The City of Your Final Destination, based on the novel by Peter Cameron, assembles many of the cherished Merchant Ivory values: meticulous writing by the Oscar-winning Ruth Prawer Jhabvala; an expertly drawn cast headed by Merchant Ivory favorite Anthony Hopkins; a languid and literary pace that elevates viewers without ever compromising their intelligence; gorgeous cinematography and art direction; and a cinematic elegance as rare in contemporary films as genuine wit. This is a typical James Ivory work, but more deeply wounding and emotionally involving than most. I was transfixed from beginning to end.

Mr. Ivory might work less than he did back in the day, when he was turning out masterpieces like A Room With a View and Howards End, but he has lost none of his style. You watch hypnotically as he unravels the gentle story of a handsome young Kansas University professor of Iranian descent named Omar Razaghi (Omar Metwally, who played the innocent Egyptian-born American engineer falsely accused of terrorism and tortured by the C.I.A. in the excellent Rendition), who is desperately seeking permission to write an authorized biography of an eccentric Uruguayan novelist named Jules Gund. After his request for permission is denied by the family of the deceased writer, Omar is urged on by his strong-willed, ambitious girlfriend, Deirdre (Alexandra Maria Lara), a fellow academic with a domineering personality, to travel to South America in person and hopefully convince the Gund heirs to change their minds. After an arduous and expensive journey across the pampas of Argentina, Omar arrives in Uruguay uninvited at Ocho Rios, the rambling, run-down Gund family estate, where he is met with suspicion and hostility by Gund’s embittered widow, Caroline (an unusually cold and caustic Laura Linney). She reluctantly allows him to stay as a house guest because there is no inn within miles to lodge him, but remains unyielding in her opposition to a book. The rest of the family consists of an odd group of characters more strange and exotic than the dead author himself.

His mistress, Arden (Charlotte Gainsbourg), a former hippie missionary, agrees with Caroline and resents the intrusion until she falls for Omar’s charms. The dead man’s homosexual brother, Adam (Anthony Hopkins), believing the royalties from a biography would pay off property taxes and fearing the damage a nasty book written in retaliation could cause to his brother’s place in the world of letters, becomes Omar’s sole ally, later joined by Arden’s 10-year-old daughter and Adam’s Japanese lover, Pete (Hiroyuki Sanada, the puzzling spy in Ivory’s last film, The White Countess), who entered their lives at age 15 and stayed on as a retainer in the land-rich, cash-poor family for 25 years. Watching home movies of the divided and generally unfriendly family’s history—fleeing the Nazis, carving success in Uruguay as rich foreigners and foolishly squandering its fortune—Omar promises discretion, even as he uncovers enough family skeletons to fill several volumes, aided by a local gossipy dragon surrounded by beautiful boys who knows where the secrets are buried (played with bitchy Tabasco by the great Argentine actress Norma Aleandro). The shy, childlike Arden finds love. Always in need of money, wily Adam convinces Omar to smuggle his mother’s priceless jewels out of the country. Caroline reveals the lost manuscript she’s been hiding of Jules’ final unpublished book. After Omar nearly dies from a bee sting, the film sags slightly with the unexpected arrival of the irritating Deirdre, but her presence is important in explaining the film’s coda, when she meets Caroline years later at the opera and we learn what happened to everyone in the movie and discover the different directions where destiny took them.

Like most James Ivory films, The City of Your Final Destination moves in small, self-contained vignettes, like paragraphs in a novel, taking its time but covering a lot in each scene. As Omar becomes more familiar with the internecine strife between the various couples, the nature and content of his proposed book changes. Every complex member of the writer’s legacy has an agenda, with varying gains and losses, and the power of the film rests in the way it captures so many tangled lives as they cross and intersect at curious angles. The camera is literal, so the film sometimes fails to escape its roots of literary inspiration. This did not bother me. How many times do you get the chance to curl up with a good movie?

rreed@observer.com

Running time: 114 minutes
Written by: Ruth Prawer Jhabvala
Directed by: James Ivory
Starring: Laura Linney, Anthony Hopkins, Charlotte Gainsbourg, Omar Metwally, Alexandra Maria Lara

3.5 Eyeballs Out of 4

Last night, illustrious film director James Ivory was honored at the Trophée des Arts Gala in Gotham Hall—a fittingly cinematic space with soaring, ornamented ceilings and dreadful acoustics. Uma Thurman didn’t attend the black-tie dinner, but she did arrive just in time to give Mr. Ivory his award, which pays tribute to those who promote understanding between French and American people.

