SUMMER WRAP-UP

TALK TO ME (A-)
RESCUE DAWN (A)

Two towering films, in release simultaneously, set in one of the most socially and politically poisonous periods of U. S. history, are facing an uphill battle to attract audiences commensurate with their intrepidity, grit, and craftsmanship.

On the surface, “Talk to Me” and “Rescue Dawn” appear to have little in common thematically, until you consider that both are set in the mid to late 1960’s , a time when Americans were locked in armed struggles on two fronts -- one in the jungles of Southeast Asia, the other in the ghetto ‘hoods of big-city America -- and just beginning to challenge the altruism of government and the ethics of big business. Disillusionment, distrust, and enmity, particularly among naively idealistic young people who were antiestablishment, hung like a choking cloud of photochemical smog over the land.

The gross receipts for these two bold, stimulating, meaningful, and satisfying films are paltry -- make that pitiable -- compared to the sky-high earnings of “Superbad,” “The Simpsons Movie,” and “The Bourne Ultimatum”. Hardly anyone outside the entertainment axis cities with critical masses of informed cinephiliacs is venturing into multiplex auditoriums to behold four or five of the boldest and brightest performances of the year by male film actors.

The reasons for this collective snub of artful writing and visionary filmmaking are several fold, and some are more obvious than others. First of all, it’s summer and theory has it that it’s too hot to think too deeply about complex, conflicted characters in palpably real-life contexts. Much better sit back passively and have your funny bone prodded by antic silliness or be stoked and scared stiff by action heroes, animated creatures, and high-tech effects. Summer movie audiences are dominated by adolescent males and young men who refuse to grow up and who are slaves to conformity and attuned almost exclusively to movies with big advertising bucks that are hyped by TV ads that proclaim that they’re “opening everywhere” on the same date. Not to see these movies, and see them the first weekend, is to beg for social ostracism.

The rest of the summer moviegoing public are younger kids and their indulgently compliant, almost as narrowly informed and focused parents -- those who explain away their arrested development tastes by disclaiming “we see what the kids want to see.”

“Talk to Me” and “Rescue Dawn” opened in “select” big-city theatres in July, preordained to trickle-down distribution as the blockbuster season waxed and waned. I went to see “Talk to Me” with a friend on an August Friday evening. The parking lot of the nine-screen multiplex was nearly full as we approached, and the lobby was brimming with excited, chattering throngs. A 60-something couple with three grandkids in their charge, stood off to one side of the ticket counter in a spirited debate over whether to see “Superbad” or “The Simpsons Movie”. I didn’t hang back to learn which won out. “Talk to Me,” starting only the second week of its booking, had already been downsized to two evening showings a day in the tiniest of the bandboxes -- with perhaps 75 seats, of which a cozy cluster of four were occupied. “Our” film ended at virtually the same moment as “The Bourne Ultimatum,” debuting that day in the theatre’s largest auditorium, which must have hemorrhaged at least 200 folks hooked and high on ramped-up sound and fury and thankful for minimalist dialogue and character development to ponder.

Then there’s this to consider: So many of today’s youth, who, again, comprise the majority of summer moviegoers, don’t have so much as a passing interest in what took place 40 years ago. For them, history is what happened yesterday or maybe as long ago as last week. The future is tomorrow or maybe next week. That’s why commitment to anything or anyone is becoming a lost cause. “Talk to Me” and “Rescue Dawn” might have fared better at the box office had they been held back until late autumn when older audiences turn out for the year’s more “important” films. Maybe they’ll be re-released around the time award nominations are being handed out.

On the other hand, for baby-boomers, who were the teens and twentysomethings of the Vietnam and civil rights era, these two movies, if they even know about them, may dredge up painful reminders of failed policies, broken promises, heavy casualties, and shattered ideals -- and a heightened sense of deja vu, futility, and fear in terms of the immediacy of Iraq, terrorism, and the erosion of personal freedoms. Finally, “Talk to Me,” with a predominantly African-American cast, is disadvantaged because Blacks, particularly those living below the poverty line, can’t and don’t pony up eight to ten bucks at box offices very often. Look around American stadiums and sports arenas and you won’t see many black faces -- in the stands, that is.

The careers of both Don Cheadle and Christian Bale have in common virtuosity, versatility, and the willingness to take risks with projects that carry no guarantee of mass public appeal. Their filmographies are a shifting mix of blockbusters and independents with wide varying financial results and critical notices. Cheadle scored big with “Traffic,” “Hotel Rwanda,” and “Crash,” particularly with critics, but bombed recently with “Reign over Me,” despite its earnestness and decent-enough entertainment values. Bale cashed in hugely with “Batman Begins” and “The Prestige,” but far more modestly with “Harsh Times” and “The Machinist,” despite astonishing immersion in every one of his characters in these films.

Talk to Me

Cheadle, in wide departure from several characters of quiet righteousness and moral high standing, plays Ralph Waldo “Petey” Greene, who cons his way to a commuted prison sentence, cashes in on a hastily made promise, and emerges full-blown and front-and-center as the morning-commute DJ at WOL Radio in Washington, D. C., circa 1966. Petey has a trash mouth showcased in pre-rap cadences and abrasive social commentary, in very touchy times. He’s the stinging, tell-it-like-it-is voice of his mostly African-American constituency in the nation’s capital and its blackest of all big cities. He always skirts a fine line between bare civility and running afoul of the FCC. He chain smokes, abuses alcohol, rejects authority, and is incorrigibly sexist. But, in his own way, he’s awesomely articulate -- albeit crudely and rudely -- strikes a ringing chord, and is enormously popular, a marketing bonanza for the once-floundering station.

And eventually, ironically, against the backdrop of the D. C. race riots, Petey Greene evolves into a voice of reason and, in the wake of Martin Luther King’s assassination, an impetus for dialogue and healing.

As mercurial as is Cheadle’s audacious performance, it is almost matched in intensity by that of Chiwetel Ejiofor (Inside Man, Kinky Boots, Dirty Pretty Things, Love Actually) as Dewey Hughes, WOL’s embattled program director, a former ghetto black who has jettisoned and doesn’t want to be reminded of the baggage of his sketchy youth in the projects as he climbs the professional ladder. It is during an obligatory visit to his incarcerated brother Milo (Mike Epps) that Hughes first encounters Greene, and in a heated exchange, during which Petey accuses Dewey of being an Uncle Tom black, Hughes promises Greene a job in the unlikely event he’s ever sprung from the big house. Hughes manages to keep Greene afloat and on-the-job when the station manager, E. G. Sonderling -- a fumin’ and fussin’ Martin Sheen -- wants to can his ass for conduct unbecoming an on-the-air personality, including insubordination.

