Mariska Hargitay with guests at the Me&Ro Holiday Event Benefiting her charity Joyful Heart Foundation yesterday after the awards. (Photo by Neilson Barnard/Getty Images)

Last Thursday, more than 1,100 people packed the Grand Ballroom of the Hilton Midtown for the 32nd Annual Muse Awards of the New York Women in Film and Television. This wasn’t your typical ladies-who-lunch affair, as a dazzling gaggle of silver screen honorees were acknowledged for their “outstanding vision and achievement.”

The Observer  has attended many a high-powered New York City event, but at this one the atmosphere seemed a bit more genuine with enthusiasm and pride. And no wonder, given how deserving those honored were. Awardees filmmaker Lisa F. Jackson, Kim Martin of WE TV, Lucy Liu and Mariska Hargitay were all celebrated for being women who have persevered, not only having achieved professional success, but having demonstrated commitment towards improving the lives of others. For an industry famed for its self-indulgence, celebrating these women for the opposite was a welcome change.

Debra Zimmerman, executive director of nonprofit Women Make Movies, received the Loreen Arbus award.

Ms. Hargitay delivered a poignant speech and spoke of her late parents, noted body-builder Mickey Hargitay and film star Jane Mansfield. Tearfully, she told the assembled: “I miss my mom today. On the back of the chair she had on movie sets was not her name but her measurements: 40," 21," 35." That’s not all she was!

“I embrace a different kind of measurement. I’m a woman of dimension. I’m grateful for my muses who have made this journey possible. My role as Olivia Benson has helped me to do more: I founded the Joyful Heart Foundation to help address the needs of women who have been the victims of sexual assault and suffer deep trauma. Last year I went before Congress to urge the lawmakers to address the backlog of thousands of unexamined rape kits.” Her passion for the cause was clear, and the enraptured crowd soaked up every word.

Afterwards, away from the dais, we asked about her years in the role of the professional, yet sympathetic cop Benson. We were especially curious after The Observer’s recent "Law & Order SVU" feature, which discussed the show’s regular confrontations with sex crimes.

Laughing, Ms. Hargitay told us, “I look at early segments and am amazed I wasn’t fired back then!”

Assuming all good things come to an end, we prodded about future acting plans, intrigued to find out whether or not the actress was planning her next career step to be a little more PG13.

“I’d love to do Broadway!” was all we got from the gorgeous Ms. Hargitay, although her apparent penchant for singing and dancing seemed to suggest that a more lighthearted role might be in order.

We caught her husband, actor Peter Hermann, beam satisfactorily with approval.

Perhaps, after all, that’s all we needed.

Lucy Liu

We thought ladies’ lunches were the province of the warmer months—when you just can’t wait to sneak away from the office (or the manse) for a cool glass of white wine and some cursory salmon destined to be left uneaten—but the Muse Awards are proving us wrong. This ceremony honoring women in the entertainment industry pays tribute to, among others, Mariska Hargitay (Jayne Mansfield’s daughter who’s now more famous for investigating sex crimes for more than a decade on NBC’s SVU), Lucy Liu (the former Ally McBeal spitfire who’s now on surprise TV hit Elementary) and documentarian Lisa F. Jackson. Expect lots of air-kisses.

New York Hilton, Grand Ballroom, 1335 Avenue of the Americas, 12:30pm, tickets and information can be found at nywift.org.

Brody.

Detachment is the latest curiosity from London-born singer-songwriter-painter-film director Tony Kaye, whose first film, a violent exposé of neo-Nazism called American History X, caused a minor sensation in 1998. This one is about a month in the life of a different kind of tortured, alienated soul—the substitute teacher. It opens March 16 but like a flight to nowhere, it’s already available for preboarding on television, where you can catch it anytime on Video on Demand.

Adrien Brody, one of the weirdest looking actors of the millennium, plays Henry Barthes, a man so emotionally blocked by a lifetime of disillusion that he cannot connect with any other human being. He hides from life by moving from teaching job to unemployment check, never stopping long enough in one place to become attached to students, colleagues or even an occasional one-night stand. The title of the film comes from Camus (“Never have I felt so detached yet so one with myself”). He is a metaphor for the restless souls who can’t do, they teach. Sometimes they drift into classrooms to fill something missing in themselves. Some think they can make a difference in others. In a series of brief documentary-style interviews, one man confesses he wanted to be a rock star until reality said otherwise, while another tried giving it a year’s try and stayed for years. For Henry, teaching is a reason to not go home to a bleak, antiseptic apartment with an empty refrigerator. We catch up with him in a school that makes the setting of Blackboard Jungle look like Kukla, Fran and Ollie, where a distinguished cast is largely wasted as various cynical faculty members. Marcia Gay Harden is the hard-boiled, sarcastic principal who went from being an educator to being a cop. James Caan is a wretch who pops amphetamines to get through the day. Blythe Danner stops at the water cooler on her way to staff meetings but doesn’t seem to know what she’s doing there. Lucy Liu is a burnout. Tim Blake Nelson has a nervous breakdown. The students spit in their faces and threaten them with gang rape. You get the picture.

