When Bolaño, a peripatetic Chilean who also lived in Mexico and Spain, died of liver failure in 2003, at the age of 50, he left behind 10 novels and three short-story collections, all written in the last decade of his life. His major works are The Savage Detectives and 2666, a massive posthumous novel which will be published in English for the first time next year.

An epic omnibus of earlier characters and thematic obsessions (irreverent itinerant poets, exile, political unrest), spanning many countries and more than two decades, The Savage Detectives begins on Nov. 2, 1975, as the journal of Juan Garcia Madero, a 17-year-old law student in Mexico City with a hunger for poetry. Two rugged aesthetes—self-described “visceral realist” poets—confrontationally crash Juan’s dreary poetry workshop and read aloud what Juan describes as “the best poem I’d ever heard.” Seduced, he follows them to a bar to talk about poetry for hours. The two poets, Ulises Lima and Arturo Belano (a lanky Chilean, and Bolaño’s main alter ego), both in their early 20’s, invite Juan to join their anti-establishment (i.e., anti–Octavio Paz) “gang.” “I said yes, of course. It was all very simple …. [T]ogether we would change Latin American poetry.”

The first part of the book consists of Juan’s breathless journal entries over the next two months, as he acquires the postures of an avant-garde poet. With the self-consciousness of youth, he skips classes, steals books, scribbles away for hours at bars and cafés, and nurses the proud wound of virginity freshly lost. He leaves home and moves in with a barmaid, “in a tenement straight out of a 1940’s movie.” Everything is feverish and new, and Lima and Belano are the giants of this world.

This section ends dramatically on the eve of the New Year, with Lima and Belano peeling out of Mexico City in a borrowed Impala. They are shepherding a woman away from her belligerent pimp, with Juan giddy in the back seat (“I realized that I’d always wanted to leave”). They are bound for the Sonora Desert, where Lima and Belano hope to find a woman named Cesárea Tinajero, a poet from the 1920’s who helped originate Mexico’s first band of visceral realists. Her shadow seems cast over everything that Lima and Belano do.

The tone shifts suddenly, and for the next 400 pages the book becomes a series of accounts from scores of people who have something to say about Lima, Belano or visceral realism. (Juan disappears.) These scraps of oral history, collected over 20 years, seem like responses to questions, but we never know the interviewer. They vary dramatically, revealing Bolaño’s remarkable ear for voices. But they all feel delicately tragic, perhaps the way anyone sounds when grasping for a distant brightness in some vaguely remembered past. (“[B]ack then we thought we were going to be writers and would have given anything to belong to that essentially pathetic group, the visceral realists,” says one guy. “Youth is a scam.”)

This extended chorus gives shape to the two poets by filling in much of the negative space. The various accounts also chip away at our first impression of Lima and Belano. We learn of their hapless travels, odd jobs, failed relationships and unwritten poems. There’s romance in some of these stories—many inspire wanderlust—but also the bitterness of promises unfulfilled, of people duped. “Belano and Lima weren’t revolutionaries,” someone vents. “They weren’t writers. Sometimes they wrote poetry, but I don’t think they were poets, either. They sold drugs.”

Something ominous pervades the wanderings and frayed friendship of Lima and Belano, implying a story untold, perhaps from their road trip. We do finally rejoin them on this trip and re-experience their vibrancy for the book’s last 50 pages. It’s a refreshing return, but also stained by what we know of their future. A character’s earlier lamentation sticks: “[W]hat a shame that time passes, don’t you think? What a shame that we die, and get old, and everything good goes galloping away and leaves us behind.”

Emily Bobrow is an editor at Economist.com.

I end up feeling like the new guy at a 250-person A.A. meeting. “First trip to Mexico City?” a stranger says. I nod. “Oh boy,” he says, as if I have so far to go and so much to learn before I get there.

This happened to a somewhat extreme degree on a recent weekend trip from New York to L.A. The plane, or “tin enema of the sky,” becomes a biopsy of bicoastal culture—a tour of the consequences of manifest destiny carried out in a paced timeframe, like the monorail at the zoo. Except the wildlife is on the inside.

This is nothing new: L.A. passengers are superficial and networky; New York passengers are grumpy and odd. The phrase “Some things are cliché for a reason” is itself a cliché. But for a reason.

New York to L.A.:

I arrive early to buy airport-sanctioned water at the gate and sit in a chair that affords me a nice view of Anderson Cooper on the TV. A plane has crashed somewhere in China. Footage is shown. I look around to see if anyone else is noticing this and discover my first sign of L.A.-ness: No one’s watching CNN. I start unwrapping a granola bar and hear a male voice over my shoulder: “I can’t believe you’re eating candy in the morning.”

“So judgmental,” I scoff, and hold the granola bar over my head. If this was a New Yorker they might leave it at that, but this was someone from the Sunshine Species.

“You’re lucky you’re still young and can do that.”

I turn around to see a man in his early something—40’s? 50’s? He has a face that some people might call leathery, though I personally would not buy a handbag upholstered with his cheeks. He wore a button-down shirt in need of some buttoning, and I could sooner finish counting the stars than count all the teeth in his mouth. I turn away again.

“When you’re my age, it goes straight to your thighs.”

What straight New York man refers to his thighs? One of us was definitely born and bred west of Nevada.

“Well, it’s not like flexibility,” I crane my neck. “I’m pretty sure you can eat candy bars when you’re old. Er, older. Besides, it’s not candy.” I piece the wrapping together from where I’ve ripped it to demonstrate. Only in California are solids considered junk food.

“First trip to L.A.?”

Oh Christ. This is the same insulting feeling I get walking past Columbus Circle when men with maps ask me if I’d like a bike tour of Central Park. No, I most certainly would not.

“Nope.” I turn around again, but spy something in my peripheral vision and nearly give myself a paper cut in the cornea turning my head. It’s his business card.

“Take it,” he says. “I do voiceovers.” Then what’s with the headshot? I think.

A flight attendant announces that we will have to throw away all liquids now. Always the problem child, I approach the gate to affirm that this is the water they sold to me—not some explosive terrorist shit from a bubbling stream in Maine. Normally I wouldn’t bother, but I have special swallowing needs during takeoff on account of an unfortunate past incident involving some (literally) deafening pain, a Glaswegian emergency room and a squirrel syringe. I cannot live on gum alone.

Apparently, I will have to throw away this water as well. An elfin teenager behind me steps forward, presumably in my defense. She takes the same pleading tone but uses it to describe something called a “power cleanse.” It’s a three-day minimum diet in which you only “eat” lemon-flavored water with organic maple syrup. She holds up a plastic bottle that looks like it’s filled with piss.

“If I don’t have my power cleanse, I’ll pass out. This is, like, my sole source of nutrition for this flight.”

To her credit, she’s on Day 2 of this. The attendant ignores both of us and disappears behind a metal door. The girl sits down in a huff and looks for sympathizers, which she quickly finds.

L.A. to New York:

“Oh, thank God you’re not fat.” This from the woman who has already settled next to me—in our emergency-exit row! Score! Let’s laugh! We’ve got awesome legroom!

“Thank God!” I laugh back. She is about my age, maybe a little older, beautiful and dressed head to toe in gray. Gray glasses, gray dress, gray ankle boots, gray skin. We chuckle together until I realize that her seat is being pushed forward ever so slightly by an enormously obese man. The man and I lock eyes, a look broken only by me slinking down into my seat.

Does the woman proceed to ask me if this is my first time visiting New York? Does she want to know why I was in L.A.? No. “So what do you do?” she asks, digging through the marsupial pouch of magazines in front of her.

“I—”

“Fuck!” She presses and holds the “assistance” button long after it’s lit. She must be the life of the elevator bank. The stewardess comes over. “I don’t have a sleeping mask.”

“We don’t have them anymore, Miss.”

“Well, can you see if you can find one? Or a rubber band and some napkins, for all I care?”

“Let me check,” the flight attendant smiles and looks over at me, “and I’ll be back before takeoff with your water.”

My companion grips our shared armrest and lurches her head back in a jealous spasm. “I have inner ear—” I say.

“Sure, sure. And sorry! I interrupted you. Where do you live again?”

“I have to use the bathroom.” I unbuckle my seatbelt.

I am waiting behind a man who looks and acts like Woody Allen if Woody Allen were, upon closer examination, a woman of 82. She is that rare combination of an instant, low and constant talker. She is also phobic.

