Plame, the attractive blond secret agent who made a fool out of Dick Cheney after disclosing the truth about the fact that there were no "weapons of mass destruction" in Iraq, and her husband, Joe Wilson (Sean Penn), a former ambassador to Niger under President Clinton who dispelled the false rumors circulated by the State Department that Niger was selling uranium to Saddam Hussein to build a nuclear bomb, were labeled traitors. When the White House declared war on Iraq and ignored Joe's investigative reports that no uranium purchase ever took place, he wrote a New York Times editorial about the lies the Bush-Cheney administration was feeding the American public and all hell broke loose. Retaliating against her husband's disagreement with the government, the Bush gang leaked Valerie's secret C.I.A. status to the Washington press, destroying her career, endangering her life, and nearly wrecking her marriage.

Defending her integrity after so many of her informants in the Middle East were promised jobs in the U.S. and protection for their families, then deserted by the State Department, she took a long time to lick her wounds and follow her husband's advice to speak up in Congress. Valerie and Joe each wrote books, and the result was a blizzard of  political articles that reversed the world's opinion of America's illegal invasion of Iraq, plunging a big chunk of the Bush administration into Congressional ethics investigations and criminal indictments, or landing them in jail. Valerie Plame ended up a heroine in pearls, and the Bush administration remains to many a disgrace that polarized the nation and slaughtered the economy.

Fair Game attempts to open the file on this ugly and complex chapter in American history with a steady stream of revelations, but while the result is politically sobering, it is also cinematically awkward. 

 Full of crypto-C.I.A. jargon that only succeeds in confusing the audience, the script by Jez and John-Henry Butterworth hits the ground running, with Valerie leaving the house at 3:45 a.m., saying she's going to Cleveland and ending up in Amman, leaving instructions on Post-Its. When a scene finally arrives in which overdue explanations are declared, everyone talks at once, rendering coherence impossible. The actors have all been indulged by director Doug Liman to mumble.  Important interrogations of Iraqi weapons experts are infuriatingly garbled, C.I.A. motivations and strategy unexplained. The C.I.A. flies into damage-assessment mode, covering for the White House by firing their best spy, with the lives of her 15 top sources in Baghdad hanging in the balance; the people who trusted her accuse her of betrayal; the press has a field day; and the F.B.I. launches a criminal probe to reveal the identity of the culprit on Capitol Hill who leaked the classified information about Valerie. Scooter Libby? Karl Rove? Dick Armitage? While Valerie Plame becomes "fair game" (hence the title), the list of suspects who broadsided her add up to the ingredients of a top-notch espionage thriller, but her escape from the C.I.A. building is nothing more than a ludicrous restaging of Angelina Jolie's same scene in Salt.

 Naomi Watts is credible, and Sean Penn is battered and über-intense, but no real electricity or suspense builds, even when their lives are in jeopardy and their marriage in shards. Her case, corrupted by a troubled administration of meatheads and distorted by the press, became a good example of America's long history of promising democracy to the disenfranchised and then taking it back. The Bush gang falsified evidence supporting the theory that Iraq was ready to nuke us, then coerced the C.I.A. into rubber-stamping the lies. Valerie Plame and Joe Wilson were in the middle; everything they stood for was on the line. Her redemption is a story worth telling and Fair Game is an important exposé of corrupt political power gone toxic. It's good enough that it deserves to be better.

rreed@observer.com

FAIR GAME
Running time 106 minutes
Written by Jez and John-Henry Butterworth
Directed by Doug Liman
Starring Naomi Watts, Sean Penn, Ty Burrell, Sam Shepard

3/4

Out of nowhere in Rick Moody's new novel The Four Fingers of Death, there is a gay sex scene involving two astronauts flying on a rocket ship to Mars. "There was a sharp stabbing sensation, sort of how I imagine it must feel to find your innards impaled on a pike," Mr. Moody writes. "This was the Big Bang of interplanetary sex." The scene goes on for almost 10 pages, ending with the line, "The two of us breaststroked around the capsule, attempting to swallow the afterglow of our profane and inadvisable entanglement."

