LEGENDS OF THE FALL

HALF NELSON (A)

In the “sport” of wrestling, if you have a “half nelson” on an opponent, you’ve approached from behind, slipped an arm of yours under an arm of his and grabbed his neck in a choke-hold. Then you push forward on his body with your other hand and haul him down to the canvas, whereupon you pin him for a count of three.

In the movie “Half Nelson,” Dan Dunne and many of the people he comes in contact with in his dark and desperate inner-city neighborhood are being similarly whiplashed by opposing forces. For some, their precarious state is due to circumstances beyond their control. For others, it’s a matter of making the wrong turn at a crucial crossroads.

Dunne (Ryan Gosling) teaches American history in a ghetto middle school -- a position which, from all accounts, can strike fear and loathing in the hearts of most serious educators. But far from an authoritarian imposing martial law in his classroom, or a condescending intellectual trying to drum knowledge into numb skulls, Dan is a facile communicator and as chill a dude as he can be and still stay under the radar of a didactic administration bent on enforcing the curriculum.

Dan’s techniques for getting through to his students, drawing them into the subject matter, aren’t techniques at all. He has an infectious love of teaching and of history -- which he defines as change over time that is propelled by the clash of opposing forces. He talks their talk, but doesn’t patronize -- the rapport comes naturally and from the heart. His politics are as far left as can be, so he accentuates the parts of the curriculum they can’t help but relate to, such as social injustice and the struggles of minorities. After school, he coaches the girls basketball team with boyish verve.

But there are two Dans -- the energetic, inspirational role model at school and the laid-back, contemplative introvert we see after hours. At home in a spartan apartment, he unwinds with a latin beat in the background emanating anachronistically from LPs spinning on a rickety turntable, as he dabbles in watercolor illustrations for a kid’s book he’s working on and his curious cat looks over his shoulder.

Then there’s this other pastime, and it’s becoming the proverbial elephant in the room -- Dan is a crack addict and has been for quite awhile. Drugs busted up his romance with Rachel (Tina Holmes), when she opted to go through rehab and he couldn’t or wouldn’t. She still loves him, keeps trying to reenter his life, but he’s ambivalent and puts her off. “I’m a big asshole, baby,” he laments apologetically. Asshole he isn’t. Conflicted he is. And now it’s all Dan can do to get through the school day without a hit or snort. What’s more, he carouses well into the wee hours, even on school nights. Telltale signs of addiction are beginning to creep into his classroom demeanor, as his eyes droop and water and he repeatedly goes to his nose and mouth with the end of his tie or a sleeve or collar of his shirt. His students are beginning to give each other knowing glances.

When one of them -- a sullen, streetwise 13-year-old named Drey (Shareeka Epps) -- discovers him nearly passed out in a bathroom stall in the girls’ locker room after a basketball game, his life is about to veer into the breakdown lane. You see, while Dan may be cocky, cool, and charismatic, he’s also appealingly sensitive and achingly vulnerable. And what a masterful job Gosling does in conveying those schisms -- the opposing forces that yin and yang beneath Dan’s nonchalant, equanimous surface.
“I’m sorry, I’m fine,” he mumbles feebly and abjectly, his body crumpled against the base of a toilet bowl. Drey knows better. Drugs are no stranger to her, either. Her mother’s ex Frank (Anthony Mackie) -- we’re never sure whether or not he’s actually Drey’s father -- is a dealer, and since mom works double shifts as an EMT, Drey is at loose ends to accompany him on delivery runs, a lucrative sidelight that eventually leads her directly to a sky-high party whose guests include her teacher and friend.

Director Ryan Fleck shuttles the film back and forth between the private comings and goings of Dan and Drey, she with little parental supervision and a brother she idolizes already serving time, he trying fitfully to jump-start an affair with a fellow teacher and put up a genial front at a family function that is alien to his values. Fleck’s screenplay (co-written with Anna Boden) isn’t explicit about Dan’s demons, but we can guess that a man of his sensibility and compassion must be outraged and demoralized by America’s current political landscape and the precarious state of the world in general, scratching and scrambling within his limited sphere to impart to his still impressionable students the lessons of history and humanity that so many older folks ignore or fail to understand.

Drey is no snitch; she, like most of her classmates, thinks highly of her embattled teacher, but she’s wise beyond her years and knows instinctively that her solicitude has to be low-key and covert. She is in watchful-waiting mode, mindful of his need to maintain a prudent, professional distance, as well as retain some semblance of dignity. At one point, their friendship frays. “Why don’t you play with kids your own age?”, he blurts out uncharacteristically. She calls him an “asshole,” he retaliates with “bitch.” It’s the only time in the film that Dan raises his voice.

Eventually his double life merges into one; his lectures become incoherent rambles, he nods off during quizzes. One day, he leaves class to attend to a nosebleed and either forgets or is too humiliated to return. A colleague in the faculty lounge becomes suspicious and solicitous. The principal, already irked by Dan’s unorthodox classroom methods, now has even deeper concerns. “Is there something going on I should know about,” she asks cautiously.

What distinguishes “Half Nelson” from other films dealing with conflicted characters in the throes of substance abuse is its steadfast avoidance of cliché and moral judgments. There isn’t one instance where Fleck sensationalizes the events of his narrative or sentimentalizes his characters or their predicaments. Even a confrontation between Dan and Frank about the dealer’s negative influence on Drey, while heated, doesn’t degenerate into fisticuffs or, worse yet, a duel to one of their deaths. Other filmmakers might have felt compelled to concoct something romantic between Dan and Drey to fuel controversy or an ethical dilemma -- Fleck doesn’t stoop to such devices. The nature of their friendship may be unprecedented in American film.

Nor does Gosling go overboard conveying the torments of his character, which, after all, are largely subliminal, or the physical manifestations of addiction. Gosling uses his eyes and body language, not vocal decibels, to convey Dan’s pain. His performance is highly intuitive but remarkably subtle and unmannered. Only 26, with eight feature films under his belt, Gosling is already in the top echelon of North American film actors -- he’s Canadian. His characterizations have ranged widely from the sinister and violent (“The Believer”) to the quirky (“The United States of Leland”) to the utterly enchanting (“The Notebook”). But, in “Half Nelson,” he rises to an even higher level of interpretive eloquence.