“At my age, you’re too old to hover. It’s the knees. And the flushing—forget about it. That noisy blue water makes me feel like I’m gonna get sucked into Hell. It makes me hold onto my jewelry. If I dropped my rings, God forbid. And there’s no room to pick anything up in there without smashing your skull! Not that anyone should have to use the bathroom anyhow. It’s not like they hydrate or feed you anymore. They’d sooner see you starve then spend a lousy—what could it be, 30 cents?—on a pack of peanuts. Or crackers, if people have those allergies.”

“You’ll be home soon enough,” I say. “In the meantime, can I offer you a granola bar?”

Unlike large gatherings in New York that I’ve been to—especially after Sept. 11—this rally was more sanguine than sanguinary; the police gently prodded the crowd, deftly stopping car traffic at one intersection to let the energized mob through, and using a stream of vehicles at another intersection to block the way. There were no portable metal fences penning the participants in, no line of bullying officers arbitrarily blocking no-go areas. After Mr. López Obrador emerged from the S.U.V., he addressed the crowd full of confidence; the polls gave him a slight lead in the election to be held in four days. “We are going to win!” he bellowed into the microphone, his voice booming over the now hundreds of thousands of cheering people.

Victory, it seemed to the crowd, was assured. After all, this was Mexico City, the largest city in the country—one of the largest on earth! If Mr. López Obrador could overwhelmingly carry all these people, how couldn’t he win the election?

I caught the Mexico bug several years ago, when I visited the country during a college break. One trip south led to another, and by the time I moved east to New York from California, I had logged many months south of the border, traveling from the desert north of Baja California, Sonora and Chihuahua states down to the jungles and beaches of Oaxaca and Veracruz.

But what had really excited me was the sprawling capital megalopolis—the Aztecs’ ceremonial pyramid, which juts out of the ground just north of the Zócalo in the city’s geographical, historical and political center; the art galleries of the Condesa and Roma neighborhoods, where stone mansions damaged in the mid-80’s from powerful earthquakes were consequently abandoned by their rich owners and taken over by artists in need of cheap housing; and Coyoacán, an upscale neighborhood that was formerly a small village, subsequently swallowed up by urban sprawl, where Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo once cavorted and where Leon Trotsky, in exile, fell victim to his Stalinist assassin’s ice pick.

Mexico’s history is etched on the stone street corners downtown; avenues and neighborhoods are named after Aztec warriors and revolutionary heroes and martyrs; you can still walk into cantinas where, legend has it, Pancho Villa shot up the ceiling during a drunken fiesta, or an upscale restaurant where Emiliano Zapata and his campesino followers incongruously sat and ate dinner at the counter. The city is a palimpsest—scratch the surface next to an Art Deco office tower and you’ll see the Spanish colonial era; scratch it elsewhere and the plumed head of Quetzalcoatl stares out from between cobblestones. As a bartender told me later that week, with the weight of history hanging heavy on every street corner, “The central district is surreal.”

It’s sometimes said that Mexico is in a state of permanent revolution, and the last couple of Presidential elections have supported that view. After the 1910-20 revolution, power was consolidated by the Institutional Revolutionary Party, or P.R.I., which reigned nearly unopposed for 71 years. But in 1988, Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas just nearly attained the Presidency after splitting off from the ruling party and creating his own. The P.R.I. was weakened, and two elections and 12 years later, the ironically named center-right P.A.N. (the National Action Party; pan means “bread” in Spanish—a populist, left-wing symbol, if any at all) ascended to power with Vicente Fox.

Now, people whom I talked to around town were guardedly confident that Mr. López Obrador (of another party, the P.R.D.) would be elected. The Friday night before the election, in a second-story club in the bohemian Roma Norte neighborhood, I spoke with a photographer, Rubén, and his computer-programmer girlfriend, Rebecca.

“We want López Obrador to win, of course,” Rubén told me as a three-piece tango band played in the smoky room. Cigarette smoke filled the air, and couples sat languorously at tables piled with empty wine bottles and heaping ashtrays. “But sometimes he plays up class differences a little too much, and that scares people off.”

Indeed, Mr. López Obrador’s opponent, Felipe Calderón of the P.A.N., had accused him of being a politician in the same vein as leftist anti-American firebrand Hugo Chávez in Venezuela. But Mr. López Obrador employed more conciliatory rhetoric. At his pre-election rally, he emphasized the need to help Mexico’s poor but said that he would not increase spending dramatically.

Other Chilangos weren’t interested in the election at all. At the Café el Centro, not far from the Zócalo, I spoke to an advertising businessman named Manuel briefly about it. “I do not care for politics at all,” Manuel told me as he puffed cigarette after cigarette. “Sports, yes. Do you like football?”

On Election Night, the Federal Election Institute had guaranteed that a winner would be declared by 11 p.m. I had been struck down by food poisoning the night before, when, ironically enough, I had gone to a restaurant in the upscale Polanco neighborhood—two overpriced tacos from a glorified taco shop next to a Fendi and Hermès store incapacitated me for the next 12 hours. It was like eating from Chinatown street vendors all week, but getting stricken after a burger at Balthazar. Perhaps it was the lack of beer; federal law had decreed that there would be no alcohol sales the day before the election. Sober voters apparently make sober decisions.

But I managed to drag myself down to the Zócalo around 10:30 p.m. to read the crowd, and from the look of it, Mr. López Obrador was coasting to victory. The yellow flags, which days before had read “Smile! We Are Going to Win!”, now read “Smile! We Won!” A salsa band played on the giant stage, and people were hugging and laughing, assured of victory.

By the appointed hour, a large video screen was filled with the studious profile of the president of the Federal Election Institute. After a rambling, self-congratulatory 10-minute rundown of the mechanics and safeguards of the electoral process, he said the results of the election were too close to call. The crowd, nevertheless, continued to grow and kept chanting Mr. López Obrador’s name. It was becoming a victory party, although no victory was evident. Clutching my stomach, I made my way back to my hotel and climbed into bed. All night, I could hear people chanting, cars honking and fireworks exploding as the party raged outside my window.

For the next three days, the city returned back to normal. The polls showed Mr. Calderón as having a slight lead, and he quickly proclaimed victory over Mr. López Obrador. But a certain matter of three million missing votes became an embarrassment for the Federal Election Institute after Mr. López Obrador called attention to them. The margin of victory narrowed, but I, unfortunately, was due to fly home.

On my last night in the city, I went to a mescal bar in Condesa, a neighborhood not unlike Chelsea: full of galleries, cafés, artists and fashionistas—and their hangers-on—but minus the large discotheques. My bartender, Hector, was skeptical about the results of the election. “You know those three million votes they ‘found’?” he asked. I nodded. “Doesn’t that seem a little suspicious?” Yeah, I agreed, about as suspicious as Florida in 2000. He filled my glass with another large pour of mescal and clinked it with his glass of water. “Salud.”

The next day, posters for Mr. López Obrador still hung in store and taxi windows. Store workers scrubbed the stone sidewalks, Indian women sat next to the street with hands outstretched to passersby, and businessmen hurried by. A street-vendor woman blew into the coal chamber of her taco stand, heating the grill for her first customer. A man in a yellow shirt stopped at a lamppost and hung a poster for an upcoming pro–López Obrador rally.

I flew home and scoured the papers for news of that rally. While the one I was in was peaceful and optimistic, I wonder how the mood has now changed. Reports are trickling in of more fraud than originally thought: discarded ballot boxes found in the dump, videotapes of P.A.N. workers stuffing votes. The official election results are tight—a difference of only 244,000 votes. That’s about the same number of people surrounding Mr. López Obrador when I stood there, slack-jawed and amazed, as the populist politico stood confident in his impending victory and waved at us all.

Of course I ascribe a portion of his enthusiasm to his habla-Spanish engagement with the story, but at dinner last night, a couple of friends pointed out that the culture of the NewsHour under Jim Lehrer is a bit dour. No smiles, a kind of thoughtful but impersonal professionalism. This viewer, anyway, is grateful for the new mood.

I was going on about the way certain films and certain filmmakers (and their cinematographers) had indelibly changed the way we see the world and ourselves, just through the cumulative effect of the never-before-seen look of their work.

For me, Terrence Malick’s Badlands, Peter Brook’s King Lear, Martin Scorsese’s Raging Bull, Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner, Oliver Stone’s JFK (not for the idiot conspiracy theory, but for the faster-than-the-speed-of-thought fluid film-stock-shifting look), Errol Morris’ The Thin Blue Line and, most recently, David Gordon Green’s George Washington and All the Real Girls. (If you haven’t seen the last two, especially the former, you’ve missed something inexplicably powerful and almost mystically beautiful.)

