SPRING PICKINGS 2007

BREACH (A)

What d’ya know -- an A-list 2007 film already, and we’re only in the middle of Spring. Billy Ray’s curriculum vitae as a movie director doesn’t impress with its quantity -- he’s been at the helm of only two productions -- but both are artistic triumphs, even if not boffo box office. His “Shattered Glass, for which he also wrote the screenplay, is the true story of rising-star journalist Stephen Glass, who fell from grace almost overnight when his editor, Chuck Lane, discovered he had fabricated elements of most of his articles for The New Republic. With finely etched performances from Hayden Christensen (Glass) and Peter Sarsgaard (Lane), “Shattered Glass” finished fifth in my “Dazzling Dozen” sweepstakes for 2003.

Now, four years later, Ray has taken a screenplay co-authored by Adam Mazer and William Rotko, also based on actual events concerning another who brought discredit and dishonor upon himself and his profession, and fashioned a second minor masterpiece that will likely get lost in the shuffle of late-year releases target-marketed for awards consideration. “Masterpiece,” as I apply it to filmmaking, is reserved for projects in which all of the elements are authentically and compellingly imagined and executed.

“Breach” refers to a security breach of historical magnitude and unparalleled acts of treason by an FBI agent named Robert Hanssen, who sold U.S. government secrets of the highest classification to the Soviet Union during a long, iconic career with the agency. Hanssen is ultimately brought down by Bureau newbie Chris O’Neill, who is officially assigned to the agent as an administrative clerk, but who is instructed to spy on his boss’s extracurricular pursuits, notably a penchant for kinky sex and internet porn, which, if it surfaced in the media, would bring disgrace to the agency. Only when O’Neill begins to view Hanssen as a mentor and role model and questions the validity of his surveillance is he brought in on the far weightier issue of an agent who gives aid and comfort to the enemy. His new insight reinvigorates O’Neill, and “Breach” becomes a nail-biting confidence game of wits and nerves between the two men.

No one can play sullen, embittered, narrowly focused, inherently disapproving, unyieldingly conservative and self-righteous characters better than Chris Cooper (Capote, My House in Umbria, October Sky), and casting him as Hanssen was an artistic no-brainer. Cooper is bedeviling as a family man; devoted husband; pillar of the community, devout, proselytizing Catholic -- all piety and sanctimony -- who routinely undermines the safety and security of his country at great financial enrichment. Curiously, and to quote disingenuous sports celebrities, “it’s not about the money” with Hanssen. He squirrels away his spoils in an office hiding place in further disavowal of ostentation. Hanssen commits treason for the pure conceit of knowing that he can -- with impunity -- because of the appalling bureaucracy and ineffectuality of the agency he works for.

But Katie Burroughs, the department director who hand-picks O’Neill to get the goods on Hanssen, is a tough cookie who has staked her career, her dedication to which leaves no time for a personal life, on stanching the outflow of sensitive documentation to the Soviets. She’s anything but a blithering bureaucrat, and Laura Linney, who ranks with Cate Blanchett, Kate Winslet, and Nicole Kidman among dynamic leading ladies for whom apparently no role is beyond artistic reach, plays her in full throttle. Linney, in fact, can play anything from babe in the woods to ball buster, with conviction and veracity. Burroughs is a fully committed Bureau soldier, with, by her own admission, no one to come home to at the end of the day.

Unexpected, though, is the mature, resourceful performance of Ryan Phillipe as O’Neill. It appears that Phillipe, like Leonardo di Caprio, has finally outgrown the earnestly boyish and sometimes purely ornamental roles that sustained him as a box office draw throughout the late 90s and early 2000s. I’ve never doubted his talent -- he has scenes in the shamefully overlooked “Playing by Heart” that take my breath away. I thought he took a giant leap forward in “Crash,” playing a cop who tragically misreads and overreacts to a touchy situation, then a giant leap backward as one of the bland, faux Iwo Jima heroes in Clint Eastwood’s grossly overrated “Flags of Our Fathers”. Up next is “Stop Loss,” slated for release later this year.


THE LIVES OF OTHERS (A+)

I don’t bandy about superlatives casually or carelessly. In any given year, there are up to a score of films that merit high praise, films I have no hesitation in labeling “excellent.” Every one of my “Dazzling Dozen” picks for last year were excellent movies in every artistic aspect; so were my six documentary nods. And there were at least a half-dozen other features that didn’t make my lists but straddled a fine line between very good and excellent. However, only one 2007 film superseded “mere” excellence -- “United 93.” Paul Greenglass’s high-torque docudrama was extraordinary, and, in some respects, a landmark film.

