Ivanir, Hoffman, Keener and Walken in A Late Quartet.

In A Late Quartet, a somber, moody and uneven film about chamber music and the dedicated professional musicians who devote their lives to playing it, Christopher Walken takes some getting used to as a renowned cellist with Parkinson’s disease who is forced begrudgingly to end his career as leader of one of the world’s most celebrated string quartets. A far cry from the lurid and sloppy addicts, psychopaths and serial killers he usually plays as though walking in his sleep, it’s not the kind of role I would personally think of as perfect casting for him. Also, the movie is too slow, highbrow and sophisticated to draw the youth market that loves to see Mr. Walken play violent and stoned in trash like Seven Psychopaths. But playing the cello is such a pleasant change of pace that he eventually grows on you, scene by scene, proving for the first time since his role as Leonardo DiCaprio’s troubled father 10 years ago in Catch Me If You Can, that he really can act. He—along with the rest of the elegant cast—keeps A Late Quartet in tune when it threatens to go flat. 

The Fugue, a famous ensemble much like the Guarneri Quartet, has been filling concert halls for 25 years. It consists of cellist-concertmaster Peter Mitchell (Mr. Walken), first violinist Daniel Lerner (Mark Ivanir), second violinist Robert Gelbart (Philip Seymour Hoffman) and Robert’s wife, Juliette (Catherine Keener), on viola. As the new season begins, they are rehearsing all seven movements of the intricate Beethoven String Quartet, Opus 13. As soon as you realize the film runs the length of most chamber music concerts, you might panic at the thought of being forced to sit through the whole thing. Not to worry. Director Yaron Zilberman soon makes it clear that he is more interested in the emotional upheavals in the lives of the four high-strung musicians than he is in the music they play. It takes a long time to get around to the program they’re rehearsing, and by then you might wish they had started earlier. As soon as Peter’s crippling disease is diagnosed, the theme becomes “Move Over, Beethoven.”

You know it’s coming when Mr. Walken starts stretching his fingers to strengthen the grip on his bow. Clearly his reflexes and coordination are failing. The others, who have been with him for a quarter of a century, look the other way. But this is a pragmatic perfectionist. He starts to plan his farewell concert and seek a replacement. Robert, the second violinist, takes this inopportune time to announce his long-festering resentment of Daniel, the first violinist, who refuses to alternate solos.

The tension grows, opening a floodgate when Peter announces his plan to hire Robert and Juliette’s daughter Alexandra (Imogen Poots), who is a talented and promising cellist on her way to stardom, to replace him. Further complicating the volatility of an already complex situation is the fact that without Robert and Juliette’s knowledge, Alexandra, who feels neglected and ignored by her parents, is sleeping with the sensitive and petulant Daniel, her coach, who years earlier had an affair with Juliette, now causing a rift between mother and daughter. Worse still, Juliette, who never fully committed to her husband, catches Robert working out his frustrations in bed with another woman, and their marriage collapses. What began as an intelligent film about real music (instead of the junk that poisons contemporary rock soundtracks) loses its way and collapses under the weight of a shameless soap opera. With so much sturm und drang,it’s a miracle these musicians ever find the time to play a simple adagio.

Everyone ends up emotionally shredded, with the future of the Fugue Quartet endangered. Like all passionate artists, however, they come to their senses in time to realize that craft comes first and personal lives are a lower priority, and in the final minutes, we at last get around to the Beethoven. The movie sometimes gets stuck in its own awkward groove like a needle on a warped phonograph, but it has its moments. The script, co-written by the director Mr. Zilberman and Seth Grossman, contains technical information about how to construct, polish and cherish a good violin, and the four actors make you believe they actually know how to play their instruments. They skillfully demonstrate how each member of the quartet brings to the table one of the four legs that hold it upright: Mr. Ivanir has enough precision and driving perfectionism for four, Mr. Hoffman adds color and texture, Ms. Keener provides the mournful passion, and Mr. Walken is the patriarch of the group, with the heart, soul and discipline to keep the music balanced. The pileup of romantic entanglements and competitive egos gets in the way of the music, but the soundtrack is glorious, even if it is truncated. The final concert was filmed on the actual stage at the Metroplitan Museum, where the Guarneri Quartet gave its final performance after 45 years together. In A Late Quartet, life imitates art in more ways than one.

rreed@observer.com

A LATE QUARTET

Running Time 105 minutes

Written by Seth Grossman and Yaron Zilberman

Directed by Yaron Zilberman

Starring Philip Seymour Hoffman, Christopher Walken and Catherine Keener

2.5/4

Janney, Platt, Laurie and Shawkat in The Oranges.

Leaden and cliché-riddled, The Oranges is, for starters, not about the four neighboring townships in New Jersey. There are no emerald green lawns in New Jersey in December (and it was filmed in New Rochelle). No, it’s about two neighboring dysfunctional families—instead of just one—who live across the street from each other. David and Paige Walling (Hugh Laurie and Catherine Keener) have been best friends with Terry and Carol Ostroff (Oliver Platt and Allison Janney) for years. They exercise, barbecue, raise their kids and celebrate Christmas together, and frankly it’s as boring to them as it is to the viewer. Paige is obsessed with Christmas and spends too much time shopping for ornaments and organizing her choir of carol-singing flakes to pay much attention to David, who holes up every night in front of his TV set in his off-limits “man cave.” (Shades of Tommy Lee Jones in the brighter, far superior Hope Springs.) Their marriage has hit a speed bump, and one of the many things wrong with this movie is that nobody ever bothers to explain why.