1) The Redness of Red

Anyway, she interrupted me to say something typically smart and allusive about “the redness of reds.” She was recalling something she’d read years ago in a Jane Kramer “Letter from Europe” in The New Yorker, a reference to a Berlin director, Hartmut Bitomsky. He’d made a film called Die Röte des Rots von Technicolor (The Redness of Reds in Technicolor) in 1972. He was lamenting the loss of the look, the vision of the world beheld by those who saw the original Technicolor films with their, well, Technicolor reds, a redness that has now seeped out of the aging prints and become a kind of cheap-rosé toxic cloud that diminished what was once the shamelessly carnal scarlet lipstick of its original industrial-strength palette.

By the way, “the redness of red” is a common buzz-phrase in the philosophy of mind, when the perennial unanswerable question is asked and analyzed: How do you know that what you see as red, your “redness of red,” is the same as my redness of red? Couldn’t my redness of red look like your blueness of blue? How can we know? This is an aspect of what’s called “the problem of the qualia.” But you knew that.)

Anyway, with the appearance and disappearance of Technicolor red, its evaporation into a metaphor for a memory, a whole way of looking at the world was invented and lost. What struck me was the power, the impact that the memory of that phrase, the redness of red, had on the filmmaker and on my friend. And the way the power can disappear, the vision can be lost.

I mean, I still love Blade Runner, but it will never have the vision-changing impact it had when I first saw it. Then, it was a sudden glimpse of the implicit future; now that it’s been incorporated into everyone’s vision, it seems more a nostalgic, almost antiquated futurism.

Sometimes we’re not even aware of the way films change the way we see things—or, as in the case of Tony Scott’s Domino, which practically nobody saw (but which I want everybody to see), the way a film captures, purely with its look, the way we look. Holds a mirror up to our distorted nature. (You can still catch it on Time Warner’s “on demand” movie channel as of this writing.)

It stars Keira Knightley as Domino Harvey, the real-life—now dead—daughter of original Manchurian Candidate actor Laurence Harvey, a wild child who went from being a runway fashion model to a white-trash bounty hunter, before—this is not in the film; it happened a few months before the widely ignored October 2005 opening—reportedly dying of an overdose in her bathtub while facing up to 10 years in prison for a federal meth-trafficking rap. (In her own way, she was keepin’ it real, no? Her death gave the film a grave retroactive credibility). Just your ordinary English girl in America.

I think most critics didn’t know what to make of Domino. (I still don’t really know myself.) There was just too much damaged information in it. Too much sleaze, from the low-rent (a Ron Jeremy type denouncing our “all porno, all the time” culture) to higher-grade classy sleaze (Christopher Walken!) to medium-grade smarmy sleaze (Mickey Rourke!) and back to low-rent “reality” sleaze (Jerry Springer!).

And I think Tony Scott has suffered somewhat from being the brother of Blade Runner’s Ridley. And, of course, for having directed the risible Top Gun. And so what Scott has been doing in his last two films—Man on Fire starred Denzel Washington in what I thought was a beautiful, melancholy take on a hired bodyguard in Mexico City, who loses, avenges and then regains the child he’s supposed to protect—just hasn’t gotten the respect it deserves.

2) The Greenness of Green

What is he doing? Well, I wouldn’t claim that he’s the only one who does it, or that every technique is his invention, or that it doesn’t partake of techniques pioneered in avant-garde TV commercials or Brazilian cinema (or that he didn’t cop a plot device from Point Break in Domino). But I would say he’s taken it to another level. Synthesized its incoherencies, taken them to the max.

He’s made films that—more than just about any mainstream films I’ve seen recently—have embedded violence and violation together in its very molecular matrix. His films seem not to be made from film stock, celluloid—rather, a creepily cellular green slime-mold emulsion, electro-slime, poison neon green. The green of Love Canal.

The colors themselves are a violation, almost an emotion. The motion itself is an act of violence 24 frames a second. All the images are as if from an illuminated manuscript of Satanic verses.

What you notice is the greenness of the green, the poison green making a mockery of the secular worship of Greenness. Then there’s what he does with movement. Nothing moves at the right speed. Images are violently sped up, violently slowed down and chopped up. Motion is violently violated, almost a metaphor for emotion violently violated. Early on in the film, Keira Knightley’s Domino says that she loves bounty hunting because “I can live the nasty and not do time for it.” Domino the film does the nasty to the time in it. Nothing proceeds at the same pace, everything is out of synch, everyone is out of their minds, and it seems to have something to do with life as we live it now—with, as Hamlet put it, the time being “out of joint.” Disjointed, disorienting.

In the introduction to his acutely observant if somewhat deranging The Pyrotechnic Insanitarium, Mark Dery explains that he got his title phrase from another writer, Judith A. Adams, who was describing the early twentieth-century nightscape of Coney Island, with its madly beautiful illuminated Dreamland, and the fire that consumed Dreamland, a blaze that broke out “in Hell Gate, a boat ride into the bottomless pit.”

“Pyrotechnic insanitarium”: It’s a phrase that Mr. Dery argues “perfectly captures [a] signature blend of infernal fun and mass madness, technology and pathology,” one that mirrors our contemporary condition better than any other two-word phrase I know. In the last two films of Tony Scott, Man on Fire and Domino, to use Mr. Dery’s phrase, “Dreamland is burning again.”

Some might say that in praising Tony Scott’s disjointed, disordered recent films, I’m violating the so-called Fallacy of Imitative Form, as they called it at Yale: the “fallacy” being that art shouldn’t excuse its own disorder by blaming it on the disorder of Existence.

But I think this disorder—Scott’s Disorder, let’s call it—is intentional, carefully calculated, indeed, artful. And since he uses two different gifted cinematographers on each film—Paul Cameron and Daniel Mindel—it is his responsibility. Of course, now I’m violating one of the other fallacies they warned us about in New Haven: the Intentional Fallacy, the search for the author’s intentions as the privileged reading of a work of art. Oh well, it’s all about violation, isn’t it?

When I say I prefer the commercial failure Domino to the modestly successful Man on Fire, which uses almost all the same techniques and used them earlier, it’s because Man on Fire risks being seen as a Hispanicized version of Orientalism. Risks suggesting it’s not modern life but Mexico City life that is sickeningly violent. Rather, I believe that for Man on Fire, Mexico City is a metaphor for a world on fire, for the violent insanity beneath the surface of our ostensibly more placid part of the hemisphere. In Domino, American life itself is more deeply disturbing than anything in Mexico City.

Not that Domino neglects the racial subtext of everything American. There is that weird—what degree of reality is this?—realistic “episode” of the Jerry Springer show in which one of the characters goes on with a “flow chart” to show her different ways of naming the racial fissures, fractures and fusions that have destabilized the notion of what’s “American” in the first place. She wants to bestow official recognition on categories such as “Blacktino,” “Chinegro,” “Japanic” to reflect the fracturing of unofficial identities. As if a “flow chart” can capture the flow.

And did I mention that there’s an important, underplayed Afghan plot buried in the mix? And then—and this gives Tony Scott a lot of credibility with me—he casts Tom Waits as some possibly deranged, possibly enlightened desert-dwelling prophet, “The Wanderer.”

Domino may not have been a commercial success, but it will be a cultural referent longer than many movies that make more money. It’s our flyblown, electro-slime “Wasteland.” Our Dreamland Burning.

I was going on about the way certain films and certain filmmakers (and their cinematographers) had indelibly changed the way we see the world and ourselves, just through the cumulative effect of the never-before-seen look of their work.

For me, Terrence Malick’s Badlands, Peter Brook’s King Lear, Martin Scorsese’s Raging Bull, Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner, Oliver Stone’s JFK (not for the idiot conspiracy theory, but for the faster-than-the-speed-of-thought fluid film-stock-shifting look), Errol Morris’ The Thin Blue Line and, most recently, David Gordon Green’s George Washington and All the Real Girls. (If you haven’t seen the last two, especially the former, you’ve missed something inexplicably powerful and almost mystically beautiful.)

1) The Redness of Red

Anyway, she interrupted me to say something typically smart and allusive about “the redness of reds.” She was recalling something she’d read years ago in a Jane Kramer “Letter from Europe” in The New Yorker, a reference to a Berlin director, Hartmut Bitomsky. He’d made a film called Die Röte des Rots von Technicolor ( The Redness of Reds in Technicolor) in 1972. He was lamenting the loss of the look, the vision of the world beheld by those who saw the original Technicolor films with their, well, Technicolor reds, a redness that has now seeped out of the aging prints and become a kind of cheap-rosé toxic cloud that diminished what was once the shamelessly carnal scarlet lipstick of its original industrial-strength palette.

