A match made in...somewhere (Getty Images)

Monday evening, Woody Allen announced the cast of his yet-to-be-titled film, set in San Francisco and New York. (This is different from his upcoming summer feature with Jesse Eisenberg, To Rome With Love, which is set in Rome.)

The cast is...eclectic, to say the least. To say the most would be calling it the work of either an insane genius or just a regular insane person. Let's take a look, shall we?

Woody Allen announced today the cast of his latest untitled film. Starring, in alphabetical order, are Alec Baldwin, Cate Blanchett, Louis C.K., Bobby Cannavale, Andrew Dice Clay, Michael Emerson, Sally Hawkins and Peter Sarsgaard. Co-stars include Max Casella and Alden Ehrenreich. It is a Gravier Productions film produced by Allen’s long time producers, Letty Aronson and Stephen Tenenbaum.

The new film will be shot in New York and San Francisco this summer. This marks Allen’s second time directing in San Francisco -- his directorial debut, 1969’s TAKE THE MONEY AND RUN, was also set there.

Of course, everyone is flipping biscuit's over the casting of Andrew Dice Clay, most recently seen playing himself on Entourage, though a close second is Louis C.K. (Though we could absolutely see the FX star as a blue-collar Woody surrogate in the feature.) But the other members of the cast are just as strange: Cate Blanchett and Alex Baldwin are the biggest names on the roster, but we just can't imagine those two with any type of neurotic sexual chemistry.

Then there's Michael Emerson, better known as the villainous Ben Linus from Lost, who absolutely should be in everything, ever. But maybe not a Woody Allen movie? Unless Andrew Dice Clay will be playing a Smoke Monster going through a mid-life sexual crisis, only to be aided by the help of his best friend, a grown-up Vincent Delpino.

Add Peter Skarsgard, and you have a farrago of stoic, emotionally-repressed character actors...and Andrew Dice Clay. Based on the casting, we're going to assume that Mr. Allen's next feature will be a tense melodrama, in the vein of Matchpoint or the one with Ewan McGregor that no one saw.

The earlier screening included Tovah Feldshuh, James Toback, Peter Riegert and Bob Balaban, with his writer wife, Lynn Grossman.

Producer James Stern introduced the film, which was directed by Dutchwoman Lone Scherfig, saying, “I’m like the substitute teacher. No one more interesting could be here to introduce the film. So it had to be me.”

Afterward, 24-year-old star Carrie Mulligan accepted accolades from Mr. Balaban. “It’s always possible to play a character who is less intelligent than you are, but it is almost impossible to play one who is more intelligent than you,” he said, somewhat cryptically. “Good job!” (He later told the Transom: “You know, it’s like the old character-driven movies. I like these people. I like spending time with them, I am happy to be with them for two hours. You don’t get that anymore.”)

The Transom asked Ms. Mulligan if she had ever dated someone much older than she, as her character does in the film. She giggled a little and then replied with poise that she didn’t have a boyfriend until she was 20, but also confessed: “When I was working at the pub back home, a similar thing happened to the whole car scene in the movie. A man ordered a pint and then after he paid, he wrote on his receipt, ‘Dinner?’ I went to dinner with him but then I decided it was creepy.”

Clutching a napkin full of hors d’oeuvres, Ms. Feldshuh gushed, “Even the smaller actors were great. Like that girl who plays the idiot. What is her name?”

“Rosamund Pike.”

“Well, she was just fantastic, because, well, you really thought she was an idiot.”

Actor and Park Slope parent Peter Sarsgaard, who plays the older man, joined Ms. Mulligan to introduce the second showing of the film, and then made his young costar laugh as he demonstrated how he had “shaken his butt” at a taping of The Jimmy Fallon Show earlier.

Couples Retreat

What’s the story: With fall firmly in the air, what better time to see a movie about a tropical paradise?  Apparently, after having such a good time filming The Break Up, Vince Vaughn, Jon Favreau, Jason Bateman and Peter Billingsley (Ralphie from A Christmas Story!) decided their next adventure would take place on a beach. The four friends reunite for Couples Retreat (Mr. Billingsley directs the others from a script by Messrs. Vaughn and Favreau), a relentlessly mediocre-looking studio comedy that is sure to make us long for the days of Swingers and even Made. As a side note, we’re not sure when Mr. Vaughn became the chief purveyor of these kind of PG-13 comedies (see: Four Christmases), but we liked it a whole lot more when the guy was in rated-R movies. Come back to us, Vince!

