'The Campaign' (Warner Bros.)

Primary Colors, this is not.

North Carolina congressman Cam Brady (Ferrell) is the small-town incumbent who has coasted through each election by virtue of being the only candidate running. But a phone-sex scandal—reminiscent of that of Anthony Weiner, though sexting doesn’t come into play until later—threatens to make him too much of a risk for the Motch brothers (John Lithgow and Dan Aykroyd)—a sure nod, last names and all, to a certain Tea Party-funding duo—two Washington businessmen who plan on turning a profit by “insourcing” Chinese factories. They need a new pawn in Congress, and they find him in the pudgy Marty Huggins (Zach Galifiankis), a pug-loving weirdo who runs a failed bus tour service.

Thus begin the endless montages, as Marty is trimmed and tailored into an ever-more-attractive candidate with the help of a terrifying ninja of a campaign manager (Dylan McDermott) and Cam’s life deteriorates through the increasingly debased tactics the brothers Motch employ. The film is filled with the requisite talking heads—Chris Matthews, Ed Schultz, Lawrence O’Donnell, Joe Scarborough, Mika Brzezinski and Willie Geist (apparently the film made a deal with MSNBC before shooting)—“reporting” with unnatural interest on this small-town rivalry.

Without spoiling it, by the end the two men learn that they should be setting their sights on the real enemy instead of each other. In this way, The Campaign fits the formula of the frenemy-cum-bromance genre, which can be set in any world: that of fashion (Zoolander), the police (The Other Guys) or con men (Dirty Rotten Scoundrels). Almost every Will Ferrell vehicle is a spin on the story of two men who hate each other eventually working together to overcome greater adversity, and some might find The Campaign to be the same old shtick, albeit with a new sidekick riding shotgun.

For all its toilet humor, pop culture allusions—Cam makes a sex tape with Marty’s wife, only to find his poll numbers going up—and broad comedy, The Campaign is a failure of political satire; its teeth have been pulled so as to test well across all states and parties during an election year. Its saving grace is not in the concept but in the execution. Jay Roach and his writers (Eastbound and Down’s Shawn Harwell and Chris Henchy, with a “story by” credit to longtime Ferrell pal Adam McKay) have made sure that audiences won’t miss the references to Trading Places, the 1983 comedy in which Mr. Aykroyd played one of the maliciously rich Duke Brothers, the puppeteers behind a similar stunt.

“That wasn’t unintentional,” Mr. Roach told The Observer at the New York premiere’s after party about the reference of Mr. Aykroyd’s role. But Trading Places, for all its humor, had real-life impact: the “Eddie Murphy Rule” actually went into effect as Section 136 of the Wall Street Transparency and Accountability Act.

The Campaign is unlikely to have such a far-reaching effect. It’s a funny film, but one that feels a lot like this year’s political coverage—we’ve seen this story before, and we know how it’s going to end.

THE CAMPAIGN

Running Time: 85 minutes

Written by Chris Henchy, Shawn Harwell and Adam McKay (story)

Directed by Jay Roach

Starring Will Ferrell, Zach Galifianakis, Dan Aykroyd

2.5/4

Mr. Myers has stated in interviews that the enormous popular success of what has come to be acknowledged as the Austin Powers franchise came as a complete surprise to him. I don't doubt it, since nothing seems quite as doomed as self-parody (Austin Powers) of a self-parody (James Bond). Yet Austin Powers, International Man of Mystery (1997), which Mr. Myers created, wrote, produced and starred in, with Mr. Roach directing, went on to gross more than $200 million. The inevitable sequel, Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me (1999), went through the roof to make more than $300 million. Perhaps in the fervent hope that Austin Powers in Goldmember would escalate the franchise to $400 million, Austin Powers and his four alter egos have struck again.

To that end, it was indispensable that the movie receive a PG-13 rating rather than an R, which it did despite what the MPAA describes as "sexual innuendo, crude humor, and language." After the critics' screening a colleague asked me semi-rhetorically, "What do you have to do to get an R rating these days?" I didn't answer, although I knew that the slightest glimpse of a bare breast, the merest suggestion of an erotically charged scene or, of course, full male and/or female frontal nudity-if only for an instant-would have guaranteed an R.