Like some kind of Old World potentate—surrounded by a blushing, frenzied team of guards, handlers and publicists—Ms. Thurman was whisked from her car, which was curiously made to first circle the block a couple of times, through central gilded doors, flung open only for her fast approach, and into the main hall. We tried to ask the 37-year-old actress, who was draped in flowing black cloth, a question, but she had little things hanging out of her ears (iPod earphones? cell phone headsets? the new earrings?), so she apparently couldn’t hear our frantic calls for a quote. The Kill Bill star did, however, say that she was “so cold.”

“I love Uma. She’s a great, great soul,” said Mr. Ivory, who was smiling over a polka-dotted bowtie in his seat at a central table, where he was flanked by a cache of adoring fellow filmmakers and moneyed Francophiles. The august auteur behind Oscar magnets like A Room with a View, Howards End and The Remains of the Day said he asked Ms. Thurman to present his award because she is a “great friend.” He also told us that the Alliance Française called him to say that she’s one of their best students. “She’s learning French, systematically, which I never did unfortunately,” said Mr. Ivory, 79.

He may never have learned the French language, but Mr. Ivory described his long love affair with the home of cheesy soups and Claude Monet. “Starting with Paris, the beauty of so much of it is undeniable,” he mused to The Daily Transom. “You’d have to be really dead not to see that, and even though today, when so much is messed up by the modern world, it’s still a very beautiful country and a very beautiful place to go.” A few moments later, after he asked a server what kind of wine was being poured into his glass, Mr. Ivory mentioned being struck on his first visit to France, at the age of 22, by the country’s citizens, artists and literature.

“I’ve carried that love around with me for fifty years, and it’s still there, just as strong as ever,” said the director wistfully. Together with his longtime lover, the Indian-born film producer Ismail Merchant, who died in 2005, Mr. Ivory took home six Academy Awards for his work.

“I never really thought in any kind of systematic way about French culture when I was growing up. I read a lot of books about France and I learned a lot about French history and the French Revolution, but I didn’t really think about French culture as such,” he admitted, adding: “But slowly over the years, the more I came the more I began to absorb what you’d call culture. And it wasn’t just about food or wine or that kind of thing—sex. It was really about culture.”

Playwright and screenwriter Matt Crowley even had a line, in William Friedkin’s 1970 screen version of The Boys in the Band, about the alleged typecasting of the late Leo Carrillo as the Gay Caballero. Mr. Crowley may have been thinking of Rouben Mamoulian’s The Gay Desperado (1936), which featured Nino Martini in the singing lead role opposite a young, ingénue-ish Ida Lupino and Carrillo overacting (as always) in a supporting part. The widely reported carryings-on in Brokeback Mountain also reminded some reviewers of the supposedly subtextual implications of Howard Hawks’ Red River (1948), with John Wayne and the posthumously “outed” Montgomery Clift, as well as George Roy Hill’s Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969), with Paul Newman and Robert Redford—the latter lacking even the gossipy whispers of Clift’s sexual orientation to sustain the subtextual suppositions.

If I choose to digress from what started out as a review of Brokeback Mountain, it is because, for whatever reason, I was never moved or even overly excited by what I finally witnessed on the screen, though I have no quarrel with the superlatives heaped upon the film by most of my colleagues. For example, Heath Ledger as the comparatively quiet and guilt-torn Ennis Del Mar gives as remarkably nuanced and detailed a performance as I had been led to expect, and the always dependable Jake Gyllenhaal as the unrestrained, more emotionally dependent and almost allegorically named Jack Twist isn’t far behind.