But things are about to change in the teeth-clenching dramedy of a TV sitcom, when the Ostroffs’ daughter Nina (Leighton Meester) returns home after five years away at college (Huh? No summer vacations or Thanksgiving reunions in five years?) and a hippie romance that has just hit the rocks, and starts sleeping with Mr. Walling, who is more than twice her age. All hell breaks loose, making for easy laughs and weak double entendres, and all of the other members of the two families are forced to rethink their own lives, while the story plods along in voiceover narration by the Wallings’ dumpy, pot-smoking daughter Vanessa (Alia Shawkat).

Only a British director making his first film (Julian Farino) could pile on so many clichés tackling a subject as foreign as warped American domesticity and eccentric suburbanites trying to cope with the Christmas holidays. Instead of discussing the sexual revolution in their own bedrooms in a rational manner, the men rant, the wives suffer breakdowns, Allison Janney delivers a demented lecture on what happens when penises age and poor Catherine Keener, in a thankless role as the sour-faced Walling matriarch, leaves her two children home with their hormonally charged father while she maxes out his Visa renting an entire bed and breakfast to sulk in, and drives over the family Christmas decorations with her automobile. What does David see in his best friends’ vapid daughter in the first place? Why does Nina fall in love with a family friend her father’s age? Can’t anyone just talk to each other? Finally you come to the conclusion that you just couldn’t care less.

The cast practically throws their hips out of place running a marathon to build characters where none are provided by script writers Ian Helfer and Jay Reiss, who go for quirky sentimentality where sanity should be. The lackluster direction is pretty much what you might expect from a man who has helmed episodes of Sex and the City and The Office. The film is worth seeing for the excellent ensemble work by a cast that, although diligent and appealing, remain somewhat less than thrilling. They do their best to plumb the depths of domestic dysfunction, but in the end, The Oranges does not quite deliver the goods.

rreed@observer.com

THE ORANGES

Running Time 91 minutes

Written by Ian Helfer and Jay Reiss

Directed by Julian Farino

Starring Leighton Meester, Hugh Laurie and Catherine Keener

2/4

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!"

I’m the first to admit that I went into Where the Wild Things Are with perhaps too high expectations. I blame part of this on the most excellent trailer—remember that teaser, released back in March, full of sumptuous, wondrous images set to that infectious Arcade Fire song? It seemed (regardless of the chatter over delays and studio clashes that has followed this project around) to be a perfect combination of parts: Maurice Sendak’s classic children’s book; director Spike Jonze, the wacky mind behind Being John Malkovich and Adaptation (not to mention some of the best music videos around. And hey, remember music videos?); co-writer (with Jonze) Dave Eggers, author of A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius and co-writer of the charming Away We Go. Plus, have you taken a good look at this Max Records kid, who plays Max in this movie? He has the most sweetly melancholic face—one can’t imagine him just walking into an audition. It seems more likely that the twee trinity of Wes Anderson, Sofia Coppola and Mr. Jonze all joined forces to cook up his genetics, Gattaca-style.

The film starts off pitch-perfect. Young Max, just like in the book, is a mischievous boy who gathers snowballs to pelt his older sister and her friends, makes forts, throws tantrums, etc. But Mr. Jonze is also able to capture how long those childhood afternoons can drag, and how lonely being a kid can be. The rage that gets Max sent out of the room without dinner is more dramatic than it is in the source material (of course, it’s impossible to make a 100-minute movie to match a book that takes somewhere between one and three minutes to read), and is borne of a new backstory about a divorced mom and her new boyfriend (oh hi, Mark Ruffalo!). Suffice it to say, it’s not a mysterious forest that grows out of Max’s bedroom (bummer) but a fantastical journey that Max takes, which involves a seafaring passage that would make the Losties proud. And there, finally, is where we meet our Wild Things.

So here’s the thing: This movie looks so damn perfect. The sunshine filters beautifully through insanely tall trees, and those giant puppets are great-looking and move with a balletic grace that is fascinating to see. Yet once Mr. Jonze and Mr. Eggers depart from the bare-bones text, allowing the Wild Things to speak (it’s a little hard not to think of Tony Soprano when you hear James Gandolfini’s voice, even if it’s coming from a giant puppet), things get a little strange. The gang (which includes effective voice portrayals from Lauren Ambrose, Catherine O’Hara, Paul Dano and Chris Cooper) is less wild than they are unhappy, and there are some very adultlike gripes and resentments running through the creature community when Max arrives. Which is not to say there aren’t some truly inspired moments within the film (just wait till you meet Bob and Terry). But something doesn’t quite jell, and no matter how gorgeous each set piece is, it doesn’t always entirely add up to a complete and satisfying narrative. I couldn’t help but think, from time to time, how on earth were these guys allowed to make this movie?