Who should see it: Trent and Mike from Swingers.

An Education

What’s the story: Such is life for up-and-coming movie stars in 2009: Carey Mulligan, the ingénue at the center of Lone Scherfig’s An Education has already been crowned the belle of the Oscar ball and her movie hasn’t even come out yet! (By our count, you can expect the backlash to strike sometime around Thanksgiving.) Based on the memoir by Lynn Barber and adapted for the screen by About A Boy’s Nick Hornby, An Education finds Ms. Mulligan starring as a 16-year-old girl in 1960s England who is seduced by an inappropriate 30-something, played by Peter Sarsgaard. Despite the generic-seeming premise, the reviews have been over-the-moon and Ms. Mulligan has been compared to Audrey Hepburn. Inevitable backlash or not, get used to her.

Who should see it: Roman Polanski. (Too soon?)

Also opening this weekend: Michael Sheen and Peter Morgan reunite yet again for The Damned United, which tells the story of the short-lived tenure of Leeds United coach Brian Clough. And Chris Rock gets to the bottom of Good Hair.

Riding in on waves of raves from film festivals around the world, the exquisitely made British coming-of-age film An Education features, as its centerpiece, a career-breakthrough performance by newcomer Carey Mulligan reminiscent of Audrey Hepburn’s in Roman Holiday. Captivatingly written, directed and acted with sensitivity and nuance, this is one of the best films of the year. It lives up to its title in more ways than one.

Based on a personal memoir by British journalist Lynn Barber, it centers on her teenage experiences in the early 1960s, when she was a bright student cellist in an all-girls school in the Wickenham section of London with her sights set on Oxford. In the film, she is called Jenny, a bright, attractive 16-year-old already drawn to the forbidden Gauloises and depressing Juliette Greco records she hides in her bedroom as part of the hedonistic new postwar permissiveness that is rising all around her. Her strict, bombastic middle-class father (Alfred Molina) and naïve, indulgent mother (Cara Seymour) have big plans for their daughter, but Jenny’s goals take a detour one rainy day when she is given a lift home by a dashing older man with tailored tweeds and impeccable manners, Jewish and in his 30s, named David Goldman (Peter Sarsgaard), whose roguish charm infatuates her. Next comes a flower arrangement, a Ravel concert and a bit of late supper—all romantic attentions that can make a vulnerable schoolgirl dizzy. David is a man of the world—suave, erudite, cool, seductive and such a parent pleaser that even Jenny’s pompous, demanding father puts aside his suspicions and consents to a weekend trip to Oxford under the pretense of introducing Jenny to her literary idol, C. S. Lewis. It takes some time before Jenny realizes her paramour; his best mate, Danny (Dominic Cooper); and Danny’s blousy girlfriend, Helen (Rosamund Pike), are free-wheeling thieves and con artists who stake out old ladies, break into their flats and rob them of their possessions. But the impressionable Jenny is having too much fun to let small, intrusive principles like moral turpitude and high ideals dash her excitement. Soon she’s speeding off in a Bristol roadster soaked in French perfume, smoking imported pink cigarettes from Russia, watching films with subtitles, dining in expensive restaurants and dancing in late-night jazz clubs in Soho. Seduced by the glam life and by David, Jenny loses her virginity on her 17th birthday in a hotel room in Paris, where David has taken her under the pretense of being chaperoned by his “Aunt Helen.” “All that poetry and all those songs—about something that lasts no time at all,” she says the morning after. On the verge of womanhood and jaded overnight, Jenny gives up school and the Oxford entrance exams, to the dismay of her conservative parents and the disapproval of her cold, pragmatic and unforgiving headmistress (Emma Thompson), and prepares to become Mrs. Goldman.

Carefully calibrated by screenwriter Nick Hornby, the stages of Jenny’s saga build to a crashing blow when she discovers at last the dark secret her lover conceals, which wakes her from dreams and kicks her cruelly into the brutal reality of daylight. Jenny’s “education” leaves her older but hardly wiser when she learns the meaning of the word heartbreak. When Jenny regains her senses, there is nothing left to do but sweep the shards of her wasted emotion into the dust bin and start over, but is it already too late?

