When we bought the house, we had never owned anything but a secondhand Volvo," filmmaker Robert Benton told The Observer of his 1979 home purchase in Wainscott, Long Island, with wife Sally. Now the Bentons are listing their Georgica Pond-front haven for $29.9 million, almost as many millions as years they have called the "private oasis" home.

The 2.5-acre peninsula in a quiet corner of the exclusive Georgica Association, which counts Aerin Lauder and Eric Zinterhoffer and Dan and Brooke Neidich among its residents, is listed with Brown Harris Stevens' agent Peter Turino, who declined to comment for this article.

"We had looked at houses forever," the Bonnie and Clyde screenwriter and Kramer vs. Kramer writer/director remembered, recounting that upon their first look at the Wainscott property he and Ms. Benton couldn't see the water. "We're not interested," they said, and turned around to leave.

"The broker insisted we go around and look at the view on the other side." The couple were enchanted by the view of water on three sides, including the ocean. The property boasts 724 feet of coveted Georgica Pond frontage. "We drove two hours back to NYC and we didn't say a word."

According to legend (and Mr. Benton), the three-bedroom, Mediterranean-style home dates back to 1895, when it was built on a bet that a house couldn't be built on that site for under $5,000. The owner won the bet, and when the Bentons bought it, with no ownership experience other than their trusted Volvo—a far cry from Bonnie and Clyde's Ford Fordor "Death Car"—they kept the house intact but largely unchanged until 2005, at which time they enlisted Gagosian and Mary Boone architect Richard Gluckman to bring it up to speed. "It's a lovely, lovely house," Mr. Benton sighed wistfully. "It goes with Charlie's barn very well." Around the time of Mr. Gluckman's renovation, the venerable Charles Gwathmey redesigned the barn, or "great room"-which acts as Ms. Benton's studio; she is an accomplished painter-with 16th-century English wooden beams.

"I really think it's on the most beautiful property in East Hampton, but I'm sure the guy next door thinks the same," Mr. Benton added with a laugh.

MEANWHILE, IN SOHO, fellow filmmaker Paul Haggis made some real estate waves of his own. Mr. Haggis wrote Million Dollar Baby, Clint Eastwood's Hilary Swank-studded gem of a film that won the Oscar for Best Picture in 2004 (and then Mr. Haggis one-upped that by co-writing and directing Crash, which the Academy also honored). According to city records, he has laid down the full asking price of $3.95 million for an "expansive" two-bedroom affair at 388 West Broadway.

Mr. Haggis, who is married to actress Deborah Rennard, though she is not listed on the deed, purchased the loftlike apartment from Blackstone CFO Laurence Tosi, who chose not to comment for this article.

Listed by Stribling's Michael Chapman, the apartment features an "immense" 31-by-30-foot living room with a "baronial fireplace," mahogany framed windows and 11-foot-high ceilings supported by original columns and restored timber beams. The 700-square-foot master-bedroom suite "defies all expectations," with the bedroom measuring 15 feet by 25 feet and the suite containing a master bath to seduce any limestone lover. Luxuries of the limestone-tiled bath include an "oversized" shower with a teak bench seat and a 12-inch rainforest shower head, a bidet, a towel warmer, double sinks and "extra deep" medicine cabinets. There is also the 6-foot Waterworks soaking tub—convenient for Mr. Haggis, who measures almost 6 feet.

Because Mr. Haggis is based in Santa Monica, Calif., his Manhattan apartment purchase leads the logical reporter to presume this perfectly sized soaking tub will act as a glorified pied-à-terre for the director, who also owns a nearby penthouse loft at 169 Mercer Street, which the In the Valley of Elah director bought in 2006 for $2.9 million—right around the time Mr. Haggis became a household name after Crash's much-disputed Best Picture Oscar nod.

cmalle@observer.com

The two men met in the early ’70s when Mr. Benton was still writing partners with David Newman (with whom he co-wrote the screenplay for Bonnie and Clyde). He was alone in the office when he received a phone call, from a man identifying himself as Paul Newman. “I said, ‘Is this some kind of joke?’ There was a pause and he said, ‘No, this is Paul Newman.’” The actor had a project he wanted Mr. Benton and David Newman to adapt for him to direct (“Paul was a very good director”) called The Tin Lizzie Troop, which they wound up working on together for a year and a half. The film was never made, but a friendship was forged.

“This was before Newman’s Own, and we’d go out to his house in Connecticut to work. Paul would be sitting there in the barn working and then would be like, ‘Hey, what are we going to have for lunch?’ He’d try to teach us how to make the greatest grilled cheese sandwiches,” Mr. Benton said. “He’d cook in this little kitchen, and he would very carefully explain the greatest way to make whatever it was we were having for lunch.”

Two decades later, the men worked together again, when Mr. Benton directed Newman in Nobody’s Fool, which earned the actor his ninth Oscar nomination. “When I read the [Richard Russo] novel, I was about 30 pages in when I realized the only person I could think of in the role was Paul Newman. I wrote it with him in mind, and I knew him well enough that I started to write him and that character together.” But, Mr. Benton said, “I don’t know that I ever directed him; I cast him. And then I kept my mouth shut.” 

During the shooting of the 1994 film, Mr. Benton watched in astonishment as Newman would write out checks for millions of dollars through Newman’s Own for charitable organizations. “He was incredibly generous not only with his money, but with his time,” he said. Once during filming, there was a problem blocking out the following day’s scene and a “discussion” arose. “Paul wasn’t even a part of it—it had nothing to do with him. It was his anniversary that day, and his family was waiting outside. But he would not leave until he brokered a settlement. Because he was so good and so honorable, every single human being on that set listened to him.”

“DUSTIN HOFFMAN USED to say that there are things you can act and things you can’t,” Mr. Benton said. “You can’t act behavior. You can’t act being sexy—you can leer or lick your lips, but that’s not being sexy. Sexiness is something that’s inherent within you. Well, you can’t act wit. And Paul had the most extraordinary wit. I don’t mean the kind of wit that’s involved in telling jokes. I mean wit in how he saw life. He was talking once about [1963’s] Hud. It was the first really dark character he ever played, and he was excited. A real son of a bitch. He thought, ‘They’re going to hate me in this movie,’ and was so happy about it. And then it turned out when the movie came out that everybody loved him. He couldn’t understand why. But there was this wit that made you like him even though he did terrible things. There was something about his spirit that Paul couldn’t tamp down.”

Mr. Benton directed Newman again in 1998’s Twilight, and over the last few years they had continuously talked about working together again, particularly on Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead, which they could never get the rights to. “It would have been the perfect thing for him,” Mr. Benton said. “It would have been great.”

The past few days have been blue. “I think you won’t see another person in the film business who has felt that outpouring of affection and respect. The phone has not stopped ringing.”

svilkomerson@observer.com

Robert Benton’s Feast of Love, from a screenplay by Allison Burnett and based on the novel by Charles Baxter, serves admirably as a playful respite from the Iraq-war-driven flood of media violence that threatens to engulf us with a perpetual hangover of hopeless paranoia (and to which I am already beginning to succumb). This is not to say that Mr. Benton, Ms. Burnett and Mr. Baxter have collaborated on a concoction of frothy escapism. Quite the contrary. With the help of an exemplary cast, they have fashioned an exquisite tapestry of interlocking love stories, some of which end happily, some sadly, some farcically and one quite tragically. Throughout all the shifting moods, no single narrative disrupts the smoothly well-paced flow of the film as a coherent whole.