This one is certainly not going to be for the Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs crowd. I can’t imagine any young kid seeing it, not just because parts of it are dark and kind of scary, but because I can’t imagine any small fry having the attention span to stick with it. Perhaps the target audience can be identified through the line of Where the Wild Things Are clothes, key chains and decorations available at … Urban Outfitters. 

svilkomerson@observer.com

Joe Wright’s The Soloist, from the screenplay by Susannah Grant, is based on the book The Soloist: A Lost Dream, an Unlikely Friendship, and the Redemptive Power of Music, by Steve Lopez. The subtitle of the book says virtually everything about this film, about a Los Angeles Times columnist, Steve Lopez, who in April 2005 began a series of pieces about a onetime musical prodigy named Nathaniel Anthony Ayers who’d been reduced by an acute case of schizophrenia to playing a two-string secondhand violin in downtown Los Angeles slum doorways and alleys.

Robert Downey Jr. plays Lopez, and Jamie Foxx plays Ayers, the destitute street musician, and certainly the redemptive element in this saga of a transformative friendship is the glorious music of (mostly) Ludwig van Beethoven spread across the soundtrack. Mr. Wright and his screenwriter, Ms. Grant, have gone to great lengths to reproduce the intransigent realities of urban homelessness and mental illness in the slow, setback-filled progression of their only partially regenerative narrative. They have taken a few liberties with the biographical facts to speed up the story, but they have resisted the temptation of a grossly sentimental ending, and for that they deserve to be commended.

In addition, Mr Downey and Mr. Foxx both turn in Oscar-worthy performances in their very strenuous and detail-drenched roles. Mr. Downey is particularly impressive in the indispensable bite he gives to a characterization that might otherwise have sunk in the swamp of excessive altruism. Mr. Foxx, a talented musician on the piano in his own right, nonetheless had to master the fingering on both the violin and the cello before he could be convincing in his extensive simulations on the screen.

Catherine Keener is somewhat wasted in the thanklessly marginalized role of the columnist’s finally reconciled ex-wife. If anything, this platonic all-male love story is the antithesis of a chick flick, and the presence of Ms. Keener’s sharp-tongued Mary Weston in the proceedings becomes embarrassingly superfluous as the picture progresses. Similarly, Lisagay Hamilton as Ayers’ long-suffering sister, Jennifer, is not given much more to do than sit next to her brother during the film’s concluding concert scene.

In the only other significant role in the film, Nelsan Ellis’ charity house supervisor, David Carter, has to patiently explain to the columnist the limits of psychiatry in the miracle seeker’s quest for an instant cure for Ayers’ schizophrenia. But even after Ayers turns violently on his would-be benefactor, Lopez persists in pursuing his quixotic quest for the ex-prodigy’s rehabilitation.

Mr. Wright’s two previous prizewinning feature films, Pride and Prejudice (2005) and Atonement (2007), established his credentials to undertake The Soloist. Ms. Grant’s most notable screenwriting credit is for Steven Soderbergh’s Erin Brockovich (2000), for which Julia Roberts won an Oscar in the title role.

I might note just in passing that this is the second film I have recently reviewed that seeks to glorify the desperately endangered profession of print journalism from coast to coast. The Soloist itself contains a scene that strikes an uncomfortably timely note in what I took to be a parody of the usual soothing syrup squirted out to reporters about to be laid off by their employers. Never send to know for whom the bell tolls, etc.

asarris@observer.com

Newspapers and magazines are closing; the ones that remain grow thinner by the week as if somehow cursed; freelance budgets are being slashed and staffers accustomed to taking it easy are being forced to write like their livelihoods depend on it. (Hint: They do.) The only thing worse than losing one of the few, cramped spots in a magazine's well is losing it to a celebrity—you know, the kind of person who thinks it's fun to bang out a story while nibbling Cornichons from an Endeavor gift basket in their trailer or on their iPhone from the limo on the way to the Golden Globes.

Take the new issue of Rolling Stone, which sports a cover of Lil Wayne sure to cause nightmares in the late life miracle babies of the magazine's aging Boomer readers. Should you make it past that cover—but go boldly or he'll open his eyes like the Sphinx Gate from The Neverending Story and you shall perish—you'll find an eleven page story (fourteen if you include three full pages of photos) about Kris Kristofferson by actor-director-author Ethan Hawke, who went from RS cover boy to contributor in 14 short years.

What's amazing about the piece is that it's... actually kind of amazing. Mr. Hawke, who wrote the novels The Hottest State and Ash Wednesday, does a pretty good job capturing Mr. Kristofferson in "The Last Outlaw Poet" (which is not online, but you can enjoy its accompanying "online exclusive" playlist), whom he describes as "cut from a thicker, more intricate cloth than most celebrities today."

Mr. Hawke continues:

Imagine if Brad Pitt had also written a Number One single for someone like Amy Winehouse, was considered among the finest songwriters of his generation, had been a Rhodes scholar, a U.S. Army Airborne Ranger, a boxer, a professional helicopter pilot—and was as politically outspoken as Sean Penn. That's what a motherfuckin' badass Kris Kristofferson was in 1979.

While you contemplate that, let's take a look at Messrs. Pitt and Penn, since, as coincidence would have it, both of them have been playing journalist lately, too.