This is a film that moves you through several emotional riptides without a trace of artifice. The entire cast is superb, but it is Carey Mulligan who sweeps this picture off its feet. An Education is not her first feature (she had a small role in Michael Mann’s Public Enemies and bigger ones in the TV miniseries Bleak House and Pride and Prejudice), but it represents the kind of career-defining break that makes an actor memorable and wins awards. The way Mr. Hornby’s screenplay, under the guidance of Danish director Lone Scherfig (Italian for Beginners), gets the times and attitudes right in the dialogue of everyone from Jenny’s envious classmates to the guileless insincerity of Mr. Wrong (David even feigns Jewish guilt to win over Jenny’s father and get her in the sheets) is invaluable, and I love the attention to detail with which Ms. Scherfig and Mr. Hornby accurately re-create the authenticity of England on the threshold of cultural change and sexual revolution—a time when the pre-Beatles country, like Jenny, was full of innocence and ambition, looking for fun and reckless excitement, and mindless of the consequences. But it is still Ms. Mulligan—a blushing moss rose of a girl in bloom—who personifies the dilemma of a sophisticated, highly educated, beguiling yet immature woman trapped in the unfortunate body of a teenage girl. Like a savory meal too meticulously prepared to wolf down quickly but served in several small but unforgettable courses, it doesn’t give you too much at once. An Education is spread out over less than two hours, but rarefied and entirely delectable from start to finish.

rreed@observer.com

There are just  too many promising-looking  films vying for Academy voters this year—don’t forget to factor in some of these pics:

Broken Embraces (Los Abrazos Rotos): This film pairs the great Pedro Almódovar with his favorite leading lady–muse Penélope Cruz in a thriller about a blind writer (Lluís Homar) who must heal his wounds from the past. (Dec. 11, Sony Pictures Classic)

White Ribbon (Das weiße Band): Michael Haneke rebounds from the critical thrashing his Funny Games remake received with this drama that seemed to win just about everything there was to be won at this year’s Cannes Film Festival. (Dec. 25, Sony Pictures Classic)  

Bright Star: The Piano’s Jane Campion is back with this ultra-romantic-looking period film that centers around the passionate love affair between poet John Keats (Brideshead Revisited’s Ben Whishaw) and Fanny Brawne (Abbie Cornish), plus our favorite soon-to-be megastar, Paul Schneider. Prepare to swoon! (Apparition, September 16)  

An Education: Speaking of swooning, here’s a question: What’s better than Peter Sarsgaard? Peter Sarsgaard with an English accent! This film makes our heart beat faster just thinking about it: Set in 1960s suburban London, it is a coming-of-age story about a teenager who falls for a man twice her age. Doctor Who fans should rejoice at seeing Carey Mulligan in the starring role, with Mr. Sarsgaard as the older man; it co-stars Alfred Molina, Rosamund Pike, Olivia Williams, Dominic Cooper and Emma Thompson, with a screenplay written by Nick Hornby. (October 9, Sony Pictures Classic)

Sherlock Holmes: Robert Downey, Jr. takes on the role of super sleuth, with Jude Law stepping in as the faithful Watson, and Rachel McAdams looking charming as usual. Will this be just a super-fun popcorn flick? Or can director Guy Richie and the ridiculously talented Downey translate this Christmas movie into some sparkly gold hardware? (December 25, Warner Brothers)

With a whopping six movies hitting theaters today, the fourth weekend of July feels like an ad for the local general store: In the mood for horror, romance, or even talking guinea pigs? Then have we got a movie for you! As we do every Friday, here’s a handy guide to the new releases.

G-Force

What’s the story: The cast of G-Force is wildly impressive—including Zack Galifianakis, Will Arnett, Bill Nighy and the voices of Nicolas Cage, Jon Favreau, Penelope Cruz and Tracy Morgan—but all you need to know about this live action/animation hybrid comes from the tag line on the movie poster: “Gadgets. Gizmos. Guinea Pigs. In 3-D.” And they say there’s no truth in advertising!

Who should see it: The dogs from Beverly Hills Chihuahua.

The Ugly Truth

What’s the story: Stop us if you’ve heard this one before: Katherine Heigl and Gerard Butler star as a pair of mismatched mates (a television news producer and her boorish host, respectively) who meet-hate and gradually come to realize that they’re made for each other. Along the way, expect to see Ms. Heigl scowl, frown and wear a pair of vibrating underwear to a fancy restaurant. Yep, it’s that kind of movie. The reviews for The Ugly Truth are pitched just above scathing, but, sadly, we actually think this thing looks moderately entertaining. Talk about an ugly truth! It must be that Flo Rida music cue in the trailer.