Later, the film shifts focus for a time and explores Hughes’ own aspirations and achievements as a DJ and commentator on behalf of the people and his own self-rediscovery as the result of civil rights foment. Some critics have complained about the duality of the narrative, but I didn’t find it troublesome at all, and the London-born Ejiofor, who earned a Golden Globe nomination for “Kinky Boots” last year, morphs counter-culturally and empathetically. Then there’s Taraji P. Henson, yet a third prickly presence, as Vernell Watson, Greene’s true-blue, but no-nonsense girlfriend, who sasses and sashays all over the screen both in behalf of her man’s irrepressible gifts of gab and in retaliation for his infidelities and other excesses.

“Talk to Me” was co-written by Rick Famuyiwa and Michael Genet -- the latter is Dewey Hughes’ actual son. Kasi Lemmons, with more than 30 acting credits spanning almost as many years, directs this film con brio and gusto and keen insights. She wrote and directed “Eve’s Bayou” in 1997. Her current film is as fused with strong messages as it is unbridled energy -- it deserves to be widely seen and deeply reflected upon.


Rescue Dawn

Bale’s gutsy, gritty, quirky turn as Dieter Dengler, an American navy pilot shot down on a secret mission over the Ho Chi Minh Trail in Laos during the early stages of U. S. military involvement in Southeast Asia, required the Welsh-born actor to shed about 50 pounds and submit to quasi-sadistic director Werner Herzog’s real-life rigors of hell in the jungles of Thailand. Dengler, German by birth, but staunchly American by doctrine, shares some characteristics with Timothy Treadwell, the subject of Herzog’s chilling 2005 documentary, “Grizzly Man”. Like Treadwell, Dengler is fearless, passionate, optimistic, and off-center. Actually, Herzog made a documentary about Dengler, too, about ten years ago, called “Little Dieter Needs to Fly”. We’ll get to the significance of that title in a little while.

This dramatized narrative account of Dengler’s capture and brutal imprisonment by either the Pathet Lao or the Viet Cong operating in Laos and his subsequent valorous escape with fellow inmate Duane (Steve Zahn) was a grueling endurance test for the actors and is an assault on the sensibilities of the audience, as well. A scene in which Dengler consumes a bowl of live worms is pretty hard for us to stomach.

There isn’t much in the way of backstory in “Rescue Dawn,” but of Dieter we learn this much. He was a boy of five when allied fighter planes unleashed their furious raid on his German town in the closing stages of World War II. As he peered from a hiding place, a plane swooped so low overhead that Dieter could make out the pilot’s face and his fierce resolve. Yes, he was the enemy, this was war, Dieter’s town, his very house was under siege, but in that instant, the boy knew he had to fly.

Little more than 20 years later, Dieter, now a prideful, thoroughly assimilated American, is beholden to his adopted country to the extent that it is unthinkable that he would sign, as he is asked to do by the Laotian Province Governor, a statement admitting he is an American spy that will earn him freedom. But prisoners don’t come more resourceful, resilient, and upbeat than Dengler. With his derring-do and mischievous smile, he has the stuff of leadership and survival, and before long, he’s hatched a ballsy escape plan and rallies his band of dispirited inmates to sign on. But it’s a tough sell -- Eugene (Jeremy Davies), in particular, is resistant. His lucidity is clouded by months of subhuman treatment -- he believes a peace conference is in session, and they’ll all be sprung within a fortnight.

Ultimately, only Dieter and Duane carry out the plan. Once they’ve distracted camp guards and made their getaway, however, they face a much greater imprisonment and challenge -- surviving in the vast, teeming, treacherous jungle where packs of enemy soldiers, more familiar with the terrain and its inherent perils, roam at will and enemy aircraft fly overhead. “Rescue Dawn” evolves into a punishing grind against all manner of hostile forces -- at times the force that keeps them going is the bond of trust they’ve forged with one another. One can’t help but sense the intrinsic goodness of both men, and their mutually caring relationship gives “Rescue Dawn” its welcome moments of humanity.

When an interviewer recently asked Matt Damon how he felt about being shut out of the Oscar sweepstakes last year despite memorable performances in “The Departed” and “The Good Shepherd,” he modestly diverted the question to amazement at how Christian Bale’s performances in “The Prestige” and “Harsh Times” could have been snubbed by the Academy. Bale is a formidable presence in “Rescue Dawn,” but he doesn’t convey strength with a swaggering show of testosterone. With unfailing instincts, he plays Dengler as a freewheeling spirit with a screw just loose enough to make him indomitable. The actor is willing to endure physical hardship on shooting location in support of authenticity. And he not only delivers a non-mechanical American accent, but has the mannerisms down pat, as well. We’ll be seeing Mr. Bale again in “3:10 to Yuma,” “opening everywhere” September 7 and as Batman again next year in “The Dark Knight”.

All this said, Steve Zahn, heretofore known for his brattish,wise-ass characterizations, delivers a transfixing performance as Duane Martin, who by the time he and Dengler make it out of the prison camp, is a haunted, spiritually broken shell of a man, fatalistically dependent on Dengler. Zahn’s character reminded me a little of Dustin Hoffman’s “Ratso” Rizzo in the concluding scenes of “Midnight Cowboy,” as he and Joe Buck (Jon Voight) board a bus out of New York for the healing climes of Florida.

As for Herzog, the man has an affinity for obsessively driven men, with moderately arrested development and an infectious whimsy, who perform with grace under fire. When Dengler is finally rescued and returned to the aircraft carrier from whence he came, he gets a rousing hero’s welcome. When asked what his motivational philosophy is and what got him through his ordeal, his insouciant reply leaves us scratching our heads: “Empty what is full, fill what is empty, and scratch where it itches.” In other words -- perhaps -- a man’s gotta do what a man’s gotta do.


BECOMING JANE (A-)

“Affection is desirable. Money is absolutely indispensable.” With those cautionary words from her commonsensical mum ringing in her ears, offending her romantic and artistic sensibilities, and assailing her right to independence, the stage is set for a conflict between young Jane Austen’s late 18th century idealism and unconventional thought, and the pragmatism of selecting a marriage partner on the basis of future financial security -- essentially a choice between bliss and solvency.

Mrs. Austen (Julie Walters in usual top form) hopes that her daughter, who is known to have a streak of willfulness, will rethink her rejection of Mr. Wisley’s hand in marriage. Wisley (Laurence Fox) is the strapping, but dorky and tongue-tied nephew of snooty dowager Lady Gresham ( the ubiquitous Maggie Smith), who has resolved to finagle the cross-class union, despite her misgivings about Jane’s defiance of female propriety and her upstart literary aspirations. When Lady Gresham and Wisley pay a social call and Mrs. Austen summons her daughter to join them, Gresham wonders out loud what Jane is doing. When her nephew replies matter-of-factly, “writing,” the aristocrat, in her most imperious tone, inquires: “Can anything be done about it?”