In September, Mr. Pitt wrote a short article for Vanity Fair about Human Rights Watch. (The article was headlined Thunder on the Rights.) Mr. Pitt also wrote his own Esquire profile in 2006. (Talk about cutting out the middle man.) When not writing, Mr. Pitt is snapping pictures, as he did for the cover of W's 'Art Issue' in November 2008. That cover featured a very intimate photo of Mr. Pitt's partner, Angelina Jolie, breast-feeding. Now that's what we call access!

Mr. Penn had the December 15th cover story of The Nation, which had him interviewing Hugo Chávez and Raúl Castro. He's also filed reports from Iraq and Iran for The San Francisco Chronicle. Mr. Penn's Nation story was particularly annoying to The New Yorker's George Packer, who asked in December on his 'Interesting Times' blog:

Why does someone like Penn think he can do this job, which isn’t his job? Perhaps because he can write down and relay the words of famous people to whom his own fame gives him access, and because certain thoughts pass through his mind while he’s writing them down. Penn’s moonlighting shows a kind of contempt for journalism, which turns out to be rather difficult to do well.

Of course, magazines have always called upon celebrities to write tributes to other celebrities using their own fame to gain access. But unlike the editors of Interview setting up a conference call between, say, Mickey Rourke and Christopher Walken and editing together the transcript (which is how we presume most of these things are done), or The New York Times Magazine asking Catherine Keener to say a few nice words in print about Kat Denning, Mr. Hawke's profile represents the handing over of a significant chunk of editorial real estate that might've otherwise been occupied by the work of—what were those people called back when the existed?—a journalist. (Do we even need to mention all the celebrities and demi-celebrities blogging on The Huffington Post—that means you, John Cusack!—taking away space from the Mayhill Fowlers of the world?)

Which is not to say Mr. Hawke does a bad job. Far from it. That's what's so scary about the rise of the celebrity journalism dilettantes. For a working hack—that word is used here without judgment—it's hard enough to get a pitch accepted by an editor (much less an 11-page evergreen on a 72-year-old who's in not in the Jonas Brothers). But now you gotta compete with writers editors think are cooler, better connected, and who don't even need the money.

This situation may get worse before it gets better. In an article from this weekend's New York Times 'Arts & Leisure' section about the Hollywood remake of the BBC journalism-themed thriller State of Play, Chip McGrath quoted the film's director, Kevin McDonald saying this about star Russell Crowe:

'The great thing about Russell is that he's so unvain. I explained to him that this guy is a bit of a schlub, a bit of a loser, he lives in the kind of apartment where you would never have people over, and Russell got that right away.'

'The interesting thing,' he added, 'is that Russell had such contempt for the press to begin with. He hates reporters. It took him a while to acknowledge that there could be such a thing as journalists who were idealistic and incorruptible.'

Coming soon, Russell Crowe, ace reporter? What's a real writer to do? Sign up for The Actors Studio?

After all, from the opening credits onward, the mood is one of anything-goes frivolity in a succession of funhouse settings. The usual assorted clowns and pseudo-straight men are on hand with an array of deadly weapons, including their own hands and fists. And believe me, it turns out to be more fun than a barrel of monkeys, to coin a phrase. I am already aware that many of my readers will disagree with me, as have many of my esteemed colleagues. “Rip-off!” they cry. “Confusion compounded!” they argue. I disagree, if only because I had begun to despair over the low level of literacy in American movies. I say “American” instead of “Hollywood” because most of Lucky Number Slevin, for example, was reportedly shot in Toronto, and a racetrack in Montreal doubled for the venerable Aqueduct Race Track in Ozone Park, Queens, near where I grew up and went to high school at John Adams. However, that is the way with so-called “American” movies in these times of budget-driven outsourcing. But I digress—in the garrulous manner favored by the movie itself.

Indeed, what I liked most about Slevin is that all the characters talk a blue streak, often with wit and panache to spare. Everyone, it seems, has a story to tell and can’t wait to tell it. After a while, the stories begin to collide with each other, until the biggest whopper of all redefines all the character alignments we have been persuaded to accept. The central poltergeist in the proceedings is a mysteriously omnipresent mob assassin played by Bruce Willis and impudently named Goodkat. But even before this assassin is given a name, he tells a nameless listener a long story about the “Kansas City Shuffle,” referring to a race involving a doped horse and a poor wretch who bets heavily on the supposed “sure thing,” only to have the horse drop dead in the home stretch just after the “sure thing” has surged into the lead. The unlucky gambler and his family are subsequently murdered by a vengeful mob boss, on whose account the similarly targeted bookie has laid off the wretch’s bet.

After Goodkat has finished his story, he deftly cracks his listener’s neck, and the stage is set for the introduction of the apparent protagonist, Lucky Number Slevin, played by the top-billed and topless Josh Hartnett (whose continuously bared chest deserves its own feature credit). Slevin, who has just been laid off from his job and has recently caught his girlfriend cheating on him, has come to New York at the behest of a friend named Nick. His run of bad luck extends to New York, where, after his arrival in Penn Station, he is mugged and has his wallet stolen and nose broken. Luckily, the door to Nick’s apartment has been left open, and Slevin has just finished taking a shower when a pretty neighbor named Lindsey (Lucy Liu) knocks on his door to borrow a cup of sugar from Nick and discovers Slevin instead. She asks who he is and where Nick is, and hears the whole story of Slevin’s misadventures and his complete ignorance of Nick’s whereabouts.