HEADING SOUTH (Vers le Sud) (A-)

Ellen, Brenda, and Sue can’t get any sexual satisfaction on their home turf, but they’ve discovered, each on her own, a highly viable option. They head south on holiday to a beach resort in Haiti called the Hotel Petite Anse for fun in the sun and frolic in the sack with one or more of the black, native studs. It’s the late 1970’s, pre-AIDS. The country is ruled by a brutal dictator named Jean-Claude “Baby Doc” Duvalier, and the hotel is managed by a courtly, but canny gentleman named Albert (Lys Ambroise), who barely disguises his resentment toward Americans -- particularly white Americans -- for their complicity in Haiti’s political and economic state of affairs -- conditions about which Ellen, Brenda, and Sue are uninformed and disinterested.

Ellen (Charlotte Rampling), 55, a Brit living in Boston, which she disdains as “that goddamn stuck-up city,” teaches French literature at Wellesley College. She’s sneers about her colleagues and their fractured affairs with sexually repressed and abusive boyfriends and grumbles about the dead-end bars that demean the integrity of women of a certain age.

Ellen’s been coming to Port-au-Prince for six years and is the unofficial grand damme of her restless and lustful gaggle, holding court daily with like-minded ladies she’s taken under her wing, plus a stallion or two-in-waiting. Ellen has the affect of a noblewoman, confident that she knows her way around and has mastered the rules of the game. Her precision even shows when she pronounces the name of this sexual sanctuary -- “Hah-ee-tee.”

Brenda (Karen Young), nearing 50 and newly divorced, is from Savannah, Georgia. She’s on her second visit to the Central American “paradise,” this time without the encumbrance of a partner in marriage. The first time around, she and hubby Mark had befriended a 15-year-old native boy named Legba (Menothy Cesar), with whom Brenda became wildly infatuated. Off one day on a solitary stroll up the beach, Brenda encountered Legba, the two went for a swim and subsequently had sex, a benchmark event in her life because, at 45, she experienced her first orgasm. The film opens as she arrives at the resort several years later, then heads immediately up the beach in hopes of a “chance” reencounter with her sexual liberator.

Sue (Louise Portal), a warehouse expeditor from Montreal, remonstrates about the lascivious behavior of her male coworkers and the dearth of dating opportunities for middle-aged women back home. “Here, the guys are gracious and I feel like a butterfly,” she says joyously. Of her steady native beau Neptune (Wilfried Paul), she declares “I really love him.” And he appears similarly devoted, although all three women acknowledge that they haven’t come to Haiti with any delusions about finding long-term partners. “Legba belongs to everyone,” Ellen preaches. She cautions a more naive, free-spirited Brenda about becoming too possessive: “He makes the decisions.” And she’s right -- Legba may appear callow, guileless, and uninhibited -- and he’s certainly attentive, endearing, and both physically gifted and sexually proficient -- but he is circumspect about his life away from the surf, sand, and resort bedrooms.

It’s understood that the women will lavish gifts on their boy toys -- and not just money, clothes, and trinkets. There’s enough political corruption to fuel a black market in passports. Brenda repays Legba for his services by taking him to town and buying him expensive outfits. Their rivalry for the young man’s affections is beginning to annoy Ellen, despite her lecture on possessiveness, and she scolds Brenda for her naiveté and her notions about “syrupy love...just because some kid gave you an orgasm.” Ellen even takes a swipe at Legba as he walks by her table at the hotel restaurant in his new duds: “You look like some black guy from Harlem.”
Eventually, “Heading South” heads down a very dark road on which Legba is being hotly pursued, we know not by whom or for what. His carefree spirit belies dangerous intrigues in his life away from the beachfront resort and his ardent admirers, having to do with fractured alliances and obligations he’s been neglecting. And Ellen, after all, is not the princess of perspicacity she has led us to believe. She compromises her own principles and abandons her imperious and emotionally impenetrable masquerade by attempting to claim Legba for her very own in an unraveling scene that gives full expression to Rampling’s authority and authenticity as an actor. A tragedy occurs near the end of the film that invigorates Brenda even as it stuns and demoralizes Ellen, but, finally, it is a voice-over monologue by the sagacious Albert that puts the dueling perils and pleasures of Haiti in perspective.

“Heading South” is essentially a Canadian film in French (subtitled) and English, made with money from multinational production sources and directed by Laurent Cantet, who co-wrote the screenplay with Robin Campillo. Cantet has created a cogent, coherent drama that, within the confines of its modest budget, gives us a sufficient sense of the way things went down in Haiti during the brutal Duvalier regime, at the same time giving credence to the illusions and delusions of three women for whom the turbulent culture serves only one pleasurable purpose. Ultimately, “Heading South” is about aging’s diminishing returns and how hope springs eternal in lonely hearts even when reality checks dictate otherwise.

Rampling, whose career now spans four decades, is relatively unknown to American mainstream film audiences, even with a recent appearance in “Basic Instinct 2”. At 60, she has a sensuality that is unsettling, almost daunting, and, in “Heading South,” she commands every scene she’s in, displaying a biting hauteur more jocular than off-putting, but formidable nonetheless.

Young, in real life exactly the age of her character in “Heading South,” is also being seen currently as Grace in Bent Hamer’s “Factotum,” which I reviewed earlier this year, and on TV in episodes of “Law and Order” and “The Sopranos”. As Brenda, she excels in portraying, in contrast to Rampling’s Ellen, an unsophisticated, impressionable, conventional woman in the process of shedding those conventions and basking in newfound freedoms. Ironically, at the end of the film, in an ironic reversal of fortune, Ellen is heading north, full of recriminations and in an agitated state of disillusionment, all the playfulness sapped from her. Brenda is departing also, but heading to other islands and further adventures. “I want nothing to do with men from the north,” she exhorts.


THE DEPARTED (A-)

Martin Scorsese has earned his creative medals and made piles of money aiding and abetting America’s morbid obsession with crime -- the more heinous, hideous, and horrific, the better. Scorsese is Hollywood’s master of mean streets malevolence, its baron of butchery, its grand capo of cynicism and sadism. One wonders what demons lurk in the man’s mind to sustain such a lurid preoccupation and engender such shocking scenarios. We Americans just can’t get our fill of cruel and inhuman entertainment, tuning in nightly by the tens of millions to TV’s bountiful menu of murder and mayhem. And even as it’s entertaining us, it’s heightening our fears and paranoia, fueling our angst, and making us trigger-happy in real life.

But, hey, ours is not the province of societal psychoanalysis. Scorsese’s films are ripping good yarns. And what sets them apart from most others of the cops and robbers and slash-and-dash genres are their spellbinding, labyrinthine narratives, gritty, sociologically provocative environments, and psychologically complex characters played by big name actors eager to work with the maestro of malice. Nothing about Scorsese’s filmmaking is cheesy. He directs from screenplays that are stylish and pungent. His pacing and editing cut to the quick and can leave audiences hyperventilating, and his production values are impeccable. His movies appeal to critics, as well as the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences, earning accolades and nominations. Strangely, even with all the critical genuflecting, collegial adoration, and box office magnetism, Scorsese has yet to carry home one of those coveted statuettes.