Despite her family’s impoverished condition -- Jane’s father George (the equally ubiquitous James Cromwell) is the pastor of a small congregation -- and the lucrative offer on the table that will mitigate that condition, Jane, at least in this highly presumptive iteration of her life, chafes under the constraints of place and position and is damned if she’s going to marry solely for money. In her view, financial resources are desirable in a prospective husband, but passion is absolutely indispensable. Our heroine functions just enough outside the boundaries of place and duty to raise eyebrows and hackles.

Just then, as coincidence would have it, a suitable candidate enters her life, in the personage of Tom Lefroy (James McAvoy), an apprentice member of the bar who’s been banished from London and consigned to the countryside by his benefactor uncle, on whom he is totally dependent for his livelihood, for wantonly roguish conduct unbecoming a barrister. He shows up at an Austen family wedding, during which Jane reads a tribute she’s written.

It isn’t exactly love at first sight for Jane and Tom. He mocks her writing as banal, pretentious, and unworldly. She regards him as a shallow, arrogant misogynist. But there’s an obvious spark between them that ultimately ignites. And it is their tempestuous on-again, off-again, but undeniably ardent liaison, and the intervening power plays of those holding position and purse strings that are the competing forces at the root of “Becoming Jane,” directed with an economy of period pomp and starch by Julian Jarrold (Kinky Boots), from a literate, but unmannered screenplay by Kevin Hood and Sarah Williams. If nothing else, Jarrold gets my stamp of approval for reigning in Maggie Smith’s caricaturistic excesses. She gives an understated (for her) but thoroughly credible performance.

The character of Lefroy appears to be based on Mr. Darcy, the romantic hero of Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, the first draft of which she is writing as “Becoming Jane” unfolds. McAvoy, who gave such an outstanding performance as Dr. Nicholas Garrigan in “The Last King of Scotland,” for which he earned a British Independent Film Awards nomination as best actor, is yet another in a parade of classically trained (Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama) and gifted young actors from the UK and down under who are now routinely cast in independent films made both abroad and in North America. McAvoy’s Lefroy is a likable lout who, under Austen’s spell, morphs from hedonistic rake to ardent and tender lover.

Much is made in this essentially fictionalized narrative of her penchant for happy endings. Austen never married and died when she was only 42, but the final scenes of this bittersweet film imply that she was at peace with her solitude and the anguished decisions that brought it about. The luminous and graceful Hathaway (Brokeback Mountain, The Devil Wears Prada), who signed onto the role of Jane with some trepidation, gives a thoroughly persuasive performance with a more-than-passable English accent, infusing her character with dignity, wit, feistiness, and romantic fervor.

“Becoming Jane” is a visual and aural feast, sumptuously photographed and scored (Adrian Johnston), highly recommended for fans of the author and people who might want to be.





MY BEST FRIEND (MON MEILLEUR AMI) (A-)

Francois Coste (Daniel Auteuil) should be lonely and despondent because he hasn’t a friend in the world. No one in whom to confide, no one to stick by him in thick or thin, no one with whom to enjoy the camaraderie of shared experiences and likemindedness. But he’s clueless about his friendlessness because he is object obsessed, smug, and delusionary.

Francois is an eminent art and antiques collector and dealer and is defined by that exclusively. He is a materially consumed and ruthless businessman, divorced, with a grown daughter in whom he has a purely obligatory interest that, in turn, elicits her thinly veiled contempt. Francois’ girlfriend (Elizabeth Bourgine) hangs by his side like an ornamental accessory to his manhood and material accumulation and seems only mildly phased by his impassivity. It isn’t so much that Francois is surly, as he’s charmless and socially distant and unskilled -- style without substance.

Out for dinner one night to observe his birthday with a group of colleagues, and his unflaggingly attentive mistress, Francois turns to his longtime gallery partner Catherine (Julie Gayet) and asks who the woman is at the end of their table. He’s astonished when she tells him the mystery guest, who he’s been eyeing flirtatiously for several minutes, is her own life’s partner and adds, in case he misses the point, “I’m a lesbian.” Francois is too obtuse to be embarrassed by his unperceptiveness, but the others around the table aren’t about to let him off the hook. One by one, they weigh in on how out-of-touch he is, even with people he’s known for a long time, and they all deny, against his protests, that they are any more to him than business associates.

In this awkward moment, Catherine makes him an offer his overstuffed pride won’t let him refuse. Produce an authentic best friend within 10 days or hand over the one-of-a-kind Grecian vase he acquired at auction earlier in the day -- for the demoniacal pleasure, by the way, of outbidding a celebrity TV producer.

Francois goes on a feverish goose chase to track down a prospective ami, scouring his phone directory for old acquaintances, mostly fellow dealers he’s f_ _ _ _d over who regard him with wariness and distrust. But during his search, Francois keeps hailing the same taxi, driven by a gregarious, infectiously interacting chap named Bruno (Dany Boon). Bruno is a people person -- he chats up and lends a hand to total strangers, he smiles easily and warmly, and he’s a fountain of fascinating facts -- has even auditioned for TV games shows like “Know It All”.

Annoyed at first by Bruno’s imperturbable amiability and inquisitiveness, Francois begins to realize that the cabbie may be a resource for how to win friends. He picks Bruno’s brains for pointers on how to get people to like him. Bruno’s credo is simple enough: smile, be sociable, and be sincere. However, Francois’ old habits die hard, and the days are passing by with disheartening results. But, under the radar and unbeknownst to both men, Francois and Bruno are growing fond of one another and their banter is increasingly more spirited and personal. Bruno even invites Francois to his parents’ house for dinner.

Now don’t go assuming that things get all mushy, and the guys declare themselves buddies for life. Francois, being Francois, concocts a scheme involving the heirloom vase itself by which he can prove, unequivocally, to his doubting colleagues that not only does he have a best friend, but a best-in-show best friend. Francois miscalculates miserably, the scheme backfires, and an infuriated and disillusioned Bruno exits Francois’ life.

Does the master of antiquities learn from his blunders, see the error of his ways? In whose possession does the vase end up, and under what circumstances? What part does Francois’ disassociated daughter play in the film’s denouement? Is there a French equivalent of “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?” Remember that TV producer Francois gleefully outbid for the vase?

Director Patrice Leconte (The Girl on the Bridge, The Widow of Saint-Pierre), who also wrote the screenplay, imparts cogent insights into the spiritual nourishment that true friendship engenders, but keeps it mostly good-natured and unsentimental. There are observant messages and lessons, but Leconte directs with a light hand. Try not to get too analytical about the contrivances that ultimately tie up the loose ends, even if they are a little out of tenor with the rest of the film.

