Carlyle.

The versatile, underrated Scotsman Robert Carlyle finally gets a starring role in California Solo, an unusual character study about a retired Britpop guitarist from the 1990s who moved to America after his band broke up and has been living for the past 15 years or so as a reclusive, alcoholic laborer, haunted by private demons from his past. By day, Lachlan MacAldonich works on an organic farm near Los Angeles and sells his prize tomatoes, radishes and corn at the Silver Lake farmer’s market in the city. At night, he hides away in a shabby secluded country shack where he deejays a podcast nobody listens to, playing records and dispensing information about classic rock stars like David Bowie and T-Rex while drinking himself unconscious. After he’s arrested for aggravated DUI, an old arrest for marijuana possession resurfaces, and instead of being slapped with a simple misdemeanor, Lachlan finds his immigration status in jeopardy. The movie is about how a simple man who thinks he’s managed to successfully forge a new life finds his peaceful existence turned upside down, and what humiliating and desperate things he is forced to do in order to avoid deportation.

Although Lachlan has become a legal permanent resident of the state of California, he has to hire an immigration lawyer to help him beat the rap and avoid jail time, but the man demands $5,000 he doesn’t have, plus another $10,000 to post bond. All of which dredges up the past Lachlan’s devoted his life to forgetting: his reputation back in the day as “the British Kurt Cobain” in a best-selling band called The Cranks, and the torturous guilt he feels for the drug-related death of his brother and band-mate. “California Solo” is the name of a hit song he recorded on his only solo album after the band broke up—and Mr. Carlyle sings it wistfully in the film’s most revealing scene—but that was years ago. Now his only hope of staying in the U.S. is to prove that his deportation would cause “extreme hardship” to a spouse or relative who is already a U.S. citizen. Against his will, Lachlan contacts the ex-wife and daughter he hasn’t seen for 10 years. The ex-wife (Kathleen Wilhoite) is less forgiving, but the daughter (Savannah Lathem) is so drawn to her Dad’s plight that she accompanies him on a wrenching trip to a pawnbroker to sell the vintage Les Paul guitar he played on his hit album. The film’s denouement involves the courageous ways Lachlan finds to resolve his past, face his future and find redemption.

The private hell of a man who tries to survive a fame that keeps intruding on his personal life is interwoven with writer-director Marshall Lewy’s critical feelings about America’s biased treatment of outsiders. The results are not always smooth. Lachlan is the only character who emerges as three-dimensional, and that is largely due to Mr. Carlyle’s sympathetic portrayal. There’s a dull and underdeveloped subplot about his unrequited attraction to a fickle female chef who buys his fresh produce, which never comes to anything at all, and his relationships with farm workers, bartenders and authority figures are superficial at best. But the star is vibrant and touching in every scene, often providing character revelations where none appear in the script. As his troubles increase along with his alcohol intake, it’s tough to watch him slide down the rabbit hole toward a bleak unknown. Mr. Carlyle, probably best known as the hardscrabble Dublin father of Frank and Malachy McCourt in Angela’s Ashes, and the divorced, unemployed steelworker who meets child support payments by becoming a male stripper in The Full Monty, takes full advantage of center-screen focus at last. In a bravura performance that is the primary don’t-miss reason for its existence, he gives California Solo all he’s got; even in scenes that just exist to pass the time, his presence informs the essence of the man he plays and the humanity of the film itself.

rreed@observer.com

CALIFORNIA SOLO

Running Time 94 minutes

Written and Directed by
Marshall Lewy

Starring Robert Carlyle,
Alexia Rasmussen and Kathleen Wilhoite

We've had vampires in Brooklyn and werewolves in Central Park, but cannibals in California is a new one on me. Get ready for Ravenous , a bloody, pretentious and paralyzing bore about soldiers in 1847 who feast on each other like blue-plate specials, turning fellow officers into stews and spareribs. The point of this nauseating display of De gustibus non disputandum is that you'll never order leg of lamb again once you've tasted thigh of second lieutenant.

