-hour after American Airlines Flight 11 had struck the World Trade Center, the U.S. military was still convinced it was heading for D.C. When someone at the command post finally issued the order, “get those birds over Manhattan now,” the few planes that got airborne were unarmed and, inexplicably, headed in the wrong direction -- east out over the Atlantic Ocean. It wasn’t until a half-hour after United 93 had slammed into a field near Shanksville, PA, that military command knew it had even been hijacked.


TRUTHS ABOUT DOGS AND CATS

TSOTSI (A-)

As a devoted, prepubescent son attending to his AIDS-stricken mother in her last moments of life, David (Benny Moshe) and the only other being that matters to him -- the family dog -- receive a traumatic lesson in abject savagery from his drunken father (Israel Makoe) that sets the anguished boy on a malevolent course to avenge his personal losses. We learn about this pivotal incident in flashback well into director and screenwriter Gavin Hood’s sometimes repellent, sometimes poignant, always absorbing, and ultimately redemptive tale, “Tsotsi”, based on a 1980 novel (his one and only) by acclaimed playwright Athol Fugard. Starkly reminiscent of Fernando Meirelles’s “City of God”, Rio de Janeiro’s harrowing barrio, “Tsotsi” is set primarily in the township of Soweto -- a sprawling, post-apartheid shantytown on the outskirts of Johannesburg. It captured an Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film of 2005, after making the rounds of various film festivals, but wasn’t released in this country until just before the Academy Awards ceremony.

When the film opens, the boy David, his innocence long lost and his soul imbedded with smoldering rage, is a conscienceless gang leader with deep-set, expressively vacant eyes named Tsotsi (Presley Chweneyagae), a pseudonym that by definition identifies his chosen profession -- “thug”. He and his loose-knit bunch of disenfranchised baddies, with names like Aap, Butcher, and Boston, steal for a living, but have very short fuses if their victims dare to resist, which means that they usually leave behind a lifeless body in a pool of blood.

After they victimize a well-dressed and flush-with-cash gentleman in a crowded Johannesburg subway car, one gang member, Boston (Mothusi Magano), gets a guilty conscious about the murder part of the caper and makes the mistake of accusing his leader of being callous and unfeeling, without a shred of decency -- whereupon Tsotsi seriously rearranges his friend’s face and rushes out on his own to further prove Boston’s point. Finding himself in a fashionably gated community in a Jo’burg suburb, he robs and shoots a woman at close range -- this dude is merciless -- then takes off in her car, only to discover that there is precious cargo on board in the person of her infant son. His first instinct is to abandon both car and baby, but when the innocent passenger locks eyes with Tsotsi and coos irresistibly -- perhaps drawing him back in time to the last haunting images of his canine pal -- the hardened hood softens just enough to gather the kid up in a shopping bag and cart him home .

The rest of this film deals with the aftermath of Tsotsi’s uncharacteristically humane decision, during which his role as career criminal is put on hold as he seeks ways and the wherewithal to keep his tiny and helpless charge safe, clean, and fed. He all but forcibly engages a young mother named Miriam (Terry Pheto), whose own husband was recently robbed and killed, to share in the care and nursing responsibilities, an evolving relationship that drives further chinks into Tsotsi’s formerly impenetrable armor. Ties with his crime cohorts eventually fray and snap, though he manages to make amends with Boston, even offering financial reparations to his disfigured and dispirited buddy.

He may have turned over a new leaf in some respects, but Tsotsi is still accountable for the crimes of armed robbery, attempted murder, car theft, and kidnapping. How he comes to face the music in a way that a measure of justice is served makes for concluding scenes that are tense, stirring, and emotionally ambivalent. For a cynical moment or two I thought that Hood and the musical score were about to plunge the film into maudlin sentimentality as events were winding down. But sense, sensibility, and integrity won out in the end, and “Tsotsi” was well worth the unsparingly joyless viewing experience.


