Fonda in Peace, Love, & Misunderstanding.

Jane Fonda is always a welcome antidote to the hackneyed drivel of today’s movies, even when she’s relegated to sharing the screen with also-rans like Jennifer Lopez and Lindsay Lohan. In her career zenith, she could always be counted on to bring both complexity and nuance to the least deserving roles. At 74, she hasn’t forgotten a thing. With a wonderful, careful and admiring director, she gives even a routine picture unbridled energy, craft and an extra dash of class above and beyond the script. All reasons to embrace Bruce Beresford’s warm, polished, feel-good comedy Peace, Love, & Misunderstanding. 

Jane plays Grace, a beautiful remnant of Woodstock, an aging hippie in upstate New York who long ago surrendered the ties that bind free spirits to conventional social acceptance. She tends her kiln, barters for supplies with her art, grows chickens while holding war protests every Saturday. She’s a vigilant flower child who has given up nothing including her marijuana plants. She grows it in a specialty plant-lighted room perfect for weed. This is not autobiographical material. When the hippies were blowing in the wind, Jane was living in Paris, married to Roger Vadim. But she is a perfect Grace. Like I said before, she has forgotten nothing—including the ability to bring even a homespun character with obelisk jade earrings and macramé Feng Shui.

Culture shock looms when Grace’s successful, anal retentive Manhattan lawyer daughter Diane (Catherine Keener), in the middle of a nasty divorce, arrives in Woodstock to visit the estranged mother she hasn’t spoken to for 20 years, bringing along her two children, Jake (Nat Wolff) and Zoe (Elizabeth Olsen), who have never met their grandmother. The reunion packs an instant wallop. Diane is appalled to find her mother sleeps around at will and plays town matriarch to what’s left over from the Flower Power movement, as well as local fertility goddess and revered dope dealer. She welcomes frequent visits from naked men in the middle of the night and dances once a month around a bonfire, playing weird instruments and howling at the moon. Instead of Diane’s feared negative effect of her mother’s liberal personality on her kids, they adjust quickly and embrace their eccentric grandmother’s force of nature with relish. Diane resists her mother’s primitive lures, but the kids discover a liberating energy they didn’t know they had. In no time, vegetarian Zoe falls for a handsome butcher (Chace Crawford). Jake becomes attached to a young waitress and turns into a filmmaker. Even Diane meets a handsome, hopelessly corny, guitar-playing carpenter (Jeffrey Dean Morgan) who sings, writes songs and rekindles her lost interest in romance. While Grace reminisces about Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin and threesomes with Leonard Cohen, her grandkids become enchanted with a way of life before their time. In time, they want to be just like her. Everyone learns something, in follow-the-dots movie predictability, but you like the characters so much you want them to smile and find peace in new beginnings and fresh family bonds. They bring their own hang-ups and learn to change gracefully. They all read too much Walt Whitman, and I would have liked it more if it wasn’t manipulated by so many of those old songs from the 1960s that seem so naïve and simplistic now. Still, it’s pleasant watching this uniquely cool grandmother share her pot with her uptight grandkids and encourage them to lose their virginity, presenting them with the raw material they need to look into their own souls.

Pop songs, beautiful bucolic scenery and the joy of watching Jane Fonda fizz in a fun role that looks like a no-brainer are elements that a skilled director like Australia’s polished Bruce Beresford (Driving Miss Daisy) blends with perfection. Best of all, there is Jane Fonda, whose total investment of heart and soul lights up every corner of the screen. She is so much a part of Grace that you can only wonder if placing Ronald Reagan’s autobiography next to The Cannabis Grower’s Bible wasn’t her own idea. “Maybe he’ll learn something,” says Grace. Or is it Jane Fonda talking? No matter how you slice it, she still has a lot to give, and in  Peace, Love, & Misunderstanding, she gives it all she’s got.

rreed@observer.com

PEACE, LOVE, & MISUNDERSTANDING

Running Time 96 minutes

Written by Joseph Muszynski and Christina Mengert

Directed by Bruce Beresford

Starring Jane Fonda, Catherine Keener and Elizabeth Olsen

3/4

Mr. Scanlan mentioned that it was Mr. Beresford's 70th birthday, which drew gasps and a burst of applause from the audience. Many of his friends and much of the cast of the film he's currently working on, Peace, Love, and Misunderstanding, turned out to fete Mr. Beresford. The Transom spotted child actor Nat Wolff, CNN correspondent Alina Cho, Gossip Girl's Chace Crawford and Catherine Keener, who appeared from the state of her hair to have gotten caught in the sudden rainstorm outside. (She still looked great.)