By the way, “the redness of red” is a common buzz-phrase in the philosophy of mind, when the perennial unanswerable question is asked and analyzed: How do you know that what you see as red, your “redness of red,” is the same as my redness of red? Couldn’t my redness of red look like your blueness of blue? How can we know? This is an aspect of what’s called “the problem of the qualia.” But you knew that.)

Anyway, with the appearance and disappearance of Technicolor red, its evaporation into a metaphor for a memory, a whole way of looking at the world was invented and lost. What struck me was the power, the impact that the memory of that phrase, the redness of red, had on the filmmaker and on my friend. And the way the power can disappear, the vision can be lost.

I mean, I still love Blade Runner, but it will never have the vision-changing impact it had when I first saw it. Then, it was a sudden glimpse of the implicit future; now that it’s been incorporated into everyone’s vision, it seems more a nostalgic, almost antiquated futurism.

Sometimes we’re not even aware of the way films change the way we see things—or, as in the case of Tony Scott’s Domino, which practically nobody saw (but which I want everybody to see), the way a film captures, purely with its look, the way we look. Holds a mirror up to our distorted nature. (You can still catch it on Time Warner’s “on demand” movie channel as of this writing.)

It stars Keira Knightley as Domino Harvey, the real-life—now dead—daughter of original Manchurian Candidate actor Laurence Harvey, a wild child who went from being a runway fashion model to a white-trash bounty hunter, before—this is not in the film; it happened a few months before the widely ignored October 2005 opening—reportedly dying of an overdose in her bathtub while facing up to 10 years in prison for a federal meth-trafficking rap. (In her own way, she was keepin’ it real, no? Her death gave the film a grave retroactive credibility). Just your ordinary English girl in America.

I think most critics didn’t know what to make of Domino. (I still don’t really know myself.) There was just too much damaged information in it. Too much sleaze, from the low-rent (a Ron Jeremy type denouncing our “all porno, all the time” culture) to higher-grade classy sleaze (Christopher Walken!) to medium-grade smarmy sleaze (Mickey Rourke!) and back to low-rent “reality” sleaze (Jerry Springer!).

And I think Tony Scott has suffered somewhat from being the brother of Blade Runner’s Ridley. And, of course, for having directed the risible Top Gun. And so what Scott has been doing in his last two films— Man on Fire starred Denzel Washington in what I thought was a beautiful, melancholy take on a hired bodyguard in Mexico City, who loses, avenges and then regains the child he’s supposed to protect—just hasn’t gotten the respect it deserves.

2) The Greenness of Green

What is he doing? Well, I wouldn’t claim that he’s the only one who does it, or that every technique is his invention, or that it doesn’t partake of techniques pioneered in avant-garde TV commercials or Brazilian cinema (or that he didn’t cop a plot device from Point Break in Domino). But I would say he’s taken it to another level. Synthesized its incoherencies, taken them to the max.

He’s made films that—more than just about any mainstream films I’ve seen recently—have embedded violence and violation together in its very molecular matrix. His films seem not to be made from film stock, celluloid—rather, a creepily cellular green slime-mold emulsion, electro-slime, poison neon green. The green of Love Canal.

The colors themselves are a violation, almost an emotion. The motion itself is an act of violence 24 frames a second. All the images are as if from an illuminated manuscript of Satanic verses.

What you notice is the greenness of the green, the poison green making a mockery of the secular worship of Greenness. Then there’s what he does with movement. Nothing moves at the right speed. Images are violently sped up, violently slowed down and chopped up. Motion is violently violated, almost a metaphor for emotion violently violated. Early on in the film, Keira Knightley’s Domino says that she loves bounty hunting because “I can live the nasty and not do time for it.” Domino the film does the nasty to the time in it. Nothing proceeds at the same pace, everything is out of synch, everyone is out of their minds, and it seems to have something to do with life as we live it now—with, as Hamlet put it, the time being “out of joint.” Disjointed, disorienting.

In the introduction to his acutely observant if somewhat deranging The Pyrotechnic Insanitarium, Mark Dery explains that he got his title phrase from another writer, Judith A. Adams, who was describing the early twentieth-century nightscape of Coney Island, with its madly beautiful illuminated Dreamland, and the fire that consumed Dreamland, a blaze that broke out “in Hell Gate, a boat ride into the bottomless pit.”

“Pyrotechnic insanitarium”: It’s a phrase that Mr. Dery argues “perfectly captures [a] signature blend of infernal fun and mass madness, technology and pathology,” one that mirrors our contemporary condition better than any other two-word phrase I know. In the last two films of Tony Scott, Man on Fire and Domino, to use Mr. Dery’s phrase, “Dreamland is burning again.”

Some might say that in praising Tony Scott’s disjointed, disordered recent films, I’m violating the so-called Fallacy of Imitative Form, as they called it at Yale: the “fallacy” being that art shouldn’t excuse its own disorder by blaming it on the disorder of Existence.

But I think this disorder—Scott’s Disorder, let’s call it—is intentional, carefully calculated, indeed, artful. And since he uses two different gifted cinematographers on each film—Paul Cameron and Daniel Mindel—it is his responsibility. Of course, now I’m violating one of the other fallacies they warned us about in New Haven: the Intentional Fallacy, the search for the author’s intentions as the privileged reading of a work of art. Oh well, it’s all about violation, isn’t it?

When I say I prefer the commercial failure Domino to the modestly successful Man on Fire, which uses almost all the same techniques and used them earlier, it’s because Man on Fire risks being seen as a Hispanicized version of Orientalism. Risks suggesting it’s not modern life but Mexico City life that is sickeningly violent. Rather, I believe that for Man on Fire, Mexico City is a metaphor for a world on fire, for the violent insanity beneath the surface of our ostensibly more placid part of the hemisphere. In Domino, American life itself is more deeply disturbing than anything in Mexico City.

Not that Domino neglects the racial subtext of everything American. There is that weird—what degree of reality is this?—realistic “episode” of the Jerry Springer show in which one of the characters goes on with a “flow chart” to show her different ways of naming the racial fissures, fractures and fusions that have destabilized the notion of what’s “American” in the first place. She wants to bestow official recognition on categories such as “Blacktino,” “Chinegro,” “Japanic” to reflect the fracturing of unofficial identities. As if a “flow chart” can capture the flow.

And did I mention that there’s an important, underplayed Afghan plot buried in the mix? And then—and this gives Tony Scott a lot of credibility with me—he casts Tom Waits as some possibly deranged, possibly enlightened desert-dwelling prophet, “The Wanderer.”

Domino may not have been a commercial success, but it will be a cultural referent longer than many movies that make more money. It’s our flyblown, electro-slime “Wasteland.” Our Dreamland Burning.

I keep writing “allegedly” as if I were a journalist afraid of being sued because what begins as a familiar kind of media-circus melodrama ends up being something much more complex and tangled. In the process, there is a great deal of jumping to false conclusions, thereby uncovering previously muffled resentments and hatreds.

Let’s face it: There are so many images of apparent racial reconciliation on the screen and on television these days that a movie propelling two rigidly segregated adjoining communities, one public-housing-project-black and the other working-class-white, at each other’s throat might seem a bit quaint and anachronistically agit-prop. After all, just look at the seemingly omnipotent Oprah and the consummately complacent Condoleezza. What progress we’ve made!

But then just look at the aftermath of Katrina, and notice the color of the most wretched victims. Maybe we haven’t come as far as we would like to think in the realm of racial justice. But this is only one aspect of my disagreement with most of my esteemed colleagues on Freedomland. The craziness in the film is so extremely expressed and so evenly distributed that the two lead performers—Samuel L. Jackson as the stormily asthmatic African-American investigating officer, Lorenzo Council, and Julianne Moore as the emotionally distraught and mentally disturbed white mother, Brenda Martin—have been critically tarred and feathered for the presumed sin of overacting.

I can’t deny that there is something nervously disturbing in the unfolding of the narrative, and I can’t guarantee that all or even most of my readers will find Freedomland their particular cup of tea. All I can do is describe how and why I felt about the movie as I did while following it to its wildly startling conclusion. To do so, I have to give the whole plot away, so stop reading this review if you intend to see the movie on the basis of my own less-than-unqualified endorsement.

The film begins with the almost ghostly image of a female figure trudging mechanically through dark streets, looking neither to the right nor the left at the occasional onlookers. We see her face—Brenda’s face—only when she enters a hospital to report that her car was hijacked, and that the palms of her hand were bloodied when she was thrown to the pavement by a black man she had never seen before. Only gradually does she become coherent enough to tell the investigating officer, Lorenzo, that her 4-year-old son was sleeping in the back seat at the time.