Most striking about Mr. Moody's scene is the lack of restraint. Mr. Moody is not alone. Two thousand and ten has been a summer of strange, dirty sex in American fiction. Writers are dealing with the topic in all its awkward, gruesome and (one hopes) lascivious detail. Fictional sex in 2010 is as unhinged as Norman Mailer's apocalyptic orgasm. Forty years after the old guard's fictional promiscuity, the mere presence of sex in fiction has long ceased to be interesting. Authors now focus less on the social implications of writing about sex and instead on the thematic possibilities of the act itself.

This summer's novels run through the entire spectrum of possible intercourse: missionary, ménage à trois, bondage, torture and every variant in between. In all instances, sex is not an aesthetic decoration, a superfluous indulgence or a signal of an author's bravery; it drives plot and defines character. The scenes are highly stylized in erotic, often gritty language: the 18-year-old performing oral sex on a music executive old enough to be her father in Jennifer Egan's A Visit from the Goon Squad; the virile Sam Sheppard's extra-marital affairs in Adam Ross's wonderful debut, Mr. Peanut; Benjamin Israelien's tongue cleaved to the clitoris of a woman impersonating his mother in Joshua Cohen's Witz. The sex scene, as it becomes more and more pornographic, paradoxically shifts from hormonal to metaphorical. The dirtier the sex, the more essential it is to the story.

Take Bret Easton Ellis, hardly a prude. In Imperial Bedrooms, he writes one of his most troubling depictions of sex, but also his least gratuitous, to the extent that the scene allows us to better understand Clay, his antihero. Clay gives two young prostitutes-a boy and a girl-cupcakes laced with laxatives. "Smeared with shit," Clay recalls, "I was pushing my fist into the girl and her lips were clinging tightly around my wrist and she seemed to be trying to make sense of me while I stared back at her flatly, my arm sticking out of her, my fist clenching and unclenching." Far from sex for sex's sake, Clay is finally enacting the physical violence that he has wanted to perform on his fellow characters since we first met him in 1985's Less Than Zero.

It is no accident that many of the writers offering the most unreserved representations of sex have expressed anxiety about the state of the novel and of publishing, particularly the increasing digitization and consequent simplification of language. Gary Shteyngart in his excellent Super Sad True Love Story interprets this directly through the juxtaposition of Eunice Park's Gchat-speak emails with the long form prose of Lenny Abramov's diary entries, creating what is, essentially, a critique of technology-mediated writing. Lenny's jarring eloquence-"She must have sensed just how much her youth and freshness meant to me, a man who lived in death's anteroom and could barely stand the light and heat of his brief sojourn on earth. I licked and licked, breathing in the slight odor of something authentic and human"-is mirrored by Grace's crude e-chatter-"I met this old, gross guy at a party yesterday and we got really drunk and I sort of let him go down on me."

If Mr. Shteyngart asserts the threat of technology's stunted sentence structures to oversimplify language, Jonathan Franzen in Freedom expresses the reverse of the notion. Sexual desire in Freedom is unhinged in emails, phone calls and instant messages, but in practice is often adolescent or tame ("It was fine, having sex with him"). When really pleasurable intercourse occurs, it is as vulgar as the digital version of the act. Patty and Walter, the novel's central troubled couple, finally throw caution to the wind after two decades of polite lovemaking, but Walter's newly minted experimentation in bed (actually, on the floor) is prefaced as "the violent actions which, without her consent, would have been a rapist's." Still, "instead of her usual demure little sighs of encouragement, she was giving forth large screams."

Sex in fiction is, more and more, a device through which authors experiment and take risks. A participant in the second highly pornographic scene in Mr. Moody's book unknowingly sums it up quite succinctly: "Would I be coy about a device that's all about turning the tables so that what's wrong is right," Mr. Moody writes about a decidedly different kind of device, "and what was bottom is now top?"