“The Lives of Others” is also an extraordinary movie, sensational, memorable, even momentous. But unlike “United 93,” which was febrile and frenzied, “The Lives of Others” smolders introspectively; it agitates quietly, gets under your skin, then, when you least expect it, makes a beeline straight to your heart. It debuted at the Telluride Film Festival last September; then, as Germany’s official entry, it captured the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film last month. But it wasn’t released to U.S. theaters outside of Los Angeles and New York until February 9, and then on a very limited basis, so, in my mind, it qualifies for 2007 consideration. If it plays at an art house anywhere near you, drop everything and head for the box office post haste. Chances are, it won’t be around for long. It’s too subtle and reflective for audiences raised on computer-generated visuals and thunderous aurals.

The film, set in East Germany, opens in 1984, still a few years before the first glimmer of Glasnost -- although there may have been some inkling that political upheaval was on a distant horizon because deputies of the repressive socialist regime were beginning to sense that the natives were in a restive mood and becoming more boldly interactive with the West. The Secret Police, known as the Stasi, were particularly paranoiac about the subversive activities of artists and writers, on the lookout for suspicious subtext in plays, for instance, or the sub rosa political associations and activities of those in the performing arts.

Under surveillance in “The Lives of Others” are playwright Georg Dreyman (Sebastian Koch), heretofore thought of as a loyal subject of the regime, and his lover Christa-Maria Sieland (Martina Gedeck), first lady of the East German stage. But senior officials have reason to believe that Dreyman’s new play contains subtle dissident elements. His apartment is, therefore, bugged top-to-bottom, and Captain Gerd Wiesler (Ulrich Muhe), a staunch Stasi operative with ice water in his veins, is assigned to head up a round-the-clock wiretap from a nearby loft. Wiesler is one of those fanatic loners whose entire being is consumed with defending against enemies of the vaunted system, using the most brutally manipulative techniques. His life is empty of any other purpose and, as far as we can see, any other human contact. His art is the breaking and unmasking of political adversaries, and we are meant to expect no less from him than the thorough dismantling of Dreyman’s and Sieland’s professional and personal lives. Adding to the intrigue is a bedeviling sexual affair the actress is having with a powerful party minister.

But this time around, eavesdropping on “The Lives of Others” is doing a turnabout number on Wiesler’s steely single-mindedness. As he and we are getting to know intimate details about the suspected couple simultaneously, elements in Wiesler’s subconscious -- fragments from a former life, perhaps -- are stirred up, and he finds himself in a delicate quandary of spiritual awakening and empathy -- to put it mildly, feelings inconsistent with pragmatic job performance. It is here that the film alters course as a taut, well-acted cat-and-mouse spy thriller and zeroes in on the oblique nature of allegiances and priorities in a repressed society -- an evocative study of characters and character under political duress that is ultimately redemptive and affirming, though not everyone emerges from the morass unscathed. What is all the more astonishing about “The Lives of Others” is that it is essentially the major film debut of producer-writer-director Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck. Besides its Oscar, the film has garnered more than three-dozen international awards and nominations, and, believe me, there’s nothing mysterious or subversive about that groundswell of recognition.

In German, with subtitles.


REIGN OVER ME (B)

For years I’d been crowing to friends that I’d never seen an Adam Sandler movie -- on purpose. Sandler, who made a name for himself initially on The Cosby Show and Saturday Night Live, has a career resume chock full of idiotic opuses featuring imbecilic louts, such as “Airheads,” “Coneheads,” “Mixed Nuts,” “Happy Gilmore,” “The Waterboy,” “The Animal,” and “Eight Crazy Nights”. I know, I know, it’s a generational thing. I’m not 16, 26, or 36. Who can argue against audiences that have stampeded box offices and laughed their asses off at most of Sandler’s films, plus the fact that he’s chortled all the way to the bank on a very regular basis.

I came close to breaking my string of boycotts in 2002, but a slate of more compelling releases eventually kept me away from “Punch-Drunk Love,” despite the tempting presence of Emily Watson and Philip Seymour Hoffman.

Now it’s very early in filmdom’s fiscal year 2007, and there’s not much around I want to see -- “Wild Hogs,” “300,” and “Blades of Glory” not being up my alley. So I swallowed my principles hard and ventured into a suburban multiplex -- one of their largest auditoriums with a gargantuan curved screen and earsplitting DTS surround sound -- to take a gander at “Reign over Me,” a title that derives from the song “Love, Reign o’er Me,” by The Who. A cover version of the song by Pearl Jam overlays the soundtrack during a crossroads scene, though it did not make it to the soundtrack CD -- copyright issues, I suppose -- which only includes Rolfe Kent’s quirky, but impelling jazz-pop-calypso score.