I suddenly realize that I am going to have a great deal of trouble retracing the movie’s story line so that it makes any sense at all. I haven’t even told you yet that Lindsey works as a professional coroner, and in her spare time moonlights as an amateur sleuth and crime-scene photographer. And though Slevin has all the earmarks of a born loser, he never acts or talks like one, even when he is summoned before two different warring gangster chieftains and ordered to pay off Nick’s two separate gambling debts or face death.

The two warring mobs are supposedly made up of an African-American contingent headed by Morgan Freeman’s kingpin, known as “the Boss,” and a rival Jewish faction headed by Sir Ben Kingsley’s mob chieftain, “the Rabbi.” The two feuding mobsters and their respective African-American and Jewish henchmen are ensconced in two bulletproof penthouses on facing skyscrapers in the center of the city. And if this doesn’t give you the giggles, nothing will. Despite all the beatings and death threats leveled at him by the two mobs, Slevin never loses his cool and even makes jokes about everyone’s ridiculous notion that he is actually Nick, though he can’t prove his own real identity since his wallet was stolen. That should be our first clue that there is something fishy about Slevin.

As it turns out, the Boss just wants the man dragged out from Nick’s apartment, whoever he is, to pay a gambling debt. The Boss, however, is willing to forgive Nick’s debt if the man claiming not to be Nick does him the small favor of killing the Rabbi’s gay son in retribution for the Rabbi’s men having killed the Boss’ own son. Meanwhile, Slevin and Lindsey fall in love and have sex, which raises complications as the full narrative unfolds in all its devious dimensions. It finally all makes sense after a fashion, and I think and hope that you will be entertained by all the narrative legerdemain.

They Have It All

Nicole Holofcener’s Friends with Money, from her own screenplay, continues the director’s fruitful collaboration with Catherine Keener (her muse, if you will) in such women-oriented breakthroughs as Walking and Talking (1996) and Lovely and Amazing (2001). Only now, 10 years have passed for both Ms. Holofcener and Ms. Keener, and in their latest film together, both are enmeshed in a curiously unpleasant series of midlife crises implicating four women friends, three of them married and rich and the fourth one definitely unmarried and non-rich. The three actresses playing the wives are in their middle to late 40’s, while the actress playing their unmarried, non-rich friend is in her late 30’s—yet one is never told how these women met in the first place or even how long they’ve been friends.

They certainly haven’t met at work. Christine (Ms. Keener) is a successful screenwriter in collaboration with her husband David (Jason Isaacs); Jane (Frances McDormand) is a successful dress designer married to a preening metrosexual and possibly gay husband, Aaron (Simon McBurney); Franny (Joan Cusack) works only at spending part of her considerable fortune on gala charity events with her husband Matt (Greg Germann) sitting gallantly at her side. Meanwhile, Olivia (Jennifer Aniston) has given up a job teaching in a posh private school to make her living cleaning people’s houses. I can’t remember if the four women friends in the popular television series Sex and the City ever revealed how they first met and what (besides their troubles with men) they had in common. At least that series had a point-of-view writer-narrator based on the book’s author, Candace Bushnell, and played by Sarah Jessica Parker. There is no really comparable point-of-view character in Friends with Money, since each of the women is too self-absorbed to be overly concerned with the trouble that any of the others is enduring.

Strangely, the least convincing of the “friends,” married or unmarried, rich or poor, is the screenwriter played by Ms. Keener. Her profession would seem to have been intended by Ms. Holofcener to make Christine serve as her surrogate, but the utter lack of rapport and empathy between Christine and her husband David makes them the unlikeliest of successful screenwriting teams. Drowning in self-pity, Christine is always bumping into things and saying “Ow!” (presumably because her husband is too uncaring to ask her if she has hurt herself).

Still, Christine is the Bluebird of Happiness when compared to Ms. McDormand’s Jane, who seems terminally inconsolable over the aging process, which, she says at one point, leaves her with nothing to look forward to despite all her success as a stylish dress designer. This leaves Ms. Cusack’s Franny and her level-headed husband, Matt (Gregg Germann), as the only well-adjusted and cheerfully married couple in the circle—but Franny is presented almost as a bit of sappy comic relief and is never meant to be taken at all seriously.

And so we’re given Ms. Aniston’s Olivia as the only woman in the circle with the opportunity to change the direction of her life, despite her grotesque lack of self-esteem and her inability to recognize a male jerk even when he openly two-times her. Still, she stumbles into her unexpected and unearned salvation almost in spite of herself, which may serve as the key to the director’s bitter parable of feminine futility. Happily, Ms. Aniston is the beneficiary of the best part she has had in ages, and the other cast members acquit themselves with distinction.

Still, this is one chick flick in which the male characters, whatever their foibles and absurdities, are infinitely better adjusted than the females. Perhaps Ms. Holofcener had neither the time nor the inclination to explore the men’s soulful depths. Or perhaps the director is making a statement about life in contemporary Los Angeles. From the lines I saw on its opening day, I suspect that the movie may hit a nerve with grown-up audiences of both sexes. Friends with Money is not without humor and irony, and it’s well worth seeing despite all of its gloom and doom (or perhaps because of it). This seems to be no time for happy movies, except for the littlest of children.