Brothers
Running time 110 minutes
Written by David Benioff
Directed by Jim Sheridan
Starring Natalie Portman, Jake Gyllenhaal, Tobey Maguire, Sam Shepard, Mare Winningham

Brothers is the latest in a long string of “back from the war and wish I was dead” movies, following on the heels of the still-fresh and far superior The Messenger. An unnecessary remake of a 2004 Danish film with the same title by Susanne Bier, it’s a Cain-and-Abel drama transferred to small-town America about a good brother named Sam (Tobey Maguire) who goes off to Afghanistan at the same time his bad brother, Tommy (Jake Gyllenhaal), returns home from prison. A soap opera ensues with more clichés than one movie can survive.

The two stars look so much alike that at times it’s hard to tell who’s who and which is which. You believe they are brothers, but the buck stops there. Sam is a Marine captain and the apple of his family’s eye. Clean-cut and dedicated to the military, he is headed for his fourth tour of duty in Afghanistan, leaving behind his wife, Grace (Natalie Portman); two daughters; and parents who worship him (Sam Shepard and the wonderful, wasted Mare Winningham). Tensions brew before Sam even boards the transport. Grace, who does not share her husband’s loyalty to a second-rate war nobody understands, is not happy to be left alone with no job and two kids to raise by herself, and everything is doubly daunting thanks to the gung-ho family patriarch, a former Marine who considers Sam a hero and regards Tommy, a tattooed slacker who has served time for armed robbery, as a good-for-nothing family disgrace. Grace, a former cheerleader with ample pluck, does her best to cope, but when Sam is seriously wounded in action and then reported dead, the volatile, irresponsible Tommy takes over his brother’s duties and becomes inappropriately romantically attracted to his sister-in-law. What the Cahill family doesn’t know is that Sam is not dead, just captured and tortured by the Taliban along with a fellow Marine from his hometown. While Sam is starved and buried in a hole, Tommy is painting Grace’s kitchen. Forced at gunpoint to kill his cellmate under threat of death, Sam sacrifices his friend’s life for his own—a decision from which he never recovers. By the time he gets rescued and sent home to his shocked family, he’s so psychologically damaged and physically emaciated that now it is his turn to seek the love, acceptance and forgiveness brother Tommy used to crave. Overwhelmed by guilt, shame and paranoia fueled by the suspicion that Grace and his brother became lovers while he was gone, Sam inspires fear and anxiety in the whole family, and all we can do is wait for events to build to a tragic, near-fatal and inevitable conclusion.

The venerable Irish director Jim (My Left Foot, In the Name of the Father, In America) Sheridan’s talent for creating tight, emotional films filled with domestic moral dilemmas seems to have curdled. Brothers addresses the effects of a pointless and unpopular war on the sanity of the men who are fighting it, and on the stunned and confused families who are waiting for them to come home, but there isn’t much psychology in it, and very little contextual drama to unravel. Natalie Portman glows. Sam Shepard glowers and rants. During Sam’s absence from home, the brothers, for all intents and purposes, switch identities. This leaves Mr. Gyllenhaal too abruptly charming as Tommy, and the miscast Mr. Maguire, so wimpy and genteel throughout as Sam, suddenly becomes consumed with such uncontrollable rage and jealousy that he seems subject to fits. These changes are too swift and alarming to be believable. The contrived script by David Benioff fails to strongly develop character, forcing the cast to do more reacting than acting in a stale movie that is less drama than melodrama.

rreed@observer.com

Ms. Packer also said that former Mayor Ed Koch and MSNBC legal analyst Dan Abrams usually vote at her polling place towards the end of the day, along with "a couple people from soaps who I don't know."

Austin Scarlett, the Project Runway Season One contestant who now designs bridalwear, was voting at Hayden. He was instantly recognizable, and perfectly put together, in navy pinstriped pants, brown shoes, gray suit jacket, blue patterned ascot, brown bowler hat, and vintage brown glasses.

"I love Michelle Obama's style," Mr. Scarlett said. "She's definitely, I think, closely modeling herself on Jackie O, which I think works for her. Cindy McCain sort of has this evil queen beauty about her that is intriguing. She's always composed and she's definitely a well-dressed and chic lady."