Although Mr. Brody plays a lost, unfocused, blank blackboard of a man who structures his lesson plans to avoid contact with real life, he somehow manages to touch the lives of his students—and one fat, suicidally depressed girl in particular, played by the director’s sister, Betty Kaye. Her predicament elicits sympathy, but he has too many problems of his own to offer much help—no relationships, no furniture, no music, no feelings and no nutritious home-cooked meals, but only the memory of a mother who committed suicide, a grandfather with Alzheimer’s who is being neglected in a retirement home, and a homeless, underage prostitute with AIDS he rescues from the streets. In the dreary screenplay by Carl Lund, all of these episodes are fragmented, like shards of broken glass, adding up to nothing more than a shoebox of corrosive decay.

Maybe dedicated teachers can occasionally save the future of the world from hopeless despair, if they don’t end up in a straitjacket first. But I doubt if real teachers will find much to identify with here. Detachment drives a coffin nail through a noble profession with such ruthless virulence that it makes no point at all.

rreed@observer.com

DETACHMENT

Running Time 97 minutes

Written by Carl Lund

Directed by Tony Kaye

Starring Adrien Brody, Betty Kaye and Marcia Gay Harden

1/4

WTC: "Unconvention lease." [Real Deal]

Judiciary: Jonathan Lippman warns of pain. [Casey Seiler]

Evaluating Cuomo: "I will be angry with him in perpetuity," said Bill Perkins. [Liz Benjamin]

Housing: “Rent regulation and tax caps are philosophically the same thing,” said Silver. [Rick Karlin]

Moreland Commission: Professor says "the governor would be on solid ground if his Moreland Commission investigates individual members." [Rick Karlin]

Sandra Lee: Signs deal with Sears and KMart. [Sarah Firshein]

Cathie Black: Bloomberg likes her; shrugs off polls. [WCBS]

Same-Sex Marriage: Lucy Liu comes from a district where marriage opponent, Hiram Monserrate, was replaced with a supporter, Jose Perealta. [Julie Bolcer]

Redistricting: Martins pressured. [Jackie Nash]

Prison Closure: Shut down Sing-Sing? [Caa Matthews]

Photos: Julissa Ferreras and aides, huddle. [William Alatriste]

Same-sex marriage advocates recently protested outside Governor Cuomo's midtown office. As Nick Confessore noted about another recent marriage protest, the target of their rage is somewhat unclear, since Cuomo supports same-sex marriage, and wants to sign it into law by June.

As they say, with friends like these...

Taking a notably different approach in the same-sex marriage battle is the Human Rights Coalition Campaign , which released its latest video today, featuring actress Lucy Liu, best known for her action roles.

HRC has threatened to wield a big carrot in the 2012 elections, floating through Page Six the idea of holding fund-raisers for Republican State Senators who vote in favor of same-sex marriage.

Closer to home, pricey downtown über-boutique Opening Ceremony is capitalizing on its suddenly timely moniker. The store announced that it will throw a dance party this evening to coincide with the telecast of its namesake event in Beijing, after which it will stay open the whole weekend, perhaps hoping the sight of our homegrown athletes dominating abroad will incite the consumeristic fervor that has been missing in retail these past few months. On the schedule for the 72-hour shop-a-thon: free ice cream, a Scrabble tournament, and a wee-small-hours ping-pong tournament hosted by jewelry designer Phillip Crangi. No word on whether Chloe Sevigny, whose second line of bleeding-edge clothing for the store was unveiled in March to much confusion, will participate (though we're sure she'd look great holding a paddle).

Faced with the challenge of concocting an event to launch the new Lanvin men’s collection at Barneys, I opted for a Parisian salon theme. In keeping with the refined fin de siècle vibe of designer Alber Elbaz’s vision for fall, the invitation declared that the Lanvin party would be hosted by “the ghost of Marcel Proust.”