Ms. Burnett’s astute screenplay has some major structural differences from Mr. Baxter’s well-reviewed novel. For some probably financial reason, the action has been transferred from the environs of Ann Arbor, Michigan, to a comparable college campus neighborhood in Oregon. The biggest change, however, is the inspired casting of the book’s central character, Charlie Baxter, the author’s alter ego; here he’s played by Morgan Freeman, as retiring philosophy professor Harry Stevenson, thereby becoming the only African-American character in the film’s narrative. (There is one minor African-American in the novel. But he is changed to an immigrant Hungarian-American in the film, which suggests that race is no big issue for this story in either medium.) As a happy consequence of this switch, the Oscar-winning Mr. Freeman anchors the film with his charismatic authority as a raisonneur and as a witness to the separate strands of the story, which in the book are narrated by a half-dozen or so participants in the multiple love feasts. These distractingly shifting viewpoints have been scrapped on the screen for a more neutral vantage point from which each relationship can unfold with relative objectivity.

The story begins on one of Harry’s long sleepless nights, during which he walks the deserted streets and spaces adjoining his off-campus home, which he shares with his now soundly sleeping wife (Jane Alexander). On his restless nocturnal strolls, Harry frequently encounters his next-door neighbor, and friendly fellow insomniac, Bradley Thomas (Greg Kinnear), the maritally jinxed proprietor of the campus coffee shop, and the source of much of the film’s humor in the kind of pompously clueless role he played so effectively in last year’s hilarious Little Miss Sunshine.

One late afternoon after Bradley and Harry have returned to the coffee shop following a game in the girl’s softball league, in which Bradley’s wife, Kathryn (Selma Blair), plays, Harry and Bradley share a table with Kathryn and a personable girl on the opposing team named Janey (Shannon Lucio). As it turns out, Bradley is too engrossed in his conversation with the always-more-observant Harry to notice that Kathryn has fallen in love with the slyly seductive Janey, who has subtly locked her eyes with Kathryn’s. Harry later relates this incredible happening to his wife, who is not surprised by Bradley’s misfortune, citing an old curse she believes had been placed on Bradley’s house after a long-ago murder there. It is not the last time that superstition plays a part in determining the destinies of the various characters.

Meanwhile, both Bradley and Harry encourage the budding romance between Bradley’s easygoing employee, Oscar (Toby Hemingway), a former pot addict just beginning to pull himself together, and Chloe (Alexa Davalos), the coffee shop’s newly hired waitress. Soon after, the ever-hapless Bradley talks himself into a second doomed marriage, with Radha Mitchell’s Diana, the sensually scintillating (and hottest) number in the tangled proceedings. At the time of her marriage to Bradley, Diana is still enmeshed in a passionate affair with a married man, David (Billy Burke), for whom she inevitable abandons her husband. Bradley winds up in a hospital emergency room to reattach a severed finger after his pathetic attempt at self-mutilation in grief over Diana’s desertion. Ironically, it is in this same emergency room that Bradley emerges third-time-lucky with a true and lasting love. Harry and his wife are greatly relieved to learn of Bradley’s turn of good fortune, but we have long since been made aware of their own tragic back story, in the recent death of their estranged son from a drug overdose, certainly a contributing factor in Harry’s insomnia.

I must confess at this point, if only for the sake of the ever captious and suspicious, that I have been a close friend of Mr. Benton ever since he and the late David Newman (also a close personal friend) collaborated on the screenplay of Arthur Penn’s Bonnie and Clyde (1967). In the ensuing 40-year-period, I have often disclosed my critical conflict of interest in print, but Mr. Benton’s films were too important a part of the movie scene for me to refrain from reviewing them entirely. Hence, I happily joined the chorus of approval when he scored a critical and commercial bull’s-eye with such palpable hits as The Late Show (1977), Kramer vs. Kramer (1979), Places in the Heart (1984), and Nobody’s Fool (1994), while limiting myself to “constructive criticism” of such near and far misses as Bad Company (1972), Still of the Night (1982), Nadine (1987), Billy Bathgate (1991), Twilight (1998) and The Human Stain (2003). Very often, the sheer unpredictability from the result of casting choices plays a crucial role in the outcome of cinematic ventures in both the critical arena and the commercial marketplace.

I do not know yet if Feast of Love will be a palpable hit or a near miss with the critics and the public. Certainly, the apparent aptness of its casting, particularly with the selection of Mr. Freeman, Mr. Kinnear, Ms. Mitchell and Ms. Alexander, should keep it away from the abyss of opening-week blues. But what do I know? After all, I was just about the only New York reviewer who failed to be bedazzled by either Steven Spielberg’s Jaws (1975) or George Lucas’s Star Wars (1977). My excuse for underestimating Jaws has been that I don’t swim, and therefore couldn’t see how a shark could even get at me unless I fell off a ship or a plane, in which case I’d drown long before a shark could get a crack at my flesh. I have no such easy excuse for my resistance to Star Wars, except for my increasing aversion to juvenile science fiction, particularly as I have gotten older.

By the same token, time has only increased my addiction to love and lust in the movies, which makes my enthusiastic endorsement of Feast of Love doubly suspect. Still, I urge my readers to see the film with no pangs of guilt on my part whatsoever.

Feast of Love, based on the novel by Charles Baxter, has the earmarks of previous Robert Benton pictures such as The Late Show, Places in the Heart, Kramer vs. Kramer and Nobody’s Fool: a talented cast, including Morgan Freeman, Greg Kinnear and Jane Alexander; a thoughtful, economic script about love in a small town; and hilarious and heartbreaking small moments found in the every day. After the screening, over a dinner of linguine and clams, Mr. Benton was troubled by a scene where he felt the sound wasn’t at the proper level, but effusive in his praise of his cast. “I really do think that this picture, more than any other, is the actors’ picture,” he said.

“Once we cast Morgan,” he said, “I was aware that we had to cast everybody in that weight class. Acting is like a sport: If you have a heavyweight, you can’t bring in a middleweight. The middleweight can’t come up in weight class, the heavyweight has to come down.”

He ran through the rest of his cast’s attributes: Jane Alexander, whom he had previously worked with in the Oscar-laden Kramer vs. Kramer, was brought on to play Mr. Freeman’s wife; Greg Kinnear (“I think he’s like this generation’s Jack Lemmon; he makes you cry, he’s funny, he never lets you see the acting”); Radha Mitchell (“She has a kind of skittishness—very sexy, but very skittish. There was a discomfort in her that I liked very much for her character”); and young unknowns Toby Hemingway (“He was exactly right”) and Alexa Davalos (“She was extraordinary. She’s going to be a star”).

Casting is extremely important to Mr. Benton. “When I was going to direct the first time, I remember walking behind two people talking and thinking, How can I get actors to just talk and not act? And the secret was to hire good actors.”

And he has: he’s directed Meryl Streep, Dustin Hoffman, Sally Field, John Malkovich and Paul Newman in Oscar-nominated performances. He said he takes his time when casting. “Dustin used to say, ‘There is acting, and there is character, and you can’t act character,’” he said. “When I read actors, I talk to them for a while, so you can see a little bit of who or what they are. Not if I like them or not—though inevitably that’s a part of it—and not about how talented they are—though that’s a big part—but what else it is they are going to bring with their character? You cannot act wit. You cannot act intelligence.”

