Jovovich and List in Bringing Up Bobby.

Sensitively acted, carefully written and directed with heartfelt compassion, Bringing Up Bobby is an engrossing little independent film made on an austere budget in 22 days. It marks the writing-directing debut of Dutch actress and former Chanel model Famke Janssen, a B-movie actress who specializes in playing tough, sexy, alternative women living in society’s city limits in thrillers (House on Haunted Hill) and action epics like the X-Men franchise. Who knew she had so much hidden talent? 

The story is about a beautiful loser named Olive, a Ukrainian immigrant and single mother who has somehow ended up stranded in Oklahoma as a struggling con artist. (The tagline for the movie reads, “Meet Olive: mother, breadwinner, felon.”) She came to America to escape a grim, deprived existence, because it’s a place where you can do anything you want to do. What she does, however, is attend church socials to bilk gullible hillbillies out of donations for phony Christian charities in Europe, and write bad checks for used cars that an accomplice sells for enough profit to take care of her 10-year-old son, Bobby (Spencer List). He’s her top priority, she loves him madly, and the goal is to make him the first person in her family to go to college. But Bobby is showing signs of being a chip off the old block. He steals, makes prank calls to the neighbors, throws cans at passing cars and gets Fs on his homework. Raised in the shadows of a misdemeanor a day, with a mom who is always one shapely foot ahead of the sheriff, Bobby thinks crime is cool, eagerly dreaming up inventive ways to join his mother’s scams. When Bobby gets hit on his skateboard by a sleek convertible driven by a kind, respectable real-estate tycoon (Bill Pullman), it’s the lucky break Olive has been hoping for. She sees dollar signs in her future, but before her inflated lawsuit against his insurance company can be properly investigated, her criminal past inevitably catches up with her, and Olive goes to prison. To save Bobby from the juvenile authorities, the kid is legally adopted by the man who hit him and his wife (Marcia Cross of Desperate Housewives), both of whom are still grieving over the loss of a son Bobby’s age.

Eight months later, released and paroled, Olive sees so much improvement in the quality of her child’s new life (chess lessons, art classes, private school and a swimming pool) that she is forced to rethink it all. To find a way back into the life of a child who may be better off without her, she has to go straight, turn over a new leaf and get a job. She does the best she can, but all she can manage is scrubbing toilets, living in a homeless shelter and carrying a sign around her neck advertising a muffler shop. Heartbroken, she’s forced to make the toughest of decisions. The script stops short of one of those three-Kleenex, Moses-in-the-bullrushes finales, but there is no question that bringing up Bobby will never be the same.

Olive is clearly a role Famke Janssen could play wearing a blindfold, but for her directorial debut, she’s hired the next best girl for the job. Milla Jovovich, who hit her stride as one of Richard Avedon’s favorite models at age 11, is a perfect stand-in. There are times, at certain angles and in a soft light, when she even looks like Ms. Janssen. Like Olive, she was actually born in Kiev, although she never made an impact on the screen—until now. Clumsy trash like The Fifth Element with Bruce Willis and five installments of the Resident Evil pictures haven’t elevated her career prospectus, but Ms. Jovovich displays such a keen awareness of her strengths that she brings out magical elements I never believed possible. She manages to make Olive both colorful and irresponsible, self-centered and big-hearted, infuriating and sympathetic, sometimes within the same scene. With her charming accent, Ph.D. in the school of hard knocks and unique way of murdering the English language, she keeps you riveted. Raising a toast, she giggles, “Down into hatch!” Misty-eyed and clueless, she’s irresistible.

rreed@observer.com

BRINGING UP BOBBY

Running Time 95 minutes

Written and Directed by Famke Janssen

Starring Milla Jovovich, Bill Pullman and Marcia Cross

3/4

Two things I can count on every August: Movies get lousier than they were all year, and I go on vacation. This time, it’s different. I’m still taking a month off, but there are some big surprises at the movies. Most of them are unexpected and underpublicized, some of them boast low budgets and high rewards, a few of them need to be added to your must-see list, and you can start with Bottle Shock, a marvelous, beautifully made, feel-good movie that is guaranteed to revive everyone’s flagging faith in American pride at home and abroad—something in these sorry, perilous times we’re desperately short of.

