VIEWS FROM VERMONT

AMERICAN GANGSTER -- A CRITICAL ESSAY

As a nation, our trade balance -- exports versus imports -- is all out of whack. Simply explained, we buy far more than we sell in international markets, and that’s because we no longer make much that other countries can’t make better and more cheaply. And, increasingly, what American companies do manufacture, good or bad, is largely made in plants abroad, so while we import more and more goods, we export more and more jobs.

One of the few things America excels at mass-producing and exporting is violent crime. It’s woven into our national fabric, part and parcel of our founding and heritage. Ours is a culture of guns and violence -- hoodlums are our heroes...well, sports figures, too, but it’s becoming harder to distinguish between the two, thuggery having seeped into locker rooms and onto playing surfaces, but not yet into the consciousness of the American public.

All this said, violent crimes aren’t tangible goods, commodities that can be loaded onto container ships bound for overseas destinations. However, American villainy in the extreme can be and is simulated with graphic authenticity by gifted filmmakers bankrolled by preeminently entrepreneurial movie producers, and the celluloid end product can be canned and shipped around the globe for citizens of other countries to watch with wonder, astonishment, repugnance, and horror; admire perhaps; even purchase as their slice of the American nightmare, regardless of their political or economic circumstances. That we Americans have a propensity for offing one another may evoke feelings of sorrow, pity, disgust, or satisfaction in faraway lands, but none of that matters as long as they’re lining up at the box office, ponying up the rental charge, or best of all, investing in a copy for their libraries.

I’m 70 years old. Oops, that slipped out. Like Margo Channing, I’m not sure I was ready to admit it, and she was only 40 at the time. Anyway, I’ve been watching good ole mom-and-apple-pie cops and robbers movies for 65 years. When my newly refurbished neighborhood nickelodeon -- the Ezella -- reopened its doors Memorial Day weekend of 1942, it did so with a showing of the MGM noir crime drama, “Johnny Eager,” starring Robert Taylor in the title role. The plot wasn’t complicated: District attorney’s daughter falls in love with a gangster her father is trying to convict. Lana Turner was the daughter, and one of her lines in the film is reputed to have been: “I’ve heard all about you, Johnny Eager, but I still want you to kiss me!” Noir film ladies frequently mouthed off and got slapped around by their men in between smooches, but, masochists to the core, always came back for more...smooches and slaps both.

That year, the first full year of U.S. involvement in World War II, when Hollywood was already churning out patriotic pap to buoy the country’s flagging spirit, filmmakers also managed to release no fewer than 17 gangsta-related features to a Johnny Eagerly receptive public. There was a biopic on “Baby Face Morgan,” Faye Emerson played an actress who falls in with the wrong crowd in “Lady Gangster,” and Alan Ladd made his motion picture debut in “This Gun for Hire,” as a hit man who’s gentle with cats and kids, but hasn’t much use for people, except, of course, for the sultry dame in his life played by peek-a-boo fashionist Veronica Lake. The tag line for this crime classic: “He’s dynamite with a gun or a girl.”

But high crime was playing and paying big for Hollywood studios long before I first entered the spacious (1390 seats) and hallowed hall of the Ezella Theatre. James Cagney made a name for himself and gave grapefruit a bad name in his 1931 breakthrough film, “Public Enemy”. The same year, Edward G. Robinson perfected his crime boss snarl in “Little Caesar”. In 1936, after banging around in B movies for seven years, Humphrey Bogart wore the five o’clock shadow that established his crowd-pleasing villainy as bank robber Duke Mantee in “The Petrified Forest,” so much so that he was back at it again the very next year as “Baby Face” Martin in “Dead End,” and the next year as a crooked attorney in “Angels with Dirty Faces,” in which Cagney played a Hell’s Kitchen hellion.

The hoodlum realm, in fact, provided Cagney with several of his most memorable roles, including psychopath “Cody” Jarrett in Warner’s 1949 classic “White Heat” -- tag line: “James Cagney is Red Hot in ‘White Heat’” -- ruthless Ralph Cotter in “Kiss Tomorrow Goodbye” the following year, and gangster husband Marty Snyder to jazz singer legend Ruth Etting (Doris Day) in a highly fictionalized 1955 biopic “Love Me or Leave Me”.

Fewer films are made in a typical year now than during Hollywood’s Golden Age, but television has more than picked up the slack, and menace, murder, and mayhem is the collective central theme of a dirty dozen prime-time series, not including premium cable shows such as “Dexter”. “The Sopranos” kept pay TV subscribers rapt and riveted for, what, five or six seasons? Viewers can enjoy a bloodbath in their living rooms or dens any night of the week, and apparently they never tire of the experience, since several of these series show up among the top ten Nielson listings. There is no shortage of up-and-coming criminal icons, forensic science breakthroughs, fresh cases, cold cases, kinky twists, clever angles, and shocking, simply shocking revelations to exploit.

Not that film biographers are always looking for fresh fodder. Al Capone, surely among the elite in the mobster hall of fame, got the full treatment from Rod Steiger in a 1959 docudrama. Then, Robert de Niro had a go at the Chicago kingpin in Brian De Palma’s 1987 film, “The Untouchables” (based on the forever-running TV series of the 50’s and 60’s), for which Sean Connery won an Oscar as Jim Malone, the Irish beat cop who teams with Federal agent Elliot Ness (Kevin Costner) to bring Capone down. Now we learn that Nicholas Cage has been signed to play a somewhat younger variant of Capone in an Untouchables prequel that De Palma began filming last month.

Even though tales of the underworld proliferated on the big screen throughout the 30’s and 40’s, it wasn’t until 1954 that the genre captured a share of Oscar glory, and it was indeed an awards bonanza for Elia Kazan’s “On the Waterfront,” which earned Best Picture honors, for Kazan himself, a Best Director statuette, and for Marlon Brando, a career-cementing Best Actor nod, following no-win nominations in 1951 and 1952.

However, thirteen years would pass before big-league crime would cash in again at awards time. Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow, a pair of bank-robbing adventurists, were not gangland types in an organized crime sense, but they and their odd-duck accomplices became mythological figures, and “Bonnie and Clyde” is thought by many to be the first Hollywood film to acknowledge that American moviegoers can be drawn romantically to charismatic criminals and are aroused -- even sexually aroused -- by explicit violence. The film’s finale, in which the partners in love and crime are ambushed and gunned down in a hail of bullets by Federal authorities, is choreographed orgasmically as an erotic danse macabre by director Arthur Penn. Never before had such ghastliness been filmed with such brio and panache. There was also the technology available to up the ante of on-screen carnage. The film earned nine Academy Award nominations, but, more significantly, it is widely credited with ushering in an era of violent verisimilitude. Never before had screen characters been gashed more gruesomely or bled more profusely. What’s more, the fine line between tragedy and comedy had been breached; Penn showed us that sociopaths can be sexy, sympathetic, and funny, and that humor sometimes derives from hideousness.

William Friedkin borrowed heavily from Penn’s bag of tricks and from the cast of “Bonnie and Clyde” when he recruited Gene Hackman for the lead role of bulldog detective Jimmy “Popeye” Doyle in the 1971 drug smuggling epic and ultimate car chase thriller, “The French Connection,” which hit Oscar paydirt with five wins, including Best Picture, Best Actor, and Best Director. “The French Connection” grossed more than $50 million in the U.S. alone on a budget outlay of less than $2 million. Filmmakers were convinced that cops, robbers, and crime families were box office bonanza.

Francis Ford Coppola hopped aboard the bandwagon the following year, bringing Mario Puzo’s best-selling novel “The Godfather” to the screen, with Puzo collaborating on the screenplay with Coppola. And there was an homage to Penn and “Bonnie and Clyde” about halfway through the three-hour powerhouse, when the heir apparent to capo Don Vito Corleone’s throne, hothead son “Sonny,” fell to a fusillade of lead fired by a rival gang, his body jerked in a convulsive ballet that electrified audiences.

Coppola spent a staggering (in those days) $6 million to make the film, which earned almost that entire total back its first two weekends in release, on its way to a cumulative worldwide gross of a quarter of a billion dollars. “The Godfather” cleaned up on accolades and awards, as well, earning 11 Oscar nominations and scoring three wins, including Best Picture, Best Actor, and Best Screenplay. The future of blockbuster violence couldn’t have been more sanguine, and Coppola didn’t let any dust mar the luster of his masterpiece. The worldwide stampede to see “The Godfather” had barely abated when he went to work on a sequel, which was actually part prequel, reinstalling Al Pacino as new head of the Corleone crime family and featuring, in flashback, Robert de Niro as the young émigré Don Vito. “The Godfather II” debuted just before Christmas 1974, earned even greater acclaim than its predecessor, capturing six Oscar wins from 11 nominations.

Audiences could not be surfeited. There followed in 1975 another Pacino crime vehicle, “Dog Day Afternoon,” directed this time by Sidney Lumet. The result: five Oscar nominations, including Best Picture, one win (Best Screenplay), and $47 million in the domestic till. Between the mid-70’s and now, Martin Scorsese has kept multiplex screens awash with plasma, and audiences clamoring for more: “Mean Streets” (1973), “Goodfellas” (1990), “Casino” (1995), “Gangs of New York” (2002), and “The Departed” (2006). And Quentin Tarantino has certainly done his part to bathe screens in red, either as director, writer, or both: “Reservoir Dogs” (1992), “Pulp Fiction” and “Natural Born Killers (1994), “Jackie Brown” (1997), “Kill Bill,” Volumes 1 and 2 (2003 and 2004), and two “CSI: Crime Scene Investigation” TV episodes (2005).