The point is that, while somehow successfully walking that ratings tightrope, Austin Powers in Goldmember is the most relentlessly scatological exhibition I have ever seen short of golden-showers pornography. The words "urine," "excrement" and "penis" are never uttered, but what isn't said is being constantly pantomimed. And there is a prolonged bit of business about a facial mole that comes close to being politically incorrect.

Mr. Myers, the Canadian changeling from the second generation of Saturday Night Live , is a gifted mimic with both verbal and physical wit and a creatively wide-ranging satiric imagination. He is not without a certain charm. Yet I can't help feeling that he and his associates decided to wing it this time and see if it made any difference to their target audience. Perhaps it won't. For my part, I prefer not to analyze a spectacle so awash in formlessness and facetiousness, not to mention a frenzy of cesspool humor. Michael Caine as Austin's father, Nigel, and Beyoncé Knowles as Foxxy Cleopatra would have been welcome additions to Austin's cosmos if there had been a trace of coherent narrative in which they could construct their characters. Instead, it's all amateur-night vaudeville and movies within movies that degenerate into total inanity.

Underage Charm

Gary Winick's Tadpole , from a screenplay by Heather McGowan and Niels Mueller, is hardly the first film to describe the mutual attraction between an underaged male and a mature female, but it's one of the more charming of the recent entries in the genre from both sides of the Atlantic. Sixteen-year-old Oscar Grubman (played with astute pomposity and transparent self-importance by 23-year-old Aaron Stanford) falls madly in love with his middle-aged stepmother, Eve (played with warmth and sparkle by Sigourney Weaver). But while maladroitly pursuing Eve, poor Oscar is waylaid by Eve's best woman friend, Diane (Bebe Neuwirth), a voracious man-and-boy-eating masseuse. Oscar's pathetically clueless father, Stanley (John Ritter), has no idea what's going on with either Oscar or Eve. When Eve learns of Oscar's feelings toward her, she kisses him gently and tells him that she loves his father. Oscar recovers quickly from his romantic setback and begins acting his own age by dating a young girl he had previously spurned for lacking "experience."

This fraught situation could easily have turned ugly or silly with acting, writing and direction of less tact, taste and resiliency. We certainly have come a long way from the pseudo-innocent days of The Bachelor and the Bobby-Soxer (1947), when Shirley Temple competed with Myrna Loy for the affections of Cary Grant. But though I applaud the trend toward older women and younger men as on-screen romantic partners, our society has a long way to go before it can be said to accept all the realities of "underage" sexuality. On this tricky topic, Tadpole is very much a step in the right direction, with its blend of frankness, civility and compassion.

The Trials of an Actress' Husband

Yvan Attal's My Wife Is an Actress ( Ma Femme Est une Actrice ), from his own screenplay, is a moderately affecting attempt to meld fact with fiction by imagining how Yvan (the name of both the character and the auteur) would react if his real-life wife, the French movie star Charlotte Gainsbourg (simply "Charlotte" in the movie) made him jealous by the persuasiveness of her on-screen love scenes with other men.

Mr. Attal has been acting in French and British films since 1989, but My Wife Is an Actress marks his feature-film directorial debut. Behind the camera and in the editing room, he manages to keep the Pirandellian pathology of the situation

under control, as his acting alter ego explores the paradoxes that come with a life spent mixing make-believe and reality. Eventually, one suspects that there is not all that much difference between the two.

On one level, Mr. Attal is paying loving tribute to his actress-wife, but on another, he is reliving the 1,001 petty slights suffered by non-celebrities married to celebrities . Imagine, for instance, trying to make a reservation at a chic restaurant for a decent hour under your own name and being offered a midnight seating, while your movie-star wife calls and gets the same maitre d' to give you a 9 p.m. seating. Or a traffic cop politely forgiving you for speeding, but only after your movie-star wife smiles at him. After a while, Yvan, a macho sportswriter, joins an acting troupe and promptly begins making out with one of the actresses, only to discover ruefully that she is easily distracted from him on a restaurant date by the presence of recognizable celebrities nearby.