From that point on, Lorenzo and Brenda are locked in a hysterical narrative embrace, like Coleridge characters trapped in a fog of mutual misunderstanding. One can point to one lapse of logic and probability after another if one were so inclined. But I was not so inclined, because at some level the hysteria was justified for me by the convergence of two powerful currents in contemporary society: the periodic media frenzy over slain or missing children, and the increasing alienation of adjacent communities from each other all across the country.

Lorenzo keeps hammering at Brenda, both because he doesn’t believe her story and because he fears that the white community’s police force is about to swarm all over the black projects to flush out the carjacker, which is exactly what happens. To complicate matters, Brenda’s brother, Danny (Ron Eldard), is a racist firebrand on the police force. Not that Danny is overly burdened by any great love or respect for his formerly drug-addicted sister, who teaches black children in a special school, and whose missing son, Cody (Marlon Sherman), is a “love child.”

For his part, Lorenzo watches his stature as a troubleshooter for the black community diminish during its confrontation with a largely white police force. Lorenzo’s white partner, Boyle (William Forsythe), urges him to lower his profile in the high-pressure search for Brenda’s son. The boy’s picture on television has made him an instant celebrity, and he appears to Brenda in hallucinatory form as she gazes upon an empty chair in a police station.

Lorenzo and Brenda are joined in their search for Cody by Karen Collucci (Edie Falco), the head of a group of bereaved mothers of slain and missing children now working to help others suffering the same trauma. Mr. Price has given Brenda and Karen long and (I think) eloquent speeches on what it means to be a mother who loses a child. Many reviewers have condemned the speeches for slowing up the chase to which all action directors are supposed to cut. One might argue that, to the contrary, these seeming digressions by Mr. Price and Mr. Roth may be clues to the deeper subtexts of the film.

Lorenzo, Brenda and Karen extend the search to Freedomland itself, a forest in which a notoriously harsh institution for illegitimate children was located. It is in this wilderness of long-ago tormented children that Brenda breaks down and tells the whole truth: that Cody died accidentally while in her care, and that she buried him in another field, from which Cody’s body is finally exhumed. But Lorenzo still isn’t satisfied: He notices heavy boulders marking the grave and knows that Brenda could never have lifted them without help. Her accomplice turns out to be her black ex-lover, Lorenzo’s own errant son, about whom his daughter-in-law Felicia (Aunjanue Ellis) is always complaining.

Brenda’s lies—which end up causing a race riot in which Lorenzo is seriously injured—should make her a completely unsympathetic character. Instead, she is curiously purified by her long emotional ordeal (albeit one largely self-inflicted), and by her deep affection for children of another race, as well as her strong attraction to Lorenzo and his son. The point is that life goes on, justly or unjustly—and Mr. Jackson’s Lorenzo displays a degree of existential endurance and resilience that is well nigh heroic.

The 56-year-old Mr. Price has had his ups and downs, as both a novelist and a screenwriter, in a career that began on a high note with the film adaptations of his first two novels, Robert Mulligan’s Bloodbrothers (1978) and Philip Kaufman’s cultish The Wanderers (1979), then moved sideways into big-star territory with his own screenplays for Martin Scorsese’s The Color of Money (1986), Harold Becker’s Sea of Love (1989), Irwin Winkler’s Night and the City (1992), John McNaughton’s Mad Dog and Glory (1993), Barbet Schroeder’s Kiss of Death (1995), Spike Lee’s Clockers (1995), Ron Howard’s Ransom (1996) and John Singleton’s Shaft (2000). He also contributed the screenplay for Martin Scorsese’s segment of the three-part omnibus film New York Stories (1989), which also featured segments by Francis Ford Coppola and Woody Allen. As for the author’s long array of cameo appearances in the movies based on his screenplays, I would politely advise Mr. Price to keep his day job. But looking back on all that he’s written for the screen, who the devil ever said that a screenwriter couldn’t be an auteur?

More Cowboys!

Michèle Ohayon’s Cowboy del Amor turns out to be one of the sweetest, funniest and most enjoyable nonfiction films you are likely to see this year. I don’t know how or where Ms. Ohayon found her hero, protagonist and prime mover, but there he is: Ivan Thompson, a 65-year-old cowboy with the unlikeliest of occupations—one that has earned him the self-coined nickname of “Cowboy Cupid.” What he does is find Mexican brides for middle-aged American men who have soured on American women. His clients include Rick, a long-distance truck driver and ex-Marine, and Lee, a still-hopeful 70-year-old Vietnam veteran. Rick and Lee each pay $3,000 to Ivan for a 600-mile bus ride to the heart of Mexico in search of true and lasting love. Marriage is the only option for both parties—Ivan has no patience for men who just want a little quick sex. He turns out to be the most unexpectedly moral of matchmakers.

Still, he is a comic find with his Walter Brennan–ish cracker-barrel philosopher’s Southwestern twang, which cannot mask the soul of a true gentleman as far as women are concerned. And he speaks from genuine experience, having been married late in life to a Mexican woman, who surprised him after his wedding day by producing four children from a previous marriage. Still, the marriage lasted nine years, despite the language barrier and the unexpected children. It was only when his wife, Chayo, went to school to learn English that the trouble began: Mr. Thompson had argued against it, and sure enough, Chayo soon began bossing him around as stubbornly as any American wife.

The bulk of the film is concerned with Ivan’s perceptive strategies in getting both Rick and Lee married to very attractive Mexican women. Rick turns out to be particularly hard to please, and it is only the third or fourth encounter that proves fruitful. Ms. Ohayon was wise to focus on the successful connections rather than the probably larger number of rejections by the two men (Lee, especially); the few that the movie does show are almost unbearably painful to watch. These are real people up there, not fictional performers in a Hollywood speed-dating farce.

There is a marvelous dignity, humility and sincerity in the two weddings that take place in the U.S. When Lee introduces his bride-to-be, Irmalinda, to his middle-class family, we suddenly realize how little money everyone on both sides of the border have become accustomed to having, and how happy the simple festivities make them. Ivan himself hasn’t given up hope of getting married again, though his Spanish doesn’t seem to have improved despite all the time he has spent in Mexico.

Ivan’s own life would make a heartwarming Hollywood movie, starting with his birth in 1941 in Sandhill County, N.M., to a large, dirt-poor family. His father died when he was 8, after which his family moved to Portales, N.M.—and for three years, Ivan found himself hitchhiking between his older brothers and sisters, trying to find a place where he belonged.

Hitchhiking through Texas at age 14, he was picked up by a cowboy named J.V. Stump, and Ivan soon went to work on Stump’s farm with the cattle and horses. He immediately participated in kid rodeos. Then, in 1961, he joined the U.S. Army and served for three years. He eventually raised horses, married Wife No. 1, got a divorce and was introduced to his second wife, Chayo, by his ranch hand, Carlos. In his approach to the affairs of the heart, Ivan may be serving as something of a prophet for his fellows in the U.S., a country that itself is becoming increasingly bilingual.

Shocking!

Carlos Reygadas’ Battle in Heaven, from his own screenplay (in Spanish with English subtitles), may or may not be the end of civilization as we know it. After all, the Western world has survived an unprecedented, explicit fellatio scene in Il Diavolo in Corpo, Marco Bellocchio’s 1986 remake of Claude Autant-Lara’s 1946 French classic, with Maruschka Detmers doing the honors (with or without a prosthetic penis). But with all the fuss made over a wardrobe malfunction at a Super Bowl halftime show not so long ago, I continue to wonder how long society can persist with such disparate shock levels.

In some ways, Battle in Heaven charts new ground in what is permissible in ostensibly non-pornographic cinema—not so much in the raw fleshiness of the spectacle, but rather in its almost painterly slowness and allegorical gravity. The extended opening fellatio scene, for example, is followed by a military ceremony accompanying the raising of the Mexican flag. The same unappetizingly stout man who figured in the fellatio footage presides over the flag raising. Quelle ironie, n’est-ce pas? The man is named Marcos, a general’s chauffeur (played by a nonprofessional actor named Marcos Hernández). The young woman servicing him is Ana (Anapola Mushkadiz, also a first-time actress) who turns out to be the general’s daughter, and who also works in a brothel.

Marcos’ wife is played by another nonprofessional actress, Bertha Ruiz, and she is as stout as Marco. Their explicit lovemaking is another prolonged spectacle. Only gradually do we learn that Marcos and his wife once kidnapped a child for ransom, an event that led to the child’s accidental death. The kidnapping, death and subsequent disposal of the body are never shown; instead, we have many close-ups of Marcos slowly registering guilt and despair. After a more traditional nude sex scene between him and Ana, there is a prolonged camera movement around a luxurious part of Mexico City. The director says that he has been influenced by the Iranian director Abbas Kiarostami and the Greek director Theodoros Angelopoulos in what he describes as the “purest form of cinema”—one that dispenses with conventional forms of narrative.