Which brings me to the whole point of this piece, and we hear and read the foregoing query a lot today as people become exasperated with the discordance and disorder of life in this society: just when is enough enough? If we’re talking about blood and guts in the movies, apparently never, or at least not as long as crooks and crooked cops continue to thrive. The mass production, marketing, and glorification of the most heinous, egregious, and reprehensible of all human behavior goes on and on undiminished, the situations more and more insidious, the mutilation and gore more and more deathlike, and the end product more and more praised and celebrated.

Weeks before Ridley Scott’s “American Gangster” opened nationwide (November 2), before most Academy members had even seen it, much less formed an opinion of its merits, before the end-of-year tidal wave of prestigious releases had crashed upon the consciousness of moviegoers, there was a critical rush to judgment that this was a leading Oscar contender. Makes me wonder if the movie industry has a payola mill buying the hype of broadcast and print journalists. If money translates into Oscar bronze, maybe they’re right. “American Gangster,” in its first nine days, had made back approximately 80 per cent of its production costs. That its budget was $100 million in the first place says it all for why and how these films get made. There’s no shortage of financiers for projects of this sort, such is the guarantee of the genre’s profitability and propagation, so handsomely does crime pay even in its representational form as an entertainment.

Lest you assume I’m going to break with the critical ranks and take a dissident view of “American Gangster,” be assured that I’m not. It’s an acrid, audacious, unsettling film from a visionary director with a keen sense of time, place, climate of opinion, and the confounding gray areas of good and evil. Scott’s body of directorial work includes high profile successes such as “Alien” (1979), “Blade Runner” (1982), “Thelma and Louise” (1991), “Gladiator” (2000), and “Blackhawk Down” (2001), as well as abysmal audience flops, such as “White Squall” (1996), “G. I. Jane” (1997), “Kingdom of Heaven” (2005), and “A Good Year” (2006). After two bombs in a row, Scott needed a hit, both with critics and filmgoers. In “American Gangster,” he has one, and reestablishes himself as moviemaking nobility.

What troubles me about “American Gangster” is not its subject matter per se -- violent crime is an ugly fact of life, it’s pervasive in this country, and we as Americans and apparently everyone else in the world-at-large is obsessed with it. There’s never a shortage of larger-than-life lawbreakers and related story material for screenwriters to draw from. The sticking points with me are twofold. First is the relish with which Americans, in particular, embrace gangsters as warriors, lionhearts, and superstars, not as the cancerous sociopaths and anarchists they really are. People romanticize the rejection of authority. Getting away with murder is a challenge worthy of undertaking, especially when the accumulation of wealth and the attainment of status and adulation are so inextricably linked. Self-worth is measured in dollars and cents, and audiences can empathize with the burgeoning population of have-nots who thwart the law to settle scores with what they see as an unjust system. Victims are the readily disposable means to an end.

Second, the voracity with which Americans ingest savage imagery is truly macabre. A case can be made, I suppose, that one way to overcome dread of being violated, which is pandemic in this fear-based, fear-driven society, is to immerse oneself in representational violence. See enough of it, and you’re desensitized. Or delivered from internalized terror and grateful that you’re “only” watching. We’ve always been entertained by thrills and chills, but monster movies of my youth were steeped in mythological lore; even those featuring a Count Dracula who feasted on the blood of others, left the grisliness largely to the imagination, and victims were left with only superficial wounds to their necks. When mobsters opened fire on one another, audiences typically saw the blast from the weapon, then the victim merely clutching his wound as he fell backward or forward. Nowadays, the camera focuses on the weapon for a split second, then zooms in tight on the target as the trigger is pulled and the bullet explodes within the victim and bone and tissue fragments fly and blood spills forth in pulsating spurts. Absolutely nothing in movies today is left to anyone’s imagination. Human beings are summarily carved up and dismembered before our very eyes, and many of us receive some sort of sadist gratification from being witness to the morbidity.

Noteworthy about audience response to simulated violence is the dollars-and-sense fact that the violent films that really rake in the bucks are those that put some distance of time between the audience and the savagery, e. g., “300” and “Braveheart,” which their makers would categorize cynically as historical dramas. But even 35 years in the past will do, as “American Gangster” demonstrates, particularly with the legions of young male moviegoers for whom a third-of-a-century is an eternity of detachment.

Americans are generally staying away from bloodstained narratives ripped from today’s headlines, heedful films such as “In the Valley of Elah,” based on actual events, that deal in undisguised terms with the grisly fallout from war. A military father and proud American, whose son has turned up missing at an army base after returning from Iraq, conducts an investigation of his own and is shocked to discover that the young man he knew so well and a trio of buddies from his unit have gone feral from the depravity of war and committed beastly acts even in civilian clothes. Some would argue that there’s a big difference between the effects of war atrocities on our fighting men and women and the effects of film violence on moviegoers. But can anyone be certain of that, given the criminal content in so much of daily American life.

As film literature, “American Gangster” can only be construed as groundbreaking in one respect -- the arrogant, courtly malfeasant happens to be an African-American named Frank Lucas (Denzel Washington), and he has at least one leg up on his Sicilian-American counterpart, one Dominic Cattano (Armand Assante), for supremacy in New York City’s drug trafficking industry, a feather in the cap of those who champion affirmative action and equal opportunity. Where Lucas trumps Cattano is in eliminating the middlemen in his operation -- he negotiates deals face-to-face with the sources of heroin in Vietnam, including U. S. military personnel, and the quality of the smack is unsurpassed.

Because the shipments arrive directly at Lucas’s own distribution centers (where they are processed by young ladies compelled to work in the nude to insure against pilfered product), he peddles quality at markdown prices. It’s the early 1970’s, so maybe Lucas was taking a page from the Puzo-Coppola Godfather franchise. He is steely, shrewd, and merciless in the manner of Al Pacino’s Don Michael Corleone, but a staunch family man -- even brings his mother and brothers up from South Carolina to open front businesses for trafficking operations. Mama Lucas (a regal Ruby Dee) is nowhere near as complicit in her son’s illicit dealings as, say, Ma Jarrett was in Cagney’s “White Heat” (1949), but she turns a blind eye and is all coos and kisses when he puts her up in the plantation manor house of her dreams. It’s not until the cops literally storm the mansion’s doors that she becomes all pious and indignant and slaps her naughty boy across the face. And a slap in the face by his mom is probably the worst comeuppance Lucas can imagine.

The other major players in “American Gangster” are an unctuous narcotics unit cop on the take named Trupo (a meaty, career-enhancing role for Josh Brolin) and his polar opposite, a steadfastly honest, hardworking detective named Richie Roberts who heads up a special unit to go after whomever is keeping Harlem, the rest of Manhattan, and the four other burroughs awash in black tar. What is unmistakable in this film is the sneering cynicism that permeates American law enforcement. Early in the film, when Roberts and his partner discover a trunkful of unmarked currency in an abandoned car, they dutifully count it up and turn it in to headquarters. For their integrity, they are roundly ridiculed by everyone in the department, and Scott openly invites audiences to weigh in on the side of larceny.

As Roberts, Russell Crowe shows off once again, as he did earlier this year in “3:10 to Yuma,” his less-is-more approach to characterization; Crowe’s Richie Roberts is a model of professional self-containment and singlemindedness, even as his personal life suffers from these same traits. Crowe, as well as many of his characters, is the unflappable, larger-than-life, but cool-under-fire paragon America traditionally identifies with. That he gets into scrapes in real life only enhances his celebrity. Whereas American movie heroes use to be homegrown in the personas of Gary Cooper, Henry Fonda, and John Wayne, they, like everything else nowadays, have to be imported from overseas in the personas of Crowe, Christian Bale, and Clive Owen.

As for Washington, he’s been the poster boy for black American film actors for the better part of two decades, given his stature, bearing, and toothsome grin, and, at 53, he still cuts an imposingly virile figure both on and off the screen. Washington’s performance is solid, but unremarkable, largely because the role of Frank Lucas doesn’t require penetrating insights or instincts and because scores of menacing white versions of this drug lord have paraded across the screen for seven decades, giving Washington countless role models to draw from. He has the stare, glare, and glower down pat; Lucas can be sportive or solicitous one moment and imperious and iron-handed the next. In one particularly cold-blooded scene, Lucas has the intrepidity, and the confidence of his territorial imperative, to shoot an indelicate adversary in the head point blank in broad daylight on a crowded New York thoroughfare. Scott has staged it for its pure shock value, and the effect is shuddering indeed. But essentially, Lucas is as singlemindedly evil as Roberts is singlemindedly honorable, whatever their facades at any given moment, which makes of “American Gangster” no more than a simplistic tale of the pursuit of the corrupt by the incorruptible we’ve seen again and again.

So why continue to make films like “American Gangster”? To expose the escalating evildoing that undercuts American life, in hopes that career criminals and those who obstruct bringing them to justice will acknowledge and atone for the error of their ways? Not a chance, given the entrenchment of avarice and greed, the cynicism surrounding law and order, and the declining value of virtue and humanity. Movies like “American Gangster” are made because those who put up big money to produce them do so in the knowledge that cruel and inhuman behavior fills the seats of multiplexes and pays back munificently.