After all, from the opening credits onward, the mood is one of anything-goes frivolity in a succession of funhouse settings. The usual assorted clowns and pseudo-straight men are on hand with an array of deadly weapons, including their own hands and fists. And believe me, it turns out to be more fun than a barrel of monkeys, to coin a phrase. I am already aware that many of my readers will disagree with me, as have many of my esteemed colleagues. “Rip-off!” they cry. “Confusion compounded!” they argue. I disagree, if only because I had begun to despair over the low level of literacy in American movies. I say “American” instead of “Hollywood” because most of Lucky Number Slevin, for example, was reportedly shot in Toronto, and a racetrack in Montreal doubled for the venerable Aqueduct Race Track in Ozone Park, Queens, near where I grew up and went to high school at John Adams. However, that is the way with so-called “American” movies in these times of budget-driven outsourcing. But I digress—in the garrulous manner favored by the movie itself.

Indeed, what I liked most about Slevin is that all the characters talk a blue streak, often with wit and panache to spare. Everyone, it seems, has a story to tell and can’t wait to tell it. After a while, the stories begin to collide with each other, until the biggest whopper of all redefines all the character alignments we have been persuaded to accept. The central poltergeist in the proceedings is a mysteriously omnipresent mob assassin played by Bruce Willis and impudently named Goodkat. But even before this assassin is given a name, he tells a nameless listener a long story about the “Kansas City Shuffle,” referring to a race involving a doped horse and a poor wretch who bets heavily on the supposed “sure thing,” only to have the horse drop dead in the home stretch just after the “sure thing” has surged into the lead. The unlucky gambler and his family are subsequently murdered by a vengeful mob boss, on whose account the similarly targeted bookie has laid off the wretch’s bet.

After Goodkat has finished his story, he deftly cracks his listener’s neck, and the stage is set for the introduction of the apparent protagonist, Lucky Number Slevin, played by the top-billed and topless Josh Hartnett (whose continuously bared chest deserves its own feature credit). Slevin, who has just been laid off from his job and has recently caught his girlfriend cheating on him, has come to New York at the behest of a friend named Nick. His run of bad luck extends to New York, where, after his arrival in Penn Station, he is mugged and has his wallet stolen and nose broken. Luckily, the door to Nick’s apartment has been left open, and Slevin has just finished taking a shower when a pretty neighbor named Lindsey (Lucy Liu) knocks on his door to borrow a cup of sugar from Nick and discovers Slevin instead. She asks who he is and where Nick is, and hears the whole story of Slevin’s misadventures and his complete ignorance of Nick’s whereabouts.

I suddenly realize that I am going to have a great deal of trouble retracing the movie’s story line so that it makes any sense at all. I haven’t even told you yet that Lindsey works as a professional coroner, and in her spare time moonlights as an amateur sleuth and crime-scene photographer. And though Slevin has all the earmarks of a born loser, he never acts or talks like one, even when he is summoned before two different warring gangster chieftains and ordered to pay off Nick’s two separate gambling debts or face death.

The two warring mobs are supposedly made up of an African-American contingent headed by Morgan Freeman’s kingpin, known as “the Boss,” and a rival Jewish faction headed by Sir Ben Kingsley’s mob chieftain, “the Rabbi.” The two feuding mobsters and their respective African-American and Jewish henchmen are ensconced in two bulletproof penthouses on facing skyscrapers in the center of the city. And if this doesn’t give you the giggles, nothing will. Despite all the beatings and death threats leveled at him by the two mobs, Slevin never loses his cool and even makes jokes about everyone’s ridiculous notion that he is actually Nick, though he can’t prove his own real identity since his wallet was stolen. That should be our first clue that there is something fishy about Slevin.

As it turns out, the Boss just wants the man dragged out from Nick’s apartment, whoever he is, to pay a gambling debt. The Boss, however, is willing to forgive Nick’s debt if the man claiming not to be Nick does him the small favor of killing the Rabbi’s gay son in retribution for the Rabbi’s men having killed the Boss’ own son. Meanwhile, Slevin and Lindsey fall in love and have sex, which raises complications as the full narrative unfolds in all its devious dimensions. It finally all makes sense after a fashion, and I think and hope that you will be entertained by all the narrative legerdemain.

They Have It All

Nicole Holofcener’s Friends with Money, from her own screenplay, continues the director’s fruitful collaboration with Catherine Keener (her muse, if you will) in such women-oriented breakthroughs as Walking and Talking (1996) and Lovely and Amazing (2001). Only now, 10 years have passed for both Ms. Holofcener and Ms. Keener, and in their latest film together, both are enmeshed in a curiously unpleasant series of midlife crises implicating four women friends, three of them married and rich and the fourth one definitely unmarried and non-rich. The three actresses playing the wives are in their middle to late 40’s, while the actress playing their unmarried, non-rich friend is in her late 30’s—yet one is never told how these women met in the first place or even how long they’ve been friends.