No doubt about it, Sandler has talent, and he’s clearly the best thing about “Reign over Me,” a non-fatally flawed film by writer-director-actor Mike Binder that tries to heft too much psychological baggage too great a distance in slightly more than two hours. Still, Sandler, who mumbles and croaks like Dustin Hoffman in “Rain Man,” manages to convince us that he’s Charlie Fineman, once lovingly devoted husband and father suffering from post-traumatic distress and acute denial following the slaughter of his wife, children, and the family dog aboard one of the 9/11 hijacked airliners. Now, several years later, his grief camouflaged by a hermetic life of structure and ritual, Charlie tools around a curiously uncongested metropolis on a motorized scooter, jams on drums once a week with a band of rag-tag musicians, and is hooked on video games, Chinese take-out, and an ongoing redo of his kitchen.

It is Alan Johnson (Don Cheadle) who discovers Charlie -- rediscovers him, actually, because the two were roommates back in dental school, when a big deal is made that Charlie slept in the raw. Alan has all the trappings of upper middle-class life Charlie has either lost or relinquished -- a thriving practice, trophy wife, two high-achieving kids, and a meticulously appointed home, measured to the wife’s tastes, we assume by inference. Yet, he seems acquiescent, deferential, compliant, and unfulfilled until he spots Charlie on the street and reunites with his disconnected and easily agitated ex college buddy, who is even reluctant to acknowledge their youthful association let alone the family life blasted from a more recent past.

Alan is determined to shake Charlie from his crippling funk and see him through to recovery. Charlie, in moments of objectivity and insight, steers Alan on a path to self-discovery. The irony of their juxtaposing situations is an intriguing setup, but Binder complicates the central narrative with subplots that lack authenticity or thoroughness and fringe characters whose motives are sketchy -- such as a mentally unstable patient who makes sexual advances toward Alan, threatens to sue his practice when he rebuffs them, then has a change of heart and ends up an interested party in Charlie’s journey; the three other practice partners who are an adversarial gang towards Alan for reasons that appear to go beyond the threatened lawsuit; in-laws who profess their abiding affection for Charlie, but go out of their way to have him put away; an indulgent landlady who perseveres as the front line against those who might want to insinuate themselves into Charlie’s life, despite his mental instability and the liberties he takes as a tenant; Charlie’s attorney Bryan Sugarman, played by Binder himself, who is the overly zealous guardian and dispenser of his client’s considerable assets, gleaned from insurance payouts following 9/11, but with a strong suggestion of ulterior motive in a court scene presided over by a cantankerous judge (Donald Sutherland, who, at nearly 72, has appeared in 10 films in the past two years). Only Alan’s wife Janeane (Jada Pinkett Smith) appears to have her life together, presumably because she always gets her way -- at least until her husband starts paying more attention to Charlie than to her.

Alan Johnson, agreeable and assertive-challenged, is hardly a stretch role for Cheadle after “Hotel Rwanda” and “Crash” or in front of “Talk to Me,” in which he’ll appear later this year as real-life character, “Petey” Greene, a rabble-rousing ex-con who connives and bombasts his way into becoming a Washington, D.C. radio icon during the 1960s. Yet despite its lack of ringing clarity, “Reign over Me” is an earnest and diverting entertainment, if only from the absence of the usual Sandler buffoonery.


ZODIAC (B+)

David Fincher’s “Zodiac,” which spans 14 years in the life of a San Francisco Bay area serial crime investigation and its journalistic implications, is long (172 minutes) and methodical because it needs to be, but still manages to be a gripping, if diabolically elusive conundrum throughout. In the end, two decades worth of circumstantial evidence points to Arthur Leigh Allen as the self-named Zodiac killer, but even DNA is inconclusive, and the presumed perpetrator, though occasionally, even deliberately, clumsy enough to be caught, is clever enough to avoid due process.
Eventually, the bedeviling case takes a consuming toll on the careers and personal lives of two San Francisco police detectives, an SFPD handwriting expert, a San Francisco Chronicle reporter, and his newsroom collaborator, cartoonist by trade, but also an amateur sleuth and clue buster, who puzzles out the cryptic codes contained in taunting letters Zodiac sends to the paper. It is cartoonist Robert Graysmith’s book on which James Vanderbilt’s stirring screenplay is based.

This is a male-dominated film; women are cameo accessories -- murder victims, material witnesses, neglected and exasperated wives and girlfriends. San Francisco looks remarkably as it did in 1969 (when I was in residence), the Embarcadero Freeway looming in the forefront of the downtown skyline as seen from the Bay Bridge, fully 20 years before the monstrous elevated highway was humbled and tumbled by the Loma Prieta earthquake.