The rest of the cast performs above and beyond the call of duty, particularly Michelle Williams as Alma, whom Ennis marries immediately after his tryst with Jack, and Anne Hathaway as Lureen, whom Jack later marries. These are two thankless roles of victimization by disillusion, sexual rejection and abandonment, all in the name of the greater love between Ennis and Jack. Alma’s heartbreak is more palpable than that of the self-sufficient Lureen, but we are apparently not asked to weep for either woman, and certainly not for Alma’s two daughters or Lureen’s son. Still, Ennis turns out to be a more dedicated family man than Jack, who has the foresight to marry the rich daughter of a farm-equipment tycoon, one who is quite happy to take his grandson off Jack’s faltering hands.

Lureen, a rodeo rider, is shown aggressively pursuing Jack in a rodeo bar with the one witty pickup line in the movie: “What’s the matter, cowboy? You waiting for a mating call?” No matter—Jack’s heart is elsewhere. Lureen is quickly caricatured as a ditzy, bleached-blond, chattering busybody. Alma is another story entirely after she catches Ennis in a passionate embrace with his quadrennial “fishing buddy,” and she never lets on that she has seen anything, even when Ennis keeps returning from his alleged fishing trips without any fish. Alma just suffers and suffers and suffers without even being given the compensation of a juicy renunciation scene. All she gets, in fact, is a divorce agreement in which Ennis agrees to provide child support.

What surprised me most about the film was how much larger and more sympathetic Mr. Ledger’s part was than Mr. Gyllenhaal’s. I was surprised also by how gratuitously overextended the narrative was, based as it is on a 1997 short story by Pulitzer Prize winner Annie Proulx. Her story was adapted (and perhaps inflated) to feature-film length by Larry McMurtry and Diana Ossana.

There have been reports that both men and women at earlier screenings were seen fighting away tears after the sad ending. It’s been a long time since I cried outright over a movie. Indeed, the only time lately that I even came close to tears was at a screening for the students in my Columbia course on musicals of Richard Lester’s A Hard Day’s Night (1964), whose release I had celebrated in The Village Voice 41 years earlier by describing the phenomenon as “the Citizen Kane of jukebox movies”—a then-startling blurb that ended up being used in the board game Trivial Pursuit.

Why then, after all that time, was I so close to tears? It was coming up on the 25th anniversary of John Lennon’s murder in the courtyard of the Dakota by a deranged fan. As I watched Lennon on the screen in all his joyously smooth-faced youth, belting out his group’s numbers with a comically insolent expression that I didn’t quite appreciate at the time, I mourned the vagaries of time, luck and accident that bedevil our shaky existence.

But again I digress, which is the only way I can manage to get through this unpleasant task. This is to say that I must let my mind wander until I find the ultimate source of my minority (negative) opinion of the film. Perhaps by tracing some of the key scenes through the strands of the narrative, I can isolate my bothersome concerns. Yet first I must ask and answer the question of why I was expected to cry, as if I were watching one of the classic “women’s pictures” of Hollywood’s golden age that were advertised at the time as surefire tearjerkers. These included Irene Dunne’s other-woman travails with a married man (played by John Boles) in John Stahl’s Back Street (1932), and Margaret Sullavan’s travails with Charles Boyer in Robert Stevenson’s 1941 remake. Then, more decorously, there were the non-adulterous, pathos-ridden romantic complications of Leo McCarey’s Love Affair (1939), with Irene Dunne and Charles Boyer, and his own 1957 remake of the film with Deborah Kerr and Cary Grant, retitled An Affair to Remember. And let us not forget Celia Johnson and Trevor Howard in David Lean and Noel Coward’s Brief Encounter (1945), of which Oscar Levant may have been thinking when he memorably defined a “women’s picture” as one in which a woman cheats on her husband all through the movie, and in the end he asks her for forgiveness.