Talk about novel and unhackneyed themes. Bottle Shock is not a documentary, but it does provide a true account of the actual events in 1976, the year of America’s bicentennial, when a small California vineyard produced a perfect chardonnay that won the international “Judgment of Paris” competitions, changed the course of history and put American wines on the map forever. “Bottle shock” is the term used when a new white wine—properly aged, tested and ready to market for the first time—turns brown inside its bottle before it is uncorked. This used to be a disgrace, a tragedy, and a cause for bankruptcy. But all is not lost. Veteran vintners have learned through experience that if you leave it alone to sit, brown wine sometimes returns to its natural color and flavor in a few days. This is what happened in 1976. In the Napa Valley, a lawyer named Jim Barrett (Bill Pullman) hocked everything to buy a Calistoga vineyard and follow his dream to develop the world’s greatest California chardonnay, named after his Chateau Montelena vineyard. Meanwhile, across the Atlantic, Steven Spurrier (Alan Rickman), a snobbish British wine merchant (and secret admirer of California wines) living in Paris, drummed up a gimmick to save his struggling wine shop: stage a contest, judged by nine carefully chosen French oenophiles, pitting French wines against their Californian counterparts. Bottle Shock re-stages the swirling, sniffing, sipping and spitting of the actual competition, but more interestingly, it catalogs the internecine conflicts that almost prevented the winning chardonnay from crossing the ocean at all.

Up to his ears in mortgages and bank loans, Barrett worked day and night to make better wine while Spurrier dodged the barbs of French food critics, sommeliers and his own customers. Two men with nothing in common but their passion for the grape. In Napa, Barrett also had to battle the priorities of his slacker son Bo (Chris Pine); his most loyal worker and Bo’s best friend, Gustavo (Freddy Rodriguez, from Six Feet Under), the Mexican kid who knew so much about wine he could tell the contents and vintage of a bottle just by tasting it; and his pretty new intern Sam (Rachael Taylor), whose affections were divided between both boys, causing friction throughout the vineyard. When Spurrier arrived in Napa, all kinds of hell broke loose. Then the finished product, though exceptional in taste, oxidized and turned brown, and the devastated elder Barrett ordered 500 cases to be destroyed. How the entire vintage of discolored wine was intercepted on its way to the dump, how Bo convinced a planeful of tourists to each carry one bottle of Chateau Montelena to Paris in their carry-on luggage (ah, those were the days!), and how the vineyard was saved from its creditors and Barrett was elevated to the status of global royalty are fertile elements in a story that leaves you cheering.

It’s a great story, and Bottle Shock polishes it off like a rare Mouton Rothschild. From the spectacular backdrops of Napa wine country to the uniformly spot-on performances by his entire cast, director Randall Miller has left no bridge uncrossed in the unfolding saga. Except for a few dramatic liberties (the gorgeous intern Sam, who adds romantic oomph, is fictional), the characters in the story are real, still alive, and acted as invaluable contributors to the meticulous research. Jim Barrett is in his 80s now; his son Bo is in his 50s; and their Chardonnay is still coveted by wine lovers, though it’s in short supply. Their obsession with the art of winemaking is thrillingly captured in a script (by Jody Savin, director Miller, and Ross Schwartz) that makes you feel the soil, smell the vines, taste the body and flavor of the finished product, and appreciate what Galileo meant when he said, “Wine is sunlight held together by water.” Bottle Shock goes a long way toward turning 2008 into a vintage year.

rreed@observer.com

Under the assured direction of Pam MacKinnon, and excellently acted by Bill Pullman, Johanna Day and Dallas Roberts, Peter and Jerry combines Mr. Albee’s seminal, one-act Zoo Story (1958) with Homelife, the delicious and troubling one-act prequel he wrote to accompany it in 2003.

The renowned playwright has said that he was tempted to tell us more about his reticent, 40-something Peter, the pipe-smoking, anonymous man on a Central Park bench in Zoo Story who encounters a “permanent transient” named Jerry. We all know who Jerry is when we meet him in the play: He tells us about himself unsparingly. But who exactly is his innocent victim, Peter?