Yvan's jealousy takes off into the stratosphere when Charlotte does a nude sex scene with her screen lover John, played by the marvelously aged British actor Terence Stamp, who adds a comic dimension to the film with his banal womanizing lines about the "real art" of painting in which he dabbles, as opposed to the "lower art" of movie acting. The comic self-effacement of Mr. Stamp's character keeps the film light and airy, and avoids needlessly suspenseful complications that would cloud the central concept.

Mr. Attal does his part as a director to keep his two co-protagonists only vaguely disaffected and only slightly disconnected, thus forestalling any terminal disruptions. For the most part, My Wife Is an Actress is bright, pleasant and intelligent entertainment with no undue alarums or excursions. This degree of comic restraint and emotional balance is not all that easy to attain in telling a story of life in what amounts to a marital goldfish bowl.

A False Friend

Sandra Goldbacher's Me Without You , from a screenplay by Ms. Goldbacher and Laurence Coriat, follows the obsessive friendship of two women, Marina (Anna Friel) and Holly (Michelle Williams), from their childhood in 70's London through the 80's. After many stormy interludes, the relationship ruptures, a casualty of the flashier and prettier Marina's tendency to dominate and exploit the self-doubting Holly.

There are several problems with the development of the narrative. Most important is the unequal allocation of audience sympathy between Marina and Holly. There is nothing admirable about the vain, selfish, intellectually unambitious and even disloyal Marina. All that can be said in her defense is that she is the product of a broken marriage, the child of a grotesquely self-absorbed and self-pitying mother (Trudie Styler) and a wandering minstrel of a father (Nicky Henson).

Not that the likable Holly has any picnic at home. Though her sturdy Jewish father, Max (Allan Corduner), ends up as a supportive and consoling presence for both Holly and Marina, her impatient mother, Judith (Deborah Findlay), constantly undermines Holly's self-esteem with disparaging remarks about her looks. As the decades roll by, Holly ends up looking more attractive, in an unaffected way, than the perpetually preening and hair-color-changing Marina. The long span of the story, with the passing years marked by changing pop tunes, chops the scenes between Holly and Marina into mere sound bites. The men in their lives drift in and out, with only Holly ending up in a happy marriage to her longtime love, Marina's older brother Nat (Oliver Milburn)-predictably, much to Marina's dismay.

A Dench-Irons Flashback

David Jones' Langrishe, Go Down (1978), from a screenplay by Harold Pinter, based on the novel by Aidan Higgins, provides us, at the very least, with an opportunity to see what Jeremy Irons and Judi Dench looked and acted like almost a quarter of a century ago. The story takes place in the Dublin countryside during the 1930's. Ms. Dench plays Imogen Langrishe, a lonely single woman of aristocratic Anglo-Irish origins stranded on a decaying estate. She allows herself to be seduced by an impoverished 35-year-old German graduate student named Otto Beck who is working on a hopelessly esoteric thesis. The affair ends badly, with Imogen taking a shot at the fleeing German. In between, the fragmented storytelling is, well, vintage Pinter, but Ms. Dench and Mr. Irons remain mesmerizing after all this time.

German Anarchists Face the Music

Gregor Schnitzler's What to Do in Case of Fire? , from a screenplay by Stefan Daehnert and Anne Wild, answers that question with a defiant "Let it burn." Yet the movie's bark is worse than its bite, as six former squatters in an empty Berlin apartment building come together after 12 years to plot a raid on a heavily guarded police station with the goal of retrieving some incriminating film footage that identifies them as destructive anarchists from another era. A largely unfamiliar German cast acts out the familiar challenges facing former revolutionaries after the revolution has been filed away as a lost cause in the world of capitalist careerism. Nothing much is resolved at the end, beyond establishing a few amiable ironies. Interesting, but not compelling.