The three cast principals -- Jake Gyllenhaal (Graysmith), Robert Downey, Jr. (reporter Paul Avery), and Mark Ruffalo ( police inspector David Toschi) all give credible, workmanlike performances, as befit their recognized talents, but none of their roles is a career stretch. Gyllenhaal’s Graysmith is an eager, earnest, abstemious, but persistent boy wonder we’ve seen before in “October Sky” and “Proof”. Ruffalo is made-to-order for gumshoe characters that are just edgy, surly, and cynical enough to get under your skin. And Downey has way enough real-life experience to draw on to play the wisecracking, chance-taking, substance-altered investigative reporter.

Despite the fact that all of the mayhem and gore takes place in the first half-hour or so, “Zodiac” has enough suspense and riddle octane left in the tank to sustain it, as Graysmith out-persists law enforcement in piecing together evidence. Critics who get paid for their views have been even more sharply divided than usual on this film. Some have complained that once the murders have taken place, the film crawls along laboriously, dissecting the minutiae of the evidence, with only a tantalizing cat-and-mouse interview with the prime suspect as a genuinely creepy interlude. Others argue that the film deals brilliantly, on the one hand, with the psychological impact on detectives being outwitted by a sociopath who covets the highest profile possible without being apprehended and stymied by juicy leads that dry up in an instant -- and, on the other hand, with the obsessive pursuit of the case on an unofficial basis by a newspaper cartoonist who comes close to unraveling the mystery and unraveling his own life in the process.

Fincher (The Fight Club, Panic Room) is a deliberate, painstaking craftsman -- as studious in telling this story as Graysmith is in pursuing it. “Zodiac” is not a masterpiece, as a few scribes have opined, but it will draw you in and keep you involved if you don’t need booster shots of violence-induced adrenaline to keep you from wandering or nodding off.


THE NAMESAKE (B+)

Ashoke Ganguli, a bespectacled, socially awkward scholar, has already seen something of the world and established residence in New York City when he returns to his native Calcutta to find a suitable Bengalese wife. There, in a ceremonial interview, with both sets of eager and solicitous parents present, he meets a stunning, if reticent, dark-eyed beauty named Ashima he hopes will nod her approval. Years later, in a startling departure from their diffident, non-demonstrative relationship, Ashoke asks Ashima why she accepted his proposal; she, in a rare moment of playful candor, replies, to the effect, that he was the least offensive of the litter, though, still in her teens at the time and finely featured, she was hardly in danger of becoming an old maid -- by our standards.
The two board an airliner for America and a Manhattan culture and climate Ashima is ill-prepared for. She never does fully acclimate over the next 20 or so years, even eschewing Western attire, and, except for a work associate and confidante at the local library, sticks close to her community of fellow Indian émigrés, even when the Gangulis become prosperous enough to move up to a Westchester suburb. Within a year of their arrival, Ashima bears a son, but the couple is unaware that they need to provide a name for the birth certificate before the hospital will release the baby to go home. Urgently pressed for a response, Ashoke comes up with “Gogol” until, as is the custom, the parents and the extended family back in Calcutta, can weigh in on a more suitable appellation.

However, it turns out that “Gogol” is neither random nor a hasty stab at alliteration with the Ganguli surname. It’s a namesake dating back to Ashoke’s chance meeting years before with a garrulous stranger on a train, an enlightening spiritual discussion with the older man that ensued, and a brush with death later that same night. We learn about this connection at the same time that Gogol does, shortly after he’s come of age, is fed up with the taunts of xenophobic classmates (“goo-goo”, “gargle”, etc.), and decides to be called Nick, henceforth and forever more, as a truncation of the formal name of Nickolai he ended up with in due course after birth. That namesake becomes the film’s pivotal conceit, central to Gogol’s evolving relationship with his father, his conflicted identity as a native-born American, but with growing awareness and strengthening familial and cultural ties to India, and, ultimately, the two contrasting women with whom he becomes romantically involved as he struggles to sort things out well into his twenties.

“The Namesake” is reasonably well told by director Mira Nair, who gave us “Vanity Fair” in 2004 and a surprisingly popular “Monsoon Wedding” three years earlier, but with some reservations on my part on how the first quarter or so of the film was cut. The back story shifts between New York City and Calcutta so abruptly and transiently that relationships are occasionally unclear and passages of time jarring. I’m looking forward to a DVD of the film that may contain prefacing deleted scenes that may have littered Nair’s “cutting room floor,” in the interest of bringing the production in at slightly more than two hours. Once the film tracks with more linearity, and certain narrative links reveal themselves, “The Namesake’” becomes infinitely more involving and satisfying. The international cast is enormous -- more than 50 actors altogether, with some of stature, such as Linus Roache and Amy Wright, on-screen ever so briefly. The principal players -- Irfan Khan, as Ashoke, Kal Penn (Epic Movie, Superman Returns, A Lot Like Love), as Gogol, and Tabu, as Ashima, all bring an astute understanding of their characters and the thorny issues of assimilation, culture clash, and celebration of identity and dignity to their performances.