Who should see it: Denny Duquette.

Orphan

What’s the story: Go ahead and file Orphan under the list of movies we’ll never see. Everything about this film, from the poster to that ubiquitous trailer, has made us want to burst into tears. (It’s just too scary!) For braver souls than us: Vera Farmiga and Peter Sarsgaard play parents who adopt a little girl from an orphanage, only to have buyers remorse once she starts killing people and haunting their dreams. Think The Good Son, but with a daughter.

Who should see it: Macaulay Culkin.

And! For some indie-fun, check out: In the Loop (with James Gandolfini), Shrink (staring Kevin Spacey) or The Answer Man (with Jeff Daniels and Lauren Graham).

Definition: To act melodramatically; overact; ham it up.

We’ve all seen actors chew the scenery from time to time. It goes with the territory. But how many of us can claim to have seen an actor actually gnaw on a set?

My thanks to the Tony Award–winning Denis O’Hare for providing a first in my theatergoing lifetime. Playing the tortured, frustrated Vanya in Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya at the Classic Stage Company, Mr. O’Hare no doubt wished to convey his thwarted desire for the young and beautiful—and married—Yelena (Maggie Gyllenhaal). True, he’d been hamming it up all night.

Expression: Chew the scenery.

Definition: To act melodramatically; overact; ham it up.

We’ve all seen actors chew the scenery from time to time. It goes with the territory. But how many of us can claim to have seen an actor actually gnaw on a set?

My thanks to the Tony Award–winning Denis O’Hare for providing a first in my theatergoing lifetime. Playing the tortured, frustrated Vanya in Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya at the Classic Stage Company, Mr. O’Hare no doubt wished to convey his thwarted desire for the young and beautiful—and married—Yelena (Maggie Gyllenhaal). True, he’d been hamming it up all night. But when he gnawed on a wooden pillar of Santo Loquasto’s cramped set, I could have kissed him.

Mr. O’Hare made theater history for me, and I can never take that away from him. Furthermore, he made an agitated grrrrrr sound as he chomped on the pillar, and I don’t blame him one bit. The pillar was blocking the view (as were the other pillars). Did Mr. O’Hare—the uncharitable thought occurred to me—grow so maniacally frustrated with the set that he decided to eat it?

While there’s no weirder symbol of Austin Pendleton’s hyperactive, utterly un-Chekhovian production of Uncle Vanya than Mr. O’Hare sinking his teeth into the woodwork, the set design by the usually excellent Mr. Loquasto is an expensive blunder.

The three-sided stage at the intimate CSC has always been awkwardly confined. But the designer’s overstuffed set, divided up by those obtrusive pillars, only serves to cramp the playing area even more. Intended to represent the Serebryakov estate—with its 26-room house—the structure Mr. Loquasto built is more like a claustrophobic log cabin. There’s no sense of air or the outdoors, though Act I takes place entirely in the garden. (Chekhov subtitled the play “Scenes From Country Life.”)

Mr. Loquasto’s cumbersome set is also two-tiered, giving the production height instead of depth. Yet the upper rooms are rarely used by the director—and when they are, the clumsy outcome is the very thing Chekhov’s stage naturalism opposed. Thus Yelena traipses self-consciously up the staircase, and all the way down again, in order to say to Astrov, “I’m taking this pencil to remember you by.”

THIS Uncle Vanya proves again that star actors (principally Ms. Gyllenhaal and her partner, Peter Sarsgaard) are no guarantee of artistic success. (The starry Hedda Gabler at the Roundabout with the monotone Mary-Louise Parker makes the same point.) Ms. Gyllenhaal, better known for her film work, possesses too little stage experience to create a convincing portrait of Yelena’s tedium and corrosive vapidity.

Her voice, for one thing, crucially lacks tone and emotional range. She’s too preoccupied with being languid, and she’s inappropriately touchy-feely with more or less everyone around her. (The unhappily married, bewitching Yelena is not the sort of lady who snuggles.)