Money masquerades as prestige; it attracts esteemed directors, who, in turn, have the financial backing to permit their creativity to take full flight, and A-list actors, who have the opportunity to be associated with a product “that has Oscar written all over it” long before its premiere screening. No matter what its stylish trappings, “American Gangster” is a purely exploitative film, its ambitions obvious even as the opening credits roll, and a methodical, impassive Frank Lucas presides over a ritualistic execution. The offender has already been tied up and pummeled. As he’s bleeding from all visible orifices and pleading for his life, the boss’s henchmen douse him with gasoline. Lucas allows his victim a few seconds to contemplate his fate and beseech further, then tosses a flaming cigarette lighter onto the writhing figure. Again, a few seconds pause for insidious effect. Finally, Lucas takes aim with his pistol and silences the awful screams with three or four -- I wasn’t actually counting -- bullets to the victim’s head, putting him out of his misery, one could argue. That this establishes the tenor of “American Gangster” is a gross understatement.


IN THE VALLEY OF ELAH (A+)

This is a nation in denial that its world relevance is in steep decline, that it is under siege as much from within as without -- a deteriorating condition brought about by morally and economically bankrupting foreign policies and misadventures, an aging and decomposing infrastructure, a deepening health care crisis, a moribund government beholden to economic special interests that no longer responds to the needs of its complacent, complicit electorate, and an ideologically fractured populace that feeds off fear, distrust, patriotic delusions, and religious zealotry. Too many of its citizens, because they are uninformed, fall victim to political smokescreens, see things simplistically in the extremes of black and white, are chauvinists and xenophobes, and believe it when they’re told the United States is the richest country in the world, even as its middle class is disappearing amidst a widening chasm between the haves and have-nots and they find it increasingly difficult to make ends meet themselves.

None of this is lost on director-screenwriter Paul Haggis. Two years ago, Haggis reeled in a Best Picture Oscar, upsetting front-runner “Brokeback Mountain,” with his searing, wrenching take on the exploding myths of the American melting pot and the fear and loathing attendant to relations between races and ethnicities, called “Crash”. Los Angeles was Haggis’s choice of venue for “Crash,” partly because he was working with a modest independent film budget, but it could just as easily have been a couple dozen other U. S. population centers. But because it was shot entirely in the backyard of the American movie industry, it struck awfully close to home and touched an especially raw nerve for resident Academy voters.

Now, Haggis, armed with the veracity of actual events culled from several case histories, has crafted and directed a screenplay that documents, with seething subtlety, the horrific psychological fallout of war without a single scene on a field of combat, save for muddled video fragments from a cell phone camera. And he concludes that the war in Iraq is only going to exacerbate the culture of incivility and violence already depleting American morale and resources, by breeding a subculture of feral mental defectives, morally disassociated service personnel returning from the helter-skelter hideousness of the Iraqi insurgency, confronting multiple enemies all but impossible to identify and defend against.

Military personnel returning with missing limbs and other physical disfigurements are the readily identifiable victims of war. But what of the incalculable numbers returning with psyches so haunted, souls so deeply scarred, not only by the depravity they witnessed, but the depravity of what they themselves did, who can no longer function away from the insidious encounters and fevered adrenaline of their deployment duties. The weight of their psychological baggage is shared by their families, friends, mere acquaintances, and has a sinuous effect on society as a whole. “In the Valley of Elah,” which references the Biblical confrontation between David and Goliath, is one-part murder mystery, a harrowing whodunit, and one-part morality play, which, ultimately, calls upon its audience to contemplate in the soberest terms the real battlefield for our national security.

Hank Deerfield (Tommy Lee Jones) is a Vietnam vet now in his 50’s, a solid, if stoic patriot who trucks granite for a living in the drab, faceless community of Munro, Tennessee. He shares a functional, faux-American-dream home with his wife Joan (Susan Sarandon), whose lassitude tells us her complicit life as a military wife has sapped nearly all of her starch. She has yet to recover from the loss of their elder son on a battlefield ten years before. When Hank receives word from Fort Rudd that their younger son Mike (Jonathan Tucker) has returned stateside from Iraq, but has been AWOL from the base for several days, he takes off for New Mexico, imparting only the sketchiest details to the little woman he instinctively shields but can’t bring himself to be open with.

Once in the deja vu territory of military soil, everyone Deerfield encounters, including Army front men Lt. Kirklander (Jason Patric) and Sgt. Carnelli (James Franco) and Mike’s unit buddies, Steve Penning (Wes Chatham), Gordon Bonner (Jake McLaughlin), and Ennis Long (Mehcad Brooks), are concerned, cooperative, and congenial -- all totally mystified by the disappearance of one of their own. But Hank, whose instincts were sharpened 30 years before during his own tour of duty as a military cop, begins to smell a cover-up in progress, and when Mike’s charred, dismembered, and partially consumed remains turn up in a desolate field outside the base, the Army and the municipality adjacent to Fort Rudd stage a jurisdictional dispute over exactly on whose property the murder took place. There are insinuations that Mike was hooked on drugs and the likely victim of a Mexican dealer he had f___ed over.

Deerfield, who internalizes much of his feeling anyway, has to put his shock, disbelief, and anguish on hold while he tries to get someone to pursue the case. That unlikely someone turns out to be police detective Emily Sanders (Charlize Theron), a single mom derided by fellow officers because she purportedly earned her promotion by bedding down with the department boss. She’s endured enough sexual harassment and only succumbs to Deerfield’s badgering when he convinces her his son’s grisly demise is not an open-and-shut incident, that the slaying didn’t take place where body parts were found, and that certain people may be stonewalling.

Once Sanders signs on, she becomes as impassioned as Deerfield is self-controlled. But leads are slow to develop and lips tough to unseal. Deerfield sneaks his son’s cell phone from belongings that have been impounded. The phone’s data fried in the Iraqi heat, but Deefield hires a hacker to try to restore sound and imagery. Conversations are shrill, frenzied, and muffled, images fragmented and distorted, so it’s hard to draw conclusions, but Deerfield begins to assimilate ignominious evidence that the son he had raised to be a model soldier and upstanding American, subjected to the morbid chaos of the Iraqi insurgency, had morphed into a feral beast.

As repugnant as are the ghastly revelations about Mike’s murder, about its perpetrators, and about Mike himself, Haggis makes certain we understand, as Deerfield does, that this is not an isolated incident. We are left with heartbreak for the American male archetype, whose core beliefs have been undermined, for Joan, who has nothing left to show for 30 years of motherhood, and for a nation cluelessly flirting with disaster. That gloomy fatalism is embodied in Haggis’s last scene, employing a piece of patriotic irony that is both visionary and cautionary, and, by implication, hopeful that the tide can still be turned.

Haggis’s detractors castigate his films for being manipulative -- a label customarily used by critics in tandem with “sentimental” as a damnation. Asked about that label as it was widely applied to “Crash,” Haggis, in a recent interview with Entertainment Weekly, was eagerly forthcoming: “It’s completely manipulative. I set out to manipulate, and I did. All good films are manipulative.” To which I add, we are, all of us, manipulative. We often have to be, to persuade, cajole, bring others to our points of view. And so, yes, “In the Valley of Elah” is manipulative, though more subtly than “Crash” and finally hangs its message on the use of metaphor.

“Elah” is a brilliant film, ah yes, a masterpiece, with a career-topping performance by Jones (never before among the actors I most want to watch), as the war hero from another era whose paternal mentoring was no match for the monstrous ramifications of new millennium conflicts. All the sublimated pain that dare not speak its name out loud somehow registers on Jones’s deeply creased and weathered face. There’s no bravado in this Jones character, and he’s left at the end with only a throbbing reflection on the new disorder of things. Sarandon, looking for once or at last like the sum of her years, evokes every ounce of our empathy as her character navigates the gamut of emotional responses -- anxiety, bitterness, rage, helplessness, and devastation. Against her husband’s wishes, she flies to New Mexico and insists on viewing what remains of her son’s body, but is only permitted to peer in through an eye-level door window. We feel like intruders on her privacy, and her expression is almost as unbearable to observe as the gruesome sight in front of her. She gazes resolutely, bravely for perhaps ten seconds, then turns and walks -- wobbly, but determined not to crumble -- back down an austere, antiseptic corridor, arm-and-arm with a husband in awe of her strength and in sync with her despair.


MICHAEL CLAYTON (B+)

Karen Crowder (Tilda Swinton) is in-house legal counsel for U/North, a manufacturer of agra-chemicals, one of which, a weed killer, is suspected of obliterating humans, as well. Crowder’s job is to mount the company’s defense against a class action lawsuit filed by farming families, that has the potential for sending U/North due south.

In her high stakes position, Crowder is asked by a media interviewer how, with her demanding workload, she achieves balance in her life. Intercutting the actual interview are scenes of Crowder rehearsing herself that morning at home, posing questions she’s most likely to be asked and formulating answers that will reflect favorably on the company and herself. “Balance” isn’t a topic she anticipated, and she is flummoxed for several seconds while she googles her lawyerly mind for a percipient reply. When the light goes on in her head, she smiles tentatively and says: “if you love what you’re doing, there’s balance” -- a disingenuous reply the interviewer chooses not to pursue.