In Bengali, with subtitles, and English.


THE ITALIAN (A-)

Vanya is known as ‘the italian” among his fellow inmates at a seedy, overcrowded orphanage, situated on a remote and desolate stretch of real estate somewhere in the post-Communist Russia hinterlands. Six years old with the face of an angel, but already wise to the ways of the institution and its hierarchal setup, Vanya (Kolya Spiridonov) has earned his newfound ethnicity by endearing himself to a childless couple from Italy who are looking to purchase a son on the black market. Heading up the adoption “agency” is a voluptuous, hard-as-knuckles businesswoman known, appropriately enough, as Madam (Maria Kuznetsova), she out of central casting for la putana stupenda. The process takes two weeks, so Vanya has a breathing space of time to contemplate his impending change of scenery.
Most of the inmates are outcasts from out-of-wedlock liaisons, either abandoned by their unfit or unwilling mothers or rounded up from the streets as quick turnaround commodities. Some are guileless infants, others wiley youths who have established an intimidating caste system within the institution. A late-adolescent stud-thug named Kolyan (Denis Moiseenko) rules the roost and doles out rewards to those who are compliant.

Once they give up a child, mothers don’t have the option of a change of heart, as one repentant woman finds out early in the film when, on a mission to retrieve her son, she is barred from entering the facility, an altercation that Vanya witnesses. The boy follows her, and a conversation between the two convinces him to to eschew the chance of a new life in the Mediterranean sun and set off instead to find his real mother, aided in flight by a sympathetic older inmate. The dodgy entrepreneurs, Madam and her submissive boyfriend, are not in the least amused by the disappearance of one of their hottest properties and take off in fevered pursuit. Vanya, with mature instincts and canniness, gives them and moviegoers one helluva run for their money.

Director Andrey Kravchuk paints a starkly gritty portrait of cruel opportunism and abject futility -- an endlessly looping struggle for survival and a shred of dignity in the bleak and barren Russian heartland, and his actors fully embody characters who are, if not quite feral, if not quite aberrant, then surely highly idiosyncratic. One has to be cagey, devious, highly resourceful to live one day at a time in such an unkind environment.

Stories about exploited children, especially if they’re irresistibly adorable, are tricky for filmmakers, because of the inherent danger of slipping into sentimentality. Vanya is cute and likable enough, but he’s also crafty and a mite scampish. Kravchuk and Andrei Romanov, who wrote the screenplay, have us rooting for the kid because he’s formidable, not vulnerable. And, astonishingly, young Spiridonov seems to understand that distinction.

In Russian and Italian, with subtitles.


FIRST SNOW (A-)

We don’t see nearly enough of Guy Pearce, but maybe that’s just as well. Absence makes the heart grow fonder; familiarity breeds, if not contempt, then predictability, even cliché, as in the ubiquitous appearances of Anthony Hopkins, Morgan Freeman, and Will Ferrell. The edgy Australian actor, who sometimes reminds me of Kevin Bacon, made it known years ago, after completing Curtis Hanson’s “L.A. Confidential” with fellow Aussie Russell Crowe, that he isn’t interested in blockbuster celebrity and Hollywood hype. He makes little pictures, few and far between (Priscilla, Queen of the Desert, Memento, The Proposition) and gravitates either towards fairly ordinary characters whose lives are upended by a course-altering event or offbeat characters who don’t share ordinary people’s views of what is normal and real. Pearce plays Andy Warhol in a current release called “Factory Girl,” which I haven’t seen.

As Jimmy Starks in “First Snow,” Pearce is a flippant, motor-mouthed flooring salesman who has more ambitious plans to branch out into the higher stakes merchandising of vintage Wurlitzer juke boxes, if he can con his boss into funding an inventory. When Jimmy’s car breaks down in the middle of a New Mexico no-man’s land, he has a few hours to kill while the only mechanic in those parts gets it running again. He saunters over to a trailer owned by an itinerant soothsayer, an unassuming, monotonal, middle-aged chap named Vacaro (J. K. Simmons) who tells fortunes out in the middle of nowhere with none of the mystical paraphernalia usually attendant to the trade -- as in crystal ball, tea leaves, and Tarot cards. He asks politely if he can grip Jimmy’s hands, future-gazes routinely for less than a half-minute, then breaks off abruptly with a deep shudder and declares the session over.
When Jimmy demands an explanation for his jarring disconnect,Vacaro refuses, even offers to refund his fee.

Jimmy tries to shrug off the incident, but his mind keeps coming back to the fortune teller’s sudden fit of negative energy. He returns a day or two later seeking, if not another reading, then at least some insight into the psychic’s unsettling vision. Under the weight of Jimmy’s badgering, Vacaro blurts out that Jimmy’s days dwindle down to a precious few -- he sees no future for the salesman beyond the first snow. Now paranoia really sets in, and the merest of coincidences take on ominous foreboding, including the release from prison of a childhood chum Jimmy once sold down the river to save his own hyde. The rest of the film is a tortuous mindbender as his once lively confidence dissolves and he takes desperate measures to survive the fall of the first flake and cheat death.