Oddly, Mr. Reygadas is referring to one director who works in such a heavily censored environment that he has to keep his camera moving to keep a man and a woman from coming into any physical contact, and another who maintains such a distance from all movements that sex scenes of such physical proximity would be unthinkable. This is to say that Mr. Reygadas has played the anti-narrative film-festival game with the most voyeuristic means at his disposal, and then stuck on a luridly melodramatic plot almost as an afterthought.

There are no clarifying speeches or sermons in Battle in Heaven to explain the phenomenon of widespread kidnapping in Mexico City. Poor people have taken to kidnapping from the not-quite-as-poor—and even from neighbors and relatives—for piddling ransoms. Battle in Heaven ends as it begins, with an act of fellatio invested with spiritual, even heavenly, implications. Somehow, I was never moved or even particularly impressed: The sex looks much too easy in its ritualized splendor to be truly erotic, and the characters might just as well be puppets or animated figures for all the reality they project. The best I can say for Battle in Heaven is that it manages to be more compelling than Vincent Gallo’s The Brown Bunny.

Their first meeting ends abruptly when Julian responds with an emotionally inappropriate (and very funny) dirty joke to Danny’s heartfelt account of the death of his only child in a school-bus accident and the devastation it has wrought on his marriage to his high-school sweetheart, Bean (Hope Davis). It’s not clear from Julian’s drunkenly glazed expression whether or not he realizes the faux pas that he has committed, but Danny quickly walks off in anger anyway.

Danny spends the rest of the night, however, trying to fight off the sleep-depriving effects of the depression caused by his failing marriage and seemingly dismal job prospects—which leads him to seek out Julian the next morning for company. Julian has two tickets for the local bullfight; Danny reluctantly agrees to accompany him to the corrida, where Julian stages a fake assassination in which Danny is seemingly recruited as a lookout. The bullfight scenes are enacted in sufficient detail to indicate that writer-director Mr. Shepard has seized the matador metaphor for Julian and will run with it for the rest of the picture.

Yet who has ever heard of a matador needing a buddy out there in the ring to help restore his lost confidence? This is the switch that Mr. Shepard pulls on his genre. There are several levels of trickery involved in his management of the narrative. First, we have to be rooting for the hit man to succeed in his mission in the first place; second, his targets have to be anonymous or unlikable, and unconnected to any identifiable politics—even when the locale happens to be Moscow, as it is on one occasion in The Matador. The penalty for failure on Julian’s part is almost certainly death, but at whose hands? Mr. Shepard gives us only a sliver of specificity in a mysterious intermediary known almost facetiously as Mr. Randy, played with casual portentousness by that charismatic character actor, Philip Baker Hall.

The crux of the relationship in Mexico City between Julian and Danny involves an action that we never see onscreen and an intervention in Danny’s floundering career— of which Danny himself is blissfully unaware until a desperate Julian comes banging on his door six months later, during a snowy Christmastime in Denver. Danny’s own career is now booming and his marriage thriving, perhaps from his wife’s own association of her husband’s business success with his renewed virility (and is this not also the American Way?).

The final harmless joke of this essentially harmless entertainment is the unexpected reaction of Danny’s wife to the visit of a professional killer: She finds it pleasantly intriguing, titillating and just a bit sexy to be sleeping under the same roof as a hired assassin. The wife’s fascination with criminality remains safely vicarious; The Matador would have been a more dangerously complex film if it didn’t. As it is, the three major characters remain frozen in their psychological and sociological types.

Still, on one level The Matador illustrates Charlie Chaplin’s insight in Monsieur Verdoux (1947): that if war, as Clausewitz’s dictum has it, is the logical extension of diplomacy by other means, then murder (in Chaplin’s view) was simply the logical extension of business. But there is also a touch of amateur psychological therapy in Danny’s accompanying Julian on his next mission so as to lend him “moral” support. And why not? Whether wittingly or unwittingly, Danny himself became the beneficiary of the murder business six months before in Mexico City.

In the end, Julian saves himself by assassinating his own would-be assassin, with Danny’s supportive presence on the scene. He then leaves Danny and Bean to their home and hearth, albeit a little regretfully in view of his own unbridled existence of forbidden pleasures and soul-destroying hedonism. The Matador is admittedly a trifle in the long view of cinema, but it’s an amusingly adroit piece of work nonetheless. My only regret is that the always-remarkable Ms. Davis didn’t have more to do. Mr. Brosnan and Mr. Kinnear are otherwise almost perfectly cast, written and directed as polar and temperamental opposites.

Reese’s Treats

James Mangold’s Walk the Line, from a screenplay by Gill Dennis and Mr. Mangold, based on the books Man in Black and Cash: The Autobiography by Johnny Cash, raises the ante on musical impersonation not only with Joaquin Phoenix playing and singing the role of Johnny Cash, and Reese Witherspoon delivering similar duties in the role of June Carter, but also such lesser-known actor-musicians as Tyler Hilton and Waylon Malloy Payne presuming to represent such iconic luminaries of popular music as Elvis Presley and Jerry Lee Lewis. On the whole, the impersonations are zestful enough and energetic enough to remain thoroughly entertaining in the midst of the darkening clouds of amphetamine addiction that threatened to destroy Cash’s life and career.

Indeed, before I saw Walk the Line, I was predisposed to disapprove of the genre itself, especially when its real-life subjects have become overly recognizable through previous nonfiction films, concert films and even a television series. I know I picked Ray as my third-best picture of 2004 and Jamie Foxx’s incarnation of Ray Charles as the best male performance for that year. But Ray is the exception that proves the rule—or was it that I was more familiar beforehand with the Johnny Cash persona than with Ray Charles? Was it also the obstacles of race and blindness that made Charles automatically more sympathetic as a screen protagonist than Cash, despite the vices they had in common?

But what I hadn’t counted on in Walk the Line was the spine-tingling feistiness of Ms. Witherspoon’s performance as June Carter. This feat has belatedly placed it (in my mind, at least) among a mere handful of more-than-Oscar-worthy performances this year, such as Gwyneth Paltrow in Proof, Maria Bello in A History of Violence, Keira Knightley in Pride and Prejudice, Claire Danes in Shopgirl and Laura Linney in The Squid and the Whale. Mr. Phoenix isn’t bad either, but the clinical details of Cash’s addiction (in which he is enmeshed for much of the film’s running time), along with his emotional neediness, deprive his performance of Ms. Witherspoon’s comic buoyancy, which has always been her strong suit. Some Cash admirers have deplored the predominantly gloomy tone and warts-and-all frankness of a film about a performer they always found cheerfully exhilarating. Of course, all great entertainers double as con artists in concealing from the audience their deepest hurts when they’re onstage or onscreen.

Cash’s problems seem to have started in early childhood with the death of his beloved brother, whom their father pointedly preferred to little Johnny. The father, Ray Cash (Robert Patrick), is presented as emotionally cold and vocally abusive. Cash’s first wife, Vivian (Ginnifer Goodwin), seems to pop up from nowhere just before Cash’s first big break. She has ample cause for complaint over his frequent womanizing with groupies, an omnipresent tribe of underage temptresses that seem to have infested the tour buses of every pop sensation of modern times.

Indeed, the earlier rock-music side of Cash’s career is emphasized over the later, more remorseful folk music that he also recorded, as exemplified by the film’s title song. Unfortunately for the movie, our most vivid memories of Cash seem frozen in the period of his comparative maturity, whereas Mr. Phoenix’s portrayal seems fixated on his youthful escapades and congenital wildness. By contrast, Ms. Witherspoon’s June Carter remains, even in the midst of her own antic high spirits, a calming and stabilizing force in Cash’s life. A colleague who knows more about these things than I do assures me that Vivian Cash has been somewhat slandered in the film by the ingrained tendency of biopics to treat the hero’s first wife as a disaster from which he has to be rescued by his second wife. In actuality, my colleague insisted, Vivian remained friendly and hospitable to both Johnny and June even after they were married.

Even so, the movie overcomes whatever lapses of fact and nuance it has incurred by the sheer verve of the folk-music ethos, which ever since Robert Altman’s triumph with Nashville in 1975 has seemed singularly unique in its ability to establish an immediate and seemingly effortless rapport with audiences. Hence, even if you’re not the folk-music type (and I assure you that I am not), I advise you catch up with Walk the Line, if only for Ms. Witherspoon’s transcendent joyousness as a still-growing legend within a legend.