The role in Peace, Love, and Misunderstanding that has everyone talking, however, belongs to Jane Fonda: She plays a Woodstock-dwelling flower child now embarking on grandmotherhood. We suggested delicately that perhaps the role had given Ms. Fonda a chance to get back in touch with her hippie roots; she, of course, was a vocal opponent of the Vietnam War. "My what roots?" she asked, holding her remarkably well-behaved little dog in her arms. "Stoned hippie grandma?" Ms. Fonda insisted that she has little in common with the character, really. "I've never played a character like this before, and I never was like this character! Protests, yes, but not like her. She's very colorful!"

We asked about the funny, strange Scissors Sisters comedy video released earlier this month, in which Ms. Fonda appears along with Amanda Lepore, Kylie Minogue and Juliette Lewis. She explained she's a friend of the band. "And I went to the concert when I was in Paris. Un-friggin'-believable. Unbelievable. [Jake Shears] ended up almost naked, I might add. It was great."

Kyle MacLachlan had also been to Paris lately. "I did one trip to Paris, which is my wife's favorite city, and I love it, too," he told the Transom. "We happened to hit it right at the height of a heat wave, which is difficult-but we enjoyed that very much, took our son with us." Now that Desperate Housewives has wrapped up, Mr. MacLachlan has again been flexing his indie muscles. "I worked on a little thing for the Independent Film Channel with Fred Armisen called Portlandia a couple of months ago. That's been picked up, it's going to come out and that will be kind of fun." We looked it up-it is co-written by Carrie Brownstein of the indie rock band Sleater-Kinney.

The man of the evening, Mr. Beresford, admitted to the Transom that he knew "virtually nothing" about ballet when he set out to direct Mao's Last Dancer. "I'd directed a number of operas, but I didn't really know anything about ballet! But then I've done a lot of films where I never knew anything about the subject. You know, you've got to research it," he said. But he didn't try out any steps himself: "None whatever! You know, you've got to be so fit, and it's one of the most rigorous things you can possibly do. To learn to be a great ballet dancer is years and years of training, you know, from childhood. Very tough."

We also inquired as to whether Mr. Beresford had rented any of the classic ballet movies-like The Red Shoes (yes) or Center Stage. "Oh yeah, Center Stage, I saw that one, yeah," he allowed. "There are a lot of 'em!"

Denzel Washington plays the fancifully named Lincoln Rhyme, a renaissance-man forensics detective who has been rendered a quadriplegic by a spinal injury received in the line of duty. He is bed-bound with the use of one finger to manipulate his high-tech environment provided by the Police Department. Rhyme has written many books on his specialty and is one of the world's leading criminologists. Nonetheless, he is so depressed at what he perceives to be his own impending vegetative state that he is planning suicide.

At this point, the department drops a juicy murder case in his lap, and he becomes intrigued by the expert investigative instincts displayed by a mysteriously moody policewoman named Amelia Donaghy and played by Angelina Jolie, who in this movie, at least, struck me as a distracting dead ringer for Ashley Judd in Bruce Beresford's Double Jeopardy . Ms. Judd and Ms. Jolie project the same feisty, pouty, almost surly expression, especially just before they burst into tears of explosive exasperation and frustration. Since both Mr. Noyce and Mr. Beresford are former Australian directors of great cultural eminence now comfortably ensconced on Hollywood's high-budget action-movie aerie, there is always the temptation for highbrow but financially impoverished film critics to proclaim that two more exalted foreign filmmakers have sold out to the filthy lucre of Lotus Land. I prefer to think that Mr. Noyce and Mr. Beresford have chosen to accept the challenges of mass-audience, big-star projects, by providing something extra with their transcendent directorial talents. That is to say, Mr. Noyce and Mr. Beresford make The Bone Collector and Double Jeopardy absorbingly and entertainingly watchable despite the silly lapses and improbabilities in the respective scripts.

Be that as it may, The Bone Collector is more original though less audience-pleasing than Double Jeopardy , which shrewdly splices the story lines from Thelma & Louise and The Fugitive . Mr. Washington, generally a diffident and reluctant star talent, is well cast as a physically handicapped but mentally overloaded mentor for Ms. Jolie's emotionally insecure but sharp-eyed, sharp-witted and sharp-tongued policewoman, to ease her rite of passage through the horrors of forensically perceived crime scenes.

Mr. Washington and Ms. Jolie interact both emotionally and cerebrally without too many contrived complications to make their characters more cutely contentious. Rhyme and Donaghy are ably assisted in their mind-body collaboration by Queen Latifah's no-nonsense Thelma, Rhyme's live-in nurse; Michael Rooker's Captain Howard Cheney, who has it in for Rhyme and Donaghy simply because they are treading on his turf; Mike McGlone's Detective Kenny Solomon, a suspicious-looking character, who was obviously fed to me as a red-herring suspect whom I swallowed hook, line and sinker; Luis Guzman's Eddie Ortiz, a lab technician with an encyclopedic knowledge of possible crime scene substances almost equal to that of Rhyme himself, and Ed O'Neill as Detective Paulie Sellitto, a character with the same helter-skelter likability as Mr. O'Neill's goofy paterfamilias in the long-running television series, Married With Children .