Pearce is fun to watch as the arrogant, fast-talking huckster and frightfully compelling to behold in his character’s panic free-fall. Once again, the actor is facile, as are so many Brits and Aussies, in an archetypal American role. The screenplay, co-written by director Mark Fergus and South Burlington resident Hawk Ostby, makes a persuasive case for the incredible power of suggestion and the susceptibility of even the most grounded, practical-minded, and self-possessed among us to the audacious forecast of a premature demise -- particularly when the prophecy comes from someone else who appears as grounded, practical-minded, and self-possessed. I can relate because someone made such a prediction about me many years ago; fortunately, the fateful day came and went and I’m still here.

Fergus and Ostby build their tale of tightening claustrophobia and heightening agitation as a radio voice in Jimmy’s car trumpets the impending arrival of winter’s first blast and the camera nervously scans the southwest’s wide open spaces. The two also collaborated recently on the screenplay for “Children of Men,” the cautionary tale about the infertility of women in a futuristic doomed world, a film that finished just out of the running during last year’s movie sweepstakes season.


THE LOOKOUT (C+)

It may be asking too much for a filmmaker to objectify his or her finished product, having spent months or more so closely tied to every aspect of the creative process and the talent assembled to maximize that process. Clearly, not every writer or director sets out to fashion a masterpiece -- many films are nothing more than escapist fare, and that’s not a knock.

However, I have the dickens of a time reconciling layers of what I call “improbable content” in a movie about people in the throes of critical verismo situations. Please don’t play so fast and loose with credulity that I stop following the narrative and start looking instead for the next gross inconsistency or unlikelihood, wondering why capable, even outstanding, actors signed on to such a pot-holed project.

Case in point is “The Lookout,” from first-time director Scott Frank, who also wrote the screenplay, which starts out with high promise as a sensitive drama set in the midwest about a brain-damaged ex-high school hockey hotsot from injuries sustained in a car accident for which he was entirely responsible. Not only does Chris Pratt (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) suffer from diminished mental acuity, but he has the deaths of two of the car’s other occupants on his conscience. Now he’s trying to stitch his life back together, with the aid of cognitive rehabilitation programs.

Chris works as the night janitor in a small-town branch bank in rural Kansas, with high hopes of regaining enough of his mental faculties to graduate to teller. He shares an apartment with Lewis (Jeff Daniels), a mentoring presence who is sightless but highly intuitive and self-sufficient. Chris, who’s severely memory challenged, keeps a notebook with entries reminding him of the most rudimentary daily tasks, such as “get up and take a shower...with soap.” Lewis suggest that Chris arrange more complicated tasks in reverse order, working backward from the desired result.

One night after his shift, Chris checks into a main drag hangout called The Local, and, over a near-beer, bumps into a former chum named Gary Spargo (Matthew Goode), who pretends to have Chris’s best interests at heart. But Goode’s character is a real baddie plotting the heist of the very bank whose floors Chris mops every night. Spargo appeals to Chris’s feelings of disenfranchisement by premising that his employer is a repository of corporate greed that sucks blood money out of the farming community. He enlists Chris as a lookout by appealing to his frustration with a Joe job and a dead-end existence.

But once the heist is underway, there are reality gaps in Frank’s screenplay that rival the cavernous hollow being carved in the wall of the bank safe. Even as plans go awry, violence erupts, and Chris has second thoughts about his complicity, the suspense is evolving from circumstances that are implausible, especially when Chris’s roomie gets dragged into the melee. Chris’s role as lookout is superfluous as it turns out. During the entire time the safe is being drilled and the safecracker’s accomplices are pacing about the bank in plain view of plate glass windows fronting the town’s main artery, not one pedestrian or car passes by until, finally, a cop in a patrol car pulls up, fulfilling his routine nightly check on Chris, whom he supplies with donuts, and the bank.

Still, there are positives to acknowledge, including fully committed performances by the entire cast. Gordon-Levitt follows up his excellent work in the sociologically disturbing “Mysterious Skin” and last year’s neo-noir teen thriller, “Brick,” with another unmannered, carefully considered characterization. The young (29) British actor Goode casts off his spit and polish upper crust persona in “Match Point” to play a sleazy Middle America sociopath to perfection. Frank employs Chris’s reverse-action notebook as a plot twist that could have been pivotal during the tense climactic scenes, but the device appears almost as a fleeting afterthought -- either that or key shots were lost in the final editing. In any event, the concluding action unfolds awkwardly, as if in slow motion. If this were Frank’s first screenplay, I could be more charitable. But “The Lookout” has been preceded by a considerable output in the past 10 years -- including The Interpreter, Flight of the Phoenix, Minority Report, Get Shorty, and his Oscar-nominated Out of Sight.