Maybe this time. Audiences are currently storming multiplexes nationwide to see Scorsese’s latest foray into the domains of villainy, “The Departed,” a remake of the 2002 Hong Kong thriller “Infernal Affairs”. For the record, the title of this version is a truncated reference to the dearly departed, in the parlance of law enforcement entities whose job it is to retrieve and identify corpses and pursue those responsible for their lifelessness. The body count in “The Departed” is staggering even by Scorsese standards, and the violence visuals should ramp up the adrenaline of even the most glutted and inured among bloodhounds. Scorsese may be guilty of excess savagery, but how else to lure the jaded appetites of those who feast daily on a virtual smorgasbord of evildoing on their TV’s, computers, and game players. The screenplay, written by Boston native William Monahan, features some of the most effusive testosterone-laced sallies ever heard in a mainstream film, as the cops rev each other up and egg each other on with homophobic insinuations and libidinous references to oral and anal sex.

There’s no need to get into too much plot detail. “The Departed” is essentially the story of Irish mob boss Frank Costello (Jack Nicholson) and two undercover “statees” (Massachusetts State Police) working at cross purposes -- one named Billy Costigan (Leonardo di Caprio), an honest cop without traceable police identity assigned to infiltrate Costello’s inner circle of ganglanders and provide police hierarchy with a blueprint of the kingpin’s illicit dealings -- the other Colin Sullivan (Matt Damon), groomed from boyhood by Costello himself to go through the cadet program and become a syndicate informant. Now Sullivan heads up a special Irish mafia investigations unit, but sabotages every effort of that unit to catch his mentor in the act. Eventually, each mole learns of the other’s existence, but not his identity, and the film comes down to dueling cell phones and volleys of telltale text messages as each is frantic to unmask and destroy the other first.

But “The Departed” is so much more than a smart cat-and-mouse cliff-hanger -- it’s a blistering commentary on the pervasive amorality of American society, where truth and trust are the province of wusses and underachievers, where just about everybody, including the police force psychologist, lies “to keep things on an even keel,” where duplicity and deception are de rigueur. Sullivan sums it up succinctly in a final scene with his guru: “Frank, it’s a nation of fuckin’ rats.”

There’s no more fitting locale for this nasty tale than the City of Boston, where the vestiges of Puritanism merge with collective Catholic guilt to create a peculiar matriarchal culture of repression, insularity, and bigotry that has far-reaching ramifications for those who grow up in the environment. I say matriarchal, because the women, mothers and wives, buttress the family while their husbands are off making mischief in the bars and streets -- mischief that’s sometimes malicious enough to warrant “time away.” Even now, in an age of growing social enlightenment, Boston’s ethnic neighborhoods, particularly Irish enclaves such as “Southie” and Charlestown, cling to a rigid turf mentality that carries over into city politics, governance, and law enforcement.

For so long, the working-class Irish of Boston were lowest in the city’s socioeconomic pecking order, subject to the same brand of humiliating discrimination African-Americans endured elsewhere. (Blacks made up only a small percentage of Boston’s population until burgeoning influxes during and after World War II.) Cruel discrimination begot an ethnic group determined to raise itself up by hook or by crook, even if it meant dovetailing touches of larceny with touches of blarney and putting one over on the Brahmin establishment. Frank Costello mirrors that mentality of contempt, derision, recalcitrance in the extreme; he brands priests “cocksuckers” to their faces and threatens to expose them as child abusers, refers to cops as having a “slight air of scumbag entitlement,” and is in a turf war with “the Guineas of Providence,” his Sicilian-American rivals 50 miles south on I-95. Ironically his opening voice-over is a declaration that he is not a product of his environment, his environment is a product of him. While key scenes were shot in the so-called Hub of the Universe to establish location authenticity, most of the exterior shooting had to move to New York City when Boston denied the filmmakers access to certain neighborhoods because of sensitivity to the film’s themes.

Nicholson’s performance is a demonic tour-de-force, relatively free of the stock Jackish mannerisms that have crept into most of his performances in the past ten years. He took this role reluctantly, but plays it with obvious relish. He looks like he hasn’t run a comb through his hair in weeks, and his eyes frequently take on Charles Mansonesque expressions as he leers, sneers, and hisses at just about everyone crossing his path, including his own soldiers. Yet, even in a pathological context, Nicholson manages to avoid caricature most of the time. His last scene, a confrontation with his prize protégé, harkens back almost 60 years in cinema history to a duel of wits and guns between Humphrey Bogart and Edward G. Robinson that decides the outcome of “Key Largo”.

The fact that Damon, a Harvard dropout, grew up in the Boston area gives him an insider’s frame of reference for the film’s ethnocentric mentality, and he hung out with the Mass State Police to acquire insights into that agency’s modus operandi. The chilling duality of Sullivan’s character, former altar boy, clean-cut, turned out, and buttoned-down, for all appearances, but an unprincipled Machiavellian deep within, is reminiscent in some ways of “The Talented Mr. Ripley,” Damon played so brilliantly for Anthony Minghella seven years ago. For whatever reason, split and conflicted personalities who build a box of deceit around themselves really bring out the best in Damon; what’s more, two of his three finest performances, this one and “Good Will Hunting,” (for which he co-wrote the screenplay with Ben Affleck) are in movies set on the home turf he knows so well.

Mark Wahlberg, another high-achieving local boy, as in “Dawchester,” plays Dignam, second in command of a unit headed by cool-headed chief investigator Oliver Queenan (Martin Sheen). Dignam is Queenan’s corrosive alter ego, whose task, which he carries out with a vengeance, is to shake down new cadets who may be candidates for higher-risk undercover assignments if their dignity and self-respect can withstand his baiting antics and survive his humiliating verbal assaults without becoming aggressive themselves. Billy Costigan grits his teeth and bites his tongue, but manages to internalize his rage and make the grade. Wahlberg, who served time for felonious behavior in real life -- before his underwear stint as Marky Mark and his boy band days with the Funky Bunch -- still retains his streetwise stride and a hard, piercing gaze. And his posture-packed abusive blitzes strike the fear and loathing they should.