I must confess that I was expecting more from a movie endowed so richly with acting talent in the personae of Russell Crowe, Hank Azaria, Mary McCormack, Lolita Davidovitch, Ron Eldard, Colm Meaney, Maury Chaykin, Michael McKean, Judith Ivey and not least the resurgent Burt Reynolds. What a cast! And then there was the prominent participation of Mr. Kelley, the current white knight of the Emmys for his creation of L.A. Law , Chicago Hope , Ally McBeal , Picket Fences , The Practice , among other television programs festooned with wit and panache. Director Jay Roach was still an unknown quantity, despite his having hit the commercial jackpot with the two Austin Powers bonanzas, but what could possibly go wrong with all these gifted people on the premises? My first premonition came when I and my regular companion found ourselves all alone in a very large screening room. Were we the last to know?

Still, I stayed with the film as long as I could, hoping against hope that it was very slowly building up to something, anything. I expected its hockey plot to be as hokey and inspirational about hockey as Hoosiers (1986) had been about basketball. What I didn't expect was the almost complete lack of tension and suspense and even common-sensical reality in the spectacle. Not that I minded the movie, particularly. It was pleasant enough to watch in an empty screening room. And then it hit me that I was watching a once-upon-a-time fable with the wrong cast and too many production values.

The town of Mystery is introduced as a veritable Shangri-La of ice hockey. On the surface, the people seem to cherish their quaintness and smallness, going so far as to resist the invasion of chain stores–though why even the most imperialistic chain would want to expand into Mystery is a bigger mystery than Mystery itself. The town has a judge (Mr. Reynolds), a sheriff (Mr. Crowe), a lawyer (Mr. Chaykin) but nothing much else besides overgrown hockey players, restive wives and a few children for atmosphere. From time to time, someone cracks a joke about there being no economy and seemingly no entertainment besides the Saturday-afternoon hockey game.

At this point I should mention that hockey is far from being my favorite spectator sport, ranking just ahead of arm-wrestling. I know there are all kinds of strategies, as there are in soccer, but both sports are bedeviled by the same fallacy that makes tic-tac-toe less challenging than chess. If one team is determined to prevent the other team from scoring, all it has to do is gather all its players around the net to stifle the opposing offense. That's why the scores are most often so ridiculously low. I know I am missing something esoteric about both sports, but there are times when I enjoy wallowing in my ignorance.

Still, I cannot deny that ice hockey on a frozen pond in a mountainous never-never land is a beautiful sight to behold, just so long as I don't have to be there, suffering through Arctic temperatures. That may be why I have never warmed to Robert Flaherty's Nanook of the North (1922). The point is that the creators of Mystery, Alaska have inflicted their characters with a set of sitcom problems and crises that could be solved simply by moving out of the wintry setting for an ice-hockey operetta into a warmer and livelier location.

The first crisis occurs when 32-year-old sheriff John Biebe (Mr. Crowe) is told by Mayor Scott Pitcher (Mr. Meaney) that he has lost a step and is therefore too slow to play for Mystery in its Saturday game. A faster-skating 17-year-old kid will replace John. John is inconsolable, but he keeps his stiff upper lip. His marriage to Donna (Ms. McCormack) has not been going well for a long time, and when her old flame from high school, Charles Danner (Mr. Azaria), returns to Mystery on a media helicopter to announce that he has made a deal to bring the New York Rangers to play the local hockey team, all hell breaks loose. There is a heated town meeting in which opposing viewpoints are vociferously expressed. Talk about lack of suspense. Why spend all that money in the middle of nowhere if you weren't going to stage a choked-throat spectacle of underdogs against a professional team that, incidentally, hasn't been doing too well lately? When Donna starts smiling provocatively at Danner for auld lang syne, John becomes jealous.

Meanwhile, Mr. Pitcher confronts his own midlife crisis when he discovers that his wife Mary Jane (Ms. Davidovitch) has been sleeping with one of the young hockey players. For his part, Judge Burns (Mr. Reynolds) has a very difficult relationship with his underachieving, hockey-crazy son "Birdie" (Scott Grimes). Deep down, everyone in the town is good at heart, and every problem is not so much resolved as dissolved in a stream of good will from the locals and the intruders as well. With all the malignancy in mainstream movies, one would think that Mystery, Alaska would sweep into town as welcome relief. Instead, it drowns in a sea of unearned sweetness.