In order to achieve balance, there have to be at least two elements to balance. Crowder’s life is taxingly one-dimensional. Outwardly stony and severe, but inwardly a jumble of nerves and self-doubt, she’s up to her visibly sweaty armpits in litigation and consumed with securing vindication for her bosses and indispensability for herself.

Arthur Edens (Tom Wilkinson) works for the uber New York law firm defending U/North. Edens is his firm’s star trial lawyer, but he’s also bipolar and has gone off his meds. One day, while giving a deposition that’s being videotaped, Edens snaps, strips down to his birthday suit, and launches into a ramble that seems incoherent and hyperbolic at first, until he starts making it clear that U/North has been deceiving him about exactly what they knew about their weed killer’s deadliness and when they knew it. It becomes painfully clear to Crowder that Edens is recusing himself from the case. Edens is now a ticking time bomb for U/North, and Crowder swings into damage control mode to defuse him.

Into these churning and murky waters wades the erstwhile Michael Clayton (George Clooney), whom we’ve already come to know as Kenner, Bach, and Ledeen’s “fixer, janitor, jack-of-all-trades,” a well-paid niche player who seldom sees the inside of a courtroom and will never be welcomed as a full partner. Clayton is dispatched by the firm’s head honcho, Marty Bach (Sydney Pollack), to tidy up cases whose ends have become frayed because of mismanagement or other compromising developments -- such as lost marbles and slippery tongues. When Edens melts down and acts out, Clayton is rushed in to pull him together and get the defense of U/North back on track.

Now Clayton may be a whiz at putting things right professionally, but his personal life is off the rails. He has a gambling addiction which, we surmise, led to a less-than-amicable divorce -- his former wife has since remarried. Over and above his gambling debts, Clayton is being hounded by shadowy shakedown snarks for $75,000 he still owes on a restaurant business that went belly-up because of a n’er-do-well brother. And he’s also chafing from the cumulative indignities of swimming in corporate cesspools. He, like Crowder, has lost his way in a culture of manipulation, intimidation, and greed, drifting farther and farther from his Irish-Catholic roots . His only oasis is the mutually adoring relationship he shares with his irrepressibly precocious son, to whom his former wife limits his access. The boy has covert interactions with Edens -- he lends his dad’s colleague a cultish book -- and we are enticed into thinking there’s link between the attorney’s breakdown and the contents of the book. If there is, it was edited from the final cut.

Not surprisingly, matters turn very sinister -- there’s a murder the morbid mechanics of which are among the most unsettling ever enacted on the screen. And a nerve-wracking, eleventh-hour, who’ll-blink-first verbal showdown between Clayton and Crowder that rivals any other on film for its strategic maneuvering, a do-or-die volley of deceits and, in the end, Clayton’s systematic raid on Crowder’s arsenal of options.

“Michael Clayton” is essentially about the moral mindlessness, the lapses in ethical judgment, that creep into job performance when all that glitters are billable hours, the preservation of corporate image, and, of course, the glory of finishing on the winning side.

Though George Clooney is the titular star of this film, and as the enigmatic, emotionally isolated Michael Clayton, gives his most variegated, least self-conscious performance to date, he, like the Clark Gables, Tyrone Powers, and Robert Taylors of three generations ago, can never quite convince me that he is anyone other than a suave Hollywood throwback to its star system golden age. And, in his case, a suave personality of whom no one ever speaks a disparaging word. Actors who lose themselves in their stage and screen characters almost always have their demons, a dark side, some temperamental ticks, behavior that compensates for self-doubt and shyness -- and they are seldom, like Clooney, universally adored.

On the other hand, the UK tandem of Swinton, Scottish-born and Cambridge educated, and the extraordinarily gifted and versatile West Yorkshireman Wilkinson, both playing Americans with flawless aplomb, make the most indelible imprints on this film. Swinton is singularly focused and fearsome as her character disassociates herself from ethics and morality so that her company can be vindicated. It’s gratifying, both in terms of our appreciation for fine acting and our distaste for the Crowder character, to watch her taut composure deconstruct as she faces her last-standing nemesis. Wilkinson’s body of work over the past decade, a far-ranging curriculum vitae of 32 deliciously diverse roles (e.g., The Full Monty, Shakespeare in Love, In the Bedroom, Normal, Girl with a Pearl Earring, Batman Begins, Separate Lies) attests to his high ranking with international filmmakers.

“Michael Clayton” is an auspicious directorial debut for screenwriter Tony Gilroy, whose previous writing credits include the Bourne trilogy, “Proof of Life,” “The Devil’s Advocate,” and “Dolores Claiborne”. One of Gilroy’s most inspired scenes in “Michael Clayton” juxtaposes bucolic simplicity and tranquility with Clayton’s harried, hard-bitten, high-risk existence. Actually, the scene appears twice, near the beginning and near the end of the movie. His life veering out of control, Clayton is returning from a particularly acrimonious meeting with a client and stops his car along a lonely country road because his attention has been diverted to the top of a knoll where, partially shrouded in the calm of an early morning fog, are three horses leisurely grazing. Clayton gets out of the car and trudges up the knoll. The horses acknowledge his presence with genial nods and barely audible whinnies. As man and beasts are communing, there is a sudden bang and burst of light from behind. Clayton’s car, rigged with explosives and a timing device, is engulfed in flames. The fixer realizes he’s in one helluva fix.


TWO DAYS IN PARIS (C+)

If ever a film demonstrates how stifled, squeamish, and naive Americans are about sex and how spooked American men are about the previous liaisons of their present girlfriends -- or boyfriends -- or how people show their true colors when treading on their own soil, it’s Julie Delpy’s stream-of-consciousness talkfest, “Two Days in Paris,” an homage to her two well-received real-time films with writer-director Richard Linklater and costar Ethan Hawke, “Before Sunrise” (1995) and “Before Sunset” (2004). The second of those relationship-intensive narratives was also set in various arrondissements of the City of Light, and tied with “Sideways” for numero uno on my dazzling dozen list for 2004.

Whereas Parisian Celine (Delpy) and American Jesse (Hawke) meet on a train to Vienna and spend a serendipitous overnight on the streets and in the parks of the Austrian city getting to know and like each other very much (“Before Sunrise”).

And whereas they split the next morning because Jesse has to catch a flight home, promising to meet up again in Paris six months hence, a reunion that doesn’t actually take place until nine years later, by mere chance, in a Paris bookshop (“Before Sunset”). Author-of-note Jesse is on the last leg of a book promotion tour, and his flight home leaves that evening, again impinging on their time together -- time crammed into a magical afternoon they wish would never end, and perhaps, we can only hope, never does.

This affair between photographer Marion and interior designer Jack in Delpy’s one-woman band production -- she co-produced, wrote, directed, composed some of the music for the movie, and costars in it with Adam Goldberg (Entourage, Zodiac) -- is a stormy, far-off-kilter entanglement that’s been going on for two years. The couple met and live in New York, but are on holiday in Paris for the dual purpose of introducing Jack to Marion’s folks and rekindling the passion and restoring the trust in their own relationship.

Marion’s parents are Delpy’s real-life mother and father, Marie Pillet, as Anna, and Albert Delpy, as Jeannot., and their eccentricities -- mom’s a phlegmatic middle-aged ditz who regales Jack with free-love experiences from her hippie days, pop’s an ascorbic lecher who runs an art gallery of works that prominently feature male genitalia and delights in etching the sides of cars parked illegally on city sidewalks with his keys -- clearly rattle Jack’s insular New York Jewish sensibilities. He’s dealing with culture shock -- trying to go with the flow, but even the platters of food on their table -- langue de boeuf and lapin -- are making him queasy.

No matter where they go for these interminable two days -- a bistro, a party, a casual stroll -- Marion and Jack keep running into her old boyfriends. She’s brazenly hostile towards one, causing a public scene, flamboyantly flirtatious with others. It appears, to Jack and to us, that a couple of these intimacies -- with chaps named Mathieu and Manu -- overlapped Marion and Jack’s own involvement, and her protestations to the contrary are toyingly playful and ringingly hollow. In point of fact, Marion is passive or neutral about nothing. A casual disagreement she has with a taxi driver escalates into a volley of vitriol and character assassination on both their parts, much of it centering on politics and racism. Gradually, her abrasive, outspoken side overtakes her initial agreeability -- she becomes increasingly nasty and opinionated -- and Jack is having second thoughts about the devoted, companionably high-spirited and good-humored woman he thought he knew. When one of her exes leaves a text message on her cell phone, which Jack intercepts, to the effect that he got an instant woody upon seeing her again, Jack has just about had enough.

Much of “Two Days in Paris” has the feeling of being ad-libbed, which gives the film its nervy spontaneity. And the dialogue is certainly vigorous and full-flavored. But ultimately both characters are irksome, Marion for being so injudicious and insensitive, Jack for being so fussy and phobic, and both of them for being so self-absorbed. Dirty old man aside, Marion’s dad Jeannot is the archetypically prickly Parisian xenophobe, exasperating under his breath about Jack not speaking French, and Jack the ugly American for not being able to savor the cultural differences. We’re left to wonder at the end if the two days really did do Marion and Jack in as a couple. But, personally, I left the theatre not caring very much one way or t’other.