Author Richard Russo, who became a good friend during his collaboration with Mr. Benton on the adaptation of his novel Nobody’s Fool, followed by two further screen writing collaborations, said, “Benton prides himself on his casting, and I think he always casts his movies very well. But when you take pride in casting, that’s another form of self-effacement. Even when an actor who would not have been his choice is forced on him by a studio, they’ll end up doing well, because the screenplays are written so well. Even a miscast actor will come across very well in a Robert Benton movie. That’s not because he cast it well, it’s because he’s a good director and his screenplays—by the time he starts shooting them—are probably better material than that miscast actor has had in a long time.”

Mention the name Robert Benton to anyone who has worked with him and then duck while the superlatives fly.

“He’s sweet, isn’t he?” said Morgan Freeman at a special presentation of Feast of Love (and who, amazingly, really does speak in that booming voice all the time). “I adore him. Robert is one of those directors that has a clear understanding of his job as a director. One of the big draws of a director for actors is how far out of your way he’s going to be. The best directors I’ve worked with—and I’ll call him one of the best directors—keep out of the way. It’s not that they’re not there to offer you the help you think you need. He’s warm, he’s giving, he’s allowing—we all respond to that.”

“I would do anything Robert asked me to do,” said Jane Alexander. “He’s just one of the great directors that we have today in America. He knows exactly what he wants, he casts the roles exactly as he wants them. If he has anything to say, it’s a tiny little whisper in your ear, a tiny little drop. He sits there like a guru, meditatively to the side, listening to his headphones and then maybe he’ll come up quietly like, ‘Let’s do it again.’ It’s a wondrous experience, calm and joyous.”

“When I made a movie called Twilight,” said Mr. Benton, “I worked with Gene Hackman and Paul Newman. Gene would act, he’d do one take and do some modification. And I went into some elaborate explanation, and he stopped me and said, ‘Do you want me to do it better? I’ll do it better.’ And from then on, I’ve learned to say, ‘Just do it better.’ Louder, softer, keep it to a minimum. As a director you have to learn to trust the actors.”

“It was as good as an experience you could have with a director,” said Greg Kinnear. “He’s the kind of director you can work with time and time again, because he loves actors and he cares about the integrity of small stories. He has this great integrity that comes alive in his movies. He has this kind of deeply ingrained decency that maybe comes from that small town in Texas, or wherever it is he’s from.”

Robert Benton was born and raised in Waxahachie, Texas (population at the time, 5,000). His father, who attended the funerals of Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow, entertained his son with stories of the legendary outlaws. Mr. Benton struggled with dyslexia, and credits the movies—which he would see three or four times a week—as where he learned the art of narrative.

“I was very lucky that I had a father who, instead of saying, ‘Did you do your homework?’, would ask, ‘Do you want to go to the movies?’” he said.

After attending grad school at Columbia University, Mr. Benton became an art director at Esquire, working underneath legendary editors Clay Felker and Harold Hayes. “We were allowed to be like noisy kids trying to get attention,” Mr. Benton said. “I would never have left Esquire if I hadn’t gotten fired. I would have stayed there forever.”

Kept on as a consulting editor (“they paid me so little; they felt so guilty”), Mr. Benton decided to try screenwriting. What made him think he could attempt such a thing?

“Look, I come from a family that was deeply unrealistic,” he said. “Grasp of reality was slim at best. I’m dyslexic, I can’t spell, I can’t punctuate, and I took one creative writing class in college and flunked it. In the midst of doing this very unrealistic thing, I went to a friend of mine [David Newman] who was an editor at Esquire and I told him all about the glamorous life of the screenwriter—which was a total lie. A, I knew nothing about it; and B, it was a lie, because even if I had known that, I would have been lying. But I knew that he knew how to write; David Newman taught me how to write. I still write in a way that copies David. He was extraordinary.”

Mr. Newman (who passed away in 2003) and Mr. Benton went on to write There Was a Crooked Man …, What’s Up, Doc? and Bad Company. But it was their first film, Bonnie and Clyde, which included the team of producer Warren Beatty and director Arthur Penn, that turned them into bicoastal—and yes, fairly glamorous—legends.

The explosive Bonnie and Clyde changed everything in movieland when it was released in 1967, ushering in the era of the auteur, and kicking off a decade that would introduce the names of young punks like Bogdanovich, Coppola, Scorcese and Friedkin. “I believe there are conversations filmmakers have with one another that they don’t have across the table,” said Mr. Benton. “I believe Butch Cassidy [and the Sundance Kid] is a conversation that Will Goldman was having with Bonnie and Clyde. Its a conversation that can only be done through work.”

In August of this year, New York Times film critic A.O. Scott took the 40-year-old film to task for its depiction of violence and its role as a precursor to future cinematic bloodbaths.

“I think it was very smart,” Mr. Benton said of the article. “I think given the fact that there is the law of unintended consequences, that it’s a legitimate thing to say… Part of me wanted to say there’s two issues here: one is the aesthetic of violence, which comes from Bonnie and Clyde, but Bonnie and Clyde took it from Yojimbo and Seven Samurai, so if you’re going to hang somebody hang Kurosawa, don’t hang Arthur Penn. Second thing is, he’s right. We did something difficult—we made Bonnie and Clyde so ordinary, and that’s what’s disturbing. What made Pulp Fiction work is that there was something about Bruce Willis or John Travolta that was just like us. We understood them. And there’s something about The Godfather that was just like us. We’re drawn into the complicity of violence and that’s what’s disturbing.”

Mr. Benton has lived in the same apartment on the Upper East Side for four decades with his wife of 43 years, Sallie, an artist. He continues to go to the movies regularly. “There are directors that I’m jealous of,” he said. “In America [directed by Jim Sheridan], I’m jealous of that one. The Lives of Others [directed by Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck]—I could never have made that movie. I’m jealous of the last shot at the end of Babel [directed by Alejandro González Iñárritu], when the father finds his naked daughter on the balcony. It’s comforting and deeply unsettling. I love that.”

MR. BENTON SAID HE'S STILL LOOKING for ways to play with narrative in cinema. “I’m trying to figure out how you work in the second and third person in film,” he said. “I’m curious how to do different voices in terms of the camera. I don’t think we’ve begun to deal with that yet.”

“He’s got a bit of the devil in him, which I particularly like,” said Mr. Russo. “He’s impish in the Shakespearian sense: He likes to stir up a little trouble…He reminds me of Mark Twain in the way he recognizes human nature in all of its foibles. And I think the devil in him is that he enjoys those foibles—in himself and in his friends. He loves to laugh and he loves to chortle, which is a different kind of thing. Chortling at our weakness, our collective weaknesses, our individual weakness, in those wonderful moments in sheer glee at our fallible human nature—those are the moments we love in his movies. That’s the kind of thing Benton just lives for.”

Earlier Mr. Benton had told me: “The only thing I have to fear is my own despair. That’s my enemy, not anybody else. Not my inabilities. But if I give up. That is still to this day my biggest fear. My biggest enemy. Myself.”