They certainly haven’t met at work. Christine (Ms. Keener) is a successful screenwriter in collaboration with her husband David (Jason Isaacs); Jane (Frances McDormand) is a successful dress designer married to a preening metrosexual and possibly gay husband, Aaron (Simon McBurney); Franny (Joan Cusack) works only at spending part of her considerable fortune on gala charity events with her husband Matt (Greg Germann) sitting gallantly at her side. Meanwhile, Olivia (Jennifer Aniston) has given up a job teaching in a posh private school to make her living cleaning people’s houses. I can’t remember if the four women friends in the popular television series Sex and the City ever revealed how they first met and what (besides their troubles with men) they had in common. At least that series had a point-of-view writer-narrator based on the book’s author, Candace Bushnell, and played by Sarah Jessica Parker. There is no really comparable point-of-view character in Friends with Money, since each of the women is too self-absorbed to be overly concerned with the trouble that any of the others is enduring.

Strangely, the least convincing of the “friends,” married or unmarried, rich or poor, is the screenwriter played by Ms. Keener. Her profession would seem to have been intended by Ms. Holofcener to make Christine serve as her surrogate, but the utter lack of rapport and empathy between Christine and her husband David makes them the unlikeliest of successful screenwriting teams. Drowning in self-pity, Christine is always bumping into things and saying “Ow!” (presumably because her husband is too uncaring to ask her if she has hurt herself).

Still, Christine is the Bluebird of Happiness when compared to Ms. McDormand’s Jane, who seems terminally inconsolable over the aging process, which, she says at one point, leaves her with nothing to look forward to despite all her success as a stylish dress designer. This leaves Ms. Cusack’s Franny and her level-headed husband, Matt (Gregg Germann), as the only well-adjusted and cheerfully married couple in the circle—but Franny is presented almost as a bit of sappy comic relief and is never meant to be taken at all seriously.

And so we’re given Ms. Aniston’s Olivia as the only woman in the circle with the opportunity to change the direction of her life, despite her grotesque lack of self-esteem and her inability to recognize a male jerk even when he openly two-times her. Still, she stumbles into her unexpected and unearned salvation almost in spite of herself, which may serve as the key to the director’s bitter parable of feminine futility. Happily, Ms. Aniston is the beneficiary of the best part she has had in ages, and the other cast members acquit themselves with distinction.

Still, this is one chick flick in which the male characters, whatever their foibles and absurdities, are infinitely better adjusted than the females. Perhaps Ms. Holofcener had neither the time nor the inclination to explore the men’s soulful depths. Or perhaps the director is making a statement about life in contemporary Los Angeles. From the lines I saw on its opening day, I suspect that the movie may hit a nerve with grown-up audiences of both sexes. Friends with Money is not without humor and irony, and it’s well worth seeing despite all of its gloom and doom (or perhaps because of it). This seems to be no time for happy movies, except for the littlest of children.

In theatrical folklore, the more time passes, the more legendary a great performance becomes. The myth grows with the telling and becomes "the truth." Who's to dispute it? The mythic performance itself has become dust and will never be seen again.

John Malkovich's performance in the original 1987 production of Burn This is a legendary case in point. The highly praised Edward Norton has taken on the Malkovich role of the incendiary antihero Pale in the prestigious revival of the play, which has just opened to acclaim at the Union Square Theater. Mr. Norton, like his co-star Catherine Keener, is best known for his film roles, and he's without question a stage actor of the first rank. Yet I can't pretend that my memory of Mr. Malkovich's astonishing, near-lunatic performance as Pale, the blue-collar hypochondriac, hasn't stayed with me.

But how true is the memory? I've checked with others, and they recall the young Mr. Malkovich in every wired detail down to his peculiar long hair, which he kept tossing around like Olivier playing a coked-up Richard III. Pale is supposed to be the manager of a two-star New Jersey restaurant, which has never been too easy to believe in the first place. It says much for the less flamboyant Mr. Norton that we believe it. Mr. Malkovich's whirlwind version came from the other side of the moon. He was literally bouncing off the walls (which Steppenwolf actors liked to do then). When he hobbled around cursing his tight-fitting crocodile shoes-"You'd think a lizard's got to be supple, right? They got to move quick "-he took one off and practically beat it to death. He was very funny, very dangerous, utterly unpredictable and furious . So is Pale. Fury goes to his manic center, with touching needs of the heart. Mr. Malkovich's playful, vain sense of androgyny appealed, too. He actually reminded us, as great performers dare to do, that the acting game can be fun.

Lanford Wilson's Pale is a terrific, electric invention, among the dramatist's very best. But I think the lengthy Burn This has always been flawed, like an inspired improvisation of an anxiety attack that peters out.

Mr. Wilson wrote it for a quartet of actors, but it's Pale who gives the evening its vitality and romantic desperation. The scenes between the three others-the dancer, the screenwriter, the best friend-are pretty conventional. They peak and dip in interest, as if the dramatist can't wait to get back to the virtuoso Pale and let him mouth off. That Mr. Norton dominates the evening less than Mr. Malkovich did is probably a good thing. The director, James Houghton of the Signature Theatre Company, has placed the focus carefully-too carefully!-on the disconnected foursome as a whole, and each character will come to deeper self-knowledge before the night is through. But whether played by Mr. Malkovich or the excellent Mr. Norton, we still miss the volcanic Pale when he's offstage.