All actors have something in common with Chekhov’s Russian characters: They laugh and cry easily. And yet I’ve never seen a weepier Uncle Vanya than this one. (Isn’t the golden acting rule to let the audience do the weeping?) Ms. Gyllenhaal, I’m afraid, is the worst offender: She appears to be crying and laughing simultaneously—you can’t always tell the difference. She’s giving an ingratiating performance.

But with one outstanding exception (Mamie Gummer’s delightful Sonya), everyone in Mr. Pendleton’s wayward production is melodramatically out of sync. I admired Mr. Sarsgaard’s insinuating, spiritually dead Trigorin in the recent Seagull, but his 37-year-old Dr. Astrov is less the embittered crusading conservationist who sees through everyone (including himself) and more a grungy, confused adolescent with a crush. An excellent stage actor, Mr. Sarsgaard has yet to find the Astrov whose love for the idle beauty Yelena—for the superficial—is a lost cause.

But then, we have that elderly professorial buffoon Serebryakov (Yelena’s lucky husband), played in his opening scene by George Morfogen as if he were a gouty Methuselah, and in his later scenes as if he’d taken a miracle youth drug.

Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya is about lives lived out in anomie, desperation and crushing isolation. It’s about the slow dawning of self-knowledge, and it’s about acceptance. With its contemporary American style wrapped in period costume, the broad new production scarcely conveys the nuances of the great play—and its middle-to-upper-class milieu not at all.

Though Mamie Gummer’s performance is also affected by the contagious weepiness, thank goodness for the compensation of her fine and openhearted Sonya. She delivers the play’s famous closing speech about endurance and hope beautifully: “And we shall find peace. We shall, Uncle, I believe it with all my heart and soul. …”

I’ve seen this young, immensely gifted actress two or three times now, and each time I’m struck by the honest reality of her work. Ms. Gummer is a stage natural with a glorious future. The time surely can’t be far off when we can stop pointing out that she’s the daughter of Meryl Streep.

WILL FERRELL’s You’re Welcome America: A Final Night With George W. Bush has arrived on Broadway about three years too late. Not that it makes any difference to Mr. Ferrell’s fans, who’ve turned the critic-proof show into a major hit. Besides, the likable star makes a wonderfully deadpan George Bush onstage, just as he makes a wonderfully deadpan doofus in his popular movies.

Or, as the 43rd president announces happily when he’s winched onto the stage of the Cort Theatre from a helicopter at the start, “I said to the pilot, why don’t you drop me in the faggy Theater District—and that’s what he did!”

You’re Welcome America, written by Mr. Ferrell and slickly directed by Adam McKay (Anchorman, Talladega Nights), is an extended—sometimes overextended—Saturday Night Live sketch, with a guest appearance from a lap-dancing Condoleezza Rice (Pia Glenn).

This is a President Bush who calls President Obama “the Tiger Woods guy.” A giant projection of what he sweetly calls “my penis” appears on a screen: “That’s what I call shock and awe right there!”

You get the frat message? But the saving grace of the uneven show is the masterly cool of Mr. Ferrell’s stage debut. He effortlessly captures President Bush’s peculiar combo platter of simmering peevishness and faux Texan swagger. One of the show’s funniest moments has the young and incompetent George trapped down a mine shaft with his father. “Why are you the only one in the family who talks with a Texas accent?” Poppy protests. “It makes no sense!”

Another hilariously surreal comic riff involves a covert army of highly trained monkeys with spear guns who’ve been recruited to fight insurgent Iraqis and entertain children.

It must be said that as cutting-edge political humor goes, it went. The show is satirically toothless. Mr. Ferrell’s targets (including Rummy, Condi and poor old Brownie) are easy, familiar prey, his Bush impersonation fond, nostalgic and even comforting. But when he asked us, in all righteously embarrassing seriousness, for a minute’s silence for our fallen troops in Iraq—and received it—I no longer knew who was doing the asking, George Bush or Will Ferrell, and found myself wishing I was someplace else.

You’re Welcome America: A Final Night With George Bush is to be televised live as an HBO special in March.

jheilpern@observer.com

The production at the Walter Kerr on Broadway began at the Royal Court Theatre, and Mr. Hickson’s use of British and American actors works uncommonly well. There’s none of the usual culture clash of either accent or manner; nor any poeticizing of Chekhov’s text (a traditional weakness among British actors).