BLACK BOOK (A-)

Rachel Rosenthal is living and teaching on an Israeli kibbutz on the eve of the 1956 Middle East war when the chance encounter with a tour bus passenger reawakens memories of a harrowing swatch of her life a dozen years before when she answered to the pseudonym Ellis de Vries. Her recollections in Paul Verhoeven’s “Black Book” are inspired by actual events and form the basis of the filmmaker’s explosive epic account of a Jewish cabaret singer’s flight from genocide and checkered involvement with Dutch resistance activities against occupying Nazi forces during the closing months of World War II.

It’s a nail-biter featuring shadowy alliances, shocking betrayals and brutality, enduring optimism and courage, plus a surprising romantic twist that defies conventional allegiances and serves as a redemptive counterpoint in a movie weighed down by treachery and inhumanity. And it’s director Verhoeven’s best work -- he also co-wrote the screenplay with Gerard Soetmeman -- since “Basic Instinct” 15 years ago.

I’ve been watching Nazi horror picture shows since I was a grade school scamp in the mid-40’s. It’s been more than 60 years since Der Fuehrer blew his brains out in a Berlin bunker, but stories of the Third Reich’s 12-year reign of terror and barbarism continue to be rolled out yearly by serious filmmakers, and most juxtapose unspeakable German atrocities with movements to subvert the holocaust and brave individual acts of beneficence. But Verhoeven deals forthrightly with the duplicity of many of his countrymen regarding the plight and flight of their Jewish friends and neighbors. It wasn’t all that “The Diary of Anne Frank” would lead one to believe, and Verhoeven rejects the notion of a national altruism, causing us to draw the conclusion that aid and protection granted to Jews was not so much based on humanitarian motives as on a thoroughgoing loathing of Germans, dating way before the emergence of Hitler.

When the story flashes back from the Israeli kibbutz, Rachel is being sheltered by a Dutch family whose stony patriarch insists that she recite a memorized Christian prayer as her entitlement to partake of the evening meal. Rachel goes along with the gag -- she’s a survivor after all, and a mock conversion to Christianity is a small price to pay for a safe haven. But later in the film, survival comes at a much higher price when she discovers that friends in high places are Nazi collaborators pretending to secure safe passage for wealthy Jews on the run, including Rachel’s own family, then selling them down the river to wholesale slaughter for a healthy cut of the plunder. That’s where a little black book comes into play.

When she joins the resistance and becomes Ellis de Vries, trust among her comrades is illusory -- it’s damnably difficult to distinguish between friend and foe -- and their efforts on behalf of her people begrudging. Ultimately, her assignment to cozy up to a high-ranking Nazi officer to obtain strategic information yields an unexpectedly ironic result and calls into question, as it did in “The Lives of Others,” just how resistant is political zeal to the powers of love and aesthetics.

Carice van Houten is radiant and enchanting as Rachel/Ellis and, because her character is by nature a cockeyed optimist, a free spirit, with remarkable inner strength and resilience, the scenes in which she reacts to breaches of trust and acts of savagery are especially galvanizing. Sebastian Koch, who was so impressive as playwright Georg Dreymann in “The Lives of Others” and who was awarded a Bambi as Best Male German Actor in 2006, is outstanding again as the politically conflicted, reclusive, and ultimately star-crossed Nazi officer Ludwig Muntze. Thom Hoffman gives a nifty under-the-audience-radar performance as flawed Resistance fighter Hans Akkermans.

In Dutch, German, Hebrew, and English, with subtitles. 145 minutes.


FRACTURE (B)

I know enough about acting, having tread the boards in nine amateur productions over a lifetime, to understand that an actor, in order to imagine and fully construct a character, has to probe his or her cumulative experiences, subconscious, and inner soul. And so, some characters for some actors are simply out of reach, out of one’s reaIm. I can only wonder, as I watch Anthony Hopkins, what dark and forbidding forces inhabit his soul that enable him to play demented geniuses with such chilling acuity. First the terrifying Hannibal Lecter in three stomach-wrenching films, then the brilliant, but certifiable mathematician Robert in “Proof,” and now Ted Crawford in a new film from director Gregory Hoblit (Hart’s War, Frequency, Primal Fear, NYPD Blue) called “Fracture”.