Does vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin have style? "No, the hair is just bad," said Mr. Scarlett. "Even with the hundreds of thousands of dollars she's spending, she's still just a little on the frumpy side. And, you know, when you're going for an international role that you're gonna fill, you really need to sort of dress the part of a world class leader and she's not that."

And what about Mr. Obama? "Well, Barack, he's so handsome," said Mr. Scarlett. "I'd like to see him in something in a little more fitted, a little more streamlined, while still keeping the classic, conservative look that you have to do."

On Mr. McCain, Mr. Scarlett was emphatic: "I would just keep him in his uniform!"

Prison movies may not be everyone’s idea of escapist entertainment, but with nearly two million people overcrowding the U.S. penal system already and the numbers growing daily, it’s a problem worth addressing. Audiences are gruesomely fascinated by horror stories behind bars, and like the phenomenal TV series Oz, the stuff that happens in a tense, taut new movie called Felon is nothing less than electrifying.

The versatility and charisma of the dynamic, always surprising actor Stephen Dorff is the catalytic converter in this harrowing story of an innocent man caught up in America’s flawed legal system. One minute Wade Porter is a nice, hardworking guy with a devoted fiancée, an adoring 3-year-old son, a promising future and a new bank loan to start his own business. The next minute he’s awakened by a thief who invades his home, and in the ensuing chase to protect his family, he accidentally kills the intruder with a baseball bat. Through a legal loophole, he’s arrested, stripped, fingerprinted, thrown into a county jail with a cell full of rapists, addicts and killers, then charged with first-degree murder. Before you can yell “Help!” he’s in Dragon Country.

Through a plea bargain conceived by incompetent public defense lawyers, he gets a three-year stretch in a state prison, but before he even gets there, another prisoner is knifed on the bus and the weapon planted on Wade. Three years turns into six, and like William H. Macy in David Mamet’s nightmarish Edmond, he’s the only blond, blue-eyed Caucasian in a snake pit called “the shoe”—a lockup for the hardest cases where the word rehabilitation does not exist. In the shoe, vengeance, brutality and hopelessness are the talismans everyone lives by. The boss is now a sadistic guard (Harold Perrineau, a doomed inmate himself on Oz) who stages his own weekly fun and games by throwing prisoners of all races, sizes and mismatched physical dimensions into a concrete cage called “the yard,” where they are forced to fight it out with bare knuckles, guns pointed at their heads from the guard booth, like gladiators. Bloody and broken in body and spirit, Wade loses his house, his truck, his tools and finally his family, and his only way out is death—or a miracle.

The miracle comes at last with the aid of his cellmate, a lifer without the possibility of parole (Val Kilmer), who forms a strange attachment to Wade’s plight, and of a retired guard (Sam Shepard) who pulls a rabbit out of a dead man’s hat. No spoilers. How it turns out is up to you, but be forewarned and forearmed: Felon is not for anyone with a heart murmur. As prison flicks go, it is exceptionally well directed and written by Ric Roman Waugh with maximum realism, and the acting is positively superb. Stephen Dorff is so convincing that he makes you feel his pain, terror and courage. A few clichés abound (monstrous guard, oblivious warden, innocent victim, vicious inmate with empathy), but the film plants you behind bars where the laws and rules of society no longer apply, and you’re at the mercy of both cops and killers, all of them bad. With fresh cases reported weekly about wrongly convicted prisoners who are locked up unfairly then later proven innocent after their lives are permanently damaged, a movie like Felon really makes you think while you shudder. Just consider the number of people who should be locked up, and some of them live in Washington, D.C.

rreed@observer.com

We were talking last week to Horst Rechelbacher, the founder of Aveda, about the $4.3m penthouse apartment he just bought at his One Fifth Avenue co-op.

"The view here is Heaven," exclaimed Mr. Rechelbacher, referring to his wrap-around porch. "Heaven on Earth with a view."

"It's 360," he continued. " I see New York from all points of view. I'm not looking at buildings, I'm looking over them."

Now, Mr. Rechelbacher, who already owns the apartment next door, will have the top floor all to himself.