It’s a cliché of theater that there are no small parts, only small actors. But Chekhov always stands or falls on the precarious balancing act of its ensemble and its accomplishment in depth. Each cast member here is of the highest order—from the beautiful, impossibly narcissistic Arkadina of Kristin Scott Thomas; to the riveting performance of Carey Mulligan as the naïve ingénue Nina; to the hardened, grieving heart of Zoe Kazan’s utterly alive Masha, who’s played too often as an old crone. What a glorious future in theater Ms. Kazan has ahead of her! But I see that I’m already en route to paying tribute to everyone onstage.

Christopher Hampton’s crisp, exemplary new version of Chekhov’s 1896 masterpiece has taken the play closer to its tragic core than is customary. Chekhov’s description of the play as a “comedy” of family life is deceptive. The Seagull is set in a country estate on a lake, and it begins on a note of dark humor with Medvedenko’s staggering question to his indifferent love, Masha: “Why do you always wear black?” (Answer: “I’m in mourning for my life. I’m unhappy.”) And the action ends four acts later as a tragedy of human folly and suicide.

A comedy tonight?

The Seagull has its farcical moments, to be sure—particularly from the ailing, buffoonish old duffer, Sorin, still longing to be reborn a writer, still fooling himself. Chekhov’s drama about two actresses (one famous, the other aspiring) mirrored by two writers (one famous, the other aspiring) might also be seen as his comment on the allure and folly of success. But in its unsentimental essence—and Chekhov, most compassionate of all modern playwrights, is never sentimental—the play is about death.

THE SEAGULL IS about the death of love and illusion. Who achieves happiness in the play? Perhaps the family doctor Dorn has found a certain smug contentment in the memory of his appeal to attractive women. Dorn is both caring and uncaring; he’s someone who’s dully settled into middle age. The rest are all portraits in self-deception and loss. Six of the characters are fatally in love with the wrong person:

Arkadina is in love with herself. (She needs the love of the best-selling, feckless writer Trigorin for vanity’s sake.) Her tormented son, the potential avant-garde playwright Konstantin, has always been disastrously in love with the future actress Nina, who wrecks her life—and his—when she runs off with Trigorin. There’s also Masha, who secretly adores the blindly indifferent Konstantin, but sacrificially marries the ardent, humorless bore, Medvedenko, the local schoolmaster; and, for good measure, there’s the babushka Polina—unhappy wife of the frustrated estate manager—who’s crazy about Dorn, who doesn’t give a toss about her.

Chekhov engages us fully in the fate of all these characters entangled, apparently, in a mere domestic comedy. His unpretentious genius conveys the extraordinary through the ordinary. Mr. Hickson’s design team achieves a miracle of staging in space and light and sound—particularly the wonderful, evocative simplicity conjured up by the scenic designer, Hildegard Bechtler (who doesn’t allow a samovar in sight). The play’s shifting mood and tempo are marvelously right. The prolonged, very risky moment that comes during the first half when “the angel of death has flown overhead” is uncannily achieved in its silent mystery and danger.

The delicate balance of Chekhov’s naturalism can be easily spoiled, as a house of cards comes crashing down with a single clumsy move. But there’s not a false note in the production the entire night. Every performance has been rethought and made fresh.

A famous actress playing a famous actress has sunk many an Arkadina relying on histrionic divalike outrageousness to “charm” us. The innate intelligence of the lovely, patrician Ms. Scott Thomas has found the glib cruelty within the renowned role. Captivating, self-deluding, middle-aged Arkadina “wants to live and love and wear vivid blouses,” as her resentful, whining son protests, “but here I am, 25 years old, and a constant reminder that she’s not young anymore.”

She clings to her fickle lover, Trigorin, as if to the image of her own fading beauty—just as she bandages Konstantin’s self-inflicted head wound in the manner of someone showing us how much she cares. (“Forgive your wicked mother!” she says to him. “Friends again?”)

Exactly when Arkadina’s acting begins and ends is part of her seductive game (and our fascination). When it’s said of Chekhov’s plays that nobody hears what anyone else says, she’s a perfect example. She thrives in her own dangerous vortex. “Think kindly of us!” she cries out rhetorically at one surprising point. Yet she can also confess with facile hauteur that she’s never read a word her son’s ever written. She’s essentially heartless, and Ms. Scott Thomas’s singular achievement is to risk not being loved by playing the coldness at Arkadina’s actressy center.