The movie looks and plays better than it might seem from a detailed print plot synopsis. The intricate series of shifting viewpoints endows every occurrence with a dazzling variety of contemplative reactions that enhance and ennoble the characters without the need for fatuous rhetoric. The metaphors of chess and jigsaw puzzles are invoked and exploited both in the dialogue and in the mise en scène . New York comes alive as a luminous abstraction that towers imperturbably over the occasionally insane atrocities buried in its lower depths. The Bone Collector falls apart at the end, however, with an inappropriately optimistic Christmas-cheer wrap-up of a disturbingly pessimistic and pathological package.

These Boys Don't Cry, Either

Rowan Woods' The Boys , from a screenplay by Stephen Sewell, based on the play The Boys by Gordon Graham, treats the subject of male malaise with much more gutsy honesty than is to be found in the flippantly fanciful Fight Club . But my readers beware. The Boys is a comparatively austere and elliptical work of art next to the MTV jazziness of Fight Club . The play and the movie were inspired by the real-life rape-murder of a young nurse in Sydney, Australia, by three brothers. The film ends, just before the crime is about to be perpetrated, with the chilling words of Brett Sprague (David Wenham): "Let's skin her."

Most of the action takes place on the day and night of Brett's release on parole from a conviction for assault with a deadly weapon. It is a day and night of Mars-versus-Venus turmoil and conflict within the Sprague household. Brett is embittered because no one in the family came to visit him during the year he was incarcerated. He spreads the poison of suspicion and discontent among everyone around him as he preaches a pseudo-anarchic rant about doing to society what society does to the Spragues.

Mr. Wenham, who played the marvelously malevolent Brett on stage in Sydney, Australia, endows the character with the bile and bite of an Iago biting his two oafish, Othello-like brothers, Glenn and Stevie, until they break up with the two women in their lives, Jackie (Jeanette Cronin) and Nola (Anna Lise). Jackie leaves Glenn when he refuses to stay away from his brothers, and the pregnant waif Nola runs away after Brett starts threatening her for having called the police when Michelle (Toni Collette) screamed while being abused by Brett.

What is particularly menacing about Brett's words is the calm, reasonable, rational tone he uses to spew his psychic poison. In Michelle, however, he meets his match when she escapes alive after taunting him for being impotent because he "took it up the ass" in prison. The venomous exchanges between Ms. Collette and Mr. Wenham make the verbal duels between the Annette Bening and Kevin Spacey spouses in American Beauty sound like Ozzie and Harriet.

Presiding over the Sprague brood is the mother, Sandra, torn between a fearful love and loyalty and an increasing feeling of horror over what Brett and his impressionable brothers may eventually be capable of doing. The Sprague boys are doomed losers in the game of life, but the filmmakers have elevated them through frequent close-ups to a stature that makes the evil they finally commit tragically inevitable.

Freedom Train

Radu Mihaileanu's Train of Life has won audience awards at several film festivals, including Venice, São Paulo, Miami, Sundance and, most recently, the Hamptons. Made in France by a Romanian director with generous infusions of Gypsy music, it may raise in many people's minds the same kinds of questions that have followed Schindler's List , Life Is Beautiful , Jacob the Liar and other alleged desecrations of the sacred subject of the Holocaust. Train of Life is presented as a cheerful fable on an admittedly apocryphal story about a Russian Jewish village that decorated a train with Nazi swastikas and rode to freedom in Palestine or somewhere equally remote in myth and fantasy.

The treatment here is rife with Yiddish humor, but there's also a disturbingly bothersome subplot about a Jewish Communist faction in the village that continually questions and threatens the entire enterprise. Since, admittedly, some of the Jews must dress as Nazi officers to bring off the deception, the faux-Nazis are almost immediately insulted and denounced as if they were real Nazis. Even worse, the few real Nazis encountered along the way are presented as buffoons. Ernst Lubitsch pulled off this sort of Jewish gallows humor in To Be or Not to Be (1942), and he was roundly attacked by the critics for his alleged tastelessness. Today, To Be or Not to Be is regarded as a comic masterpiece. Still, Lubitsch in 1942 and Charles Chaplin in 1940 with The Great Dictator were completely unaware of the eventually horrifying dimensions of the Holocaust. The same cannot be said about today's filmmakers, so I pass on Train of Life .

As for the implication that Jews and Gypsies are united by their shared martyrdom, and thus can constitute one happy tribe, I plead complete ignorance as a precondition of my tentative skepticism.