But it is Di Caprio who delivers the film’s grittiest, yet deftly nuanced performance. I’ve been critical of this exceptional actor in the past, for accepting roles (twice before from Scorsese in “Gangs of New York” and “The Aviator”) for which he was unsuited by reason of slightness and immaturity, and I cringe when I look ahead at his announced projects and see that he’s signed on to play Teddy Roosevelt. Now, about to turn 32, his face having lost some baby fat and gained some world weariness, his body filled out and bulked up, he is far more man than boy. His Billy Costigan is a fusion of contradictory elements, behavior antithetically mercurial, vulnerable, audacious, and reticent -- formidable in some instances, a bundle of insecurities in others. In a mandatory consultation with police force shrink Madolyn (Vera Farmiga) prior to going undercover, Costigan first presents as a resistant thuggish rogue, but bends under sensitive questioning, becoming almost docile, catching Madolyn off guard. “Your vulnerability is freaking me out,” she says with some embarrassment. In a parallel irony, Madolyn, already in a romantic relationship with the adroit, glossy, but emotionally impervious Sullivan, is about to fall equally hard for his edgy, visceral, diamond-in-the-rough arch rival. Unlike Sullivan, who has allowed his soul to be hijacked for an ignoble cause, Costigan has been buffeted by the opposing forces of good and evil, operating on raw instincts and pure adrenaline, putting up false fronts and battling self-doubts in order to get through life. Eventually, we get to see a decent person emerge from his inner conflicts, a breath of fresh air in a movie choking with gross inhumanity.


THE PRESTIGE (A-)

Christopher Nolan loves to play mind games with us moviegoers. Several years ago, he created a convoluted narrative (“Memento”) involving an amnesia-plagued husband trying to find his wife’s killer, by sequencing the events of the crime and its aftermath, including the emergence of suspects, in reverse. As an audience, we had to keep reminding ourselves that the last scene we were witnessing actually took place before the previous scene.

More recently, Nolan even got cerebral and psychologically complex with his stunning cartoon-based prequel “Batman Begins”. The Londoner’s latest film, “The Prestige,” is an equally artful braintwister that goes back and forth in the public and private lives of two quasi-maniacal magicians and escape artists extraordinaire, Rupert Angier (Hugh Jackman) and Alfred Borden (Christian Bale), who start out as friends and collaborators, then, as a result of a tragic accident, go their separate ways as bitter rivals, only to end up as mortal enemies bent on destroying one another.

Along the way, we gain tantalizing insight into the tools and techniques of the magician’s trade and how illusionists finesse audiences longing to be dumbfounded. Angier and Borden are high-stakes protagonists and antagonists -- not only clever and devious, but scientifically skilled. They’re way beyond pulling rabbits out of hats and sawing scanty-clad assistants in half. Their tricks are elaborate acts of deception carrying certain calculated risks, including the possibility of fatal and near-fatal mishaps. Once Angier and Borden become adversaries, jealousy and revenge inflame their pitched battle for professional supremacy, as they go to extraordinary lengths to unlock each other’s secrets and trump each other’s celebrity. Finally, their very identities become a puzzlement to each other and those of us trying to keep up with story elements which, like making magic itself, may not be what they seem.

Both Jackman and Bale give stirring, thoroughly invested performances; Bale, in my estimation, is one of the industry’s most gifted and versatile actors, dating from Steven Spielberg’s World War II epic “Empire of the Sun” in 1987 when he was only 13. Consider such devilishly diverse roles as Thomas Berger in “Swing Kids” (1993), Arthur Stuart in “Velvet Goldmine” (1998), Patrick Bateman in “American Psycho” (2000), Sam in “Laurel Canyon” (2002), Trevor Reznik in “The Machinist” (2004), and Bruce Wayne in “Batman Begins” (2005).

Michael Caine, whose career soars unabated, is excellent as the impresario and designer of staged illusions Cutter; the ubiquitous Scarlett Johansson, negotiating an in-and-out British accent, is a shade north of adequate as the sultry turncoat assistant Olivia Wenscombe. The title of the film refers to the third of three distinct stages of a feat of magic. The first stage is called The Pledge, wherein the magician shows the audience something very ordinary -- let’s say, a floral bouquet. The second stage is The Turn, during which the performer makes the floral bouquet do something extraordinary, like disappear. The Prestige is the crucial, climactic, awe-inspiring third stage of the trick or act -- the piece de resistance or coupe de grace, if you will -- in which the floral bouquet reappears, but in a totally different context or place on the stage.

“The Prestige” may not win, or even be nominated for, any awards in the upcoming season, but it is a mesmerizing, mindbending entertainment, driven by a highly literate script (co-written by Nolan and his brother Jonathan), superb production values -- late 19th century London is handsomely mounted -- and burnished performances. And it’s enjoying greater box office returns than expected. Word gets around.


RUNNING WITH SCISSORS (B-)

I didn’t read Augusten Burroughs’ best-selling 2002 memoir, upon which director-screenwriter Ryan Murphy’s (creator of TV’s “Nip/Tuck”) film is based, but, according to a recently published interview, Burroughs himself seems satisfied that his book has made it to the screen reasonably intact, considering the bizarre nature of its content . That taken into account, not all stories that are compelling in book form retain their authority and/or credibility in transition to screenplay and a finished film that condenses events to two hours, especially when actors are trying to make real-life characters and situations that are so idiosyncratic and unsettling seem even remotely believable.

I’m reminded of a book called Hollywood vs. America that conservative movie critic Michael Medved wrote more than a decade ago, in which he took filmmakers, TV producers, and musicians to task for the preponderance of sex, violence, and family dysfunctionality in their works, implying that movies, television, and hard rock are aberrations and not representative of mainstream America and the solid family values that supposedly backbone our society. It was the same Medved who last winter praised “Brokeback Mountain” for its milestone narrative, Ang Lee’s direction, and the acting of Heath Ledger and Jake Gyllenhaal, then condemned the film because Ennis married Alma after having consummated a sexual relationship with Jack and was subsequently adulterous in rekindling that relationship, ignoring the fact that adultery is pandemic in our society, and more than half of all heterosexual marriages end in divorce for any number of reasons, including the homosexuality of one or both spouses. As for violence, Americans feast nightly on a high-calorie TV diet of crimes against humanity; filmmakers and TV producers who specialize in murder and mayhem are simply giving the folks what they want, Michael Medved notwithstanding.