Not Funny

Thomas Bezucha’s The Family Stone, from his own screenplay, seems to have been designed as a Christmas-season entertainment, inasmuch as not one but two Christmas family reunions take place within the film, with all the shifting realignments of elective affinities between the first and the second. In the process, Mr. Bezucha has put many usually pleasant performers into unbelievably unpleasant situations through a strange mixture of somewhat mystifying and distinctly unseasonable rudeness, obtuseness and obliviousness. The opening-credit sequence makes the film’s ultimate intentions crystal clear with idyllically rendered winter shots of a New England country house, set to the overly familiar and overly seasonal tune of “Let It Snow, Let It Snow, Let It Snow.” Later, there’s a pointedly prolonged excerpt from Vincente Minnelli’s exquisite Currier and Ives postcard to the Middle American family, Meet Me in St. Louis (1944), with Judy Garland’s misleading rendition to Margaret O’Brien of “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas.” (I say “misleading” because Minnelli’s masterwork is only marginally about Christmas, ranging as it does over the four seasons in a family’s adventures at the time of the St. Louis Exposition at the turn of the century.) Nostalgia was big in Hollywood in the middle of World War II, and the censors made sure that family life of whatever period was behaviorally circumspect. But as Norma Desmond might have said, “Ah, we had families back then”—blissfully happy despite their enforced conformity and conventionality.

This is not the case in The Family Stone, in which jealousy, resentment and a deadly secret run rampant in our early introductions to the family and its possible additions. The most troublesome among the latter is Meredith Morton (Sarah Jessica Parker), who is presented as a nonstop chatterbox of a New York career woman. With her domineering manner, Meredith embarrasses even her flustered fiancé, the family success story Everett Stone (Dermot Mulroney), while he’s trying to buy a Christmas present. Earlier, we’ve heard Everett’s sister Amy Stone (Rachel McAdams) bad-mouthing Meredith to their mother, Sybil (Diane Keaton).

For her part, Meredith dreads spending the Christmas holiday with Everett’s family. He keeps assuring her that everything will be O.K., but sure enough, Meredith’s worst fears are realized with the deep chill she gets at the outset, particularly from Amy and Sybil. Not that Meredith doesn’t do her share to contribute to the ill will, but I still never quite figured out what all the hostility was about.

Is it because Meredith is a career woman from New York City? But the head of the Stone family, Kelly Stone (Craig T. Nelson), is a presumably enlightened college professor—and, anyway, New England isn’t all that far from New York, either geographically or spiritually. The family chill toward an outsider was far more plausible in Junebug, in which a Chicago intellectual visits her husband’s religious family in North Carolina; there at least you had massive regional and cultural divides to overcome.

The other members of the strangely prickly Stone family are Ben Stone (Luke Wilson), Everett’s comparatively underachieving and more bohemian brother from California, who is vaguely connected with making documentaries (or growing marijuana, for all we know), and—almost lost in the shuffle— Susannah Stone Trousdale (Elizabeth Reaser), a pregnant housewife with one daughter already and a husband who hasn’t yet arrived for the festivities. Most startling of all the family members is gay, deaf Thad (Ty Giordano) and his African-American boyfriend, Patrick Thomas (Brian White). Believe me, you’ve never met two nicer guys in your life, but while the other “tolerant” Stone family members are befuddling Meredith with their seemingly excessive displays of sign-language fluency, I was counting on my own fingers the numbers of ways that a newcomer like Meredith could earn the enmity of the group. She started promisingly enough by shouting her thoughts to Thad as if he were simply hard of hearing, but then went further than I expected any supposedly sophisticated New Yorker could go when she asked him (at the top of her lungs) whether he was concerned that the child he and Patrick were planning to adopt would turn out to be gay.

At that point, I abandoned all the characters to the writer-director’s devices and waited, with some trepidation, for the inevitably gushy turnarounds. Ms. Parker had drifted a long way from the warm collegiality of Sex and the City, and Ms. McAdams was quickly using up some of the points she had earned with me as the resourceful heroine in Red Eye. Even the divine Diane Keaton was sadly misused.

The most curious (though oddly satisfying) twist in the film occurs when Meredith, in desperation, summons her sister to come to her rescue—and who should show up but Claire Danes as the beautiful, intelligent and tactful Julie Morton, who wins over the same family that rejected Meredith? What happens next has to be seen to be disbelieved, except that it makes a kind of romantic sense eventually. Still, it’s much too late to save the film. I have always stressed the importance of endings in film narratives, but this is the first time that I recognized the importance of beginnings, too—especially when farcical shenanigans are involved, as they are here. Still, I can’t deny the incidental pleasures of watching these talented players giving it their all, even in such a misguided project.

Their first meeting ends abruptly when Julian responds with an emotionally inappropriate (and very funny) dirty joke to Danny’s heartfelt account of the death of his only child in a school-bus accident and the devastation it has wrought on his marriage to his high-school sweetheart, Bean (Hope Davis). It’s not clear from Julian’s drunkenly glazed expression whether or not he realizes the faux pas that he has committed, but Danny quickly walks off in anger anyway.

Danny spends the rest of the night, however, trying to fight off the sleep-depriving effects of the depression caused by his failing marriage and seemingly dismal job prospects—which leads him to seek out Julian the next morning for company. Julian has two tickets for the local bullfight; Danny reluctantly agrees to accompany him to the corrida, where Julian stages a fake assassination in which Danny is seemingly recruited as a lookout. The bullfight scenes are enacted in sufficient detail to indicate that writer-director Mr. Shepard has seized the matador metaphor for Julian and will run with it for the rest of the picture.

Yet who has ever heard of a matador needing a buddy out there in the ring to help restore his lost confidence? This is the switch that Mr. Shepard pulls on his genre. There are several levels of trickery involved in his management of the narrative. First, we have to be rooting for the hit man to succeed in his mission in the first place; second, his targets have to be anonymous or unlikable, and unconnected to any identifiable politics—even when the locale happens to be Moscow, as it is on one occasion in The Matador. The penalty for failure on Julian’s part is almost certainly death, but at whose hands? Mr. Shepard gives us only a sliver of specificity in a mysterious intermediary known almost facetiously as Mr. Randy, played with casual portentousness by that charismatic character actor, Philip Baker Hall.

The crux of the relationship in Mexico City between Julian and Danny involves an action that we never see onscreen and an intervention in Danny’s floundering career— of which Danny himself is blissfully unaware until a desperate Julian comes banging on his door six months later, during a snowy Christmastime in Denver. Danny’s own career is now booming and his marriage thriving, perhaps from his wife’s own association of her husband’s business success with his renewed virility (and is this not also the American Way?).

The final harmless joke of this essentially harmless entertainment is the unexpected reaction of Danny’s wife to the visit of a professional killer: She finds it pleasantly intriguing, titillating and just a bit sexy to be sleeping under the same roof as a hired assassin. The wife’s fascination with criminality remains safely vicarious; The Matador would have been a more dangerously complex film if it didn’t. As it is, the three major characters remain frozen in their psychological and sociological types.

Still, on one level The Matador illustrates Charlie Chaplin’s insight in Monsieur Verdoux (1947): that if war, as Clausewitz’s dictum has it, is the logical extension of diplomacy by other means, then murder (in Chaplin’s view) was simply the logical extension of business. But there is also a touch of amateur psychological therapy in Danny’s accompanying Julian on his next mission so as to lend him “moral” support. And why not? Whether wittingly or unwittingly, Danny himself became the beneficiary of the murder business six months before in Mexico City.

In the end, Julian saves himself by assassinating his own would-be assassin, with Danny’s supportive presence on the scene. He then leaves Danny and Bean to their home and hearth, albeit a little regretfully in view of his own unbridled existence of forbidden pleasures and soul-destroying hedonism. The Matador is admittedly a trifle in the long view of cinema, but it’s an amusingly adroit piece of work nonetheless. My only regret is that the always-remarkable Ms. Davis didn’t have more to do. Mr. Brosnan and Mr. Kinnear are otherwise almost perfectly cast, written and directed as polar and temperamental opposites.

Reese’s Treats

James Mangold’s Walk the Line, from a screenplay by Gill Dennis and Mr. Mangold, based on the books Man in Black and Cash: The Autobiography by Johnny Cash, raises the ante on musical impersonation not only with Joaquin Phoenix playing and singing the role of Johnny Cash, and Reese Witherspoon delivering similar duties in the role of June Carter, but also such lesser-known actor-musicians as Tyler Hilton and Waylon Malloy Payne presuming to represent such iconic luminaries of popular music as Elvis Presley and Jerry Lee Lewis. On the whole, the impersonations are zestful enough and energetic enough to remain thoroughly entertaining in the midst of the darkening clouds of amphetamine addiction that threatened to destroy Cash’s life and career.