Any major playwright who returns to his early work, as Mr. Albee has done here, is living dangerously. (Arthur Koestler once described such nostalgia lethally as like a dog returning to its own vomit.) The older, legendary Edward Albee (now 79) isn’t the same man, we assume, as the furious, unknown playwright of a half-century ago. How would the two Albees get along? Surprisingly well, as it happens, considering they’ve just met. Mr. Albee may have changed over the years, but his preoccupations remain the same.

The pain and difficulty of love or connection; the emotional battlegrounds of divided souls; the pull of unconscious sexual desires; the American tragedy of appearances; desperation and loss—these are the defining themes of his plays. (He can also be pretty funny.)

The first words of Homelife—which opens the double-bill—are: “We should talk.” They’re spoken by Peter’s wife, and though they’re delivered matter-of-factly by a woman described clinically in the script as “pleasant-looking, unexceptional,” her mundane words could easily be threatening. Peter, a successful publisher of textbooks, doesn’t hear, however. He’s distracted, reading a book.

The now famous first words of Zoo Story, on the other hand, could signal terror:

“I’ve been to the zoo,” Jerry tells Peter on the bench. But Peter doesn’t notice. (He’s reading the same book). “I said, I’ve been to the zoo. MISTER! I’VE BEEN TO THE ZOO!”

HOMELIFE IS A domestic chamber piece about Peter (played by Bill Pullman, whose fine performance in both plays is perfectly pitched). Peter’s sort of happy marriage to Ann is a relationship of mutual compromise and “no jagged edges,” with a comforting, symmetrical family of two children, two cats and two parakeets. (Neil Patel’s modern, minimalist setting on New York’s East Side is appropriately neat and bloodless.) But as we’ve come to expect from the dramatist who wrote a play about a happily married man who falls wildly in love with a barnyard animal (The Goat, 2002), all isn’t quite right in Peter’s orderly household.

Mr. Albee has given his restrained hero what must surely be one of the most unexpected lines he’s ever written:

“I think my circumcision is going away.”

Peter points this out to his stunned wife as if he’s absent-mindedly mislaid his fountain pen. And Ann (Johanna Day) laughs disbelievingly, like us. But Peter’s in earnest. It turns out that his circumcision is receding. But then, his edgier wife can tell him that he’s good at making love “but lousy at fucking”—and intend no apparent harm! Peter flares briefly—but no more than that. There’s no anger in him. “Be kind,” he says later to Ann gently, or in quiet supplication to himself.

Peter’s someone who became solidly, contentedly middle-aged before his time—a decent sort, pleasant, well-meaning, bemused and repressed. He’s incapable of irrationality or a show of passion, whereas Ann wants to put some chaos into their ordered lives. As they chat about ordinary and taboo things (voluntary mastectomy is one of her subjects), she tells him that she longs to have wild, rough sex for its own sake. She knows he hasn’t got it in him.

She’s surprised and curious to learn from Peter that he was once turned on by horribly abusing a girl during a hazing session at college. In his shame, he’s become a conventional, domesticated animal.

An undercurrent of mild unspoken menace emerges in Homelife, though it ends cheerfully in harmless whimsy. Its emotional subtext foreshadows Zoo Story’s convulsive finale in which Jerry provokes meek, harmless Peter to kill him.

Mr. Albee’s perceptive biographer, Mel Gussow, pointed out that the novice playwright found his own voice with the exhilarating Zoo Story. It’s a play that would influence an entire generation of young, emerging American playwrights in the 1960’s (and inaugurated the genre of “the park bench play”). To see it today is to realize that it’s still a shattering experience. I’ll burn my bridges and claim that in all of modern U.S. drama, I can think of no more ferocious statement about relationships than Jerry’s staggering monologue about a killer dog he describes as “malevolence with an erection.”

Dallas Roberts is riveting as Jerry, the lost, directionless soul who’s just been to the zoo and lives in a one-room dump on the Upper West Side. He wants to talk, wants a conversation. He’s like an animal who keeps flinging itself at the bars of his cage.

“The Story of Jerry and the Dog!”—as he calls it, as if announcing a grotesque sideshow for Peter’s instruction—is the long and winding story of to how he came to tame his loathed landlady’s vile dog with poisoned hamburgers, medium rare. “All right. The dog, I think I told you, is a black monster of a beast: an oversized head, tiny, tiny ears and eyes … bloodshot, infected, maybe; and a body you can see the ribs through the skin.”