Peter Sarsgaard’s bearded, slightly fey, doughy Trigorin wrong-footed me at first. I was prepared for a more traditionally dashing interpretation. Yet how brilliantly Mr. Sarsgaard insinuates the passive, spiritually dead spinelessness of the man. This is a writer who possesses enough self-awareness to know that he’s had the luck of a second-rater. Trigorin is a shallow middlebrow success made by a shallow middlebrow public. He’s the author of his own ironic, sullen epitaph:

“Here lies Trigorin. He was good—but not as good as Turgenev. …”

Carey Mulligan’s performance as Nina is kissed by greatness. Her Nina is so giddily intoxicated by theater and fame that she would have eagerly become another Arkadina—had she not ruined her young life first. In the brilliantly, modestly staged opening play-within-a-play, Ms. Mulligan’s performance of Konstantin’s overheated, experimental prose-play is utterly, touchingly sincere; and her reunion with Konstantin in which she declares her undying love for Trigorin breaks all hearts.

Nina is the only character who comes to understand herself. She’s found her way, as Konstantin tells her when they part, though it’s a hard way of tragic endurance and faith. As for the Hamlet-like Konstantin, he dies three times over—for love of Nina, who never returns his love; for love of his mother, who kills him with indifference; and for love of theater, which rejects him.

His passionate speech opposing the status quo represented by the dreary “one-size-fits-all” traditional theater of his mother is both an Oedipal rebellion and a manifesto for urgent change that rings true today.

“You couldn’t do without the theater,” his uncle Sorin suggests amiably.

“New forms. We need new forms,” the idealistic Konstantin replies emphatically, “and if there’s none to be had, we’d be better off with nothing at all.”

In typical Chekhovian fashion, Konstantin is someone who tries to commit suicide twice—the first time as farce, the second as tragedy. Mackenzie Crook—hitherto known to me only as the ridiculously ambitious Gareth, the assistant to the manager, in the BBC version of The Office—is a revelation in the role. The Byronic Mr. Crook, resisting the temptation to play his damaged Konstantin as a hysterical neurotic on the verge of a nervous breakdown, makes his contemptuous fury and resentment all the more powerful for seeming insistently rational behind blazing, hurt eyes.

Konstantin is a writer who glimpses the destination, but can’t find the way. His epiphany comes too late to save him: It isn’t about old and new forms, “but writing freely from the heart.”

That’s Chekhov’s enduring gift to us, now fulfilled by this great production.

jheilpern@observer.com

"Peter Sarsgaard wants to meet in a coffee bar in Brooklyn, but balks when he gets there," writes Mark Kennedy. "It's crowded with 30-somethings in carefully rumpled hair, funky glasses, sleek laptops, expensive jeans and oh-so-cool graphic T-shirts. The flavor of the day seems to be smug," the reporter continues.

"It's too trendy in there for me," Sarsgaard tells him. It's a much better lead-in than "Sarsgaard appears to be in his natural environment in a room full of 30-somethings in carefully rumpled hair, funky glasses, sleek laptops, expensive jeans and oh-so-cool graphic T-shirts" would have been!

So, Mr. Sarsgaard does what broke Slopers have been doing for decades when they need a place to chill out: he takes the reporter to the front stoop of the brownstone he shares with spouse Maggie Gyllenhaal, proceeding to brag about his potted plants and waving to a neighbor walking by with a stroller.

But being liked by fans as Peter Sarsgaard apparently can get in the way of his characters. The night before the interview Mr. Sarsgaard traded in his American accent for a British one in Seagull in order to be "less liked by an American audience."

"It kind of creates an immediate connection between the character most likely to be hated and the audience," he said of his discarded American accent. "I feel like I immediately have a little leg up before I go down and beg for their sympathy."