Indeed, before I saw Walk the Line, I was predisposed to disapprove of the genre itself, especially when its real-life subjects have become overly recognizable through previous nonfiction films, concert films and even a television series. I know I picked Ray as my third-best picture of 2004 and Jamie Foxx’s incarnation of Ray Charles as the best male performance for that year. But Ray is the exception that proves the rule—or was it that I was more familiar beforehand with the Johnny Cash persona than with Ray Charles? Was it also the obstacles of race and blindness that made Charles automatically more sympathetic as a screen protagonist than Cash, despite the vices they had in common?

But what I hadn’t counted on in Walk the Line was the spine-tingling feistiness of Ms. Witherspoon’s performance as June Carter. This feat has belatedly placed it (in my mind, at least) among a mere handful of more-than-Oscar-worthy performances this year, such as Gwyneth Paltrow in Proof, Maria Bello in A History of Violence, Keira Knightley in Pride and Prejudice, Claire Danes in Shopgirl and Laura Linney in The Squid and the Whale. Mr. Phoenix isn’t bad either, but the clinical details of Cash’s addiction (in which he is enmeshed for much of the film’s running time), along with his emotional neediness, deprive his performance of Ms. Witherspoon’s comic buoyancy, which has always been her strong suit. Some Cash admirers have deplored the predominantly gloomy tone and warts-and-all frankness of a film about a performer they always found cheerfully exhilarating. Of course, all great entertainers double as con artists in concealing from the audience their deepest hurts when they’re onstage or onscreen.

Cash’s problems seem to have started in early childhood with the death of his beloved brother, whom their father pointedly preferred to little Johnny. The father, Ray Cash (Robert Patrick), is presented as emotionally cold and vocally abusive. Cash’s first wife, Vivian (Ginnifer Goodwin), seems to pop up from nowhere just before Cash’s first big break. She has ample cause for complaint over his frequent womanizing with groupies, an omnipresent tribe of underage temptresses that seem to have infested the tour buses of every pop sensation of modern times.

Indeed, the earlier rock-music side of Cash’s career is emphasized over the later, more remorseful folk music that he also recorded, as exemplified by the film’s title song. Unfortunately for the movie, our most vivid memories of Cash seem frozen in the period of his comparative maturity, whereas Mr. Phoenix’s portrayal seems fixated on his youthful escapades and congenital wildness. By contrast, Ms. Witherspoon’s June Carter remains, even in the midst of her own antic high spirits, a calming and stabilizing force in Cash’s life. A colleague who knows more about these things than I do assures me that Vivian Cash has been somewhat slandered in the film by the ingrained tendency of biopics to treat the hero’s first wife as a disaster from which he has to be rescued by his second wife. In actuality, my colleague insisted, Vivian remained friendly and hospitable to both Johnny and June even after they were married.

Even so, the movie overcomes whatever lapses of fact and nuance it has incurred by the sheer verve of the folk-music ethos, which ever since Robert Altman’s triumph with Nashville in 1975 has seemed singularly unique in its ability to establish an immediate and seemingly effortless rapport with audiences. Hence, even if you’re not the folk-music type (and I assure you that I am not), I advise you catch up with Walk the Line, if only for Ms. Witherspoon’s transcendent joyousness as a still-growing legend within a legend.

Not Funny

Thomas Bezucha’s The Family Stone, from his own screenplay, seems to have been designed as a Christmas-season entertainment, inasmuch as not one but two Christmas family reunions take place within the film, with all the shifting realignments of elective affinities between the first and the second. In the process, Mr. Bezucha has put many usually pleasant performers into unbelievably unpleasant situations through a strange mixture of somewhat mystifying and distinctly unseasonable rudeness, obtuseness and obliviousness. The opening-credit sequence makes the film’s ultimate intentions crystal clear with idyllically rendered winter shots of a New England country house, set to the overly familiar and overly seasonal tune of “Let It Snow, Let It Snow, Let It Snow.” Later, there’s a pointedly prolonged excerpt from Vincente Minnelli’s exquisite Currier and Ives postcard to the Middle American family, Meet Me in St. Louis (1944), with Judy Garland’s misleading rendition to Margaret O’Brien of “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas.” (I say “misleading” because Minnelli’s masterwork is only marginally about Christmas, ranging as it does over the four seasons in a family’s adventures at the time of the St. Louis Exposition at the turn of the century.) Nostalgia was big in Hollywood in the middle of World War II, and the censors made sure that family life of whatever period was behaviorally circumspect. But as Norma Desmond might have said, “Ah, we had families back then”—blissfully happy despite their enforced conformity and conventionality.

This is not the case in The Family Stone, in which jealousy, resentment and a deadly secret run rampant in our early introductions to the family and its possible additions. The most troublesome among the latter is Meredith Morton (Sarah Jessica Parker), who is presented as a nonstop chatterbox of a New York career woman. With her domineering manner, Meredith embarrasses even her flustered fiancé, the family success story Everett Stone (Dermot Mulroney), while he’s trying to buy a Christmas present. Earlier, we’ve heard Everett’s sister Amy Stone (Rachel McAdams) bad-mouthing Meredith to their mother, Sybil (Diane Keaton).

For her part, Meredith dreads spending the Christmas holiday with Everett’s family. He keeps assuring her that everything will be O.K., but sure enough, Meredith’s worst fears are realized with the deep chill she gets at the outset, particularly from Amy and Sybil. Not that Meredith doesn’t do her share to contribute to the ill will, but I still never quite figured out what all the hostility was about.

Is it because Meredith is a career woman from New York City? But the head of the Stone family, Kelly Stone (Craig T. Nelson), is a presumably enlightened college professor—and, anyway, New England isn’t all that far from New York, either geographically or spiritually. The family chill toward an outsider was far more plausible in Junebug, in which a Chicago intellectual visits her husband’s religious family in North Carolina; there at least you had massive regional and cultural divides to overcome.

The other members of the strangely prickly Stone family are Ben Stone (Luke Wilson), Everett’s comparatively underachieving and more bohemian brother from California, who is vaguely connected with making documentaries (or growing marijuana, for all we know), and—almost lost in the shuffle— Susannah Stone Trousdale (Elizabeth Reaser), a pregnant housewife with one daughter already and a husband who hasn’t yet arrived for the festivities. Most startling of all the family members is gay, deaf Thad (Ty Giordano) and his African-American boyfriend, Patrick Thomas (Brian White). Believe me, you’ve never met two nicer guys in your life, but while the other “tolerant” Stone family members are befuddling Meredith with their seemingly excessive displays of sign-language fluency, I was counting on my own fingers the numbers of ways that a newcomer like Meredith could earn the enmity of the group. She started promisingly enough by shouting her thoughts to Thad as if he were simply hard of hearing, but then went further than I expected any supposedly sophisticated New Yorker could go when she asked him (at the top of her lungs) whether he was concerned that the child he and Patrick were planning to adopt would turn out to be gay.

At that point, I abandoned all the characters to the writer-director’s devices and waited, with some trepidation, for the inevitably gushy turnarounds. Ms. Parker had drifted a long way from the warm collegiality of Sex and the City, and Ms. McAdams was quickly using up some of the points she had earned with me as the resourceful heroine in Red Eye. Even the divine Diane Keaton was sadly misused.

The most curious (though oddly satisfying) twist in the film occurs when Meredith, in desperation, summons her sister to come to her rescue—and who should show up but Claire Danes as the beautiful, intelligent and tactful Julie Morton, who wins over the same family that rejected Meredith? What happens next has to be seen to be disbelieved, except that it makes a kind of romantic sense eventually. Still, it’s much too late to save the film. I have always stressed the importance of endings in film narratives, but this is the first time that I recognized the importance of beginnings, too—especially when farcical shenanigans are involved, as they are here. Still, I can’t deny the incidental pleasures of watching these talented players giving it their all, even in such a misguided project.

The project is an outgrowth of the award-winning ABCDF: Diccionario Grafico de la Ciudad de Mexico art book/CD-ROM that came out a couple of years ago, and several art shows held in Mexico City, Washington, D.C., and Paris.

While the folks in charge don't want to talk about it until they've gotten all the necessary approvals from the city, The Real Estate wants to give you a sneak peek at this remarkable project.

Here you see a rendering of the Maritime Hotel, at Ninth Avenue and 16th Street, and, above, 2 Columbus Circle (yep, the same building that the L.P.C. seems intent on "modernizing" into a generic eyesore).

- Matthew Grace