Auteuil is perfectly cast as Francois, always at his best with characters who are high and mighty, oblivious to their own foibles, judgmental about everyone else’s, and poised to outsmart the world. But it’s all but impossible not to succumb to the gentle geniality of Bruno, so disarmingly embodied by Boon, who we saw earlier this year, also with Auteuil, in “The Valet”.

Ah, and rejoice at the homage to Rick and Louie at the end of the film.


HAIRSPRAY (B)

Most screen careers that endure for decades flourish uninterrupted for an extended period, fall off gradually over time, then take off once again on the wing of a reinventive role. John Travolta’s career is an exception to the ebb-and-flow model. It has been a bumpy ride of fits and starts almost from the start.

Ever since Travolta strutted his stuff and gyrated every contour of his tight, lean frame in “Saturday Night Fever” 30 years ago, charming us with the foulest good-natured mouth ever heard outside the provinces of porn, success has been a damnably fickle creature, sticking around for a hit picture or two, then jilting the charismatic star for reasons not always assignable along artistic lines. But even when his films have bombed, Travolta, the actor, the personality, has sidestepped being branded box office poison, picked himself up, dusted himself off, and rebounded, sometimes out of nowhere in a role not expected to be up his alley.

Travolta has been in one of his bedeviling slumps lately. Earnest enough projects, such as “Lonely Hearts” and “Be Cool,” and “A Love Song for Bobby Long,” have not seen box office stampedes. And so, it was time for the 53-year-old New Jersey native to test the waters -- John Waters, if you will -- with a risky new persona. This is a whopper of a makeover, and it has lured legions of the curious into multiplexes nationwide, since debuting the weekend of July 20. Fitted with a foam-rubber fat suit, a bouffant wig, and various other prosthetics, Travolta has undertaken the character of Edna Turnblad, the rotund, ribald Baltimore hausfrau Mr. Waters originally created for his 1988 counter-mainstream romp, “Hairspray” -- all about innocent teens, circa 1962, competing for supremacy on an afternoon TV dance party called the Corny Collins Show in the era of the twist and mashed potato.

This 2007 movie incarnation is a melding of Water’s original screenplay and a 2002 Broadway musical created by Mark O’Donnell and Thomas Meehan, with music and lyrics by Marc Shaiman and Scott Wittman. That show is still entrenched in the Big Apple with Paul C. Vogt as the redoubtable Edna, as well as ex-N’Sync-er Lance Bass.
However, moviegoers expecting Travolta to reprise the salacious drag that was stock-in-trade for Divine, who played Edna in the original movie, and Harvey Fierstein, who played her on Broadway, may feel cheated by Travolta’s abstruse take on the character.

I’ve never been a fan of the Waters shlock shtik, and I’ve never been able to cleanse from my memory the loathsome scene in Waters “Pink Flamingos” in which Divine (Waters’ Baltimore bud Harris Glenn Milstead) chows down a handful of dog poop, even though it’s been 35 years since I’ve seen the film. Nonetheless, Edna in the current film is not the character Waters created. Oh, her appearance is an approximation -- pitchfork hips, sagging jowls, beady eyes, and a silly 60’s coif. But Travolta’s variant is girth without mirth. Edna has been cleansed of her saucy camp -- presumably to be family friendly -- and reduced, if not in size then in persona, to an agreeable agoraphobe who inadvertently grew to ginormity and now won’t be seen in public. Edna takes in laundry from busier neighborhood moms, and she’s as sanitized as her finished product.

If Travolta in drag was strictly a marketing device to fill seats, it has worked to the tune of more than $100 million in domestic gross, nearly unheard of for a movie musical, especially one released during the blockbuster season. “Moulin Rouge” and “Phantom of the Opera” reeled in only half that amount. But once the minions paid their money to see the Travolta freakshow, they wound up cheering the real stars of the film -- the young company of exuberant teens and twentysomethings that energize “Hairspray”-- led by bubbly newcomer Nikki Blonsky, as Edna’s zaftig daughter Tracy.

Blonsky drives the show right from the beginning, establishing its effervescence with a fizzy outpouring of “Good Morning Baltimore.” Unlike her self-ostracized mom, Tracy’s not about to let excess poundage weigh against Corny Collins fame -- even going so far as to infiltrate her high school’s detention room, where black classmates predominate and where she meets and bonds with Seaweed (Elijah Kelley), a quick and nimble dynamo white kids long to emulate on the dance floor. Trouble is, much to the chagrin of its super-animated host, played by James Marsden (The Notebook, Heights, Superman Returns), the Corny Collins Show is a segregated affair -- there’s a separate black edition once a month, owing to a racist policy implemented by the TV station’s waspy and shrewish program director Velma von Tussle (an on-target performance by Michelle Pfeiffer), who’s trying to rig the contest so that her own daughter wins.

Despite the moxie and pizzazz of Blonsky and Kelley, 19-year-old Zac Efron, fresh from his instant star-making performance in The Disney Channel’s “High School Musical,” has emerged as the most hyped presence in “Hairspray,” as Link Larkin, Seaweed’s squeaky clean white boy counterpart. No doubt Efron deserves his rave notices -- he’s a dervish on the dance floor, has a killer smile, and projects as a model of wholesomeness. Word of that has brought families in large numbers to “Hairspray” that were certainly absent from Waters’ original film.

Some of the casting choices are not so easy to fathom: Queen Latifah is bland and underutilized as Motormouth Maybelle, the black antidote to Pfeiffer’s von Tussle. And the inescapable Christopher Walken -- 13 films in the past three years and weirder and weirder with each outing -- mugs and babbles as Edna’s husband Wilbur, who, appropriate to Walken’s stock otherworldliness, runs a shop specializing in jokester novelties.

The musical score for “Hairspray” isn’t memorable -- you won’t exit the theatre whistling a happy tune, but it is zippy and infectious while you’re watching the movie. It is the spoonful of sugar that makes the medicine of messaging go down delectably. “Hairspray” has plenty of dazzle to entertain, and champions diversity and inclusion with disarming clarity and good will.
As for Travolta as Edna, he gets to hoof at the end of the film like he hasn’t on screen in a very long time.


DEATH AT A FUNERAL (A)

A mislabeled prescription bottle, a dwarf with a score to settle, shocking revelations about the father his reluctant son is set to eulogize, a grumpy uncle with irritable bowel syndrome, and a houseful of other neurotic mourners with heavy axes to grind, chemical dependencies to feed, and not-so-hidden agendas to advance are the splintering elements that farce is made of in Frank Oz’s unrelentingly hilarious black comedy, “Death at a Funeral”.

It all begins with a mix-up at the mortuary and the wrong coffin arriving at the memorial service for a beloved patriarch and degenerates from inadvertent confusion to dysfunctional calamity, resulting in the funniest film I’ve seen in years.