As far as family dysfunctionality goes, people who write books, plays, and film scripts choose their subject matter on the basis of thier own life experiences, augmented, we expect, by arduous research. They are simply articulating through a creative process what most folks are unable to express because it’s either too painful or too deeply repressed. Or they simply don’t have the communication skills to express what they feel, either verbally or on paper. In “Running with Scissors,” Deirdre (Annette Bening), the film’s pivotal character, who fancies herself a gifted writer, hosts a poetry club in her home for married women who, like herself, are simmering with discontent about their marriages. Her call to arms message, bellowed as if delivered from an Evangelical pulpit, is “get your rage on the page -- funnel that rage into the only escape you have, your writing!”

Medved, by implication, thinks that Ozzie and Harriet and the Donna Reed Show were more representational of American family life, and that the Hollywood dream factory should be turning out mega-reel escapism for the masses. But one can make the case that films like “Brokeback Mountain” and “Running with Scissors” qualify as escapist fare because they trigger an intense emotional response, providing an escape valve for latent feelings that may have been locked up in audience members for as long as a lifetime. I have firsthand knowledge of straight men sitting alongside their wives and partners, who wept openly during the last 20 minutes of “Brokeback Mountain,” suggesting that the film was digging deep into their subconsciousness and resonating mightily.

I don’t know anyone who hasn’t evolved from a dysfunctional family. In fact, I’m convinced that dysfunctionality is common to nearly everyone’s experience growing up, with variations on theme and intensity. Augusten Burroughs’ own experiences, chronicled in a journal, then published as a best-selling memoir, are so garishly bizarre they could easily be mistaken as the collective product of an overactive imagination. Deirdre is his imperious, self-obsessed, habitually unhinged, latent-lesbian mother with grand delusions of becoming a renowned poet, who seethes and storms about her floundering marriage to Augusten’s father Norman (Alec Baldwin), who, she claims, drinks a lot, chases after other women, does not validate her intellect and talent, and is deficient in the sack. Already tyrannized and cowardly acquiescent, Norman gets suckered into accompanying Deirdre to a hedonistic and behaviorally permissive couples counselor named Dr. Finch (Brian Cox), a quack of the first order who takes Deirdre’s side and mounts an assault of his own on Norman’s character. Eventually, Deirdre overplays her ball-busting self-righteousness, and Norman rises up and casts her off, along with the shrinking violet son he doesn’t and doesn’t want to understand.

Deirdre becomes more dependent on Finch and her limitless stash of Diazepam, and in her fog of super sedation, she is persuaded to farm Augusten out to the good doctor so she can devote her full energies to pursuing the recognition and fame she so richly deserves. She serves her son his adoption papers at the kitchen table one evening, and he is summarily thrust into Finch’s house of dementia -- a psychedelic pink palace and veritable asylum of certifiable nutcases of the doctor’s own making -- including his stuporous, couch-potato wife Agnes (Jill Clayburgh), who munches daily on a bag of dog kibble while in a hypnotic state of TV watching. There is elder daughter Hope (Gwyneth Paltrow), who dialogues with God and has a cat named Freud that she’s confined to an inverted laundry basket without food or water because he gave her a sign he was ready to die; and younger daughter Natalie (Evan Rachel Ward), who’s in an acidic, self-absorbed state from her broken affair with a man more than three times her age -- a liaison brokered by her father with one of his patients. Finally, there is Neil Bookman (Joseph Fiennes), also a former Finch patient, unofficially adopted by the doctor, then banished because he is gay and incorrigible.

When Natalie comes on to Augusten, he comes out to her, and she sets him up with Neil, now 36. Neil wastes no time initiating the 14-year-old virgin, in a manner that amounts to rape, but despite the repugnance of the predatory act, Augusten regards Neil as a kindred soul he can relate to and take comfort from. And Neil, for his part, projects feelings of fellowship and commonality. “Where would we be without our painful childhoods,” he cannily observes.

Augusten has occasional weekend furloughs with his drug-addled mom, who in time gets in touch with her lesbian side and takes up with Fern (Kristin Chenoweth), one of the members of her poetry society, exhorting that she hereby claims herself as a woman. And on and on the film labors episodically toward a bittersweet ending that has Augusten developing a relationship with Agnes he should have had with Deirdre, but I don’t want to give away too much here.
Despite an explosive, electrifying performance by Bening, who is pure volatility and passion as Deirdre, “Running with Scissors” lacks cohesion and urgency after Augusten is dispatched to the Finch loony bin and his mother is stationed on the periphery of his life. Once inside the Finch household, “Running with Scissors” becomes a series of stand-alone vignettes cobbled together with no sense of time lapse or relativity to Augusten’s destiny.

The estimable Scottish character actor, Brian Cox, seen last year in “Red Eye” and “Match Point,” and on the “Deadwood” TV series, brings to the role of Finch equivocating ethics and morals, flights of whimsy and delusion, and moments of barely disguised menace. He gives voice to sanity in one scene and lunacy in the next, keeping everyone around him out of kilter and codependent. Jill Clayburgh as Agnes is a pitiable portrait of resignation and despair, and judging by the dismal squalor inside the pink palace, has long ago given up trying to keep order. The Christmas tree has been up for two years, food-caked pots, pans, dishes, and utensils litter every kitchen surface.

Next to Bening, Fiennes has the toughest role because his character is so chaotic. He’s a sexual predator in his first encounter with Augusten, though it’s unclear whether pedophilia is really his stock-in-trade. He’s edgy -- a ticking time bomb -- and spooky -- frequently off in a fantasy world. Still, after violating Augusten, he treats the boy with diffidence and tenderness, appearing to be no more than 14 himself. You don’t know whether to laugh or cry when Neil tells Augusten that when he came to Finch as a volatile teen, the doctor use to calm him by playing Nat King Cole’s recording of “Stardust”. When, near the end of the film, Neil snaps and is about to slay Finch, “Stardust” counterpointedly intervenes.

Paltrow essentially reprises her deadpan character in “The Royal Tennebaums”; Hope is totally out of her tree and scary, and her scenes, though transient and unconnected, get some of the biggest laughs. Given the traumatic circumstances of Augusten’s exile, Joseph Cross’s performance is oddly indistinct and detached, almost as if the ordeal has anesthetized him; one could surmise that he’s adjusted nicely. Some of the blame may lie in the fragmentary manner in which the film is cut, although, come to think of it, fragmented may be the best word to describe the lives of this freaky bunch. Once on his own in real life, Augusten Burroughs battled with alcoholism. Writing became his salvation. When asked by an interviewer -- “what about seeing yourself as a teen, played by Joseph Cross?” -- Burroughs replied obliquely: “I wanted to put my arm around him.”