This imputation of self-pity isn’t completely inapplicable to Brokeback Mountain, despite all its breathtaking western mountainscapes. And why not? Both Mr. Lee and Mr. McMurtry are no strangers to lachrymose sentiment, although Mr. Lee’s The Ice Storm (1997) and Mr. McMurtry’s screenplay for Peter Bogdanovich’s The Last Picture Show (1971), which was based on one of his novels, left me singularly dry-eyed—perhaps because both films tried too hard to make me cry.

The very first scene of Brokeback Mountain takes on an excessively suspenseful tension because of the aforementioned advance hype, as two men in cowboy hats—who have not been introduced to us or to each other—steal glances at each other while waiting for their prospective boss to open the small shed used as a ranch office. It’s as if they are furtively cruising each other, but when the surly boss, Joe Aguirre (Randy Quaid), finally appears, he demystifies them somewhat by greeting them rudely and explaining their duties with a contemptuous tone of voice, as if he didn’t expect them to be capable of keeping coyotes and bears away from the thousand or so sheep they are expected to herd until winter comes.

So here we have two men, more or less on their own, in an idyllic setting that Mr. Lee and his cinematographer, Gustavo Santaolalla, have rendered in all its sky-angled splendor. Eventually, Ennis and Jack begin exchanging their young life stories at the meals they share after a day spent apart in different parts of the mountain. As they bathe more than I have ever seen Wild West characters do, I suddenly realized that these allegedly hard-boiled ranch hands had unusually delicate nostrils for the genre.

And this was the thing with all the cowboys I have ever seen before on the screen: They just never worried about how they smelled, nor how other cowboys smelled. They were occasionally shown shaving, and Eli Wallach had a memorable bathtub scene in Sergio Leone’s epic spaghetti western The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly—but offhand, I can’t remember any western character shooting another because of the way he smelled. It’s a small point, granted, but it involves a degree of genre-destroying realism that paves the way for a strenuously aggressive surge of desire in both men resembling a form of rape-wrestling at night, and continuing as rambunctiously physical horseplay in the daytime. From a distance on horseback, Mr. Quaid’s field boss stares disapprovingly at this uninhibited behavior through his binoculars. The outside world has already started crashing in on Ennis and Jack’s mountain paradise.

The syndicated comic strip The Boondocks recently had two older black characters watching Brokeback Mountain in a movie house and complaining that the heroes aren’t at all “manly” after the first big sex scene. But not to worry—both Ennis and Jack insist afterward to each other, and perhaps to themselves, that neither is “queer.”

Stephen Holden’s perceptively erudite review in The Times notes that the word “gay” was not in common usage in 1963, when the events in the movie begin. Mr. Holden makes an insightfully appropriate reference to Leslie Fiedler’s notorious essay in a 1948 issue of Partisan Review, provocatively titled “Come Back to the Raft Ag’in, Huck Honey.” For decades afterward, people around me were arguing about the essay and its claim that a persistently homoerotic strain manifested itself in serious American literature, with an accompanying diminution of the role of women. (After all, didn’t Rip Van Winkle go to sleep for 20 years to escape his shrewish wife, who conveniently died in the interim?) Yet the subtexts of this phenomenon remain more interesting and stimulating then the textual specificities, at least for me.

Hence, I suppose that my ultimate objection to Brokeback Mountain lies in its stretching out what originally begins as a physical relationship between two young men to, after 20 years, Ennis and Jack quarreling like an old married couple about the forced infrequency of their reunions. Yet what are the odds that they would have managed to stay together if they had been together all that time? The current odds on married heterosexual couples staying the course are no better than 50-50, and that is as true in the red states as it is in the blue.

Besides, the problem of the economic disparity between lower-middle-class Ennis and upper-middle-class Jack isn’t sufficiently addressed in Brokeback Mountain, even though Ennis is rendered virtually immobile by his pressing need to keep his job to support his kids. By contrast, Jack has the means and the time to hop down to Mexico to sleep with male prostitutes. In this, he follows a pattern of promiscuity that raises doubts about the stability of any more lasting day-to-day relationship between him and Ennis.

And just for the record, none of the classic women’s pictures that I mentioned actually made me cry. They were too good for that. All they did was create an aching feeling of loss in the pit of my stomach. I never felt that ache in Brokeback Mountain, despite all the artful acting, writing and direction devoted to that end.