Lately, however, Mr. Ramis has been steadily losing comic traction with the impromptu comedy team of Robert De Niro and Billy Crystal in the gangster-shrink shenanigans of Analyze This (1999) and its even lamer sequel, Analyze That (2002), and so he may have felt that it was time to vary his palette with some darker paints. Mr. Benton dealt with period gangsters in the film adaptation he directed of E.L. Doctorow’s nostalgic novel Billy Bathgate, but the predators there were more whimsical and less nihilistic than they are in Mr. Phillips’ take-no-prisoners scavenger hunt of a novel. The book, in fact, is much too brutal to be taken straight, even in a film noir.

Hence, Mr. Benton, Mr. Russo and Mr. Ramis are to be commended for recognizing this fact. If ever there were a time for a reprise of Terry Zwigoff’s Bad Santa (2003), this is it—and who better to play the bad Santa in The Ice Harvest than the original bad Santa himself, Billy Bob Thornton? As Vic, Mr. Thornton is a co-conspirator with John Cusack’s Charlie in a scam to fleece their mob boss of $2 million, then skip town in the midst of an ice storm. At least that’s the plan, but one never knows with a perpetually nervous antihero like Charlie, who seems to float through most of the film in an alcoholic haze, going from one seedy strip joint to another in Wichita, Kan.—a setting that is about a million miles from the humdrum Kansas of Dorothy and Toto.

Though Charlie and Vic don’t spend much time together until the fateful, corpse-filled climax, they are a perfect study in comic contrasts. Charlie compulsively talks too much for his own good, while the tactically taciturn Vic never lets his right hand know what his left hand is scheming. Both men have gone through disastrous divorces, both have lost their children, and both have neglected to buy any Christmas presents for them. Charlie does have a buddy of sorts in the even more drunken Pete (Oliver Platt), who is the only comparatively legit major character in the film (he’s an architect), though also bitterly divorced. One of the film’s comic highlights comes with Charlie and Pete’s invasion of an ex-wife’s “family” Christmas, complete with children and grandparents and a seething stepfather. After this scene, one is unavoidably reminded of the familiar statistic that homicide and suicide rates both rise during the Christmas season.

Completing the roster of non–Kris Kringle characters are Connie Nielsen’s accomplished femme fatale, Renata, who, like Charlie and Vic, is a manager of a mob-run strip club; Randy Quaid as mob boss Bill Guerrard, who comes all the way from Kansas City on Christmas Eve to find out what Charlie and Vic are trying to pull; and Mike Starr as Bill’s henchman, Roy, who spends most of his screen time in a footlocker trying to bargain for his life. Ms. Nielsen’s Renata is icy cold in her calculations, and an object lesson in how to play a lethal charmer plausibly without losing any of her erotic appeal. She alone is worth the price of admission, and a sufficient reason for me to go see anything in which Ms. Nielsen appears.

The world on view in The Ice Harvest is so universally corrupt that even the almost-accidental fatal shooting of a policeman doesn’t slow up the flow of quasi-hallucinatory incidents that gives the film a genuinely nightmarish quality. I can understand its very mixed reviews, as well as its not being everyone’s cup of tea.

Still, I can’t join in the criticism of the film’s last-minute softening of Charlie in the way of compassion for his fellow man. To follow the book to its final ironic oblivion would have made the movie completely unpalatable, which it is very close to being right now. What reviewers sometimes forget is that characters in movies, played by flesh-and-blood actors, can never be as disposable as they are in books, where they are made up of words, words, words. Charlie is hardly alone in this world as a self-pitying sinner with few (if any) scruples about what he has to do to survive, but we seldom see this brand of existential extremism prominently depicted on the screen. This alone makes The Ice Harvest worth seeing.

Desperate Characters

Duncan Tucker’s Transamerica, from his own screenplay, deals with a delicate subject that has seldom, if ever, been explored on the screen with this degree of clinical detail. The subject is transgendering—in this case, from male to female. As the film opens, a seeming woman named Bree (played by Felicity Huffman in a curiously and, at first, distractingly artificial style) is soon identified as a male in an intermediate stage of a sex change into a woman.

So here we have an Emmy Award–winning television actress from the popular series Desperate Housewives pretending to want to be what she already is in real life. One wonders if a similarly well-known male actor would be as acceptable (or as convincing) in a similar male-to-female role reversal. Transvestism is one thing, as Cillian Murphy demonstrated so brilliantly in Neil Jordan’s Breakfast on Pluto—but the whole nine yards is quite another. Hence, there’s more than a little play-acting in Mr. Tucker’s visual frankness with both male and female nudity, which in this context is more embarrassing than erotic.

The title of the film has a double meaning, in that the “trans” refers not only to sex change, but also to a long, folksy car trip from New York to California necessitated by Bree’s belated discovery that she sired a son 17 years earlier, in her one heterosexual alliance in college—one that was already semi-lesbian in spirit, as she confesses to Margaret, her analyst. Bree never knew about the existence of Toby (Kevin Zegers) until she learns that he has been jailed for soliciting men on the street. She has to leave her job as a waitress in a Mexican restaurant in L.A. temporarily to fly to New York and take charge of him. Not wishing to let Toby know that she is really his father, Bree pretends to be a church worker looking out for his welfare. This involves saying grace in a comically improvised manner, as well as trying to get him off drugs, cigarettes and alcohol. These pitiful reform efforts are mildly amusing with a clearly streetwise scamp like Toby, but at least Bree’s cross-country jaunt removes him from his dubious “environment.”

As the sheer looniness of Mr. Tucker’s plot contrivances, as well as his blithe disregard of geographical and sociological probabilities, begins to engulf Bree and Toby on their cross-country adventures, the viewer may become aware of the undeniably motherly feelings springing up in Bree’s manner. She also becomes a bit of a coquette in flirting with a philosophical, guitar-strumming Native American horse breeder, incongruously named Calvin (although the name is no more bizarre than the name of the Native American actor playing him—Graham Greene).

But the ever-touchy Toby can’t get over an American Indian proudly wearing a cowboy hat. Instead of getting offended by Toby’s surly bigotry, the warm-hearted Calvin gives Toby a cowboy hat at the end of their journey together; he then confesses his criminal past to Bree and gives her his card in case she ever wants to visit him. Calvin has actually rescued Bree and Toby from the perils of the open road after their car is stolen by a young hitchhiker that Toby has insisted on picking up, despite Bree’s vehement objections. Bree looks on helplessly and disapprovingly as Toby and the young stranger share a nude swim together in a lake; right after that, the stranger hops in Bree’s car and drives away. If it weren’t for Calvin’s timely intervention, who knows what might have happened to Bree and Toby—except that the narrative conventions Mr. Tucker has tapped into won’t allow anything seriously injurious to happen to the two before they’ve completed their respective journeys, with Bree on an operating table for the final stages of her sex-reassignment surgery and Toby in Hollywood appearing in a male porn film.

The most biographically revelatory sequence in the film reunites Bree with her seemingly well-to-do but estranged family, consisting of a still comically disbelieving sister; a horrified mother named Elizabeth (Fionnula Flanagan), who is presented as something of a horror herself; and a weirdly benign and totally miscast Burt Young as Murray, the mysteriously understanding father.