"I'm just going to take the wall out and combine them," he said. What will it look like? "Well, I mean. It will look cool. It's going to look cool. I'm using pretty much all recycled furniture--antiques. And it's going to be Jugendstil, which is Austrian. I'm going to do the apartment very Austrian."

He will also do it very sustainable: everything will be recycled-- including bamboo floors, bathroom glass, and tile. And, of course, the paint will be non-toxic.

As for that Austrian art deco furniture: "I use Josef Hoffman, he's my favorite Jugendstil designer. He has clean, simplistic design: it's very modern, very timeless. Doesn't have any frills."

Mr. Rechelbacher says he will probably have some Egon Schiele ("to match the Jugendstil"), plus photography by Richard Avedon and Horst P. Horst-- whom Mr. Rechelbacher assisted with hair and makeup before founding Aveda in 1978. In 1997, Mr. Recehelbacher sold Aveda to Estee Lauder for $300 million cash. He has since founded Intelligent Nutrients.

Even with a full-floor, Fifth Ave. aerie, Mr. Rechelbacher isn't going to be a homebody.

About twice a month he'll stay at One Fifth Avenue--where last year Jessica Lange and Sam Shepard, plus Blyth Danner Paltrow, bought apartments. Mr. Rechelbacher spends most of his time at a 570-acre organic farm in Osceola, Wisconsin.

Might he consider selling his new and improved penthouse co-op?

"Oh, no, no, no, no," he said. "This is my apartment. It's my studio!" (He's an artist on the side).

"I've been using it for my art and for my hotel," he continued. " I don't have to rent a room now."

- Max Abelson

Over the years, I've seen many of Mr. Shepard's productions on stage, and I recall being moderately impressed by their explosive renderings of family conflicts and sibling rivalries, but I can't say they've continued to resonate in my mind. Yet with all the honors the 60-year-old Mr. Shepard has received over his 40-year career-as an actor, playwright and screenwriter, stage and screen director, poet, journalist, short-story writer, monologist and celebrated movie hunk besides-he qualifies as the closest thing we have to a bona fide Renaissance man.

Since it's unlikely that many people will bother to see this latest manifestation of Mr. Shepard in Mr. Almereyda's difficult-to-describe nonfiction enterprise, it's reasonable to assume that Mr. Shepard had some compelling personal reason to reveal some hitherto guarded aspects of himself-if only to himself and his most devoted admirers. Mr. Almereyda gives us a clue as he recalls the initiation of the project: "When Sam Shepard asked me to make a movie about his new play, neither of us had a fixed idea about what would come of it. I showed up with digital-video cameras and a small crew. Soon enough, I had cause to realize how rare it is for actors to allow themselves to be filmed in rehearsal-under pressure, searching, exposed."

Mr. Almereyda goes on to describe the imponderables of his own modus operandi: "In the editing room, I considered resorting to half-whispered narration-like what you'd get in a nature program about lemurs in Madagascar, tracking the elusive creatures in their natural habitat. A certain rawness, an element of exposure, lingers in the finished movie. There's something thrilling, I think, in the spectacle of working actors-in T-shirts, pajamas and a variety of odd hats-recklessly flinging themselves from the heights of Sam Shepard's language. And there's something equally fascinating in watching Mr. Shepard wrestle in public with the ghost of his father, whose death triggered the writing of the play."

So there we have it. Mr. Shepard wanted to say something about his feelings for his father, dead or alive-or, rather, dead and resurrected-in the messy process of bringing a literary conceit to life by collaborating with a troupe of largely autonomous actors. It's a blurry form of double exposure, if you will, an uneasy mixture of rhetorical affectation with bits and pieces of confessional sincerity. Since I've only seen Messrs. Nolte, Penn, Harrelson, Gammon and Marin on the screen (I can't remember ever having seen Ms. Tousey in any medium), I can only speculate on how good any of these people were onstage. There is no substitute, after all, for physical immediacy. But what were they showing me? Something that looked like good stage work represented through the medium of film, or the real thing? It's a tricky proposition any way you look at it, especially when the writer and director, Mr. Shepard, is giving his own intuitively expert performance. The awkward moment when Mr. Shepard begins to tease Mr. Nolte about his football days at the University of Nebraska is alone worth the price of admission. Otherwise, This So-Called Disaster is an unbridled orgy of uninhibited Stanislavsky.