SHORTBUS (B-)

Be forewarned, in case you stumble blindly into movie houses on the basis of nothing more than an intriguingly title, that there has never been a more sexually explicit theatrical release in the entire history of American cinema than John Cameron Mitchell’s “Shortbus”. Mitchell is the chap who, five years ago, gave us “Hedwig and the Angry Inch,” best described as an anatomically incorrect punk rock odyssey about a transsexual singer and the ex-boyfriend who stole her songs. For his high-octane performance as Hedwig, Mitchell was nominated for a Golden Globe Award for best actor in a musical or comedy after the film had scored a triumph at the Sundance Film Festival.

“Shortbus” will win no such honors for any of the actors or for Mitchell’s stewardship, but it pushes the envelope as far as possible toward porn and is quite an eyeful for voyeurs and, in general, those who subscribe to the psychosexual philosophy that if it seems right and feels good, do it. The actors may be playing fictional roles, but the sex acts are for real.

The film opens with a young man named James (Paul Dawson), a former street hustler conflicted by his past we learn later, sitting in a bathtub videotaping his penis bobbing up and down in the water. Moments later, he double-jointedly gives himself oral gratification on the living room floor while a panting neighbor in an upstairs apartment across the alley trains a zoom lens on the action. Subsequent scenes feature a trash-talking dominatrix named Severin (Lindsay Beamish) and her unidentified, but ecstatically submissive male client, and a sex therapist -- she prefers “couples counselor” -- named Sofia (Sook-Yin Lee) and her husband Rob (Raphael Barker) in the throes of a tumultuous climax, during which, Sophia admits later, she has remained perplexingly “pre-orgasmic” and in need of counseling of her own. Had enough? No? Well, there’s lots more, including a protracted scene in which three gents -- James, his partner Jamie (P.J. DeBoy), and their boy toy Ceth (Jay Brannan) -- are daisychaining rhapsodically to the pulsating strains of “The Star Spangled Banner”.

The film follows all of these characters into an underground Manhattan salon for the freewheeling expression of repressed urges and unfulfilled fantasies, called “Shortbus.” There, depending on mood, taste, or proclivity, women and men, partnered or single, can pursue whatever pleasures them sexually or simply watch the bacchanalia play out from the sidelines. For those inhibited or conflicted, who have intimacy or trust issues or other baggage that weighs upon their sex lives, there is support group therapy. Cabaret entertainment, poetry readings, and video projections are available for those who desire nothing more than passive amusement in an orgiastic setting or are recharging their batteries for another go-around. The place is run by an earth mother drag queen played by Justin Bond, who, surveying his domain of erotic delights, is heard to observe: “It’s like the 60’s, but with less hope.” If there is a pivotal character, it is Severin, who eventually interacts in one way or another with all of the principal personalities.

What Mitchell appears to be saying -- and this legitimate raison d’etre is what distinguishes “Shortbus” from hard core porn -- is that people who partner are often hesitant to reveal their darker or kinkier sides to one another for fear of ridicule or rejection. Much may be left unsaid about certain erotic stimuli and situations vis-à-vis their unscratched itches. Sometimes awareness of unmet needs doesn’t even surface until well into the relationship, and the frustrated partner may feel awkward or embarrassed about bringing up the subject. The Shortbus experience can be a liberating one for both partners, depending on how strong their union is in the first place and how open they are to exploring their fantasies, singly or jointly, in a smorgasbord gathering of like-minded strangers. It’s a calculated gamble that could bring the couple closer together or cause them to go their separate ways.


FLAGS OF OUR FATHERS (C)

Film critics don’t hesitate to bare their fangs unless the subject matter centers around patriotism and the heroics of those who defend our country and/or rally to save their fallen comrades, as if harsh judgments on the merits of the movie itself will blemish or devalue the noble causes, fetes of bravery, and fraternal relationships it depicts. “Flags of Our Fathers,” like “World Trade Center,” “Band of Brothers,” and “Saving Private Ryan” before it, takes a single battleground incident and builds a sprawling, self-important narrative around it. Like Spielberg, Hanks, and Stone, Eastwood constructs a figurative pedestal for his heroes to stand on and dares critics not to be reverential. “Flags of Our Fathers” had “big picture” emblazoned across its frames long before it was ever screened for an audience, owing to its exalted Eastwood nameplate, and I will be astonished if it’’s overlooked at Oscar time, even though it’s pretty much a 25 lb. turkey in my book.

The film centers around the legendary and controversial photograph of six Marines raising the American flag on Iwo Jima in the midst of a raging battle that produced staggering casualties. The photograph, one of two staged by the military for PR purposes long before the actual battle was won, was published in hundreds of U. S. newspapers and came to symbolize a turning point toward victory in the Pacific and a much-needed boost to sagging public morale at home. Later, to the disgust and disillusionment of many Americans, it came to light that some of those in the photo had been mistakenly or even falsely identified to maximize the heart-tugging and funds-producing publicity campaign. Of the three servicemen who subsequently toured the country as Iwo Jima heroes to promote the crucial sale of war bonds, only two had actually taken part in a flag-raising ceremony and not necessarily the one depicted on front pages everywhere. In the movie itself, the identities of who did and didn’t pose, are further muddled by a confusion of first names that we in the audience are supposed to memorize and put to faces, when, in fact, most of the men have similar builds and similar faces and are wearing battle helmets that conceal half of those faces.

One of the three PR heroes is a Native American named Ira Hayes (Adam Beach), suffering from guilt and other emotional trauma resulting from what he did and witnessed on that small, but strategic island. His drunkenness on the tour leads to ethnic stereotyping by organizers trying to maintain damage control, and witnesses to his alcoholic tirades when he is denied access to certain bars because of his race. Though I have no reason to doubt that these attitudes prevailed -- after all, we’re talking 60 years ago -- and these altercations actually took place, the manner in which Eastwood stages them is timeworn and banal. Come to think of it, I should also be faulting the writers, the estimable Paul Haggis (Crash, Million Dollar Baby) and William Broyles, Jr. (Jarhead, Unfaithful) for a screenplay chock full of cliched, spiritless dialogue.

Of the three actors called upon to infuse substance into their characters, only Beach has meaningful screen time and scenes delivering anything close to pathos. Ryan Phillipe, as John “Doc” Bradley, is suppose to be the film’s central character, inasmuch as it’s told in flashback from his point of view as a dying old man (George Grizzard) relating the events and unburdening his baggage on his son James (Thomas McCarthy). But Phillipe struggles with bland, inconsequential lines and his own boyishness and too-precise elocution to bring credibility to his character. It’s ironic that the concluding, cathartic scene between the elder Bradley and his son is the film’s most poignant and affecting, and McCarthy’s performance is particularly tender and moving.