EASTERN PROMISES (B)

In case you need to be reminded how savage human beings can become when others trespass on the domains of their ill-begotten fortunes, take a gander at David Cronenberg’s latest foray into the gloomiest, most reprehensible realms of the European underworld. What elevates “Eastern Promises” from the basest commonalities of the slash-and-dasher (think about the “Saw” and “Halloween” franchises) are its literate script, crisp editing, top-shelf acting, and dusky cinematography that gives the film a perpetual feeling of evil foreboding (think about “The Godfather” franchise).

Kink, sadism, and buckets of blood are not incidental to Cronenberg movies -- they are central to every plot, a glorification of the macabre, amorality, and pervasive sordidness. Steven Knight’s screenplay centers around the character of Semyon, a courtly Russian mafia mogul whose London holdings include a high-profile Trans-Siberian restaurant and an under-the-radar brothel that enslaves underage émigrés, one of whom has kept an incriminating diary that falls into hands unfriendly to organized crime. Semyon is played with chilling equanimity by German character actor Armin Mueller-Stahl. Mueller-Stahl, who gets fourth billing, gives the film’s standout performance as a mob boss whose ruthlessness is masked by an ingratiating smile and lilting grandfatherly intonations, belying his frigid dispassion and barren humanity. He is best known to American audiences for his 1997 Oscar-nominated role in “Shine,” a 1990 role in “Avalon,” and appearances on the TV series “The West Wing”. Semyon

The aforementioned diary is intercepted by hospital midwife Anna (Naomi Watts) from the personal effects of a battered, needle-tracked, and pregnant refugee from Semyon’s establishment who, after collapsing in the emergency room, dies while giving birth to a baby girl. Anna asks her surly Russian-born uncle to translate the entries and is mortified by what they reveal about the whorehouse. Her mission is to locate the dead woman’s family in Russia and deliver the infant to them.

When Semyon gets wind about the potentially lethal journal, he dispatches his “driver” Nikolai (Viggo Mortensen), a sullen, enigmatic Soviet expatriate and Siberian death camp survivor, to retrieve it. Nikolai is another morally ambiguous character for Mortensen -- he was the regular family guy with a very dark past in Cronenberg’s 2006 film, “A History of Violence”. Outfitted with a deft and consistent Russian accent this time around, Mortensen exudes a seething villainy, augmented by a makeup job that accentuates his sculpted cheekbones, projectile schnozz, and dark, impenetrable eyes, his hair severely slicked back as if he just stepped out of a 1960’s TV commercial for Brylcreme. But as nefarious as Nikolai appears at first, carrying out the boss’s dirty work, we are surprised later on by revelations about his true character. Eventually he’s walking a tightrope between being his boss’s star performer and answering a call for humanity.

Adding to the evil goings-on is Semyon’s son Kirill (Walter Cassel), a lascivious loose cannon with a wandering queer eye for the straight Nikolai. Reigning in Kirill’s fiery impulses is another task on Nikolai’s job description. Eventually, his high-risk profile pits the driver against two would-be assassins in a deserted steambath. The furious joust between a dagger-wielding duo and the weaponless, buck-naked Nikolai is superbly choreographed by Cronenberg and will undoubtedly survive as the film’s most identifying scene, one that will spur DVD sales to freeze-frame voyeurs.

Hopefully, the impact of Mortensen’s and Mueller-Stahl’s performances, including evocative scenes together that imply a covert cult relationship between the two, will still be felt when ballots are being cast for acting nominees come January and February. Mortensen’s Nikolai is supremely cool and efficient under duress, seldom speaking above the Russian equivalent of sotto voce, fixing a gaze that’s intimidating but unrevealing. We’ve come to expect focused, finely-etched performances from Naomi Watts, too, and though Anna is a less demanding role than, say, Kitty Fane in “The Painted Veil” or Cristina Peck in “21 Grams,” Watts makes of the principled, committed midwife, unaware of her peril, the film’s singular voice for virtue -- which has an unforeseen effect on Nikolai.

All this acknowledged, “Eastern Promises” is, at its core, still a showcase for the basest human instincts and indignities, and, as in “American Gangster” and so many other films that exploit violence, not much more than the glorification of special effects that make the spilling of blood so rackingly graphic. Cronenberg’s penchant for unmitigated gore partially obscures his artistic vision. In the context of heads being severed, “Eastern Promises” ends on the down low. Some issues, such as the disposition of the baby, have been resolved, others, like the once and future career of Nikolai, are left dangling. Do I smell an “Eastern Promises” franchise.


ACROSS THE UNIVERSE (A-)

Julie Taymor must have been a precocious child of the revolution. A Lennonite. A disciple of Dr. Leary. Marching in step to Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. So attuned is she to the ideological schisms that energized and radicalized baby boomers during an era of ill feeling in the mid-to-late sixties brought about by the Vietnam war, civil rights struggles, political assassinations, and an escalating antipathy toward the military-industrial establishment Dwight Eisenhower had warned against earlier in the decade.

Her new film, “Across the Universe,” won’t work for you unless you functioned fully in the tune in, turn on, trip out spirit of the times or were, at the very least, an avid spectator. I am reminded that the tribal rock opera “Hair,” which took Broadway by storm in the spring of 1968, routinely falls flat in revivals because neither the actors, nor their directors, really get its urgency, really feel the undulating sociopolitical fervor, the drug-fueled euphoria of hippies and their admirers. Today’s youth may be against the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan philosophically and may be disillusioned by the policies and practices of their government, but they’re not subject to be drafted. They are largely disaffected, demotivated, and loathe to commit to much of anything or anyone. They’re not banding together to press the war issue or any other.

By contrast to the serpentine, nonlinear narratives so many of this year’s films are constructed around, the story of “Across the Universe” is simply told with minimalist dialogue, but with the wow effect of nearly three dozen Beatles tunes and cinematography featuring supersaturated hues and kaleidoscopic abstractions that convey the fabled psychedelic, hallucinogenic subculture -- the earnest but naive idealism that flourished and faded in far less than a decade. The music of The Beatles gave voice to that movement, but the movement fell victim to its excesses, brute force, and wider public scorn and had all but expired around the same time to Fab Four disbanded.

There are one or two scenes in “Across the Universe” that don’t quite gel, but, on the whole, Taymor has created an entertainment that is bittersweet, yet buoyant. The film begins as the American music scene is about to transition from sugarcoated doo-wop and suburban sock hops to harder-edged, blue-collar rock emanating from Liverpool, England. Liverpudlian laddie Jude (Jim Sturgess) leaves his never-married, self-sacrificing mother, adoring girlfriend, and shipyard mates and sails for America in search of his biological dad, the Yank who shagged his mum in the waning days of World War II and left her, as it were, “with a bun in the oven.”

Jude heads to Princeton University, where, it turns out, his absentee pop’s connection with academia is in the inglorious capacity of campus janitor. Jude’s not in a vindictive mood, he doesn’t have extortion on his mind, but he’s brought along a photograph that proves the relationship and he wants that relationship acknowledged. The scene, deftly enacted by Sturgess and Robert Clohessy, is emotive but without a whiff of sentimentality.

Jude befriends Princetonian rich-kid Max Carrigan (Joe Anderson) whose blonde, blue-eyed sister Lucy (Evan Rachel Wood) is the archetypal prom queen of her bourgeois high school in the Carrigan family’s pristine, conformist burb. But when rebellious Max drops out of school, he and Jude flee to New York City and take residence in a commune loft inhabited by a ragtag assortment of artistic types and presided over by a Janis Joplinesque blues singer named Sadie (Dana Fuchs).

Before long, Lucy’s boyfriend is killed in Vietnam, she follows her brother to the NYC pad, and she and Jude become lovers. Max gets a summons of his own from Uncle Sam -- the mandatory implications of which are conveyed by a thunderous production number built around the song “I Want You” (I Want You So Bad), featuring a regiment of strutting, stomping warriors. With Max off in combat, antiwar sentiment escalating, and protesters marshaling their forces against tac squads on U.S. streets and college campuses, Lucy hooks up with a cadre of radicals and urges Jude to take up the cause. But Jude wants no part of it; he’s in the U.S. to make art and love, not war. He prefers creating images for record albums, not images for protest placards. Besides this is not his country, he’s not even a legal guest, which eventually lands him in jail and leads to his temporary deportation.

“Across the Universe” ends on a note of conciliation and hopefulness, as befits a folk tale propelled by soaring melodies and salient messages. But soon after the end credits roll, we who subscribed, even if from the sidelines, to the ideals of flower power, free love, and peaceful dissent, can’t help but wonder in retrospect at what an innocuous anomaly the whole movement turned out to be -- an aberrant blip in 20th century American history -- a short burst of sound and fury signifying little. At least we are left with our evocative memories and filmmakers like Taymor who tap into them with such magnetism and authenticity.


GONE BABY GONE (A-)

The gritty, tough-turf Boston neighborhoods Dennis Lehane writes about are endangered enclaves, their culture-specific insularity deconcentrated by encroaching gentrification. Geographically, the so-called Hub of the Universe, despite its exalted stature among American population centers, only encompasses 49 square miles, and high-end developers have all but exhausted the available real estate in the toney Victorian neighborhoods bordering downtown.