The setting is a desolate military outpost in the snowy Sierra Nevada mountains where cowards and deserters are sent in the Mexican-American War. Eight actors on a journey to hell on ice are joined by Guy Pearce, the Australian pretty boy who was riveting as both a drag queen (in Priscilla, Queen of the Desert ) and a tough cop (in L.A. Confidential ). This time he plays a war hero dispatched to Fort Spencer, a filthy way station for weary travelers, as punishment for refusing to eat meat-a senseless plot ploy from which the film never recovers. At the fort he encounters one Indian squaw and a cast of drunks, addicts and morons that includes two of the most irritatingly mannered actors of the 1990's-Jeremy Davies, who has played mumbling, weeping, stuttering imbeciles in at least four films in the past year, and Stephen Spinella, who fawns and mewls his way through a Southern accent so phony the audience laughs every time he opens his mouth.

Suddenly, inexplicably, they are joined by a half-frozen Scotsman (Robert Carlyle, from The Full Monty ) who has survived three months in the wilderness by eating his traveling companions. When a crew of men sets out on a mission to retrieve the corpses, the Scotsman goes berserk and slaughters everyone but Mr. Pearce, who finally gives in to his hunger pains and devours the raw kidneys of his best friend. Naturally, he is never the same. Chopped carrots are no substitute for chopped fingers, and the nails make great toothpicks.

Back at the fort, where the guest list grows smaller in every scene, everybody is too busy quoting Benjamin Franklin and Aristotle to believe the lurid tale. Then Mr. Carlyle shows up disguised as the new commanding officer with a dastardly plan to turn the remaining colonels and generals into barbecue until the spring thaw, when the fort will feature a new menu of appetizing tourists. (Donner party, your hors d'oeuvres are ready!) As the plot grows weirder and sicker by the minute, Mr. Carlyle nurses Mr. Pearce back to vitality with jugular vein cocktails and says, "It's lonely being a cannibal-so tough making new friends," and the whole thing builds to a violent battle to the death between the last two cannibals to see which one gets to be breakfast.

I'd like to tell you I'm making it all up, but even Antonia Bird, the director, doesn't know if it's a comedy, a melodrama, or a lurid horror film, so what do you expect from me? Ravenous begins with a quote ("Eat me!") and moves swiftly into close-ups of men devouring plates of meat swimming in blood and there is vomiting throughout. The acting is dreadful, the pace is numbing, and bewilderment reigns. The stuff they choose to make movies about is a source of constant grim amazement. Wonders never cease, but they do sometimes cease to amuse. Bon appétit!

Planes, Trains, Runaway Grooms

With so many new actors hitting it lucky, so many agents packing and merchandising their talents like chewing gum, and so few quality movies for them to appear in, it's understandable why they so often choose the wrong ones. This is what happens to Ben Affleck and Sandra Bullock in Forces of Nature , a slender comedy that never goes for big laughs where small, benign chuckles will do.

He plays a buttoned-down, anal-retentive writer of blurbs on book jackets who is on his way to get married in Savannah, Ga. She plays a hippie with black toenail polish, tattooed navel and Vampira wig who squeezes into the seat next to his. In a series of disasters that follow, their plane crashes before it leaves the ground, they hitch a ride in the rental car of a druggie with a stash of pot and an expired driver's license and they get busted. This labored movie (lazily directed by Bronwen Hughes, whose only previous experience was the dreadful Harriet the Spy ) chronicles the draining adventures of mismatched traveling companions and the not-so-irresistible wackos they encounter along the way while he tries to make his wedding on time. Gary Cooper and Barbara Stanwyck might have made something of this square-vs.-free-soul scenario. Mr. Affleck and Ms. Bullock barely get by on their charm. If there's any chemistry, it stayed in the lab.

Switching to Amtrak, they get rerouted to Chicago and stranded in a laundromat, where they're robbed of all their money and credit cards. Broke and desperate with zero options, they invade a Miami-bound bus loaded with senior citizens on a condo-buying excursion, pretending to be newlyweds. On a motel layover, his best man (Steve Zahn) and his fiancée's maid of honor (Meredith Scott Lynn) show up and discover them sharing a queen-size bed. Things are not much smoother down in Savannah, either. The bride (Maura Tierney) is hysterical, the wedding dress arrives damaged, her parents (Ronny Cox and Blythe Danner) have separated, and an old boyfriend shows up to claim squatter's rights.