EIGHT BELOW (B+)

The plot, “inspired by actual events” and preceded in 1983 by a Japanese version, “Nankyoku Monogatari”, is uncomplicated. A team of Antarctic explorers have to leave behind their eight sled dogs at the onset of the harrowing tundra winter, when one member of the expedition, the researcher who financed the study, David McClaren (Bruce Greenwood), ignores the expert advice of the party’s guide, treads where he shouldn’t, and suffers a life-threatening injury requiring that the expedition be aborted and he be immediately airlifted to a hospital. Because of harsh weather conditions setting in and financial and logistical circumstances that rule out a return flight, the dogs are stranded in chains outside the research station and, in all likelihood, left to perish.

We learn from the backstory that the guide, Jerry Shepard (Paul Walker), has a romantic history with the expedition pilot Katie (Moon Bloodgood), and though he’s certainly an affable enough chap, with the requisite pecs, abs, and orbs appurtenant to Hollywood hunks, he appears to relate more attentively to the expedition’s dog team than to its attractive and ardent aviator. It’s clear that Shepard can’t commit to her in a way Katie would like. Still, she comes across as understanding and a good sport who’ll bide her time until her man comes around. The accident throws a monkey wrench into her strategy.

Abandoning the dogs to death by exposure and starvation is unthinkable to Shepard and he can’t live with himself, let alone anyone else, until he can organize a rescue mission -- which is just as well because this, after all, is an adventure story about bonding, bravery, and survival. The rest of the film, whose outcome is never really in doubt, deals with the dogs’ incredible fortitude, their instinctual ability to improvise, persist, and endure, their affection for and loyalty to one another, and their dignity in the face of death -- and with Shepard’s fierce one-man campaign to round up the money and equipment to get back to them before they run out of options and resources and succumb to the brutal elements.

“Eight Below” is visually stunning, the work of the dogs as actors is amazing, and their story is emotionally stirring and, frankly, exhausting. It’s billed as a family film, but I don’t know about its effect on young children -- it got pretty intense for an old coot like me, though I admit to being particularly sensitive to situations imperiling to animals. A couple of those situations, by the way, also tested my ability to suspend belief, but overall this is a film to submerge yourself in and admire when it comes out in DVD.


DUMA (C+)

Talking about suspension of belief, credibility gets stretched far beyond reasonable limits in director Carroll Ballard’s saga of a young South African boy named Xan (Alexander Michaletos) and his pet cheetah Duma. The stray, bedraggled, disoriented cub, orphaned when its mother is attacked and mauled by a lion, wanders onto the ranch and into the lives of Xan and his dad and mom Peter (Campbell Scott) and Kristin (Hope Davis). Peter allows his son to raise the cub to adulthood, with the understanding that they will eventually escort the animal back to the wild -- the distant and forbidding Kalahari Desert. If all this sounds familiar, it may be because us old timers recall a lion cub named Ilsa who was adopted under similar circumstances by Joy Adamson and her husband in a film adaptation of “Born Free” 40 years ago.

In Duma’s case, tragedy intervenes, and the family is forced to relocate to a Johannesburg apartment, in which it soon becomes very evident the full-grown cat cannot be confined. Without telling anyone, Xan takes off for the Kalahari on a relic of a motorcycle, with Duma reposing regally in the sidecar. Here’s where the film starts to get very hokey. You could call Xan fearless, or courageous, but you’d also have to admit he’s clueless, naive, a dreamer, even for a 12-year-old. In no time at all, the rickety conveyance runs out of petrol, and Xan (cycle in tow) and his big cat are trudging across an arid, barren landscape with no recognizable landmark on the horizon.

In the nick of time, boy and beast come across another wanderer, a crafty old eccentric named Ripkuna (Eamonn Walker), who talks in riddles, whose appearance and affect are sinister, and whose motives in befriending a lost innocent immediately suspect. Initially, they’re confrontative with one another; then certain negotiations are made, and Ripkuna agrees to shepherd Xan and Duma in the direction of their destination. Turns out his heart is in the right place after all, but the journey is fraught with a chain of perils the like of which Pauline never remotely encountered, including multiple face-offs with wild beasts that slither, stalk, and stampede, and one helluva treacherous plunge in a makeshift raft over a waterfall precipice so steep a gold medal Olympic diver or a career surfer of the mammoth waves couldn’t have survived. Xan and Ripkuna get separated, and the older man has a near-fatal health crisis. Never fear -- all’s well that ends well, and “Duma” ends pretty much as one would wish, even though you may agree with me that it’s a whopping fairy tale.