I knew the movie was in trouble when the only character I sympathized with was a media bitch the audience was supposed to laugh at for running inside to warm her frozen nose. I know I would have done the same thing. As I said, I hate the cold. But even more, I regret that so many likable performers were wasted on a project that was fatally unreal and unexciting from its original conception.

Heroic Resistance or Shameful Collaboration?

Claude Berri's Lucie Aubrac , based on the novel Outwitting the Gestapo by Lucie Aubrac, takes place in Lyon in 1943 and is more or less based on fact. Mr. Berri grew up with firsthand experiences of the Nazi and Vichy collaborations during the German occupation of France, and of the Holocaust that accompanied it. Ever since Marcel Ophüls' The Sorrow and the Pity (1971), France and its cinema have lived in the shadow of history's accusatory gaze. Mr. Berri was clearly one of the good guys, but the question remains about how many others in France truly resisted the Nazis, and how early they joined the ranks of the resistance. The role of the Communist Party in the resistance, which began only after Hitler invaded Russia in 1941, is another controversial issue that even The Sorrow and the Pity did not address fully. Hence, Mr. Berri cannot be singled out for not exploring the tantalizing ambiguities surrounding so many life-and-death intrigues in this still murky period.

Still, Lucie Aubrac suffers from a certain lethargy in its telling of one of the heroic success stories of the resistance. It is not so much the fault of Carole Bouquet, who plays Lucie, nor of Daniel Auteuil, who plays Lucie's imprisoned and then liberated husband Raymond, that their adventure is not more compelling. Perhaps too much time has passed for the old passions to be felt as strongly as they once were. Perhaps Mr. Berri is too close to the material to take the necessary melodramatic liberties with the facts of the case to generate more tension and suspense.

As far as I know, Ms. Aubriac is still alive, and in communication with Mr. Berri. She did nothing to be ashamed of in her clever maneuvers to set her husband free. To put it as delicately as possible, there was no aria from Tosca to accompany her deployment of her womanly charms or feminine wiles. She merely deceived the infamous Klaus Barbie and his Gestapo associates as to her true identity and that of her husband. Indeed, she exploited a legalistic propriety which the bad guys honored and respected.

But let's face it, when you cast Ms. Bouquet, the beautifully sensual icon of Luis Buñuel in That Obscure Object of Desire (1977) and Bertrand Blier in Too Beautiful for You (1989), we are somewhat guiltily anticipating at least a hint of hanky-panky with the wicked Nazis. Would Raymond accept Lucie's necessary sacrifice with a generous heart, or would he, like all sexist males, cease to respect her? I know this imaginary synopsis sounds worse than Mr. Berri's actual film, but there is a moral lurking there somewhere. Mr. Berri is too goody-goody for his own good. He has some interesting things to say about the nuanced behavior that falls somewhere in the shade between the beacons of heroic resistance and shameful collaboration. But Lucie Aubrac never comes alive with the fire of dramatic discourse. It is all too neat and noble.

A French Feast

The New York Film Festival is off and running with a roster of impending releases that should enrich what is left of this century's last cinematic year. Pascal Bonitzer's Rien Sur Robert deserves an American distributor, if it hasn't gotten one yet, if only to regale us neglected, self-pitying, increasingly persecuted American intellectuals. How many movies can casually drop names like Franz Kafka, Ernest Hemingway and Milan Kundera without having them land with a dull thud?

I felt a special affection for the marvelous central character, a film critic who committed the professional sin of reviewing a movie he had not seen, played by Fabrice Luchini. He is punished in a hilarious dinner scene with his old college professor, who denounces him for his lack of depth and conviction. He is cuckolded by his eternally disenchanted girlfriend (Sandrine Kiberlain), who insists on describing her infidelity in excruciating detail. Ms. Kiberlain plays an exasperating character with exquisite sang-froid. Mr. Luchini's character finally is almost ensnared by a curiously volatile creature, played unpredictably by Valentina Cervi.

This is not an easy movie to encompass. Its moods change abruptly. Its projection of a Parisian intellectual's paranoia begins as a funny joke and ends as a savage jest. And Michel Piccoli is on hand to provide a self-parody as a mentor gone mad.