The Last Merchant

James Ivory’s The White Countess, from a screenplay by Kazuo Ishiguro, turns out to be the final production of the team of James Ivory and the late Ismail Merchant (1936-2005). As such, it is a stylistically venturesome exploration of the chaotic world of 1936 and 1937, as seen from the maelstrom of Shanghai’s international community on the eve of the Japanese invasion. Mr. Ishiguro, whose novel The Remains of the Day was adapted for the screen for Merchant-Ivory by Ruth Prawer Jhabvala for their successful 1993 film version, seems fixated on the period just before World War II, a time when no one, East or West, seemed to anticipate the horrors that were to come.

I must confess at this point that I am much more familiar with the historical situation in England at this time taken up in The Remains of the Day than I am with the situation in Shanghai dealt with in The White Countess. I mention my limiting Eurocentrism so that my readers may be alerted to the comparative inaccessibility of some of Mr. Ishiguro’s subtleties in sketching out the political forces at work in this time and place.

The story is centered on a curiously chaste romance between a former American diplomat, Todd Jackson (Ralph Fiennes), and an expatriate Russian countess, Sofia Belinsky (Natasha Richardson). The deeply disillusioned Jackson has actually abandoned diplomacy after the ominous collapse of the League of Nations, which spells the end to the last hopes for world peace. As for the countess, she supports her daughter, Katya (Madeleine Daly), and the rest of her extended family as a taxi dancer and prostitute in a Shanghai nightclub. Though Sofia is sustained by the love of her daughter and her aging aunt Sara (Vanessa Redgrave), she is openly and ungratefully despised for her “dishonorable” activities by her embittered sister-in-law, Greshenka (Madeleine Potter), and her officious mother-in-law, Olga (Lynn Redgrave)—even though they would all be out on the street if it weren’t for Sofia’s ill-gotten gains. For her part, Sofia seems unusually resigned to their contempt in order to keep the family together for Katya’s sake.

The most fascinating fact about Jackson is that he is blind because of some unspecified accident, the traumatic circumstances of which are not revealed until the film’s later stages. The important thing is that Mr. Ivory takes his directorial cue from Jackson’s blindness, and with the assistance of Christopher Doyle, the cinematographer for the much-esteemed Wong Kar Wai, he creates a swirling expression of Jackson’s mental universe that impels me to use the word “phantasmagoric”—an adjective that I never expected to use for a work of James Ivory’s.

Mr. Fiennes performs prodigies of understatement in functioning confidently in all the action despite his handicap. In the end, he helps Sofia rescue Katya from the clutches of her evil family, who conspire to steal the child from her mother and flee to Hong Kong. In the course of opening a nightclub in Shanghai called the White Countess, with Sofia as its centerpiece, Jackson befriends a sinister but outwardly affable Japanese agent named Matsuda (Hiroyuki Sanada), though the irrevocable forces of history finally drive the two friends apart. The film is well worth seeing for its performances, and for the aptness of Mr. Ivory’s Sternbergian mise-en-scène.

The good news is that the Merchant-Ivory-Jhabvala triumvirate has once more scaled the heights of the "cinema of manners" achieved in their repertoire of picture-perfect period pieces, including A Room With a View (1986), Howards End (1992), The Remains of the Day (1993) and The Golden Bowl (2001). Messrs. Merchant and Ivory's sober musings on the written and spoken word have too often become undervalued amid the frequently overvalued visual pyrotechnics that obliterate the thoughts and feelings of the characters, as well as the narrative engines that convey these characters to their separate and conjoined destinies.

Le Divorce is essentially the story of a much-talked-about Franco-American divorce that never takes place because of a violent and completely unforeseen intervention. After much stress and strain on the allegorical level, America and France are finally, if reluctantly, reconciled. (One hopes this will be the case in the current real-life crisis in the affairs of the two nations.) Kate Hudson and Naomi Watts make good casting sense as Isabel Walker and Roxanne de Persand, two American sisters, or rather half-sisters, who find themselves entangled in messy liaisons with two Frenchmen from the same upper-class French family. The irrepressible Isabel, who comes to France to salvage a failing career, finds herself in the midst of a stormy separation between Roxanne (known as Roxy) and Charles-Henri, who also have their 3-year-old daughter Gennie to reconcile. Roxy also discovers that she's pregnant, to make matters a little more complicated.