Toby goes into a hissy fit when he finally discovers that Bree is his real father, not an otherwise inexplicably concerned church lady. When Elizabeth becomes giddy with excitement over her newfound grandson, Toby toys with the idea of staying on with Bree’s family as he lazes in their private pool—but the call of the wild proves too strong, and he disappears the next morning. By this time, I was perplexed to discover that any character in the film could be surprised by anything.

There are far too many calls of nature for my taste, attributed by Bree herself to all the diuretics she’s been taking as part of her treatment. It is a wonder indeed that she retains her incipient womanly dignity and sensitivity throughout her ordeals. Bree comes off the sturdiest of heroines by returning to a workaday normality after teetering on the edge of the abyss. In her final, very quiet reconciliation with Toby, she becomes what her own mother never was: a non-judgmental maternal presence in his ever-troubled life. Ms. Huffman’s greatest acting achievement as Bree is her ultimate unleashing of an intelligence and level-headedness that is truly beyond gender.

Next Keaton? Gromit!

I sometimes wish that I could become addicted to animated films, non-narrative abstract cinema, and even the most audacious new ventures in the nonfiction-film category. Why am I instead perpetually committed to live-action cinematography in the service of dramatic narrative performed by the immortal mortals of the acting profession as my cultural drug of choice? I suspect that I am simply too old to know better.

I’m prompted to make these semi-rhetorical avowals of my self-imposed specialization in response to the impending 35th Anniversary of the Anthology Film Archives, sustained against all odds by Jonas Mekas, the one man most responsible for the accidental spark that set off my own thoroughly enjoyable career in film criticism and scholarship. My only regret is that I haven’t been able to embrace the totality of cinema as productively and creatively as Mr. Mekas has done throughout his long career. Thank you again, Jonas, and happy anniversary.

I am also prompted to these thoughts by my belated viewing of Nick Park and Steve Box’s Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit, from a screenplay by Bob Baker, Mark Burton, Mr. Box and Mr. Park. This happens to be the feature-film debut of the reportedly popular duo—cheese-loving inventor Wallace and Gromit, his mercifully mute, ever faithful and marvelously adroit canine companion. Why do I say “mercifully mute”? Simply because I can’t stand the affectedly comic voices attributed to, among others, Peter Sallis (as Wallace), Ralph Fiennes and Helena Bonham Carter. Don’t get me wrong: I have long admired Mr. Fiennes and Ms. Bonham Carter in a variety of live-action roles; in fact, I even accepted Ms. Bonham Carter’s voice work in Tim Burton’s Corpse Bride earlier this year. But I found all the voices in Wallace & Gromit unpleasantly screechy and thereby unreal.

Still, despite its vocal distractions, this clay-animation comedy adventure managed to dazzle me with its sheer audacity and inventiveness. Which gets us back to the “mercifully mute” Gromit, whom a friend hailed as the most concise example of comic expression since Buster Keaton—and I thoroughly agree. What Gromit shares with Keaton is his uncanny affinity for technology, and his ability to anticipate and deflect all manner of danger to himself and his beloved master. But first and foremost, Gromit, like Keaton, is the quintessential realist, always calculating the odds in his ongoing struggle for survival.

The high point of Gromit’s performance—and here again I agree with my friend—is his prudent expression of refusal when a dog who belongs to his master’s enemy pleads to be let into the locked car so as to escape a rampaging were-rabbit. Gromit eloquently says “no way” with a gentle shaking of his head and a slight rolling of his eyes. It is pure magic.

Lately, however, Mr. Ramis has been steadily losing comic traction with the impromptu comedy team of Robert De Niro and Billy Crystal in the gangster-shrink shenanigans of Analyze This (1999) and its even lamer sequel, Analyze That (2002), and so he may have felt that it was time to vary his palette with some darker paints. Mr. Benton dealt with period gangsters in the film adaptation he directed of E.L. Doctorow’s nostalgic novel Billy Bathgate, but the predators there were more whimsical and less nihilistic than they are in Mr. Phillips’ take-no-prisoners scavenger hunt of a novel. The book, in fact, is much too brutal to be taken straight, even in a film noir.

Hence, Mr. Benton, Mr. Russo and Mr. Ramis are to be commended for recognizing this fact. If ever there were a time for a reprise of Terry Zwigoff’s Bad Santa (2003), this is it—and who better to play the bad Santa in The Ice Harvest than the original bad Santa himself, Billy Bob Thornton? As Vic, Mr. Thornton is a co-conspirator with John Cusack’s Charlie in a scam to fleece their mob boss of $2 million, then skip town in the midst of an ice storm. At least that’s the plan, but one never knows with a perpetually nervous antihero like Charlie, who seems to float through most of the film in an alcoholic haze, going from one seedy strip joint to another in Wichita, Kan.—a setting that is about a million miles from the humdrum Kansas of Dorothy and Toto.

Though Charlie and Vic don’t spend much time together until the fateful, corpse-filled climax, they are a perfect study in comic contrasts. Charlie compulsively talks too much for his own good, while the tactically taciturn Vic never lets his right hand know what his left hand is scheming. Both men have gone through disastrous divorces, both have lost their children, and both have neglected to buy any Christmas presents for them. Charlie does have a buddy of sorts in the even more drunken Pete (Oliver Platt), who is the only comparatively legit major character in the film (he’s an architect), though also bitterly divorced. One of the film’s comic highlights comes with Charlie and Pete’s invasion of an ex-wife’s “family” Christmas, complete with children and grandparents and a seething stepfather. After this scene, one is unavoidably reminded of the familiar statistic that homicide and suicide rates both rise during the Christmas season.

Completing the roster of non–Kris Kringle characters are Connie Nielsen’s accomplished femme fatale, Renata, who, like Charlie and Vic, is a manager of a mob-run strip club; Randy Quaid as mob boss Bill Guerrard, who comes all the way from Kansas City on Christmas Eve to find out what Charlie and Vic are trying to pull; and Mike Starr as Bill’s henchman, Roy, who spends most of his screen time in a footlocker trying to bargain for his life. Ms. Nielsen’s Renata is icy cold in her calculations, and an object lesson in how to play a lethal charmer plausibly without losing any of her erotic appeal. She alone is worth the price of admission, and a sufficient reason for me to go see anything in which Ms. Nielsen appears.

The world on view in The Ice Harvest is so universally corrupt that even the almost-accidental fatal shooting of a policeman doesn’t slow up the flow of quasi-hallucinatory incidents that gives the film a genuinely nightmarish quality. I can understand its very mixed reviews, as well as its not being everyone’s cup of tea.

Still, I can’t join in the criticism of the film’s last-minute softening of Charlie in the way of compassion for his fellow man. To follow the book to its final ironic oblivion would have made the movie completely unpalatable, which it is very close to being right now. What reviewers sometimes forget is that characters in movies, played by flesh-and-blood actors, can never be as disposable as they are in books, where they are made up of words, words, words. Charlie is hardly alone in this world as a self-pitying sinner with few (if any) scruples about what he has to do to survive, but we seldom see this brand of existential extremism prominently depicted on the screen. This alone makes The Ice Harvest worth seeing.

Desperate Characters

Duncan Tucker’s Transamerica, from his own screenplay, deals with a delicate subject that has seldom, if ever, been explored on the screen with this degree of clinical detail. The subject is transgendering—in this case, from male to female. As the film opens, a seeming woman named Bree (played by Felicity Huffman in a curiously and, at first, distractingly artificial style) is soon identified as a male in an intermediate stage of a sex change into a woman.