On Wednesday, Oct. 18, we served madeleines and Champagne to a sizeable horde of Elbaz fans. Upon arrival—and this was the ultra-cute part—guests were forced to don a “Hello, my name is … ” tag (from Staples) inscribed with the name of a Proust character. These names I acquired, not by slogging studiously through the entire Proust oeuvre, but simply by Googling “Proust characters” online. In fact, the entire undertaking was accomplished without me ever cracking open that dreaded book. The truth of the matter is that I know more about the DNA of gerbils than I do about À la Recherche du Temps Perdu. My familiarity extends no further than the whole madeleine thingy—proving, if nothing else, that this particular pastry must have a great publicist.

Proust devotees will be glad to hear that I was suitably punished—humiliated, even. My phony pose and my total ignorance of all things Proust was repeatedly exposed throughout the evening. Every time I proffered one of those pins—“Here! You can be the Duchesse de Guermantes” or “You look like a bit of a comte, take this one!”—guests demanded the back-story on each character. All except one: a French lady, needless to say, who rejected the nametags without even reading them on the basis that “everyone here knows who I am.” There goes that great Gallic sense of humor again!

Thank God for co-host André Leon Talley! Observing my ignorance, he took me aside and gave me some heartfelt advice. The Vogue editor—who was wearing, among other things, a couture black leather Chanel cardigan jacket festooned with gold chains and Prousty-looking bejeweled loafers—told me that the key was to “get past Swann’s Way” to what he described as “the szhooshing and the whooshing of the fabulous dresses and the rustle of the gorgeous taffetas on the stairs.” He also lauded “the perversity of the sex,” which allegedly turns À la Recherche into a veritable page-turner. “One minute you are lounging in a salon; the next minute you have little mice running over your naked body and tickling you,” explained the bilingual Monsieur Talley, concluding, while languidly trying on some men’s Lanvin lavender kid gloves: “If all else fails, then there’s always the audiotapes.”

Now to Malawi Madge. The hysteria around Madge’s adoption puts me in the unaccustomed position of actually defending a celebrity. It feels strange, but here goes: I fail to see why her hard-won fame—something which clearly has been instrumental in drawing attention to the plight of this faraway land—should not entitle her to jump the line just a little. And, since the British tabs are going to have telephoto lenses trained on her and her adoptee, there’s not much chance of her thrashing the little tyke with wire coat hangers or otherwise abusing him. Good luck, Madge! If little David doesn’t work out, there’s plenty more where he came from.

The Malawi/British-tabloid hysteria seems connected to the contemporary fetishization of kids and childrearing. Sadly, this is a trend that followed my arrival on the planet by three or four decades. When I was a tadpole, tadpoles were seen as annoying and expendable: Now that I am hurtling through middle age, I find that the situation has flipped, and middle-aged people have become the new tadpoles.

Regarding philanthropic celebs: Let’s hear it for local-lass-made-good Miss Lucy Liu. The Chinese-American thespian—a guest at the Lanvin fête—recently took up painting. Last month, she organized a show of her work at the Milk Gallery. The red dots rained down, raising over a quarter of a million dollars for UNICEF.

The unpretentious and hilarious Ms. Liu was by far the most attractive Proust attendee. Queens-born Lucy probably has the best cheekbones in America. Given that she’s clearly the Anna May Wong of the 21st century, isn’t it time that visage graced the cover of American Vogue?

Speaking of Proustian highbrow pursuits: All you hard-core intellectuals may wish to stop by the Borders Books at the Time Warner Center this coming Monday, Oct. 30, at 7 p.m. I will be hosting a salon of sorts for Joan Collins, after which the great lady herself will sign copies of her new book, entitled The Art of Living Well: Looking Good and Feeling Great (Sourcebooks, $24.95).

BYOM (bring your own madeleines)!

As faithful as Messrs. Eastwood and Helgeland have been to Mr. Lehane's deep feelings for family ties-in particular the helplessly wild love of fathers for daughters, and the numbing guilt of husbands toward wives-the film does not underline its message as insistently as the book does. Since excessive underlining has occasionally marred Mr. Eastwood's most impressive previous works, Mystic River must be considered a decisive advance for the director toward complete artistic mastery of his narrative material. Still, the movie retains the essence of the book in demonstrating that just as all politics is local, all tragedy is familial.