The story is told mainly from the point of view of Isabel, who has her work cut out for her, not only in consoling the secretive Roxy and finding out what Charles-Henri is up to, but also in scrounging around for some temporary jobs in Paris to pay her keep. The family's affairs are in chaos; the only reassuring sign of stability in Roxy's turbulent household is a family painting from her home in California-a portrait of Saint Ursula by Georges de La Tour or one of his disciples, depending on which art experts are consulted. The Getty Museum in Los Angeles has expressed an interest in the painting, and Margeeve Walker (Stockard Channing)-Isabel's stepmother and Roxy's mother-her husband, Chester (Sam Waterston) and especially their eager-beaver son, Edgar, are determined not to let go of it-especially once they learn that Charles' family has put in a claim for the painting as part of the divorce settlement. A curator from the Louvre is already nosing around Roxy's apartment to verify the painting's authenticity.

Meanwhile, Roxy takes Isabel to her first artsy Paris saloon frequented by American expatriates. There, Isabel is introduced to Olivia Pace (Glenn Close), a fashionable writer who hires her to help sort through her papers, which are to be donated to an American university. By this time, Isabel has learned directly from Charles-Henri that he is madly in love with Magda Tellman (Rona Hartner), a Czech mother of five married to Douglas Tellman (Mathew Modine), an American EuroDisney executive who's taken to skulking menacingly outside Roxy's apartment building in the hope of catching his wife with Charles-Henri.

Every Sunday before " le divorce " is set in motion, Roxy goes into the country with her husband and daughter for lunch with Charles-Henri's family. Presiding over these ritual gatherings is the magisterial matriarch, Suzanne de Persand (Leslie Caron). At her side are her various grown children, their wives and husbands, and her very charismatic middle-aged brother, Edgar Cosset (Thierry Lhermitte.) Isabel is immediately attracted to Edgar when she later sees him expounding his political views on a television talk show, and she pursues him shamelessly until he boldly asks her to be his mistress, and she equally boldly consents.

For her part, Roxy doesn't hesitate to go to the Sunday family lunch alone-but when she tries to confront them about Charles-Henri's outrageous behavior, his family deftly changes the subject. Roxy doesn't want a divorce and refuses to agree to one, despite Charles-Henri's desperate pleas. His lawyer even threatens her with the loss of her children in a French court, prompting Roxy to take even more desperate action.

Though all the tangles of betrayal, frustration, misunderstanding and heartbreak threaten to plunge the proceedings into the abyss of endless recriminations, relief comes with an unexpected burst of melodramatic violence that magically produces a happily comic resolution of sorts and keeps the film buoyantly bubbly until the final fade-out. The film's greatest achievement, however, is in keeping a dizzying variety of characters at odds with each other without any breach of good manners, and without descending to facile stereotypes and caricatures.

Interestingly, there's been some toning down of the book's depiction of the inbred French hostility to Americans. Perhaps it's just as well that a conciliatory gesture was made, since it's time for France and America to let bygones be bygones.

Glory Days

Gary Ross' Seabiscuit , from his own screenplay, based on the book by Laura Hillenbrand, clicks on all cylinders as a technical achievement in re-creating a piece of racetrack history, though its larger sociological statements are more than a little overblown and oversimplified. The real Seabiscuit was an impressively heartwarming horse, no question about it. I was 10 years old in 1938, when Seabiscuit beat War Admiral, the 1937 Triple Crown winner, in a specially staged two-horse race at the Pimlico racetrack in Maryland. Far from being glued to my radio for the result, I was barely aware of these two horses. As a fanatical baseball fan-much to the disgust of my serious-minded Greek immigrant father-I didn't have the slightest interest in horse-racing. On the streets of Avenue D in Brooklyn, the kids were all excited about a young centerfielder for the New York Yankees named Joe DiMaggio. We were also perhaps the only Republican welfare family in Brooklyn to vote for Alf Landon instead of Franklin Roosevelt in 1936. I mention these admittedly trivial memories only to emphasize the vast complexity of American life during the Great Depression.