Oz, who, as director, gave us “In and Out” with Kevin Kline in 1997 and not much since, has taken a screenplay by Dean Craig that dovetails sight gags with subtle humor and guides an ensemble cast of highly skilled but lesser known British and American actors playing an assortment of addled, self-absorbed ditherers -- the usual suspects, Maggie Smith, Alan Rickman, Hugh Grant, and Emma Thompson, are nowhere to be seen -- through nonsensical misadventures that are successively more compounding and chaotic. It’s always fun to watch the upper crust flake apart as their order of things deconstruct, and people who are usually proper begin behaving abominably.

Unlike most comedies made in America, “Death at a Funeral” relies only minimally on bathroom humor or personal humiliation -- exactly one scene, and that one is staged adroitly and scripted succinctly. Nor does it have an uproarious first act, then flicker and dim. Nor is it based essentially on one joke that keeps repeating until it becomes lame. The series of set pieces have sustainable comic energy, punctuated by ironies expressed with a carefully turned inflection, pregnant pause, meaningful glance, or raised eyebrow that is prototypically British.

It’s almost a disservice to single out anyone from this splendid cast for special mention. The female characters, tightly wound and more reasoned, are largely foils for the antic males, who are variously unstrung by obsessiveness, hallucinogens, untimely and unseemly disclosures, and a chain of unrelated but exponentially dire events.

Matthew Macfayden (Pride and Prejudice) is the deceased’s junior son Daniel who has arranged every meticulous detail of his father’s funeral and now faces the escalating task of maintaining some semblance of dignity and decorum as matters unravel. Rupert Graves (V for Vendetta, Mrs. Dalloway, Maurice, A Room with a View) is Daniel’s older brother Robert, a New York writer of some renown and, therefore, the funeral’s default celebrity and his mother’s favorite son, but who can’t afford to pony up his half of the funeral costs. American actor Alan Tudyk, also seen this year in “3:10 to Yuma,” and “Knocked Up,” is Simon, the gentlemanly fiancee of cousin Martha (Daisy Donovan), who has a drug meltdown shortly after their arrival at the funeral that strips him of his composure and propriety. The man responsible for Simon’s giddy indisposition is Martha’s irresponsible brother Troy, a closet junkie. But the character whose mendacity begets the film’s merriest mischief is played, in an odd, but fortuitous, piece of casting by American Peter Dinklage (The Station Agent), as a scheming blackmailer threatening to blow open a dirty little secret about the deceased.

“Death at a Funeral,” as harrowing as it is for its grieving constituency, is a laugh-a-minute mood elevator for those of us watching from the sidelines.


CRAZY LOVE (A)

There is a maxim randomly used to explain occurrences and situations that are shockingly unfathomable: Truth is stranger than fiction. Two years ago, there was a stunning documentary called “Unknown White Male,” about a young man who “came to” one morning on a New York subway train headed for Coney Island, with no memory whatsoever of anything in his life up to that moment. He had to reclaim his identity, reconstruct the past, and reinvent himself, with the help of relatives and friends who may as well have been total strangers.

This summer’s real-life jaw dropper is as compelling and confounding, but it’s also right up there on the creep and cringe scale with another documentary, the 2003 mind boggler “Capturing the Friedmans,” about an alleged father-son child molestation tag-team. “Crazy Love,” evocatively written by Dan Klores and co-directed by Klores and Fisher Stevens, is about equal parts unsettling and unfathomable. In September, 1957, Burt Pugach, then 32, met and began romancing a stylish, 20-year-old from the Bronx named Linda Riss. Pugach was a scheister lawyer, purportedly an ambulance chaser specializing in fee-splitting capers. He looked a lot like nerdy comic Arnold Stang -- a resemblance he wanted to disown -- and consequently didn’t sweep Riss off her feet.

But Pugach made big money, owned flashy cars, knew middle-tier celebrities like film and TV actor Keefe Brasselle, and wined and dined his date at all the “in” places. He was attentive, generous, and ardently in pursuit of her affection, and over the next few months he either wore Riss down or grew on her. Linda could be a “tease” (in the vernacular of the times), in the sense that she was kittenish. Heavy petting was okay, but going all the way was reserved for marriage, and Burt was already married -- a loveless union with a woman who was indifferent to his carousing and dalliances but opposed to a divorce.

On the surface, Burt had the perfect setup -- a marriage of convenience and a free ticket to cheat. But Linda was a morally principled woman; a trip to the altar was the only pathway to her vagina. Burt didn’t believe Linda was a virgin, even demanded proof. So she hauled him off to an appointment she made with a gynecologist who certified she was intact. Backed into a corner, Burt assured Linda he was going to file divorce papers, even forged some documents as evidence. But she discovered the fraud and severed their relationship. The conniving bon vivant had met his match and now became anguished and obsessive, stalking her on foot and harassing her by phone.

In the meantime, Linda went off on a Florida vacation, met and handsome, younger man, and, in the spring of 1959, became engaged. Every tactic to win Linda back thwarted, Burt took desperate measures. He hatched a fiendish, preemptive strike. On the eve of Linda’s marriage, in June, 1959, there was a knock on her apartment door, and the visitors identified themselves as delivery men. Assuming they were trundling a wedding gift, Linda threw open the door, and two burly hoods, standing in the hallway shadows, doused her face with enough lye to disfigure and blind her in both eyes.

But, believe it or not, this is all preamble -- we haven’t got to “the good part” yet. And it’s the good part that defies all assumptions and conventional wisdom about obsession, despair, rage, retribution, guilt, atonement, and, finally, abiding love, challenging one’s personal rules and standards about the evil that men do and the justice that should prevail.
In the process of watching this incredible tale play out over 50 years, as told with chilling matter-of-factness by the two principals themselves, augmented by spools of archival newsreel footage and period-enhancing music, the audience is confronted with behavior shockingly anomalous with prevailing systems of reason and logic. Ultimately, “Crazy Love” is the reckoning of tandem themes -- that nobody’s perfect and that love conquers all.


NO RESERVATIONS (B+)

I hit a dry spell in late July and early August, and it had nothing to do with that legendary weather phenomenon known as the dog days of summer. No, it was a damnable dearth of movies to see -- check that, movies I care to see. Even the two theatres in my neck of the woods that customarily book two or three or more independent and foreign films were, hopefully for the short term, mainstreaming on every screen, with Harry Potter, Chuck and Larry, The Simpsons, Transformers, Bratz, Lindsay Lohan, an Underdog, a Hot Rod, and, that wonder hero, Matthew Bourne.

I might have opted for Bourne had its progenitor, another Matthew, surname Damon, not disclosed in a recent magazine interview that during the tortuous 140-day shoot for “The Bourne Ultimatum,” that the script was being written on the fly, and “we kind of found out that the character is a lot more effective when he doesn’t talk.” Excuse me, but I don’t want to know such a screen character. I’m stimulated by talk, lots of it, by characters that are given full life by visionary directors and actors working from a literate, finely tuned screenplay.