To some extent, Boston’s socioeconomic playing field had at least the appearance of being more level back in the 50’s and 60’s, during which the city’s middle and more moneyed classes took flight to the suburbs of the North and South Shores, and Boston proper became a decaying backwater, symbolized in the lore by a dense, teeming, and often rowdy adult entertainment district for ordinary people wedged between downtown and Beacon Hill by the name of Scollay Square. When the tawdry but treasured district fell to the jackhammers in the early sixties, it was replaced by the sterile and windswept concrete plazas of government center, intended as a gateway to the new Boston. And when Kevin White rode a tide of civic pride into the mayor’s office later in the decade, a grand-scale renaissance was underway.

Forty years later, Boston -- the Boston most tourists and business travelers see -- is an imposingly handsome, robust, world-class city -- a cutting edge center for higher learning, medicine, technology, finance, and the arts -- and right up there with San Francisco and New York as one of the most expensive places to live.

Because of its topography, compactness, and layout -- meandering downtown streets follow old cow paths -- Boston’s soaring, glistening towers of commerce and luxury living -- a skyline symbolic of achievement, wealth, and power -- backdrop and stand in stark contrast to just about every working-class neighborhood within city limits, a constant reminder to blue collar stiffs of what they have not. There exists in these neighborhoods, some of which are defined by the Catholic parish that anchors them, an “everybody’s in the same boat” mentality that eases the pain of deprivation. Humdrum mediocrity and meager pay are ties that bind, creating a pervasive identity and a close-knit community that is resistant to an influx of outsiders who will alter the character, dilute the flavor, upset the economics.

All this said, there simmers beneath allegiance and turf pride a yen to circumvent authorities that subjugate, to buck the system, to get a leg up by hook or by crook. Almost everyone is at least loosely acquainted by first and last name; grammar school buddies grow into manhood together, but are reluctant to surrender their rumbling adolescence, still referring to each other as Mikey and Stevey. In a culture of corner bars and street hockey, where testosterone boils over, schemes are hatched, some of which are penny candy, others truly egregious. Quite a few involve drug dealing, and when they do, ordinary citizens morph into monsters.

It is in this context that first-time director Ben Affleck has taken a novel by Lehane, who also authored “Mystic River,” collaborated on a screenplay with Aaron Stockard, and fashioned yet another in what will soon be an anthology of distinguished thrillers with a distinctive Boston imprint. Nepotism aside, Ben has given brother Casey the long overdue opportunity to demonstrate his acting chops in a leading role, and Affleck the younger performs with the kind of unassuming veracity and effortless intensity we’ve come to expect from Ryan Gosling. If there are gears shifting and wheels turning inside Casey Affleck’s head as he plies the mechanics of acting, we certainly don’t hear them. But gazing into his gray-blue eyes and watching his facial muscles tense and twitch, you can read his reactive thought processes. His assured, unmannered performance as a private investigator from the neighborhood called in by relatives of a missing four-year-old girl to augment the official police investigation is polar opposite to Ed Harris’s heavy-handed, self-conscious turn as one of the investigating cops.

I agree with another reviewer that director Affleck was either less attentive to or too deferential toward the celebrity actors in “Gone Baby Gone” -- Harris and the ridiculously ubiquitous Morgan Freeman -- failing to reign in Harris’s hammy excesses and wring more conviction from Freeman. But Ben and Casey, raised in the Boston area by a divorced mom, know firsthand the attitudes and dispositions of Boston’s blue-collar citizenry, having banged around South Boston and Charlestown in their youth, returning even now to legendary Southie haunts, one of which served as a set for the Affleck/Matt Damon collaboration, “Good Will Hunting” in 1998.

Having spent 11 years of my own life in the capitol of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, I can attest to the authenticity of the Afflecks in recreating the white ghetto mentality of Boston’s parochial Dorchester neighborhood, which hugs the drive-time traffic-choked Southeast Expressway and is flanked on its west by a burgeoning African-American population that is creeping eastward. Dorchester gave us Mark and Donnie Wahlberg, who, like Casey Affleck’s character Patrick Kenzie in “Gone Baby Gone,” are reformed street toughs who walk the walk and talk the talk.

Kenzie and his girlfriend Angie Gennaro (Michelle Monaghan), work as a private investigating team, interacting with the missing girl’s mother Helene McCready (Amy Ryan) and her aunt and uncle Beatrice and Lionel (Amy Madigan and Titus Welliver) as they try to piece together the circumstances and implications of the abduction, sift through contradictory accounts, interview a noxious assortment of suspects, and put their lives on the line during a showdown between police and the presumed perps.

Ryan (The Wire, Law and Order, Capote) and Madigan (Carnivale, The Laramie Project, Pollock) play off each other with adversarial hyperacidity -- Beatrice having profiled her sister-in-law as a drug mule first and foremost, a barroom floozie second, and a practicing mother a distant third. Both tough-as-nails personalities are byproducts of a gritty urban subculture in which husbands and boyfriends have either abandoned their families, are away doing jail time, or are psychologically messed up by earlier abuses and struggling with their identities and self-esteem. These women are tenacious survivors -- they don’t back down from a confrontation or inquisition, and truth is most often a gross inconvenience.

But “Gone Baby Gone” is not your typical, if there really is such a thing, kidnap-ransom caper. It’s a toxic morass of mass corruption that infiltrates the very halls of law enforcement. And by the time all the gross mendacity plays out in this shocking, labyrinthian tale, only four characters remain unimpeachable. One of them is Kenzie, but he is forced to make an agonizing decision near the end of the film. He decides on the side of justice. But is doing the right thing always the right thing to do? We and he are left to contemplate that question and the consequences of his decision.


THE ASSASSINATION OF JESSE JAMES BY THE COWARD ROBERT FORD (A-)

In another moral and ethical dilemma, Casey Affleck’s character, Robert Ford, has to kill the man he once admired and longed to emulate, a man who has subjected him to scorn and humiliation, a man who suspects him and his brother Charley and just about every other member of the legendary James gang of insubordination and betrayal. For the record, when Ford the younger fires the fatal bullet into the back of Jesse James’s skull, he has no practical choice. It is a simple act of self-preservation -- either kill or be killed. But there is a secondary, almost as compelling, motive -- a bid for celebrity of his own as the man who finally (after 14 years) brought down the West’s most storied and feared outlaw, not coincidentally, the one with the largest bounty on his head.

But the guileless Robert Ford hadn’t fully anticipated the consequences of his act, his vision clouded by the will to live, revenge, and the hunger to be somebody. Jesse James was a 19th century incarnation of Robin Hood. A Confederate sympathizer, he robbed banks and trains partly as retribution for political injustices he perceived were brought about by the outcome of the Civil War. His 14-year reign of plunder was at the expense of war profiteers, real or fabricated, and earned for James veneration as a national folk hero. Again, as in “Gone Baby Gone,” Affleck’s character is left to grapple with the idiosyncrasies of justice.

By the time of the assassination, we have come to know Jesse James as a miscreant so sought after for so long that he lives under the assumed name of Tom Howard and moves his family -- wife Zee and their two children -- from place to place in and around Kansas City, Missouri, to avoid being fingered and captured. He suffers physically from the residual effects of gunshot wounds from his guerilla days in the war and his desperado days ever since, and mentally from a paranoiac distrust of everyone, now that the temptation of reaping a handsome reward for information leading to his arrest may be compromising the loyalties of his disciples.

James is unpredictable and volatile -- schizophrenic possibly -- and delights in getting into the heads of his gang members as a means of keeping them agitated, but inline. In the end, his subterfuges are his undoing, and his suspicions of disloyalty are self-fulfilling. And he has squandered the reverence of his truest believer. Brad Pitt, as Jesse, relishes James’s instability, moods shifting abruptly from melancholia to mischievousness to malevolence, and conveys this aberrant personality with chilling acuity -- perhaps his finest three hours on film.

Affleck is just as engaged as the open-book, starstruck sycophant whose demigod tumbles from grace. Robert Ford is overmatched by Jesse James in intellect and craftiness, but in the settling of scores, all that matters is that he’s a straight shot. Among the most memorable of the supporting performances are those of Sam Rockwell and Paul Schneider as gang members Charley Ford, Robert’s big brother, and Dick Liddil, both hoping against hope that their duplicity stays beneath Jesse’s paranoiac radar, that their obsequiousness buys them enough survival time until the boss is brought to justice.

“The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford” is a cinematic tone poem, a lyrical narrative written and directed as a highly observant character study, not ordinarily associated with the western genre, by Andrew Dominick. Don’t go looking for macho posturing and blazing gunfights. The James gang is at the very end of its stellar run, and, with its final, rather lackluster, train robbery, the curtain comes down with a thud, and the rest of the movie deals with the psychological fallout. It is a more than worthy new-age genre companion piece to “3:10 to Yuma,” released late last summer.

Despite the pall of treachery that hangs over its stark, expansive landscape, despite the hard edges of human existence it portrays, “Assassination” is an inventive art film resplendently photographed by Roger Deakins and hauntingly scored by Nick Cave and Warren Ellis. But we live in a society disdainful of delicacy and nuance, especially in the traditional provinces of heroes and villains. Art belongs in galleries and museums, not up there on the big screen. Who wants to think of Jesse James, who robbed the rich to empower the poor, as a mere mortal pursued by demons, maybe even your common garden-variety sociopath. Hey, don’t muddy my illusions of folk heroism with psychoanalysis backdropped by nature photography.