The linked destinies of Jimmy Markum (Sean Penn), Dave Boyle (Tim Robbins) and Sean Devine (Kevin Bacon) are forever clouded by an evil act inflicted during their otherwise uneventful childhoods. When l1-year-old Dave is taken away in a car by a pair of shrewdly calculating adult predators pretending to be police detectives, Jimmy and Sean can only look on helplessly, setting the stage for their lifelong regret over "dropping" Dave from their intimate circle after his traumatic misadventure. At this point, Mr. Eastwood and Mr. Helgeland leap forward 25 years to the respective adulthoods of the three co-protagonists, without dwelling on the book's description of a whole community turning its back puritanically on Dave as "damaged goods."

We then learn (more indirectly in the film than in the book) that Jimmy has served a short prison term for a series of robberies before becoming the respectable owner of a grocery store. Sean has become a detective with the Massachusetts State Police, and Dave has barely moved on from his humble origins as a low-paid laborer. Jimmy has been widowed and subsequently remarried and has one 19-year-old daughter, Katie Markum (Emmy Rossum), from his late first wife and two little girls from his second, Annabeth (Laura Linney). Sean has been separated from his wife and little girl, and Dave is in the midst of a shaky marriage with a neurotic partner, Celeste (Marcia Gay Harden).

When Katie is brutally murdered, Jimmy goes berserk with grief and vows his own personal revenge against his daughter's killer. As Sean and his African-American partner, jokingly named "Whitey" Powers (Laurence Fishburne), begin their investigation. Sean soon realizes that Jimmy and his former gang members may impede the investigation with their vigilante tactics. To make matters more complicated, Dave accidentally becomes a suspect in Kate's murder after getting involved in an unrelated violent incident-unrelated, that is, to Katie's murder, but very much related to the horrible crime inflicted upon him when he was a child. Unfortunately for Dave, the incident has left his hands bloodied, arousing the wife's suspicions.

Ironies abound as fatal coincidences and rampant hysteria combine to create a murderous misunderstanding, binding three erstwhile playmates to the moral and emotional consequences of a hot-blooded homicidal ceremony. The acting is uniformly inspired, and deftly balances the bereft primal outbursts of Mr. Penn's Jimmy and the emotionally disconnected depression of Mr. Robbins' Dave at one extreme, and the cool, methodical procedures of Mr. Bacon's and Mr. Fishburne's dogged detectives on the other.

In this mostly male maelstrom, Ms. Linney's Anabeth erupts in one transcendent Trojan Women –like scene in which she exalts her guilt-ridden husband Jimmy as a warrior king from the Celtic mists of blue-collar Boston's immigrant past-a time when men of iron drew their metaphorical swords on anyone menacing their wives and daughters. Yet the testosterone level never reaches the heights of self-worshipping Schwarzeneggerian rapture. Mr. Eastwood keeps a lid on all the masculine fury by opening many scenes with overhead helicopter shots, pinning the characters down to their sociological surroundings, as well as making them submit to the caprices of a cosmic fate.

Like most of the more interesting films this year, Mystic River displays a darker view of our existence in the new millennium than was the norm in the old Hollywood dream factories. Mr. Eastwood is to be commended for reportedly insisting that the film be shot in its natural Boston habitat rather than in a cheaper approximation of Boston, such as bargain-basement Toronto. This emphasis on geographical authenticity helps make this film a masterpiece of the first order.

The Bride of Vengeance

Now that I have seen Quentin Tarantino's Kill Bill: Vol. 1 , from his own screenplay, I can't wait to see Kill Bill: Vol. 2 , due out next February. Still, I am glad he and his producers decided to release his multi-hour Kill Bill feature in two bladder-friendly parts, each one of normal and desirable movie length. After all the Vol. 1 martial-arts mayhem, which makes the Matrix movies look like acrobatic dance numbers from Singin' in the Rain , I doubt that I would have had the energy to sit through both Vol. 1 and Vol. 2 at a single setting-particularly for an enterprise that professes to be a B-picture, however baroque. After all, a three- or four-hour B-picture is an oxymoron.

As it stands right now, Mr. Tarantino's soulful kung fu flick does for Uma Thurman as an action icon what Sergio Leone's "Man with No Name" trilogy, A Fistful of Dollars (1964), For a Few Dollars More (1965), and The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly (1966), did for Clint Eastwood. Indeed, the idea for Kill Bill reportedly originated in a conversation Mr. Tarantino had with Ms. Thurman during the shooting of his breakout film, Pulp Fiction (1994), after his debut, Reservoir Dogs (1992), had made him a cult sensation. But Ms. Thurman was less an action icon in Pulp Fiction than a memorably sassy dance performer with John Travolta on a date in which she called all the shots as his mob boss' imperious mistress. Here, however, she is nothing less than a woman samurai, driven to avenge the slaughter of her entire wedding party at an El Paso rehearsal hall by the Deadly Viper Assassination Squad, headed by Bill (David Carradine) and his three female hit women, Vernita Green (Vivica A. Fox), O-Ren Ishi (Lucy Liu) and Elle Driver (Daryl Hannah). After being shot in the head, Ms. Thurman's character-thereafter known simply as the Bride-is left comatose for four years. One day, she suddenly awakens to find that she's been sexually abused on a regular basis by a male nurse and his paying clients. After biting off the tongue of the latest would-be rapist, the Bride disposes of the male nurse in gruesome fashion and rides off in his "pussy wagon." From then on, she becomes an avenging angel seeking retribution not only for the murderous assault upon her, but also for what she assumes must have been the death of the baby in her womb.