My options on the afternon of August 3 came down to one choice. With nothing approaching heightened anticipation, I put myself at the mercy of the expanding genre of present-day cinema known as the romantic comedy. In order to qualify for that pigeonhole, there needs to be a heterosexual courtship, an intervening force or meddling character, and some amusing (and sexually explicit) repartee. This particular iteration goes by the name “No Reservations,” and I had seen the trailer enough times to understand that it involved an antagonistic pair of competing chefs trying to function together peaceably in the same restaurant kitchen.

I figured, oh what the hell, if nothing else, I could watch two physically appealing, high aptitude actors, known for plying their trade with conviction and authenticity, go through their paces for a couple of hours, even if the plot setup could only lead to a predictable outcome. Well, the outcome was predictable, but the mostly linear journey took some surprising turns, and, on the whole, was satisfying and occasionally even gratifying.

Kate Armstrong (Catherine Zeta-Jones) is the headstrong cooking genius who oversees the manic kitchen of a classy Bleecker Street eatery owned by a perfect hostess named Paula (Patricia Clarkson), who is frequently called upon to referee confrontations between her head chef and customers who cast aspersions on her preparations. Kate has her issues, she’s in analysis, and it doesn’t take her shrink (Bob Balaban) long to figure out that her total absorption with the art of fine cuisine is, in part, compensation for a personal life that’s a total zero. So phobic is Kate about the opposite sex, that she sends out “warning, stay away” signals when any man comes within 20 feet, including her eager downstairs neighbor Sean (Brian F. O’Byrne), recently divorced and definitely interested in being more than neighborly.

When tragic family circumstances thrust a child -- Zoe (Abigail Breslin) -- into Kate’s life, her boss insists she take time off to heal her soul and gather her wits. Returning to her kitchen domain a week later, Kate comes face-to-face with the ebullient, ingratiating presence of an interim sous chef named Nick (Aaron Eckhart) Paula has hired on, at least until Kate’s home life settles down.

Nick’s an exuberant, likable Italophile whose boom box dispenses operatic arias, and the overall atmosphere has become more laid back. Kate and Nick in the same kitchen is like mixing Filippo Berio with Pellegrini. No culinary slouch himself, Nick left a job as head chef elsewhere for the opportunity to cook with Kate, so exalted is her reputation. But the harder as he tries to break down her defenses, the more she resists. But an incident involving Zoe gives Nick the opening he needs to effect a grudging truce with Kate. Their relationship becomes more collegial, then even cozier. Kate’s therapist is cautiously optimistic: “I’m sure you will be able to prevent the worst from happening,” he says. “And that would be?”, she inquires. “That he will tolerate you for any length of time,” he bites back. Sure enough, along comes that intervening force, and this one looks insurmountable.

“No Reservations” is a slick flick, but mindless fluff it isn’t. Not only is Zeta-Jones one of filmdom’s most beautiful women, but she’s a facile, multifaceted actress. And there appears to be a lot of Eckhart the ingenuous, forthright actor in Nick the chef. The two make a stunning screen pair, and they appear to have had as much fun making this film as it was for me to watch. Director Scott Hicks, whose previous credits include the 1996 Oscar winner “Shine,” for which he also wrote the screenplay, never allows “No Reservations” to become boilerplate, cliché, or icky sweet, despite elements in common with all those of its genre.


LADY CHATTERLEY (B-)

If you have a teenage son who has seriously misbehaved and you want to mete out a punishment more excruciating than grounding or the withholding of certain privileges, commandeer his hyde into a theatre showing “Lady Chatterley,” harness him into a seat, and watch him squirm for 168 minutes. Remember to ply him with one of those super-sized cola drinks movie houses specialize in, so he doesn’t dose off and defeat your purpose. Of course, since it’s likely that you, too, were born post-baby boom, this latest French language adaptation of D. H. Lawrence’s steamy 1928 novel of carnal relinquishment, that was once banned in America, may well bore you to utter distraction and tears aussi -- except for its three or four sex scenes, which, frankly, are tame in comparison to those in recent sexfests such as “The Brown Bunny,” “Shortbus,” or “Intimacy”.

There is much to admire about Pascale Ferran’s languid film, including a pervasive sensuality that transcends its sexual content. The film’s serene bucolic settings are sumptuously photographed, Ferran’s camera embracing and caressing the flora and fauna of meadows, orchards, streams, and woods, and the mostly gentle creatures that inhabit the countryside, so that even though almost the entire film encompasses no more than a few miles of landscape, it never feels claustrophobic.

With one very important exception, Ferran’s actors wear their roles fittingly enough whether they’re dapper in a motorized wheelchair, chic around an elegant dinner table, rain-soaked, half-dressed, or buck naked. Of the sex scenes, only one contains full-frontal nudity, both male and female. That one scene that includes a split-second glimpse of an erect penis and a playful reference a short time later to its flaccid state, was enough for the filmmakers to avert an NC-17 classification by the Motion Picture Association of America by releasing the film unrated.

The story, in case you need to be reminded, is simple enough. Constance Chatterley (Marina Hands) is the young, sexually ripe, but conjugally deprived wife of aristocrat Clifford Chatterley (Hippolyte Girardot), seriously wounded during World War I and now confined to a wheelchair and presumably impotent. One morning, Clifford sends his wife off on an errand to convey some instructions to the gamekeeper, Parkin (Jean-Louis Coullo’ch), whose hut on the Chatterley estate is at the edge of a wooded area, some distance from the manor house. Constance catches Parkin in the middle of his morning ablutions at the well to the side of the hut and is overcome by her own longings.

Their relationship is slow to build -- very slow -- and when they finally do get into the act -- a full 45 minutes into Ferran’s film -- the director is way too fussy about the mechanical undoing of some garments and rearranging of others. I know it’s stuffy old England of the 1920’s, and Parkin is suppose to be this strong, silent hulk mindful of his position in the social pecking order and a bit overwhelmed by her ladyship’s bold attentions, but their trysts, even as the purely physical evolves emotionally, have an oddly efficient, lukewarm brevity. Their scenes together don’t have the incendiary spark to contrast with the serenity of their environment.

It’s been 50 years since I saw the first film adaptation of Lawrence’s novel, also from France, starring Danielle Darrieux, Leo Genn, and Erno Crisa, and now available on DVD, by the way. That was before bans of the book both in U. S. and England were lifted by court order, and anticipation ran high when Marc Allegret’s movie was booked into the Heights Art Theater in suburban Cleveland during my college years. The Hays office was still in its censorship heyday, as far as American films were concerned, so we weren’t use to lovemaking as explicit as that portrayed in the 1955 “Lady Chatterley’s Lover,” although its simulation of sex is chaste by today’s standards. Allegret’s film is more than a full hour shorter than Ferran’s, which, given the straightforwardness of the plot, is probably to its credit.