By the time Mr. Affleck ends up stripping in a gay disco to earn enough money to buy a wrecked car, I found myself checking my watch. But there's still a hurricane on the way, as well as some concern about whether the film will ever end. Complicated and contrived, Forces of Nature is a film that wastes some good people, but it sort of grows on you, and Mr. Affleck is actually endearing as a confused, clean-cut conehead who realizes he still has a few wild oats to sow before he's mature enough for marriage. Which girl he ends up with is your discovery to make.

"All you can do is commit to the people you love, hope for a little luck, and some good weather," is Mr. Affleck's character's moral, but does it have to take two hours? It's a harmless way to waste time, but with Y2K on the way, who has two hours to waste?

On Film, Harmonists Sound Better

In a curious (and, to my knowledge, unprecedented) stroke of timing, a movie and a Broadway show based on the same subject material have both opened in the same week. The movie, directed by Joseph Vilsmaier in German with subtitles, is The Harmonists . The play, co-directed by Patricia Birch and Susan Feldman, is Band in Berlin . Both explore the life and work of the Comedian Harmonists, a popular vocal group during Hitler's rise to power that was beloved by millions of German music lovers and on its way to international fame when its career were halted because three of its six members were Jewish. If you only have the time, money and interest to see one version of their story, don't miss the movie.

Richly textured and beautifully acted, The Harmonists is a deeply moving canvas of life in Berlin from 1927 to 1935, a time of unemployment, hunger and unstable politics when six broke and struggling musicians formed a unique show-business act using funny hats, corny songs and voices arranged in five-part harmonies like musical instruments. They rehearsed in a brothel, performed for everyone from the Gestapo to Hitler himself, and made more than 200 recordings. They even played Radio City Music Hall. Although their songs ran the gamut from Duke Ellington to the overture from The Barber of Seville , they specialized in harmless sentimental fluff of the "tra-la-la" variety.

The movie uses actual recordings of the group, evoking a sense of time and place, while meticulously examining the diverse lives and personalities of the five singers and their pianist. Harry Frommermann, the lyric baritone who founded the group, was the son of a cantor; Robert Biberti was a blond, strapping Aryan who sang bass, handled business affairs and stole Harry's girlfriend; Ari Leschnikoff was the Bulgarian tenor and resident lothario; Erich Collin was the Jewish-born second tenor, baptized and raised as a gentile, a bon vivant who spoke seven languages fluently; Erwin Bootz was the 19-year-old accompanist, and Roman Cycowski was the happily married Polish Jew who, after fleeing the Nazis, ended up in Palm Springs, where he died in 1998 at the ripe old age of 97.

Life was peachy until this group of innocent people with no politics or prejudices at all was finally ruined and forced to disband with the cheers of a devastated country still echoing in their ears. The film has some powerful scenes of joy and tragedy. In one, a vicious anti-Semite from the Reich's Ministry of Music threatens the group with extinction, and then asks them for an autograph. The film also restages their final sold-out concert in 1934, following the announcement that they would be forced to disband because of non-Aryan "racial impurity," when the stunned audience fell silent, refused to leave the concert hall, then erupted in a wild and tearful standing ovation in support of the music they adored.

Such dramatic sweeps are only sketchily observed in Band in Berlin -the production opened at the Helen Hayes Theater on March 7-which is more of a cabaret act than a play. Using still photos of the period on a stage hung with swastikas adds an eerie authenticity, but 22 songs mostly translated into English and performed by Americans do not have the same impact. The effect is lulling. The skimpy text also leaves out some of the film's most salient facts. (The group's loyal accompanist later divorced his Jewish wife to save himself from persecution, and married the daughter of a high-ranking Nazi.)

Band in Berlin adds nothing to the film, but seeing The Harmonists contributes immensely to a fuller understanding of the play. Either way, another little-known chapter of a brutal history has come to life with compelling emotional force, and the Comedian Harmonists are finally getting the recognition they richly deserve. Heil, Harmonists! I say, as their music lives on.