Crawford is a high-tech aeronautical engineer tracking the cause of a commercial airliner crash and the comings and goings of his adulterous wife Jennifer (Embeth Davidtz [Junebug]). When he’s certain he’s got the goods on her and the ace police detective Rob Nunally (Billy Burke) she’s shacking up with, Crawford hatches an elaborate plot to kill her, confess his crime under the duress of being assaulted by the cop in charge of the investigation -- the very same Rob Nunally -- then get himself off for lack of physical evidence, i.e., the smoking gun.

Enter Willy Beachum (Ryan Gosling), crackerjack assistant DA, short-timing as the case prosecutor while transitioning into corporate law with an A-list Los Angeles firm. Beachum, sporting a flashy 97% conviction record, regards this as a classic open-and-shut case, but he underestimates the diabolical cleverness and legal perspicacity of Crawford, who insists on defending himself. What ensues is a pitched battle of wits and Beachum’s desperate, under-a-deadline search for the missing weapon.

Hopkins essentially dusts off and repolishes his patented turn as a cerebral creep, well-stocked with his signature twitches, lip curls, darting glances, withering snarls, and distinctive Hopkinsonian vocal cadences that have a disquieting effect on every set of ears they fall upon. As I think about it, the Welsh actor, who must never turn down an offer -- he’s appeared in 16 films just in the seven years since he became an American citizen -- has fully invested himself in his fiendish roles, but mailed in many of his other performances.

Gosling, the second coming of James Dean, conveys, with a panoply of classic method devices (though he has no formal acting training), an overconfident wunderkind suffering his first professional setback. We are meant to understand that this case will be critical in Beachum’s maturation process, urging him to hone keener instincts and lose some of his nonchalant cockiness. Gosling is as facile and nuanced a youthful actor as you’ll see in American film today, and Hoblit’s camera frames his face in tight portraiture throughout the film, revealing expressions that can insinuate deeply felt responses without so much as a line of dialogue. Recalling preceding performances in “Half Nelson” (an Academy Award nomination), “The Notebook,” (an enormous sleeper hit), and “The Believer,” which won the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance, I’d say Gosling’s star has already risen in the east. We’ll see him twice more this year in the offbeat comedy “Lars and the Real Girl” and a fairy tale mystery called “The Other Side”.

As for the dilemma of the missing gun in “Fracture” and the unraveling of Crawford’s grand scheme, you may have to overlook some tall storytelling by screenwriters Daniel Pyne and Glenn Gers. Nothing of the magnitude of “The Lookout,” mind you, but make sure you’re wearing your suspenders of disbelief.


SPIDERMAN 3 (B+)

Professional critics have been all over this movie -- the first blockbuster of the summer -- a summer of threequels, as it were. Within weeks, “Spiderman 3” will be followed into a multiplex near you by third installments of “Shrek,” “Pirates of the Caribbean,” “Rush Hour,” and, most absurdly, yet another shameful “Oceans” indulgence from the Clooney rat pack.
But getting back to “Spidey,” reviews from the New York Times, Washington Post, and other prestigious journals, have put the knock on this action epic for too many villains to keep track of, a clumsy, confusing, bloated narrative, and a wrongheaded mean streak and inflated ego in Gotham’s popular folk hero. I beg to differ. Since when do we apply the standards of cinema verite to a Marvel comic strip fantasy suffused to the max with computer-generated images? No one’s burrowing seriously into the hearts and minds of people in real-life quandaries here. Improbable content is expected, desired, cheered. This is supposed to be pure escapist fun, an adrenalized eyeful and earful, with brief flourishes of touching humanity -- and, thanks to the gifted imagination of writer-director Sam Raimi, it is...in spades.

It’s true that Spidey/Peter Parker (Tobey Maguire) is confronted with not one, not two, but three seething adversaries, including his vengeful ex-chum Harry Osborn (James Franco), who persists in believing that Spidey vanquished his dad in the triptych's first volume. The Sandman (Thomas Haden Church), an escaped con on the the run who stumbles into a sandy pit being used for scientific experimentation and mutates into a foul-tempered granulated monster of immense proportions, turns out to be the accomplice in the murder of Peter Parker’s Uncle Charlie in the first Spiderman, or does he? Finally, there’s Peter’s professional rival Eddie Brock, the photographer who morphs into a lean, mean killing machine when he suspects that Spider Man has cost him his newspaper job.

Kirsten Dunst is back as Peter’s long-suffering girlfriend, and Rosemary Harris reprises her role as Peter’s sweet Aunt May. A slithering black mutation from a falling meteorite puts Peter and Spidey in a bad mood for much of the last third of the film, but that adds a dimension that makes his characters and their interaction with his friends and enemies more intriguing.

“Spiderman 3” is superior to the second series installment and at least as good as the first. It’s an eight-legged elegy for a character who may have spun his last web on the big screen for current generations of moviegoers. Don’t despair, though, is still fluttering and will glide into theaters on the wingspan of Christian Bale as “The Dark Knight” in the summer of 2008.