It attacked him, going to bite his leg off, from the first day he moved in. “Now animals don’t take to me like St. Francis had birds hanging off him all the time. What I mean is: Animals are indifferent to me … like people,” he adds, smiling lightly. “But this dog wasn’t indifferent.” So Jerry decided: “First, I’ll kill the dog with kindness, and if that doesn’t work … I’ll kill him.”

Peter is listening wincingly to all this—anxious to oblige the talkative stranger who’s joined him uninvited at the bench. Jerry then tells how he poisoned the dog: “AND IT CAME TO PASS THAT THE BEAST WAS DEATHLY ILL.” He said to the stricken landlady that he’d pray for the dog, but she didn’t believe him. “I told her, and there is so much truth here, that I didn’t want the dog to die. I didn’t, and not just because I’ve poisoned him. I’m afraid that I must tell you I wanted the dog to live so that I could see what our new relationship might come to.”

The dog recovered, and they reached a compromise, a truce between them. He even got to love the
dog. “Don’t you see?” Jerry pleads with Peter. “A person has to have some way of dealing with SOMETHING.” And in the howling and wreckage of life, he has learned that “the teaching emotion” is a combination of kindness and cruelty, and that the dog and he “neither love nor hurt because we do not try to reach each other.”

Perhaps Jerry is a crazed martyr; perhaps in the last primal moments, he’s simply content to be out of it like a wounded animal who has to be put down. “I’ll tell you something now,” he tells the horrified Peter with his dying breath. “You’re not really a vegetable, you’re an animal. You’re an animal, too. But you’d better hurry now, Peter. Hurry, you’d better go. …”

Zoo Story left me feeling shocked and elated, and yet I’m uncertain whether we truly need its prequel—glad though I was to see it. Having visited Zoo Story again, it seems to me that we’ve always known who Mr. Albee’s Peter is, more or less.

He’s us.

A lifetime ago, a talented lady by the name of Rochelle Owens wrote Futz! , an Off Broadway hit about a guy who falls helplessly in love with a pig. It was named Amanda. Sylvia is the goat. Ms. Owens was working at Sotheby Parke Bernet in New York City when she wrote Futz! , and her play for pig lovers did for the pig what Mr. Albee tries to do for the goat. It put zoophilia on the map.

The innovative 1968 Futz! also included various acts of bestiality, sadism, transvestitism and what the most erudite John Simon called in The Times "troilism" (man, woman and pig). I'm not sure whether Amanda the pig was bisexual or just going with the program. Anyway, the cult-movie version of Futz! –not to be confused, of course, with Das Fröhliche Dorf (1955), the hilarious German comedy concerning a sow named Jolanta–which was directed by Tom O'Horgan, of Hair fame, is principally remembered today for Sally Kirkland riding naked on Amanda.

Lucky Amanda. Like Futz! 's heroine, however, Mr. Albee's Sylvia could be, just might be … A Symbol . Try not to tell anyone. Very Important Dramatists want you to figure these things out for yourself. I wouldn't say, though, that Mr. Albee's goat is Ishmael's whale. Sylvia is no Moby Dick. No sirree. Sylvia is sweet, if a little predatory with her come-hither eyes.

"And it was then that I saw her," confesses Martin, Mr. Albee's tragic hero, explaining to his understandably stunned wife his first eye-lock with the goat. "And she was looking at me … with those eyes."

Even so, Sylvia symbolizes Innocence. The goat possesses an Edenesque purity of soul, whilst also seeming to be a most charming spokesperson for fundamentalist vegetarianism. "I've never seen such an expression," Martin, the cross-species lover, says of his epiphany. "It was pure … and trusting … and innocent; so … so guileless."

We don't actually see Sylvia, and perhaps it's as well. It would spoil the illusion. But in their different, so … guileless ways, Mr. Albee's goat and Ms. Owens' pig amount to the same morality tale. Sylvia and Amanda are inevitably killed in acts of blind retribution–making them heavily symbolic martyrs to society's censorious conformism and its judgmental spoilsports. Mr. Albee's hero, Martin, is another martyr to the cause, and the dramatist seems to see himself as one, too. He's even thrown in references to Christ and Saint Sebastian, for Heaven's sake.