Some reviewers have complained that Seabiscuit is very slow getting started as it elaborately tracks the trajectories of three damaged lives that ultimately converge on a demoralized horse who becomes a champion. Charles Howard (Jeff Bridges) works his way up from the assembly line and a bicycle shop to become a millionaire automobile mogul, but his son is killed in a car accident. Tom Smith (Chris Cooper) is one of a dying breed of horse whisperers who winds up riding the rails after the Depression sets in. Ned Pollard (Tobey Maguire) is embittered after being abandoned by his Irish immigrant family. And though Seabiscuit himself is a horse of noble lineage, he is small, with wobbly knees and a slight limp. His early trainers dismiss him. Out of all these disparate defeats is forged the united will to be victorious. Isn't that what America is all about? Well, yes and no. America is all about a lot of other things as well, good and bad.

Still, I can't find fault with the actors-including, in addition to Messrs. Bridges, Cooper and Maguire, Elizabeth Banks as Howard's second wife, Marala, and the real-life Hall of Fame jockey Gary Stevens, who plays Seabiscuit's replacement jockey George Woolf so vividly it's as if he's been acting all his life. Nor can I criticize the amazingly fluid cinematography of John Schwartzman, the production design of Jeannine Oppewall, the race design of jockey Chris McCarron (who appears in the movie as Charles Kurtzinger, War Admiral's jockey) or the work of one Rusty Hendrickson, the head wrangler for the many contemporary horses required to simulate the racing scene of the middle and late 30's.

I certainly can't cast doubt on writer-director Gary Ross' reported devotion to his subject. My only complaint is that he doesn't show the entire race between Seabiscuit and War Admiral, which can be seen so thrillingly in the newsreel footage shown in the PBS and A&E programs on Seabiscuit. But everything is forgotten and forgiven when Seabiscuit runs his last comeback race at Santa Anita and wins just before the final fade-out. After all, horses are ancient and enduring stars of cinema, which was born when Eadweard Muybridge (1830-1904) decided to prove that racehorses lift all four legs off the ground at the same time when they're in full stride. In my later life, I had the privilege of seeing the immortal Secretariat race at Aqueduct Race Track. I only wish, in retrospect, that I had been caught up in all the excitement over Seabiscuit in my childhood. But the current movie and televison films are the next best thing to having been there at the time.

Free-Market Economy

Fernando León de Aronoa's Mondays in the Sun , from his and Ignacio del Moral's screenplay, is a Spanish film that's as close to a William Saroyan play as I have ever seen, in that nothing much really happens for the longest time, even as several lives slip by ever closer to an unmarked and unremembered oblivion. Santa (Javier Bardem) is the reigning philosopher-king of a drab group of unemployed shipyard workers who can't adjust to the catastrophic consequences of free-market globalization, which our own economists in their infinite wisdom tell us is all for the best, despite the "temporary" dislocations of workers. After all, if ships can be made cheaper in South Korea than in the northern Spanish coastal city where the movie takes place, who are the workers to complain? (Perhaps if economists' jobs could be transferred to Cairo or Calcutta in accordance with the immutable laws of the "free" market …. )

Santa and his friends begin to raise some of these questions, but there is no one around to answer them. So they try to console each other at the local tavern, where they manage to display enormous capacities for both resignation and compassion, with only very occasional outbursts of fruitlessly petty defiance. Mr. Aronoa makes his intentions quite clear in his director's statement: "Cinema should deal with what it has at hand, with what it may forget because it doesn't see it clearly, because it doesn't want to see it. With local, everyday, prodigious stories." In this respect, Mondays in the Sun is prodigiously uneventful, though its heart is in the right place. It would be easier to dismiss if it weren't.