Jason Stanford, as René Gagnon, fares no better than Phillipe, and we gain absolutely no insight into who he really is, though admittedly these men were very young and immature within the year-long timeframe of most of the movie. Attempts by Eastwood to follow the trio into civilian life and explore their post-war paths and relationships are sketchy, occasionally maudlin, and inconclusive. Government exploitation of these men and their families, while cynical and deplorable, is a tempest in a teapot compared to the cavalier, reckless, and malignant policies and adventures pursued by American governments ever since.

If this is meant to be Eastwood’s anti-war statement, it achieves that goal with battlefield scenes of gross mutilation surpassing those of any other war movie. The film jumps back and forth between the bond tour -- which is exacerbating the men’s nightmarish memories of what happened to their buddies on Iwo Jima -- and the actual events as they took place. Every time Eastwood’s cameras return to the battlefield, we are revisited with escalating scenes of carnage -- a severed head, detached limbs, gaping neck and face wounds, even guts spilling out of mangled abdomens. In that sense, Eastwood is as exploitative as the events of 60 years ago he’s depicting. What’s more, he has produced a gorefest to sensationalize those events that may be as gratuitous, in its own way, as that of “Saw 3” or any other slash and dasher.

“Flags of Our Fathers” is a major disappointment after “Million Dollar Baby” and “Mystic River,” but even Clint Eastwood is entitled to a clunker now and then.


THE QUEEN (A)

Directed by Stephen Frears (Mrs. Henderson Presents, Dirty Pretty Things, High Fidelity) from a cogent screenplay by Peter Morgan, this is an incisive, keenly observant, fully imagined account of what probably took place among the British royals and between Queen Elizabeth and newly elected Prime Minister Tony Blair in the days following the death of Princess Diana during the late summer of 1997. It might well have been called “Royals Behaving Abominably”. At one point in the film, Blair (Michael Sheen) throws up his hands in exasperation and bellows to his staff: “Will somebody please save these people from themselves.” To his wife Cherie (Helen McCrory), Blair is even more acerbic: “They screwed up her life -- let’s hope they don’t screw up her death.”

But even as he accuses the queen of being obtuse and intractable, Blair comes to her defense when one of his aides -- a speechwriter who dubbed Diana the “People’s Princess” -- makes particularly disparaging remarks about Elizabeth. The prime minister stresses that her narrow focus on loyalty, custom, and service derives from knowing no other life and being supremely responsible for holding the monarchy together, maintaining its integrity amidst divergent royal personalities who sometimes stray from constrictive rules of conduct; increasing media encroachment; and public antipathy.

The family, holed up at Balmoral Castle, has detached and distanced themselves from a world in shock and mourning and a grieving British public seeking solace and support from their monarch (Helen Mirren). It is the family’s narrowminded, spiteful contention that, since Diana is no longer an HRH -- code for Her Royal Highness -- and since she had besmirched her position by behaving wantonly, they were under no obligation to issue a statement of lamentation or in any way express their sorrow in public. The queen is indignant when Prince Charles (Alex Jennings) assumes he can use the royals’ private plane to fly to Paris and retrieve Diana’s body, citing extravagance at public expense. Even as world dignitaries and celebrities weigh in with their eulogies, the queen is oblivious to the implications of what she’s watching on TV. She urges Philip to distract the boys -- Harry and William-- by taking them up country to hunt stag, but cautions against displaying their guns to avoid judgments of impropriety.

While the queen herself is seen to be oddly perplexed by and unyielding toward all the fuss and clamor for her comforting words -- maintaining for days that the British people shun public displays of emotion and expect the royal family to set an august tone and grieve quietly, privately, and with dignity -- it is Prince Philip (James Cromwell) who is openly hostile to the memory of Diana, snidely merciless toward the Princess even in death. “Prig” is a term the British are fond of using to describe someone who is arrogant, stuffy, self-righteous, and moralistic. It fits Philip to a tee. The only thing he can think of when his wife is summoned to take an urgent call from Blair is “your tea will get cold.” Even the queen mother (Sylvia Sims), who reputedly had a ribald sense of humor and a penchant for late-night hobnobbing with the palace kitchen staff, chimed right in with all the sanctimony and insularity, though in one scene she does clutch her signature martini in a tumbler-size glass.

As the days go by and the mood of the people is escalating from puzzlement to displeasure to hostility, Charles, alone among the royals, understands the enormity of what is taking place. “Her weaknesses and transgressions only made the public love her more,” he tells the prime minister, adding praise for his ex-wife’s model motherhood. Blair believes that Charles fears an assassination attempt on his mother’s life --.or even on his own -- and seeks an alliance with the prime minister that may save his hide, leaving his mother to be targeted.

In the end, it is Blair himself who saves the clueless and stoical royals from themselves by appealing to the queen with deft diplomacy, facts, and figures. “70 percent of the British people think your behavior has damaged the monarchy,” he tells her, “and one in four want to abolish it.” He finally convinces her that “there’s been a shift in values.” If not contrite, the queen is at least persuaded that her wall of silence is not in anyone’s best interests. She drives up country on the 40,000-acre estate, and her Land Rover breaks down. While she’s waiting for assistance, she encounters and makes eye contact with a stag that’s being stalked by the royal hunting party. She is awed by the animals’s regal bearing and beauty, but it is its unfair disadvantage and vulnerability that strike a compassionate chord with the monarch. A shot rings out in the distance, and, impulsively, the queen waves her arm at the animal and murmurs “shoo, go on!” Was she thinking at that moment about Diana and the hotly pursuing paparazzi?

When she learns the next day that the proprietor of a neighboring estate has brought down a “14-pointer,” she is moved to call on the man and inquire about his prize trophy. He proudly shows off the stag, adding that they had to stalk the animal for miles. “Let’s hope he didn’t suffer too much,” the queen says elegiacally.

The film is full of resonant performances, but, as anticipated, it is Mirren as the seemingly impregnable monarch who is a towering presence on-screen, which might seem a contradiction given a character so confoundingly self-possessed and inscrutable. However, Mirren’s “less is more” approach to the role eschews caricature and embraces an economy of mannerisms, so that the mere flicker of an eyelash, arched brow, pursed lip, clearing of the throat, or escaping sigh are profoundly meaningful. In her first meeting with Blair, several months before the tragedy, the queen softens the formality of the occasion with flashes of wry humor, and Mirren is assiduous in complementing facial expression and body language with flawless intonation.