The middle-aged woman who sold me a ticket to this film issued fair warning that it runs nearly three hours and is violence deficient, heading off at the pass any complaints I might have later that my bloodthirstiness wasn’t adequately quenched, commenting further that people had been walking out early, grousing to management that “Assassination” is much talk and little action. Thinking person’s westerns are doomed to box office failure.


INTO THE WILD (A-)

The debate about the merits of this film frequently centers around whether director Sean Penn really buys into the cause-and-effect relationship between Christopher Johnson McCandless’s dysfunctional and bourgeois family life back home in Georgia and his decision to cut all ties that traditionally bind, never look back, and embark on a spirit-renewing and fulfilling cross-country adventure that winds up tragically in the wilds of Alaska.

To elaborate, were his experiences growing up amidst quarreling, deceitful parents obsessed with the trappings of middle-class materialism so offensive, so disillusioning, given the apparent absence of direct parental abuse and the tender and supportive closeness he shared with his sister Carine, to warrant such an unceremonious, cold-hearted disconnect? It wasn’t as if he was underage and subject to parental purview and apprehension as a juvenile runaway. Chris (Emile Hersch in a star-defining role) had already graduated from Emory University, as a top student and athlete, no less. He was of age to tramp the land at will. What’s more, we never see Chris as disrespectful, surly, or vindictive -- not in his interaction with his parents Billie (Marcia Gay Harden) and Walt (William Hurt), before he leaves, and not with any of the kindred, welcoming, endearing characters he befriends transiently during his travels through the upper midwest and southwest, all of whom are captivated by his infectious charm and immutable passion -- that single-minded determination to experience the full bounty and freeing powers of nature.

Every one of these encounters -- with an exuberant South Dakota wheat farmer (Vince Vaughn), a pair of aging hippies in a relationship crisis (Catherine Keener and Brian Dierker), a smitten 16-year-old (Kristen Stewart), and a lonely military retiree (Hal Holbrook) is validating for Chris and enriching for those he touches, so much so that everyone wants him to become family. But he’s resolute, he’s on an experiential mission, and there’s no wriggle room for human encumbrances or material baggage. Is that selfish or practical? Probably both. He turned down his parents’ offer of a new car as his graduation gift, preferring the comforting familiarity of his rustbucket Datsun for the journey he was secretly planning. Before taking off on that journey, he wrote a check for $24,000 -- the sum total of his post-grad nest egg -- to Oxfam International. He was clearly not interested in money or the things it could buy. And resistant to human intervention, no matter how well-intentioned. Did he cause his family great anguish? Absolutely. They were mystified and haunted by his disappearance, devastated by news of his death. Was this act predicated on payback or a genuine quest for solitude? As Penn tells it (he wrote the screenplay), we can’t really be sure, although the director’s own reputation for being mercurial, resistant to authority, and antiestablishment is well known. Penn leaves the psychology open-ended, and, in this instance, I like the ambiguity.

“Into the Wild” is based on Jon Krakauer’s 1996 book, which may provide more conclusive insights into McCandless’s psyche. It is said that Krakauer is more judgmental than Penn about Chris’s character, but one wonders how deep a writer can burrow into a young man’s soul from journal entries and interviews. Emile Hirsch (The Mudge Boy, Lords of Dogtown, Imaginary Heroes), himself 22 -- McCandless’s age at the time -- gives us an inexhaustibly upbeat, fearlessly unconventional character we can root for from a safe distance, even as we know in advance that his quest to commune alone with nature, with its inherent perils, will end badly. McCandless makes up for his small, almost delicate frame with incredible courage, resourcefulness, and resilience. But the margin of error when you’re out in the wilderness all by yourself can be miniscule, and a lapse in memory under duress is what ultimately does him in.

The most indelible scene in the film takes place, not in the Alaska wilderness, but in the desert outside Palm Springs, California just before McCandless turns north on the last long leg of his circuitous expedition. He has struck up an acquaintance with another loner, a ex Army man named Ron Franz who is living out his days in a desolate community on the banks of the Salton Sea. Like everyone else with whom Chris crosses paths, Franz takes a shine to the affable young man. Like everyone else, his instincts tell him that there’s a callow recklessness about Chris’s Alaskan obsession. The older man has dark forebodings -- apprehensiveness and a paternal instinct to protect register with aching poignance on Holbrook’s craggy, 82-year-old face. Having driven McCandless up to Interstate 10 where he can hitch a ride, Franz makes a final desperation bid to divert the young man from his mission. He offers to adopt McCandless. For an instant, the young man is speechless. But he quickly recovers his ingratiating poise -- maybe he really is a smooth operator, after all -- and lets his would-be surrogate father down very easily. “When I get back, Ron, we can talk about it.” In the meantime, the man’s gotta do what the man’s gotta do.
LARS AND THE REAL GIRL (A-)

It’s a tricky business making a palatable film about a well-meaning, 27-year-old social retard named Lars (Ryan Gosling), whose only intimate relationship is with a life-size, anatomically correct, mail-order doll named Bianca he has purchased on the Internet. How does the filmmaker, Craig Gillespie working from a script by Nancy Oliver, keep matters breezy and amiable enough so audiences don’t defect from the blithe spirit and start seeing Lars as a nasty perv, an embarrassment that has his brother Gus (Paul Schneider) all but freaking out in the movie’s early stages?

At what point does the fable stop being quirky and tantalizing and become uncomfortably weird? Will audiences really buy into the premise, fostered by an attending psychologist named Dagmar (Patricia Clarkson), that essentially Lars is going through a compensational phase, that this flight of fantasy is a way of sorting through his social clumsiness and distancing, and that, until his need for Bianca passes, everyone around them should be supportive of Lars and accepting of her -- at first, a tall order for Gus and wary friends and neighbors in the tightly knit, but nonspecific upper Midwestern town in which people of Scandinavian ancestry -- known for their live-and-let-live attitudes -- apparently predominate.

Gus’s wife Karin (Emily Mortimer) is in Lars’s camp throughout -- she goes out of her way to make allowances for his eccentricity and sets the film’s compassionate tone right from the start. Before long, the rest of the town rallies around the unique couple, too. As far as anyone can tell, Lars is just doing what seems natural, he poses no harm to himself or others, and he’s such a sociable, good-natured chap now, compared with his gloomy pre-Bianca days. Soon, Lars and Bianca are the toast of the town, and everyone is being nourished by the young man’s devotion to his doll and the prevailing climate of decency and inclusion that has overspread the community.

In what is no small miracle of moviemaking, Gillespie and his unsurpassable cast have crafted a film that eschews the opposing extremes of comic fantasy and clinical case study. Writer and director keep the psychobabble to a minimum and diagnostic implications ambiguous; but, by the same token, the film’s funny moments are cheering and affirming, not exploitative and demeaning, as is so often the case with American-made comedies these days. When Lars ultimately arrives at a reality checkpoint and goes through a process of self-discovery, Gillespie and Gosling keep the hand-wringing to a minimum, lest the film drift too far into darkness.

Lars is a departure from grittier, downbeat roles (Fracture, Half Nelson, The United States of Leland, The Believer) for Ryan Gosling but a test, nonetheless, of his ability to fuse agitation, eccentricity, gutlessness, and vulnerability into a personality who can galvanize validation and good will when repugnance and ostracism might have ruled instead. Schneider’s Gus is an average Joe who wants to do right by the troubled younger brother he abandoned to a soulless widowed father years before, and the actor does a fine job of melding compassion with discomfiture. But it is British-born Emily Mortimer (Paris, je t’aime, Match Point, Dear Frankie) who is particularly astonishing as Lars’s small-town America sister-in-law who persists in reaching out to Lars, providing him with the safe space and time he needs to find himself.

“Lars and the Real Girl” is family entertainment with a huge heart that celebrates human charity but doesn’t congratulate itself for doing so. Empathy, restraint, and warmheartedness prevail. You’d think people would be hankering for a feel-good film like this. Not so. In its first three weeks in theatres, “Lars and the Real Girl” has grossed a paltry $1.3 million. Maybe word-of-mouth will eventually trigger more enthusiasm.


LUST CAUTION (A-)

If you like your action fast and furious from the get-go, if your moviegoing experience has to be a chill or thrill a minute, if a story is set in a time period when everything up to an including espionage and carnal passion evolved at a more expository pace, if your metabolism, the quantity of caffeine, Ritalin, or, dare I infer, other substance you’ve inhaled or ingested, or the dizzying tempo of your multitasking day renders you unable to sit still for 90 minutes of figurative foreplay until the first NC-17-rated sex scene explodes on the screen, and if you’ve been raised on video games, text messaging, and other instruments of instant gratification, then that first hour-and-a-half of Ang Lee’s erotic thriller, “Lust Caution,” will indeed be an excruciating eternity.

It takes that long for Wong Chia Chi (newcomer Wei Tang), member of a radicalized group of student actors led by Kuang Yu Min (Chinese heartthrob Wang Lee-Hom), to penetrate the protective shell surrounding the political and personal life of Mr. Yee and begin setting him up for the kill. Mr. Yee (Tony Leung Chiu Wai) is an elite Chinese government minister collaborating with the oppressive Japanese occupation in the years leading up to World War II. He is movie-star handsome, debonair, mysterious, carefully composed, and calculatingly elusive; he has ceased to be a public figure, his movements are covert, his business dealings not even understood by his vacuous wife (Joan Chen) and her mahjongg cronies who are preoccupied with culinary arts and the shortages of commodities the occupation has brought about.