So here we have an Emmy Award–winning television actress from the popular series Desperate Housewives pretending to want to be what she already is in real life. One wonders if a similarly well-known male actor would be as acceptable (or as convincing) in a similar male-to-female role reversal. Transvestism is one thing, as Cillian Murphy demonstrated so brilliantly in Neil Jordan’s Breakfast on Pluto—but the whole nine yards is quite another. Hence, there’s more than a little play-acting in Mr. Tucker’s visual frankness with both male and female nudity, which in this context is more embarrassing than erotic.

The title of the film has a double meaning, in that the “trans” refers not only to sex change, but also to a long, folksy car trip from New York to California necessitated by Bree’s belated discovery that she sired a son 17 years earlier, in her one heterosexual alliance in college—one that was already semi-lesbian in spirit, as she confesses to Margaret, her analyst. Bree never knew about the existence of Toby (Kevin Zegers) until she learns that he has been jailed for soliciting men on the street. She has to leave her job as a waitress in a Mexican restaurant in L.A. temporarily to fly to New York and take charge of him. Not wishing to let Toby know that she is really his father, Bree pretends to be a church worker looking out for his welfare. This involves saying grace in a comically improvised manner, as well as trying to get him off drugs, cigarettes and alcohol. These pitiful reform efforts are mildly amusing with a clearly streetwise scamp like Toby, but at least Bree’s cross-country jaunt removes him from his dubious “environment.”

As the sheer looniness of Mr. Tucker’s plot contrivances, as well as his blithe disregard of geographical and sociological probabilities, begins to engulf Bree and Toby on their cross-country adventures, the viewer may become aware of the undeniably motherly feelings springing up in Bree’s manner. She also becomes a bit of a coquette in flirting with a philosophical, guitar-strumming Native American horse breeder, incongruously named Calvin (although the name is no more bizarre than the name of the Native American actor playing him—Graham Greene).

But the ever-touchy Toby can’t get over an American Indian proudly wearing a cowboy hat. Instead of getting offended by Toby’s surly bigotry, the warm-hearted Calvin gives Toby a cowboy hat at the end of their journey together; he then confesses his criminal past to Bree and gives her his card in case she ever wants to visit him. Calvin has actually rescued Bree and Toby from the perils of the open road after their car is stolen by a young hitchhiker that Toby has insisted on picking up, despite Bree’s vehement objections. Bree looks on helplessly and disapprovingly as Toby and the young stranger share a nude swim together in a lake; right after that, the stranger hops in Bree’s car and drives away. If it weren’t for Calvin’s timely intervention, who knows what might have happened to Bree and Toby—except that the narrative conventions Mr. Tucker has tapped into won’t allow anything seriously injurious to happen to the two before they’ve completed their respective journeys, with Bree on an operating table for the final stages of her sex-reassignment surgery and Toby in Hollywood appearing in a male porn film.

The most biographically revelatory sequence in the film reunites Bree with her seemingly well-to-do but estranged family, consisting of a still comically disbelieving sister; a horrified mother named Elizabeth (Fionnula Flanagan), who is presented as something of a horror herself; and a weirdly benign and totally miscast Burt Young as Murray, the mysteriously understanding father.

Toby goes into a hissy fit when he finally discovers that Bree is his real father, not an otherwise inexplicably concerned church lady. When Elizabeth becomes giddy with excitement over her newfound grandson, Toby toys with the idea of staying on with Bree’s family as he lazes in their private pool—but the call of the wild proves too strong, and he disappears the next morning. By this time, I was perplexed to discover that any character in the film could be surprised by anything.

There are far too many calls of nature for my taste, attributed by Bree herself to all the diuretics she’s been taking as part of her treatment. It is a wonder indeed that she retains her incipient womanly dignity and sensitivity throughout her ordeals. Bree comes off the sturdiest of heroines by returning to a workaday normality after teetering on the edge of the abyss. In her final, very quiet reconciliation with Toby, she becomes what her own mother never was: a non-judgmental maternal presence in his ever-troubled life. Ms. Huffman’s greatest acting achievement as Bree is her ultimate unleashing of an intelligence and level-headedness that is truly beyond gender.

Next Keaton? Gromit!

I sometimes wish that I could become addicted to animated films, non-narrative abstract cinema, and even the most audacious new ventures in the nonfiction-film category. Why am I instead perpetually committed to live-action cinematography in the service of dramatic narrative performed by the immortal mortals of the acting profession as my cultural drug of choice? I suspect that I am simply too old to know better.

I’m prompted to make these semi-rhetorical avowals of my self-imposed specialization in response to the impending 35th Anniversary of the Anthology Film Archives, sustained against all odds by Jonas Mekas, the one man most responsible for the accidental spark that set off my own thoroughly enjoyable career in film criticism and scholarship. My only regret is that I haven’t been able to embrace the totality of cinema as productively and creatively as Mr. Mekas has done throughout his long career. Thank you again, Jonas, and happy anniversary.

I am also prompted to these thoughts by my belated viewing of Nick Park and Steve Box’s Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit, from a screenplay by Bob Baker, Mark Burton, Mr. Box and Mr. Park. This happens to be the feature-film debut of the reportedly popular duo—cheese-loving inventor Wallace and Gromit, his mercifully mute, ever faithful and marvelously adroit canine companion. Why do I say “mercifully mute”? Simply because I can’t stand the affectedly comic voices attributed to, among others, Peter Sallis (as Wallace), Ralph Fiennes and Helena Bonham Carter. Don’t get me wrong: I have long admired Mr. Fiennes and Ms. Bonham Carter in a variety of live-action roles; in fact, I even accepted Ms. Bonham Carter’s voice work in Tim Burton’s Corpse Bride earlier this year. But I found all the voices in Wallace & Gromit unpleasantly screechy and thereby unreal.

Still, despite its vocal distractions, this clay-animation comedy adventure managed to dazzle me with its sheer audacity and inventiveness. Which gets us back to the “mercifully mute” Gromit, whom a friend hailed as the most concise example of comic expression since Buster Keaton—and I thoroughly agree. What Gromit shares with Keaton is his uncanny affinity for technology, and his ability to anticipate and deflect all manner of danger to himself and his beloved master. But first and foremost, Gromit, like Keaton, is the quintessential realist, always calculating the odds in his ongoing struggle for survival.

The high point of Gromit’s performance—and here again I agree with my friend—is his prudent expression of refusal when a dog who belongs to his master’s enemy pleads to be let into the locked car so as to escape a rampaging were-rabbit. Gromit eloquently says “no way” with a gentle shaking of his head and a slight rolling of his eyes. It is pure magic.

Based on the cult novel by Gilbert Adair, it's a wry, contemporary Death in Venice scenario about an obsession that has life-altering consequences. The story begins in London, where Giles De'Ath (John Hurt), a reclusive widowed literary figure with a pronounced disdain for anything modern, gets accidentally locked out of his house and seeks shelter in a neighborhood cineplex, expecting to pass the time watching a movie translation of an E.M. Forster novel. Accidentally, he wanders into the wrong theater, finds himself watching a vapid, submental teen flick called Hot Pants College II , and falls madly, obsessively in love with a face on the screen belonging to an American teen idol named Ronnie Bostock (Jason Priestley).