At the time “Lady’s Chatterley’s Lover” was making the rounds of American art houses in the late 1950’s, “My Fair Lady,” was a huge hit on Broadway, and among its most endearing scenes is one in which Eliza Doolittle sings “Wouldn’t It Be Loverly”. A comedian on TV -- can’t remember who it was -- turned around Lawrence’s title so that “Lady Chatterley’s Lover” became “Lady Loverly’s Chatter,” rather applicable, I think, to this new film version in which the very lovely lady, who doesn’t have much to say to her husband or he to her, does chatter on randomly to Parkin, while he listens with an opaque expression.

Singularly annoying to me, in fact, was the overall appearance and performance of Coullo’ch as the stolid, stone-faced gamekeeper -- a charmless, unkempt man of wooden inscrutability I found off-putting. I would have preferred an actor a little less thuggish in appearance, and a characterization more responsive and forthcoming, at least in the latter stages of the liaison. This nettlesome deficiency is equal parts a fault of casting and misdirection, and it partially mutes an enchanting performance by the poised, luminous, and stylish Hands.


THE NANNY DIARIES (D+)

Have you heard about the new miracle food -- it transforms monsters into muntchkins and bitches into belles. And it’s sold in supermarkets the developed world over. It’s the premixed version of that sandwich favorite, peanut butter and jelly. But it only works as a tonic for the disposition if you skip the bread and spoon it into your mouth directly from the jar.
I should have made the connection while I was watching “The Nanny Diaries” -- 40 years ago, in my indulgent, free-er spirited youth, I use to ingest the same combo when I was high and already oh so mellow. Only the two were bottled separately, and I scooped with my fingers instead of a spoon.

“The Nanny Diaries” may have played more persuasively and less gratingly on the pages of the 2002 compendium of their real-life experiences by former nannies Emma McLaughlin and Nicole Kraus on which it is based. But the film adaptation, co-written by its joint directors Shari Springer Berman and Robert Pulcini, is neither parody enough to be truly funny, nor plausible enough to be taken seriously.

Our screen nanny, Annie Braddock (for a change, an unadorned, uncostumed Scarlett Johansson), has graduated from college with a degree in anthropology and is at sixes and sevens on how to put it to practical use. Her mother Judy (Donna Murphy), a nurse, thinks Annie should look for a “real” job, something in finance maybe. Out one day for a stroll in Central Park, Annie rescues an adorable little boy on a collision course with a distracted cyclist. His grateful mom, all class and grace, gushes her thanks. Annie introduces herself, but the voguish mom, who we come to know as Mrs. X, hears “nanny,” not Annie and pounces with a job offer the younger woman doesn’t have time or the assertiveness to refuse.

Once Annie has signed on to her custodial duties on Manhattan’s toney Upper East Side, Mrs. X and little Grayer (Nicholas Reese Art) feel at liberty to show their true colors. The apartment or condo may be lavishly furnished and appointed, as well as cavernous, but Annie is consigned to a colorless room the size of a walk-in closet that overlooks a dark alley. Mrs. X treats her like an indentured servant, calls her Nanny, and barks orders and instructions often in conflict logistically. Turns out the missus, besides being fatuous, self-obsessed, insensitive, and uncharitable, has a virulent case of OCD and is in denial that her marriage to the philandering and business-distracted Mr. X (Paul Giamatti) has devolved into a compassionately bankrupt union only held together by financial entanglements.

Nor is Annie’s little charge, Grayer, the model of sweetness and light he was after being snatched from the path of a barreling bike. He’s a willful, spiteful hellion doing his best to antagonize and alienate his former rescuer.

Just when we start wondering if Annie isn’t a closet masochist for turning the other cheek several times a day, the central conceit of “The Nanny Diaries” becomes clearer. Grayer may be a holy terror and his mom the she-devil of Park Avenue, but Annie can’t fail the boy by shrugging her responsibilities and throwing in the towel. We learn that, in the past, every time Grayer has become attached to a nanny, she has it up to here with Mrs. X and walks. Annie is determined to stay and face up to the challenges. She figures Mrs. X is a lost cause, but there have to be ways to win over Grayer.

Here’s where the peanut butter and jelly come in. Grayer is on a steady diet of healthy food his unyielding mother has circumscribed. Departures are verboten, but Annie dares to be deviant. With two spoonfuls of the yummy confection -- administered as “our little secret” -- Grayer becomes her little darling -- awwwwww!

With Mrs. X out attending lectures, self-help seminars, charity auctions, and society functions -- anything to distract herself from the humdrum of child rearing and reminders that her husband goes to great lengths to avoid her -- Annie the nanny is left a lot to her own devices, and her own devices only antagonize Mrs. X all the more. Plus, Annie has no life of her own, which becomes crucial once she encounters the hunk of her dreams, under embarrassing circumstances in the building elevator, and eventually accepts a date. Wearing a T-shirt boldly proclaiming his richly endowed alma mater, we come to know Annie’s prospective love interest by his nanny-given name, Harvard Hottie (Chris Evans). Looking remarkably like John-John reincarnated, HH, by sheer coincidence (yeah, right) is also a rich kid grown up, whose mother died when he was an infant and whose father sent him off to boarding school. That’s how he’s come to reside in this posh fortress, with which he’s so totally unimpressed.

Well...crises ensue, including Grayer’s second brush with death, which reunites Annie with mom the nurse, but just when you’ve lost respect for or grown to despise everyone in this movie but the Harvard Hottie, those who are beyond redemption and should get their comeuppance do get it, and an essentially mean-spirited movie has an abrupt change of heart, all because Annie persisted and endured. In the end, us poor souls in the pews are left with the unmistakable feeling that we’ve been had.

Laura Linney, now 43, has come a long way from her stints as little miss innocence, Mary Ann Singleton, Michael “Mouse” Tolliver’s gal pal in Armistead Maupin’s “Tale of the City,” which originally aired in 1993. I can’t think of n actress in greater demand or less likely to turn down a role. In just the past five years, Linney has appeared in 17 films, including highly honored award winners, “Kinsey,” “The Squid and the Whale,” “Mystic River,” and “The Laramie Project”. I’m convinced that no screen personality within reason is beyond her reach. She can’t be faulted for the misguidance of “The Nanny Diaries”. The character of Mrs. X is a caricature, not unlike Amanda Priestley in “The Devil Wears Prada,” and I’m also convinced that Linney has the capacity to have outperformed Meryl Streep in that role.

Johansson is on pace to match Linney’s productivity. Annie Braddock is the 22-year-old actress’s 30th role since 1994, when she was only 10, and her 15th in the past five years, though, not surprisingly, her best work has come in roles (Match Point, In Good Company, An American Rhapsody) matching her level of maturity, as Nanny certainly does.