Isabel Coixet’s Elegy, from the screenplay by Nicholas Meyer, based on the short novel The Dying Animal by Philip Roth, enters a metaphysical region between life and death that few films have ever dared to explore. Ms. Coixet and Mr. Meyer have managed to capture much of the bittersweet humor of Mr. Roth’s brilliant confrontation of old age, his own included. The director and the scenarist are aided in no small measure by a very accomplished cast headed by Ben Kingsley as David Kepesh, Mr. Roth’s hyper-articulate literary alter ego, who ranges in age here from 62 to 70. Kepesh is first seen in the film on the Charlie Rose show (with real-life Charlie Rose on hand) ruminating about the first libertarian colony in America, Thomas Morton’s Merry Mount, a fur-trading settlement about 30 miles northwest of the repressive God-fearing Puritan colony of Plymouth. At Merry Mount, the settlers and the Indians commingled in every sense of the word, and staged pagan dances around the maypole until Governor Endicott of Salem sent the Puritan militia under Miles Standish to tear down the maypole, and arrest Morton for sacrilege. Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote a story about Morton and the maypole, and its neglected place in American history as the first manifestation of American hedonism—and the last until the sexual revolution in the 1960s, at least according to Mr. Roth and Professor Kepesh, who says so in an aside to the latter’s cataloging of all his campus conquests. In one fleeting image, the campus on which Kepesh cavorted is none other than that of my own beloved Columbia University. And since I am an aged professor on that same campus, it is understandable that I feel that Mr. Roth is speaking for me, if not directly to me, when he writes as Kepesh: “Can you imagine old age? Of course you can’t. I didn’t. I couldn’t. I had no idea what it was like. Not even a false image. No image. Nobody wants anything else. Nobody wants to face any of this before he has to. How is it all going to turn out? Obtuseness is de rigueur.”

When Kepesh first saw Consuela Castillo (Penélope Cruz) in his class in “Practical Criticism,” he was 62 and she was 24. Mr. Roth painstakingly describes every detail of how Consuela was dressed, and every nuance of how she wanted to be seen. Outside the door of his classroom is a sign advising his students to report any incidents of sexual harassment. Hence, he makes it an ironclad rule never to make contact with any of the female students until after the final grades were posted. When he meets students in his office, the door is left wide open. Then at the end of the term, he gives a large party in his spacious apartment, one to which he makes it a point to invite Consuela. Eventually, he finds himself in a position to have Consuela unveil the marvelous breasts that have inflamed his erotic senses.

I doubt that this movie with all its sustained contemplation of a woman’s beautiful body would have been possible even a decade ago. The literary property would have been stamped “unfilmable” from the outset. Yet I cannot describe the effect of all this frontal assault as particularly erotic. It is not Ms. Cruz’s fault. She brings a very precisely defined humanity to her role. Perhaps that is the problem. She is somehow too real, too existential, and, ultimately, too vulnerable to be viewed coldly and callously as a desensitized pornographic stimulus.

Also, Mr. Kingsley evokes too much aging angst as Kepesh for us to enjoy his lustful adventures. Indeed, Kepesh is but the latest of Mr. Kingsley’s aging academics, represented most recently by his eccentric psychiatrist in Jonathan Levine’s The Wackness. It is my new policy to try and not give the plot away when I decide that the reader may derive more pleasure by discovering it unaided by the critic. But it suddenly strikes me that anyone who has read Mr. Roth’s source material will already know what lies in store for Kepesh and Consuela. Is my new guilt-ridden policy on narrative exposure thereby unfair to my more literary readers, who might prefer me to evaluate all the plot twists in the story?

In this respect, let it be said that the film’s adapters have hit all the crucial plot points of the story, though scrimping on the densely subjective texture of Mr. Roth’s exquisite prose. I do not agree, however, with some of the negative comments about the alleged miscasting of Dennis Hopper as Kepesh’s best friend, George, a Pulitzer Prize-winning poet. I have no idea how you can possibly miscast a poet in these dismally unpoetic times. It takes someone with a motorcycle hoodlum’s hubris to keep cranking out poetry for an increasingly print-shunning populace.

Patricia Clarkson has one striking scene as Kepesh’s longtime girlfriend, Carolyn, in which she screams at Kepesh over his perceived infidelity to their unsanctified union. I can’t imagine such a scene taking place for the greater part of American film history. Yet one feels the fragility of all relationships in this one outburst of non-marital sexual jealousy.

Peter Sarsgaard also brings something extra to the faintly ridiculous role of Kenny Kepesh, David Kepesh’s 42-year-old disgruntled son, who still has not forgiven his father for walking out on the family when Kenny was only a little boy. The seemingly endless father-son exchanges do much to redeem the film’s chief protagonist as a being who can look past his own frightening old age to console his son with patience and tenderness in order to prepare him for the inevitable trials to come.

If I recommend Elegy to my readers, it is not as a licentiously escapist entertainment, but, rather, as a soberingly eloquent expression of what our lives are all about, whether we want to think about them or not.

asarris@observer.com