Completely out of touch with the 20th century, Giles feeds his reluctant infatuation by collecting pinups and fan magazines and running all of Ronnie's videos, watching transfixed while puerile epics such as Skid Marks and Tex Mex unfold behind the locked doors of his Victorian study. Banishing his bewildered housekeeper (Sheila Hancock) from his private domain, he pretends to be embroiled in a heavy writing schedule while rifling through lovesick articles such as "Hollywood's Most Snuggable Fellas," pasting together a scrapbook that he labels "Bostockiana" and even forcing himself to embrace technology by purchasing a VCR and a TV set. His total commitment to this sudden bull's-eye of a Cupid's arrow finally leads him to the sleepy Long Island town where Ronnie lives. Ensconced in a motel and the object himself of local curiosity, this renowned man of letters finds himself cast adrift without a paddle in a place where people mistake Rimbaud for Rambo and teen crushes are a dime a dozen.

Undeterred by reality, Giles shamelessly risks every last vestige of his once-proud superiority and self-respect, summons his guile and cunningly descends upon Ronnie's live-in girlfriend Audrey (Fiona Loewi) in a supermarket, claiming his vast knowledge of the young man's career was picked up from his goddaughter, a rabid fan. Charmed by his eccentricity, she takes him home for a meeting with the object of his affections. Hilarity sets in. Comparing him to a painting in the Tate Gallery, Giles doesn't even flinch when Ronnie looks as blank as a used piece of gum. Brainless, but ambitious for a more serious career, the kid is flattered by the older man's analysis of the "Shakespearean elements in Hot Pants " and talk of a film project about a young deaf-mute's quest for love. While the old man waxes eloquent, the young man can barely mutter more than "Wow!" and "Cool!" and if you're curious about how it ends, or whether Giles ever conquers Ronnie the way Humbert Humbert tackled Lolita, you have to see the movie for yourself.

I can tell you that the head-on collision of cultures, the dry British humor and the way Mr. Kwietniowski has miraculously opened up a novel in which all of the action took place inside the lead character's head, add up to a film that is both touching and completely original. The unlikely co-stars work together with remarkable chemistry. Mr. Priestley, a pinup boy from TV's Beverly Hills 90210 , really is playing little more than himself, but he does it with great charm and generosity of spirit. Mr. Hurt, who has played everything from the Elephant Man to Quentin Crisp to Caligula, is no stranger to eccentricity. The role of Giles De'Ath is yet another portrait in his gallery of lovable grotesques, but he plays it with understated, elegant panache in a heady mixture of manipulativeness and vulnerability. Foolish and endearing, his bittersweet obsession becomes a cry for help in a wasted life, with universal audience appeal, while Love and Death on Long Island develops a distinguished voice of its own.

Twilight 's Beauty: Newman's Own

Brilliant, controlled direction by Robert Benton, a tough, lean script by Mr. Benton and Richard Russo, a lot of James M. Cain atmosphere and a splendid, mesmerizing cast make Twilight one of the most haunting and sophisticated murder-mysteries I've seen in years. Paul Newman, at 73 still one of the most charismatic and accomplished actors on the screen, plays a burned-out has-been cop turned private eye recovering from personal tragedies who emerges from an alcoholic stupor long enough to rescue the nymphet daughter (Reese Witherspoon) of two old movie star friends, Jack Ames (Gene Hackman), a fading actor dying of cancer, and his über-wife Catherine (Susan Sarandon). With no place else to go, Harry Ross (Mr. Newman) moves into the guest house above their garage in the Hollywood hills, becomes reluctantly involved in a blackmail plot, finds himself up to his bloodshot eyeballs in corpses and uncovers a 28-year-old unsolved murder that resurfaces in time to cast suspicions on everyone he trusts.

Was the death of Catherine's first husband a suicide, and why is somebody digging up the land at her abandoned beach house? Can the rich buy their way out of every scandal? Is Harry Ross the only person left with a moral conscience in a town deluded by material possessions and corrupted values?

James Garner, as another loyal retired cop with a lot of unexplained wealth, and Stockard Channing, as a career detective who once had a fling with Harry and still has an old itch that needs scratching, add salt to a flavorful brew that is anything but vanilla. The film is slow, but in an age of fast cuts and formula action, the time Mr. Benton takes to develop complex subtexts is refreshing, and the easy build of character creeps into your bones like mist rolling in from the Pacific. When the camera pans the contents of Harry's room, the cigarette lighter, the half-filled brandy glass, the polo pony on the discarded pink Ralph Lauren shirt and the .38 revolver tell more than 100 pages of exposition.

For a riveting film noir that demands attention, it's only 90 minutes long (the same length movies of this genre used to be when real craftsmen who knew how to make real movies in Hollywood's golden era were turning them out under the old studio system), and it serves as a reminder of what substantial crime melodramas ought to be. Best of all, Twilight fills the screen with polish and artistry. There's something reassuring about seeing this much seasoned talent on the screen at one time. It proves quality, sanity and order still exist, while Paul Newman serves as living proof that living beyond the ragged sleeve of time can be something to look forward to.

Sylvia Sydney, Still a Player

Here's another nostalgia trip to pencil in. Legendary and eternally youthful film star Sylvia Sidney will be honored at the historic Players Club on Gramercy Park, as part of public-relations czar John Springer's continuing tribute to "Forgotten Films to Remember," on Sunday, March 8. Ms. Sidney will be present to answer audience questions. Eschewing such classic films as Fury, Dead End, Street Scene and An American Tragedy , which are anything but forgotten, Mr. Springer has chosen to follow the lavish noon brunch with a series of film clips from Ms. Sidney's lesser-known and seldom-seen works. You'll get the rare opportunity to see the doll-faced star that Humphrey Bogart once called "every man's wet dream," in Merrily We Go to Hell with Fredric March, Madame Butterfly with Cary Grant and You Only Live Once with Henry Fonda. And just in case you were born yesterday, the program will bring Ms. Sidney up to date with her film work in Summer Wishes, Winter Dreams (she played Joanne Woodward's mother) and Tim Burton's wacky Beetlejuice .

Still a crusty octogenarian who is every bit as feisty as Gloria Stuart, the star got a jolt recently when one of her famous pug needlepoint pillows turned up in the Duchess of Windsor auction at Sotheby's. "The catalogue listed it as a pillow from 1955 because they mistook the signature S.S. for the year," said Ms. Sidney. "When I called them to tell them, they announced it on the auction floor, and the little pillow I was paid $300 for 30 years ago went for $12,000. You coulda knocked me off my feet. At 88, I finally feel like I'm all grown up."

In Twilight , two beautiful people of Hollywood folklore-Jack Ames, a former screen icon, and his wife Catherine Ames-are beautifully acted by Gene Hackman and Susan Sarandon. Theirs has been and continues to be a tabloid romance written in blood, though never theirs. They have always been careless, but there was always someone from their vast celluloid kingdom to clean up after them. That seemingly endless task has recently been entrusted to Paul Newman's Harry Ross, a burned-out and washed-up L.A. private detective with something between a crush on and a lech for Catherine.

Harry had originally been steered to the palatial Ames estate by Raymond Hope (James Garner), one of Harry's ex-cop buddies with a hillside mansion of his own. In Twilight , as in Hollywood since its first screen settlers, where you live and what you drive can be even more important than what you do. At the very least, these material proofs signify either how well you're doing or how well you want the world to think you're doing.