Ultimately, what Mirren is able to convey with genius is a subtle, revelatory shift in how the monarch views her relationship with a public that no longer internalizes its feelings. Near the end of the film, when she ventures outside the gates of Buckingham Palace to mingle with the throngs there to pay their respects to Diana, she does so with misgivings, even a sense of foreboding -- the informality of the encounters is so alien to a life experience rooted in propriety and protocol, an inherent remoteness from the hoi polloi. As she interacts with individuals in the crowd and looks into their faces, the enormity of their affection and gratitude for her presence, even if it is largely symbolic, begins to sink in. Her eyes moisten and her stiff upper lip begins to quiver. Perhaps the People’s Princess has, through the most tragic of circumstances and perhaps only for this once, given her disapproving mother-in-law her first unguarded, non-scripted moment of communion with ordinary people-- a liberating connectedness with those outside her circumscribed, even oppressive realm of decorum, duty, and tradition. This concluding scene is truly a magic Mirren moment.





INFAMOUS (B)

“Infamous,” directed by Douglas McGrath from his screenplay based on George Plimpton’s biography of Truman Capote, is an often amusing, less often deeply affecting film that suffers from its fey excesses and inevitable comparisons with last year’s more grounded, penetrating, and cohesive treatment of the same subject matter, anchored by a discerning, mesmerizing, Oscar-winning performance by Philip Seymour Hoffman and propelled by a highly perceptive and literate Oscar-nominated screenplay by Dan Futterman -- making it an awfully tough act to follow.

“Infamous” was filmed almost simultaneously with “Capote,” but its release was delayed for the obvious reason that Bennett Miller’s production was the first one out of the gate and earned unanimous raves. This version of the Capote-In Cold Blood saga derives much of its entertainment value from the limp-wristed flamboyance and caustic wit of its celebrity protagonist and the fact that it features a supporting cast of Hollywood who’s who actors. McGrath’s script is heavily spiced with memorable quips and zingers, juicy interpersonal intrigues, and swaths of 50’s and 60’s fashion and glamor, all very diverting but far less germane to the monstrous massacre of a Kansas farm family and the improbability that an urbane, effete wag like Capote would want to write about it.

Shortly after Capote (a suitably gnomish and swishy Toby Jones) and Nelle Harper Lee (a remarkably self-restrained Sandra Bullock) arrive in Kansas, he, no less, in a frilly floor-length coat with fur collar and fur-cuffed sleeves, the writer places a call to District Attorney Alvin Dewey (Jeff Daniels) who’s handling the murder investigation. Dewey’’s officious secretary informs the caller that “the D.A. doesn’t take calls from strange women” -- to which Capote retaliates with: “Who says I’m strange?” Invited to Christmas dinner by Dewey’s wife, Capote and Lee arrive with the obligatory gifts of the season. Lee hands hers to Marie Dewey (Bethlyn Gerard) and gushes: “We brought you a fruitcake.” Without missing a beat, Capote rejoins “and she doesn’t mean me.” He wins over the star-struck Deweys and their other dinner guests by regaling them with anecdotes about some of his cronies, scoring biggest with a poker-game reminiscence about Humphrey Bogart, presumably to establish a link with macho men and their leisure pursuits. Later, Capote breezily challenges Dewey to an arm-wrestling duel...and wins! “When you’re tiny, you’ve got to be tough,” Capote crows. “This world isn’t kind to little things.”

The snappy one-liners continue into the big house. As Capote is sashaying down the cell block enroute to an interview with the accused killers, cat calls ring out from neighboring cells. “Hey, want to suck my cock through the bars,” one inmate calls out. Capote is quick on the retort: “Yours couldn’t reach through the bars.” Another invitation to perform fellatio gets this retort: “I never snack between meals.” When someone asks Capote whether he feels threatened around Dick Hickock and Perry Smith, he’s quick on the trigger again: “I’m much more concerned about my safety around Norman Mailer.”

But not enough screen time is devoted to Capote’s dogged struggle to research, write, and publish a book about a heinous crime in America’s heartland, at the same time he’s falling in love with one of its perpetrators. In last year’s film, the relationship between Capote and prisoner Perry Smith was subliminal and ambiguous -- their attraction to one another was mutually opportunistic, but unacknowledged either in word or deed. They never became chummy and certainly not overtly physical, although there were homoerotic undercurrents. Capote’s largely internalized torment arose when stays of execution he helped bring about were, in fact, preventing him from putting an ending on his history-making nonfiction novel, yet keeping the object of his growing ardor alive for a little while longer. In “Infamous” the attraction churns only briefly, then surfaces with a passionate bang, which diminishes the tantalizing cat-and-mouse maneuvering of both characters and tends to sensationalize and cheapen the story. The gallows scene is more macabre and Capote’s reaction to it more manifest. Whereas “Capote” the movie burrows into your psyche, gets your diagnostic juices flowing, “Infamous” leaves little for one to puzzle out.

Jones’s performance, while fascinating to watch, really doesn’t flatter Capote in any way. Nor does it give proper weight to the author’s intellectual acuity and artistic genius. Much is made of the fact that Capote can’t be trusted with a confidence, that he trades in cruel and careless whispers about the rich and famous, . He is one of the notorious “ladies who lunch,’’ and his partners in scandalous scuttlebutt are his so-called bevy of “swans,” playfully impolite society matrons such as Babe Palely (Sigourney Weaver), Diana Vreeland (Juliet Stevenson), and Slim Keith (Hope Davis) who are dazzled by his acerbic wit and flirtatious coddling. Other real-life characters who populate Capote’s dizzying Manhattan social life and indulge his eccentricities, and whose recollections are the basis of Plimpton’s original memoir, are Gore Vidal (Michael Panes), Marella Agnelli (Isabella Rossellini), and Bennett Cerf (Peter Bogdanovich.

Daniel Craig, the new James Bond, is alternately savage and tenderhearted, recalcitrant and remorseful as the hulking Perry Smith. Never is Smith’s essential fragility revealed more poignantly than when he turns to Capote just before being led to the gallows and asks: “You weren’t just being nice to me for the book, were you?” And character actor John Benjamin Hickey (Flags of Our Fathers, Flightplan) brings surprising dimension to the small role of Jack Dunphy, fellow writer and Capote’s forbearing and forgiving partner-in-life, a bemused bystander to the artifice of Capote’s social circle. According to one of Vreeland’s recollections, Dunphy had been married to a wife who cheated and cured his bad taste for infidelity by turning to men. Not that liife with Truman Capote was blissful or nurturing.