I suppose that there are many women moviegoers who will choose to give Mr. Tarantino's latest opus as wide a berth as they have his three previous films, the most recent being the woman-hero-friendly Jackie Brown (1997), with blaxploitation movie veteran Pam Grier as the protagonist in Mr. Tarantino's screen adaptation of an Elmore Leonard novel. There are several points to be made here about what exactly Mr. Tarantino represents in the current cinema. For one thing, he is the most casually color-blind Caucasian filmmaker around; not merely in terms of a liberal "tolerance" for African-Americans and Asians, but with a deep and passionate embrace of all their cultural nuances. The bare bones of his studio-authorized biography provide some auterist clues to his artistic predilections. Born in 1963 in Knoxville, Tenn., and raised by a single mother, he was named after the "half-breed" blacksmith character Quint Asper, played by a young Burt Reynolds on the old Gunsmoke TV show. When he was 2, his mother and he moved to the South Bay area south of Los Angeles, where he lived for the next two decades in a racially mixed neighborhood in the city of Torrance. He grew up sharing many of the movie and pop-cultural tastes of black audiences. There was some cultural lag at work here, as opposed to much of the rest of the country. Martial-arts movies, for example, continued to be popular with black audiences long after they lost their vogue with the mainstream. Mr. Tarantino quit school at 17 to take acting classes and support himself with odd jobs. He found what Godard and Truffaut had found earlier in the Paris Cinématèque; for Mr. Tarantino, its California equivalent was the Video Archives in Manhattan Beach, where he developed his encyclopedic awareness of film, old and new, American and foreign. Like the earlier New Wave directors, his work is full of homages to earlier filmmakers, particularly the darker and more violent masters of the medium.

What redeems Mr. Tarantino's violence from mere exploitation is his genuine affection for the genres he celebrated, particularly his unironic appreciation, in Kill Bill , of the various moral codes by which his heroines conduct their lives and establish limits to their warrior behavior. But what makes him especially unusual is a fondness and respect for women that never lapses into lust or lechery. Even Truffaut, for all his professed love for women, often disguised his womanizing onscreen with the affected expression of a blushing little boy with his hand caught in the cookie jar. As it happens, Ms. Thurman's Amazonian prowess as the Bride in Kill Bill has been compared to that of Sigourney Weaver as Murphy in Ridley Scott's scary Alien (1979). The big difference in that Ms. Weaver's character is just trying to save her skin from the danger posed by an insidiously malignant extraterrestrial. Ms. Weaver's Murphy isn't looking for trouble; it simply keeps coming at her. By contrast, Ms. Thurman's Bride ventures across oceans and continents to find her enemies and vanquish them in single combat with their weapons of choice. She wishes to redress a wrong, and she devotes herself entirely to this mission.

By the end of Kill Bill: Vol. 1 , both her targeted victims have been women-Ms. Fox's Vernita Green and Ms. Liu's O-Ren Ishi-but neither antagonist is easy. Green's little girl comes home from school right in the middle of the death struggle between the Bride and her would-be murderess. The two women resume their struggle when the child is sent upstairs. The Bride spares her dead enemy's child, even though she tells the child that she knows she will grow up and come after her mother's killer-but the Bride is used to such eventualities. Todd McCarthy of Variety objected to this one improbable sequence in his generously favorable review of the film. I can see what he means, but I think this is part of Mr. Tarantino's overall strategy of keeping his audience off-balance. By the time she encounters Ms. Liu's virtual army of Yakuza members, all of them set on destroying the Bride before she can reach their leader, we have been conditioned to accept the Bride's superhuman abilities in combat. I would argue that, in a bizarre way, Mr. Tarantino empowers women as no action-genre director before him ever has. Kill Bill: Vol. 1 is quite simply a marvelous entertainment, and I recommend it to members of both sexes.