Burn This begins with the dancer and choreographer Anna (Catherine Keener) alone in her spare downtown loft. "Yeah, yeah, yeah," Pale says to her later, eyeing the place. "It's supposed to be artsy, I know. It's quaint. Look at it-you should make automobile parts here; can tomatoes, it's a fuckin' factory …. "

But the opening 20 minutes are a lengthy setup to Pale's entrance. Anna has just returned from the funeral of her roommate, Robbie, a brilliant dancer who's been killed along with his gay lover in a boating accident. Her potential husband and lover, butch Burton in jogging shorts (played by Ty Burrell), is a screenwriter who was born wealthy and spoiled but sold out. He's the least interesting character in the piece-the author's familiar, quite muted comment on the second-rate, self-involved Hollywood hack. Burton is well-meaning but dim. From the outset, we know he isn't right for Ms. Keener's intelligent Anna, who seems draggily inconvenienced by him. Anna is smart and independent and upset, and this dope's no use.

She also shares her loft with Larry (charminglyplayedbyDallas Roberts). Again, we recognize the type. I'm afraid that even from Mr. Wilson's pen, Larry is that entertainment-industry cliché, the Gay Best Friend. He tidies, he washes up, he comforts . He's always there. "You know me," he says drolly to the grieving Anna. "I'm always willing to drape the joint in crêpe." He quotes amusingly from Lust in the Dust : "Who are you? Where did you come from? What do you want? It's me, isn't it? You've always wanted me. You want to have your filthy way with me in the hot desert sun. Ravage me like I've never been ravaged before …. "

Larry's fun, but he's essentially a comic foil who's as lovable as a loyal house pet. He cutely plays Cupid to Anna and Pale. There's no spice in him, except for a belated frisson with Burton, of all people. In a moment of confessional candor, dim Burt had told Larry and Anna of the time he sheltered in a doorway during a snowstorm and a man he met there gave him a transcendental blowjob. In the snow ? It understandably raises Larry's interest.

But more or less everything leading up to Pale's gloriously unhinged entrance is foreplay . Along with David Mamet's Teach in American Buffalo , it's one of the great entrances in modern drama. "Goddamn this fuckin' place," go Pale's opening words as he bursts into Anna's loft. "How can anyone live in this city? I'm not doin' it. I'm not drivin' my car in this goddamn sewer, every fuckin' time. Who are these assholes? Some bald-headed, fat-lipped son of a bitch thinks he can own this fuckin space. The city's got this space specially reserved for his private use. Twenty-five fuckin' minutes I'm driving around this garbage street; I pull up to this space, I look back, this fuckin' baby-shit green Miata's on my ass going beep-beep …. "

"I'm sorry," Anna says when he's finally done. "Do I know you?"

It turns out that he's dead Robbie's older brother by 10 years, who has come to get his things. "Ten years, so what? What's older? Older than what ?" There's a fastidious inner logic to the seemingly deranged Pale, like his preference for a perfectly brewed pot of orange pekoe tea or his peculiar pride in immaculately pressed trousers. "Half linen, half wool," he moans at his creased trousers. "Fuckin' useless." Then he adds, without pause: "I could've been a dancer. Who needs it?"

Edward Norton's honest, jittery firepower owes less to showmanship, more to the recessively neurotic. He conveys a genuine system of almost surreal beliefs. He shoots down pretension like a marksman taking lethal aim at sitting ducks. Pale, it's little appreciated, would have made a good ballet critic. (Or drama critic, come to that.) Anna's pat aesthetic for balletomanes of choreographed bodies and "sculptural mass" are no use to him. He responds to things as they are, like hurricanes. When Anna's mind drifts off during one of his moral anecdotes concerning pulping trees, he chides her mild apology for "giganticness of unconcern." "The fuckin' world is going down the fuckin' toilet on 'I'm sorries' … "

In his fashion, Pale is as much an artist as Anna (and arguably a better one). He's his own invention. The fact that Lanford Wilson invented him is almost beside the point. Pale's an act of spontaneous combustion, a work of art in the making. Nothing the other three characters do or say really surprises us. The battle between Pale and Burton to claim Anna's soul is a no-brainer. Was the outcome ever in doubt?

However, the tortured desire of the two lovers for each other isn't as hot as it might be. It never ignited between Mr. Malkovich and the future star Joan Allen. Mr. Norton and Ms. Keener, who play so well together, don't generate any erotic heat, either. It's referred to in the script. But the great tragic love between Pale and Anna is ultimately unearned. They're in search of "understanding." The love is affectionately needy. There's no convulsive passion between them, and Burn This turns out to be a sentimental play with a tidy end.

"Somebody's always cryin' in your house," says Pale, and he has a point. He enjoys a good weep himself. Meanwhile, certain overstated lessons are to be learned about Love and Art. Although Pale has long been married with two children, he learns how to love for the first time. So does the newly freed Anna, who's now inspired to choreograph a dance piece as never before. Even jilted, sobbing Burton ends up writing a serious movie script, abandoning the one about the dangerous, mythic sea and sailors' wives left waiting by the shore. He shouldn't have-he might have written The Perfect Storm . Who knows about Larry? He's left lusting in the dust, I guess.

Burn This isn't a great play; it's a play with a memorably great role . James Houghton has staged a winning production, but there are times when he directs at a self-consciously slow tempo, giving stretches of the evening an arty, underlit "meaning." Pale would not have approved.