Edward Albee–or St. Ed, as he's sometimes known–intends to shock us, obviously. The renowned dramatist, anxious to condition us in what to expect, announced before The Goat opened at the Golden on Broadway: "There's one thing I'm doing in this play: testing the tolerance of the audience. Testing the limits of tolerance."

He must be joking. He's written a play that's about as shocking as blueberry pie. Far from pushing the limits of theater, he's doing nothing new–least of all avant-garde or revolutionary. The message that married couples kill each other was first told by Mr. Albee a generation ago with Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? He's actually pulled his punches about the boundaries of love and sex. In The Goat , we're given the hero's vague, stammering romanticism of illicit love, but no sense whatsoever of its reality. He and the goat nuzzle, but how do they actually get the show on the road? "I won't go into the specifics of our sex with you," Martin announces primly about his new love. Why not? A detail or two would have surely tested the limits, and the audience would have been in welcome uproar.

For all Mr. Albee's posturing, at best he's written a conventional drawing-room comedy with Serious Undertones. The piece is self-consciously, flippantly Cowardesque. One of Mr. Albee's dubious messages is that some things in life are too serious to be taken seriously. (Is a stiff upper lip masking superficially brittle emotion the same as Greek tragedy? Kindly discuss among yourselves.) But it's why Mr. Albee's married couple likes to impersonate Noël Coward. (Is this what married couples do?)

Mr. Albee, and Sylvia, get their laughs, but there are more bad jokes than there ought to be. After all, the life and marriage of Stevie, the betrayed wife, have been ruined and tragically diminished. Yet she still has time for jokes about their teenage "kid." Geddit? At another side-splitting moment, she teases her husband, "Oh, you kid." She means "You're kidding." The audience laughs just the same, and, frankly, it gets your goat. Not to ram the point home, but while we're meant to sense tragedy about to explode beneath the trivializing surface, this is just silly.

The wife's anger, when it arrives, amounts to campy melodrama. She smashes symbolically primitive art works as she learns of her husband's primitive new love. "I've laid it all out for you," she cries. "I'm naked on the table; take all your knives! Cut me! Scar me forever!"

Meanwhile, 50-year-old Martin, the placid goat lover and architect who's just won the Pritzker Prize, is a pedantic semantician who's meant to be a cool ironist. He corrects people for saying "who" when they mean "whom," and "ranunculi" for the plural of "ranunculus." He's a dope. He's far more concerned about the betrayal of his lifelong best friend Ross, the Judas and liberal-minded hypocrite who ratted to his wife about the goat, than he is about his wife. "I'll tell you what's sick! Writing that fucking letter …. " Martin says.

Be that as it may, The Goat is little more than a shrill domestic drama about infidelity ending with a crime of a passion. "What did she do?" the broken Martin cries to the betrayed wife over the corpse of the lover. "What did she ever do? I ask you: What did she ever do?"

Well, she stole the husband. She ruined a blissfully happy 22-year marriage. And she's a goat ! I'm not sure what the wife, or Sylvia, ever saw in Martin. But what Martin sees in a coarse 1950's fink in a blazer like Ross is more of a mystery. It's a pity, or an easy mark, that Ross is the voice of "reason" in the play. If we happen to think that liberty (on balance) has borders, we therefore find ourselves agreeing with a contemptible informer.

The Goat is a smug play that way. There's a brief moment–not too unexpected–when Martin's adolescent son, who's gay and confused, kisses his father sexually while they comfort each other. There's also one fleeting story that Martin tells about a man who held his baby in his lap and became aroused. "Things happen" is his casual conclusion–the moral equivalent of a shrug.

Hey-ho. Anything goes, according to Edward Albee. "Is there anything anyone doesn't get off on, whether we admit it or not–whether we know it or not?" Martin asks as the evening comes to its close. The answer is yes, plain and simple. Ask the baby. But for Mr. Albee to suggest that everything is right is as mindless as saying everything is wrong. He wouldn't claim, I assume, there's no such thing as bad art or a bad play. But in the end The Goat offers us nothing fresh, and bad plays are all around us.