Mr. Yee has his eye on Wong from their first meeting around Mrs. Yee’s mahjongg table, but he is exceedingly circumspect, unyieldingly cautious, inscrutable. She glances up furtively from her tiles to let him know that she, too, has more than a passing interest. But this is a role for Wong even more daunting than her first performance on stage. That night, full of fear and self-doubt, she was transformed once the play began and scored a triumph. Now, again, she is facing her shyness and reticence head-on, having agreed impulsively to carry out her crucial and dangerous role in the resistance plot. Her indoctrination includes being “broken in” by the only member of the group with coital experience.

Wong proves consummately cool under pressure; on their first date, she manages to lure Mr. Yee back to the assassins’ lair. Just as the plot’s decisive moment is at hand, the traitorous official has chivalrous misgivings, or perhaps a stab of suspicion, and he bids Wong goodnight at the door. Within a matter of days, Mr. and Mrs. Yee have relocated to another part of the country, and the assassination plot is put on hold for nearly four years, by the end of which the world has been plunged into war.

Wong and the other five resistance fighters part company but reunite by chance just about the same time the Yees return to Shanghai and opportunity knocks again. Wong has polished her wiles and honed her enticement skills, but this time their interaction with one another has a manic love-hate ambivalence with repercussions in sadomasochistic sex -- prolonged scenes of steamy -- make that frenzied -- copulation which, if it really is simulated (unlikely), deserve a special category of awards recognition. In any event, lust has trumped trust, and Mr. Yee has thrown caution to the winds, though that doesn’t begin to give away the outcome.

Who better than Ang Lee to recreate the repressive pall that hung over a China occupied by the Japanese imperialists and the underlying sexual tension that begged for a highly charged outlet. We’re never sure how truly invested Wong is in eradicating the political evil that Mr. Yee represents or in resisting the oppressors from the Empire of the Sun. She enlists in the movement as much for her admiration for Kuang Yu Min, though that connection is left unexplored until the very end of the film. One can read on Wei Tang’s face the bedevilingly contradictory responses -- fear and fascination, contempt and desire -- her character is internalizing, her composure held in check until the volcanic passion between them finally erupts.

Lee, for all the lore about Chinese reserve and propriety, is drawn to sexually demonstrative characters (Brokeback Mountain, The Wedding Banquet, The Ice Storm) and sexual expression that transcends convention and confronts comfort zones. He demands that his actors reach down to the bottom of their souls to convey the contrariness of their public personas and their private urges. But the subtleties of character development and plot exposition, and assiduous re-creation of period detail are increasingly lost on today’s action-oriented moviegoers, including critics who have skewered this film for the amount of time Lee takes (158 minutes) to tell a simple story, sometimes complaining of thematic repetition I wasn’t aware of. Frankly, if I have any criticism of Lee’s laying out of the story, it’s that the students’ plot to gun down Yee was hatched in unrealistic haste -- an impulsive decision seemingly out of sync with reputed Asian introspection.
The greatest strength of Lee’s film lies in how its characters variously respond to life amidst suspension of human rights, social upheaval, and prolonged enmity, how repression deadens some responses and energizes others, how lust and caution are not mutually exclusive, but diabolically, desperately, mystifyingly intertwined.


DAN IN REAL LIFE (D+)

This has proved to be a modest crowd pleaser; I just don’t happen to be one of that crowd.

Dan Burns (Steve Carell) is a journalist and stay-at-home dad. He writes a daily column called “Dan in Real Life” for a New Jersey newspaper, in which he dispenses pearls of wisdom about how troubled people who write him letters of despair, should alter their ways and reorder their lives. But Dan could use a healthy dose of his own medicine. He’s still stuck in grief over his wife’s death, four years before, hasn’t as yet put himself out there to date, and is dad and mom to three daughters of whom he is too protective and who think he’s an anxious fuddy-duddy, which he is, and his rules far too restrictive, which they’re probably not. So far a passably interesting narrative.

Dan and the girls pack up one Friday and head north to a weekend family retreat at the compound of Poppy (John Mahoney, underutilized as never before) and Nana (Dianne Wiest) Burns on Naragansett Bay, in Rhode Island. The whole fam damily is there, siblings, spouses, kids and caboodle, and they’re all so chipper and chummy that melancholy Dan stands out like a sore chump. Well, Nana can’t conscience his long puss the next morning and tells him to drive into town, pick up a newspaper, and refresh his mood in the bracing salt air. He pops into the local bookstore and meets Marie (Juliette Binoche), who, thinking he’s the proprietor, solicits his advice (who besides his daughters doesn’t?) on a gift book for her new boyfriend. Dan is smitten, summons his gallantry, and dazzles Marie with his literary perspicacity. There’s clearly a spark between them, even though she’s clear about her budding relationship. He gives her his phone number, nevertheless, just on the chance that...well, just on the chance -- let’s leave it at that. She zooms off in her car, leaving Dan on cloud nine, giddy with serendipity.

Dan arrives back at the compound, all energized and uplifted. “Come meet your brother’s new friend,” Nana beams. Brother Mitch (Dane Cook) has a reputation for being a bit of a rogue -- girlfriends are readily disposable commodities. This one, Nana infers, is different. And is she ever! La femme du semaine is none other than Marie. Poor Dan is stunned, addled, annoyed -- struck dumb by the cruel coincidence. And I can’t wait to see where all this is going. I find out soon enough -- straight down the tubes. Dan has to pretend to be happy for bro Mitch -- and Mitch is one of these endearing, hail fellow jocks that has never outgrown his adolescence -- which just tickles the feather of most of his family. An abject Dan also has to be obliging toward Marie -- smile though his heart is breaking” -- even though he can’t imagine what she sees in Mitch -- no offense -- besides playtoy amusement. Of course, neither Dan nor Marie can let on that their paths have crossed that very morning.

But this fluke of fate, which had such comedic promise, becomes muddled because there are just too many demanding personalities rousting about that household that weekend, and nearly all of them are extroverts eager for their time in the spotlight. Now I’m not saying families like this don’t exist, but the outpouring of good-natured fraternity and rah-rah spirit really began to grate on my nerves. I’ve never cottoned to what I regard as “forced fun.” But this clan is big on organized activities and no one’s exempt from participating. -- touch football on the side lawn, an overwrought game of charades, an evening-long talent show -- anything to cement familial togetherness.

Dan and Marie steal a few moments away from the madding crowd -- with this bunch, real privacy is accorded only for sleeping -- mostly to complain to one another about how delicate is their plight. Duh, yeah! But their surreptitious exchanges begin to sound like bickering. Dan’s head-over-heels, so we know why this situation has put him in a foul mood. But Marie’s state of mind and her allegiances are unclear, and this is where Peter Hedges direction and his screenplay (co-written with Pierce Gardner) hit a big snag, that not even the usually intuitive and resourceful Binoche can untangle. Now having seen him in the context of Burns tribal rituals, is she beginning to have second thoughts about Mitch? Is the bookstore Dan who enchanted her with his wit and wisdom more suited to her temperament and worldliness? On the other hand, is the irritable and mopey Dan she’s seeing back at the house the real deal?

Somebody besides Nana and Marie finally notices that Dan isn’t buying into all the bonhomie, assuming he’s just bummed out by being the only one flying solo that weekend. It’s bro Mitch who offers to fix him up with a former classmate who’s back in town -- one Ruthie Draper, who had the dubious distinction of being their high school’s ugliest duckling -- but has now returned a new woman, and a doctor, no less. Recalling her outcast days of yore, Mitch has composed a nasty little ditty likening Ruthie to that lowest class of farm animal, the one that yields the other white meat. Cook can’t really carry a tune, and the improvisation, drawing fiendish laughter from this largely crass crowd, is juvenile and insensitive, in lock step with so many American comedies.

Next thing we know, Mitch has set up a double date at a local pub, but he, Marie, and Dan come face-to-face with a completely restyled Ruthie Draper (Emily Blunt), in no way resembling the model Mitch was trashing the night before. Tooling up in a rakish sports car, Ruthie presents as a slinky femme fatale, a flirtatious temptress adorned to the nines, who comes on to Dan on all cylinders. Ruthie’s the perfect tonic for his floundering ego, and he plays up to her allures to arouse Marie’s jealousy. Blunt, only 24, is establishing herself as a chameleonic character actress, somewhat in the Parker Posey mold, and her appearance enlivens a film that has otherwise lost its way. Steve Carell is riding a crest of popularity right now, appealing to moviegoers of both sexes and all ages. But “Little Miss Sunshine” aside, his films simply don’t resonate with me, but that’s more a reflection of how I regard the stories and roles he chooses than his level of talent. Why an actress with Juliette Binoche’s credentials (The English Patient, Chocolat, Cache, The Widow of St. Pierre) would align herself with a lightweight project like “Dan in Real Life” is baffling -- she can’t have been paid lavishly for this stint.

The outcome of this film is never really in doubt -- Dan’s luck has got to turn, he’s just too nice a guy -- but I won’t spell it out in so many words, just on the chance that I’m the movie’s only naysayer, and the viewpoints of others will influence you more.