Harry's first job for the screen royals is to retrieve their nubile nymphet of a daughter, the terminally sullen and smartass Mel Ames (Reese Witherspoon), from the probably mercenary embraces of Liev Schreiber's Jeff Willis, one of the swarm of lucre-sniffing locusts infesting Hollywood. Harry takes care of Willis easily enough, but he is not so lucky with the enraged Mel, who accidentally shoots him in a region sensitive enough to set off speculation in Los Angeles that he has lost the last remnants of his already diminished virility. But this is only the first ordeal Harry must endure in his chivalric services to the Ames movie monarchy. It is but a comic prologue to a tale of blackmail, treachery, betrayal, murder and the truth revealed from an uncovered grave. Along the way, Mr. Benton and Mr. Russo have endowed Twilight with the nuances of a novel and the seeming ellipses of a screenplay adapted from it, even though the script itself is an original.

Mr. Newman's Harry has come a long way from the Hud (1963), Harper (1966), Hombre (1967) trilogy. The roguishness has faded from the piercing blue eyes, and has been replaced by something wiser and mellower. He was once the charismatic big star Mr. Hackman and Ms. Sarandon could never have been, despite their enormous talents. Yet it would have been a mistake to cast Mr. Newman as the aging ex-star. A Pirandellian pall would have fallen over the proceedings as viewers would lament the little bit of Norma Desmond in every faded screen deity. By being cast as a patsy with no delusions of grandeur, Mr. Newman is able to sneak up on audiences with a modulated version of the old magic. For their part, Mr. Hackman and Ms. Sarandon have a lot of fun spicing up their imperious roles with expertly delivered doses of guile, vinegar and vitriol.

Much of the plot of Twilight is reminiscent of both Mr. Benton's Nobody's Fool (1986), from Mr. Russo's novel with its existential locale of Last Chanceville, and Mr. Benton's The Late Show (1976), with Art Carney as an aging private detective and Lily Tomlin as a dizzy-dame sidekick. Curiously, Mr. Carney was a dozen years younger as the detective in The Late Show than Mr. Newman is as the detective in Twilight . Yet it was out of the question for the Carney character to have sex with the Tomlin character or anyone else. His TV sitcom fans would never have accepted such lewd behavior.

Indeed, many older viewers were shocked by the violence in The Late Show because of Mr. Carney's lovably avuncular presence in the cast. By contrast, Mr. Newman has never been a stranger to sex and violence. As Hud, he even helped Patricia Neal win an Oscar by raping the character she played. In Twilight , Mr. Newman's Harry enjoys an adulterous interlude with Catherine Ames, and at the final fade-out he is en route to a fling with a lady cop warmly and yet ironically played by Stockard Channing.

The point is, Mr. Carney was never young and lustful in movie terms, and Mr. Newman can never be old enough to withdraw from the hunt. As for the rest of Twilight , it draws, as did The Late Show , on many of the riffs and flourishes from the classic private-eye melodramas in the noir canon derived from the novels of Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler. The inevitably ill-fated Elisha Cook character is reprised by the combined team of Mr. Schreiber's Jeff Willis, Margo Martindale's Gloria Lamar and M. Emmet Walsh's Lester Ivar, a trio of losers in the criminal enterprises they initiate. Giancarlo Espositos's Reuben, a private dick wannabe until he realizes how life-threatening the occupation can be, provides a needed comic counterpoint to soften the aftershocks from spasms of brutish and clumsy violence.

Twilight is the kind of movie that people who have sworn off violence on the screen should see for its civilized virtues. The hard-core ghouls will stay as far away from it as they have tended to do with Quentin Tarantino's Jackie Brown and Curtis Hanson's L.A. Confidential . For the characters in Twilight , it is not yet Sunset Boulevard time. They are still teetering on the edge of the abyss, but they are scratching and grasping for life amid the faded elegance of past glories. The cast and their collaborators have succeeded in preserving the nobility, idealism and underlying morality of a genre that of late has too often succumbed to the cynicism and amorality of our age. Twilight lights up the cinematic sky with its craft and grace, and it sparkles even when it descends into the darkness of the soul.

Rea's Escape to New York

Robert Dornhelm's The Break , from a screenplay by Ronan Bennett, based on an idea by Stephen Rea, is held together mainly by the heroically understated charisma of Mr. Rea, the most underappreciated actor I have ever seen on the silver screen. He alone makes The Break worth seeing. In other respects, this is an inadequately articulated and flimsily constructed movie about an escaped Irish Republican Army prisoner named Dowd who seeks a new and nonpolitical identity in New York, and finds himself in the midst of an amateurishly revolutionary Guatemalan conspiracy. Pursued by the F.B.I. and knifed in a scuffle with urban lowlifes, Dowd drifts into involvement with the Guatemalans, led by his dishwasher friends Tulio (Alfred Molina) and Paco (Jorge Sanz). Dowd drifts also into a love affair with Tulio's sister Monica (Rosana Pastor), who bears a strong resemblance, with her sad Madonna eyes, to Roisin (Maria Doyle Kennedy), the Irish sweetheart he left behind in Belfast.

Drift has been the operative word for Mr. Rea's screen persona ever since he eased onto the screen in Neil Jordan's Danny Boy (also known as Angel ) in 1982. Since then, he has become best known for his strange, genuinely surprising relationship with a transvestite played by Jaye Davidson in Mr. Jordan's The Crying Game (1992). For me, and for hardly anyone else, Mr. Rea reached his peak in 1993 with Les Blair's Bad Behavior , opposite the enchanting Sinead Cusack. I was alone in thinking that this was the best movie of 1993. The Break is not as good, but Mr. Rea makes it worth seeing, particularly for his final, tragically self-defining expression-one of a man for our time of absolute chaos.

The Shue Thing: Harrelson's Helpless

Volker Schlöndorff's Palmetto , from a screenplay by E. Max Frye, based on James Hadley Chase's novel Just Another Sucker , should be more fun than it is. It's the kind of out-and-out trash that is almost guaranteed to be a guilty pleasure, particularly with three ultratalented babes like Elisabeth Shue, Gina Gershon and Chloe Sevigny. The big problem is Woody Harrelson as the newspaper reporter Harry Barber, who has just been released from prison after being cleared of the trumped-up charges used against him in the Florida seaside town of Palmetto.

Despite being welcomed back with open arms, open lips and open legs by Gina Gershon's Nina, a girlfriend who has "found" herself as a money-making sculptor in his absence, Harry is bitter, bitter, bitter. (Has Woody Allen started a run on Harrys, with Mr. Harrelson here and Mr. Newman's Harry in Twilight ?) Hence, sour, whiny Harry is fit to be bamboozled by the first dame to come along to offer him a scam requiring almost no work at all. Enter Ms. Shue as Rhea Malroux, the whistle-bait wife of Felix Malroux, a rich man who is dying of cancer. Rhea seems too good and bad to be true, if you know what I mean. Harry isn't completely fooled, but he is fooled just enough to find himself mixed up in two murders. There are many twists and turns in the narrative, but as Bobby Clark said in and of Victor Herbert's Sweethearts , "Never was a thin plot so complicated."