However, “The Nanny Diaries” is a fabled exaggeration of the authors’ actual experiences. And as silly and surly as people and things get, we just know there have to be reckonings and reconciliations. A certain amount of predictability and/or redemption I can deal with, if the entertainment values are high overall. But Mrs. X sitting alongside her forgiving son, jointly cooing over spoonfuls of peanut butter and jelly, is more than I can stomach.


3:10 TO YUMA (A)

Westerns, ergo cowboy movies, just aren’t what they use to be, and that’s a good thing. But before I explain what I mean, I should point out that the genre has been out of vogue for some time. And don’t even go there with “Brokeback Mountain” -- it was a sociological case study set against the backdrop of the American west of scarcely 45 years ago.

Westerns, cowboy movies, horse operas, whatever you want to call them, were purported to be accounts of what life was like when the western United States, top to bottom, north to south, were being settled in the mid-to-late 1800’s, long before the advent of the motor car or airborne transit and even longer before the dawn of rocket science and weaponry capable of wiping out whole cities in one fell swoop.

One of the reasons the genre has fallen into cinematic obscurity, I submit, is that America has developed an unquenchable blood thirst for higher tech violence or murder and mayhem on a much larger scale, borrowed from recent events that generate fear and rage throughout this society. As I said in an earlier review, much of the moviegoing public couldn’t give a rat’s ass about history. The plight of homesteaders trying to scratch out an existence, at the mercy of land grabbers, horse thieves, cattle poachers, and assorted other agents of lawlessness thriving in a virtual state of anarchy, are quaint curiosities to today’s youth, and the crimes of the wild, wild west are small potatoes compared to the wholesale slaughter of 9/11 and genocides taking place around the globe.

If you’re James Mangold (Walk the Line), you’ve hankered for a shot at directing a western, and think a movie made a half-century ago is ripe for a redux, you’ve got a find a way to elevate the product to a new standard of relevance that will get people into theatres in bankable numbers. Mangold has succeeded mightily with his remake of “3:10 to Yuma,” a fairly routine shoot ‘em up from 1957 that was directed then by Delmar Daves from a short story written by Elmore Leonard. It certainly had star names above the title -- Glenn Ford and Van Heflin; Heflin had anchored the cast of “Shane” four years before, and Ford was coming off a high-profile success in “Blackboard Jungle”. But audiences were lukewarm about the film and it was overlooked at Oscar time, competing against the likes of “The Bridge on the River Kwai,” “Sayonara,” and “Peyton Place”. Oddly, it snared a “Best Film from Any Source” nomination from the British Academy of Film and Television Arts. Ned Washington and George Duning were hired to write the requisite dirge sung over the titles by Frankie Laine -- a la “High Noon” and “Gunfight at the O. K. Corral”.

Mangold has done much more than dust off an old screenplay and give it a spiffy new spin. Oh, screenwriter Michael Brandt hasn’t tinkered a lot with the kernel of Leonard’s tale. What he has done is give the central characters, Ben Wade and Dan Evans, souls they bare and dimensionality they reveal. Wade, the bad guy, is a sociopath with a conscience, Machiavellian with a spiritual ideology, a complex man of moral contradictions he admits to and gloats about, committing high crimes and spouting the Scriptures in virtually the same breath. Evans, the good guy, is tired of being a victim, as much of his own virtuousness as those who prey upon him; he needs to show some mettle, regain some self-respect and the respect of his family, even if it means putting his life on the line.

The characters of Wade and Evans, as manifested by Russell Crowe and Christian Bale, are unlike the narrowly circumscribed righteous heroes and unrighteous villains -- extremes even identified by the color of their attire -- white hats for the good guys, black for the bad. Unlike Ford or Heflin, Roy Rogers, Tom Mix, Gene Autry, “Wild Bill” Elliott, Randolph Scott, Rory Calhoun (who, in real-life, had done jail time) or even the deified John Wayne, Gary Cooper, and Henry Fonda, all of whose western characters were models of stalwart self-containment, all sweat and swagger, virtually impenetrable, role-modeling for three generations of young men taught never to give vent to their fears and doubts or betray their emotions. It would have been unthinkable for these heroes and anti-heroes to have sat across a table from one another calmly reflecting on their lives, even engaging in soul-searching and meaningful self-assessment as Wade and Evans do near the end of Mangold’s film. They’re on opposite sides in this culture of violence, but each has gained, if not respect for one another, then an empathetic charitability toward their differences.

How they arrive at this point is, of course, what “3:10 to Yuma” is all about. Evans is an in-over-his-head rancher who suffered a crippling injury in the civil war and is trying to eke out a living as a cattle rancher. He’s deep in debt and being harassed by his debtor, a land baron by the name of Glen Hollander (Lennie Loftin) who wants to seize the rancher’s land for the railroad right-of-way. When the film opens, Hollander’s goons have just torched Evans’s barn. Evans’ 14-year-old son William (Logan Lerman) wants to take off in pursuit of the perps, but his dad, believing that discretion is the better part of valor, calls him back, which young William regards as cowardice. Even Evans’ briefly seen wife Alice (Gretchen Mol) is losing patience with her husband’s sangfroid.

The next day, on their way to town (Bisbee), father and sons encounter a Pinkerton stagecoach robbery and slaughter in progress. Ben Wade, the titular head of the plunderers, has blocked the conveyance’s path by instigating a stampede by Evans’ cattle herd, but the gang member who carries out most of the savagery is a mercurial chap named Charlie Prince (Ben Foster), an odd amalgam of menace and mince. I’ll bet that Foster’s querulous take on his character, punctuated by a snaking strut and withering sneer, will be acknowledged when awards nominations are handed out.

Eventually, Wade is taken into custody, and the Pinkerton agent in Bisbee, Grayson Butterfield (Dallas Roberts), offers his star witness $200 to head up a band of men escorting Wade to the choo-choo that will take him to prison. Evans can hardly refuse a sum that will enable him and his family to get back on their feet and a mission that may elevate him in the eyes of his boy.

Its graphic carnage aside, “3:10 to Yuma” charts no new territory for westerns in its plot setups nor in the stock nature of its protagonists, for that matter. What distinguishes this film from its earlier treatment and most other western narratives are its sociological implications -- how those protagonists interact with one another, given their opposing moral ideologies. Wade and Evans are complex men with underlying demons, not the posturing stoics who inhabited the cowboy movies of my youth. Crowe and Bale, giving us a master class in method acting, allow us to peer into the souls of their characters in a way that blurs the distinction between goodness and evil, between honor and disgrace. The ending of “3:10 to Yuma,” is a psychological conundrum that will leave you drained, perplexed, meditative, and oddly resigned that matters couldn’t have been resolved in any other way.