Retracing the Tramp

Charles Chaplin's Modern Times (1936) at the Film Forum was either hailed or reviled in its time as the first Chaplin film to tackle a theme of social significance with any degree of ideological consistency. Yet its alleged topicality was always the least of its charms. Chaplin, like René Clair before him in À Nous la Liberté (1931) and Jacques Tati after him in Mon Oncle (1958), hated machinery for reasons more aesthetic than ecological-an attitude more Luddite than Leninist. Still, the mechanical feeding sequence in Modern Times is probably the funniest routine in cinema history. It's hardly surprising that the humor is derived not from the historical logic or technological plausibility of the feeder, but from Charlie's goggle-eyed reaction to his mechanical tormentor. Chaplin's factory may be half–René Clair pseudo-modern and half–Fritz Lang comic-strip totalitarian, but Chaplin himself is the supreme cinematic performer of all time.

Nonetheless, it's hard to believe today that an astute 30's critic like Meyer Levin could praise Chaplin for aligning the Tramp with the world's working stiffs. The feeling that emerges most clearly from Chaplin's characterization is a studied distaste for his comrades in industry. Nothing personal or anti-socialistic, mind you; the Tramp just happens to hate work, and this hatred is consistent with the logic of his classical prototypes. He may chortle at the dove-like gyrations of a young middle-class couple, but he ends up yearning for the most grotesque tokens of economic security-a cow to be milked at the front door, grapevines crawling around the cottage like Virginia creepers, and a resourceful street gamine as immaculate child bride (played by Paulette Goddard-here and in The Great Dictator -as the urban descendant of Mary Pickford's girl of the rural slums). For the sake of this regressively childlike and sexless ménage, the Tramp announces proudly that he will make the supreme sacrifice and go to work. He is clearly one of the poetically unemployed, Mr. Micawber masquerading as Mother Courage.

At times, the Tramp's happiness is uncomfortably opportunistic. Unjustly imprisoned, he thwarts an attempted jailbreak and is rewarded with a comfortable cell and other special privileges. The siren call of liberty holds no charm for him, and his fellow convicts, like his fellow workers, sink into the slough of anonymous grayness reserved for abject creatures of economic necessity; hardly the stuff of comrades in arms for the supposedly oncoming revolution. All in all, Chaplin's Tramp gets off quite a few stops before the Finland Station.

The Western Front

Also being revived at Film Forum is Fred Zinnemann's High Noon (1952), from a screenplay by Carl Foreman and produced by Stanley Kramer. The press release claims the film is the favorite Western of three Presidents, Reagan, Clinton and Bush II. It's certainly not mine, but if you've never seen it, you could do a lot worse these days than to check it out, particularly with this spanking new print struck directly from the original negative, which is unprecedented even for its original release 52 years ago.

This 85-minute Oscar contender came out at a time when Oscar contenders could run for only 85 minutes without being considered hopelessly unimportant. The story concerns an aging sheriff (Gary Cooper) about to retire with his Quaker bride (Grace Kelly) and move to another town in the Old West to operate a grocery store. But he's forced to confront a returning outlaw (Ian MacDonald), just released from prison and vowing revenge with his gang on the sheriff who sent him there in the first place. To make matters more desperate, and more bitterly ironic, the sheriff is abandoned by the whole town, which he has made safe for its law-abiding citizens. Even his deputy (Lloyd Bridges) deserts him out of pique at not having been named his successor.

High Noon is one of the least scenic and horse-oriented Westerns ever made, as all the action is confined to a dusty town and its train station, where the arch villain is scheduled to arrive shortly before high noon on Judgment Day. There are innumerable shots of clocks taken from all angles, punctuating with showy montage the suspenseful passage of time.

Howard Hawks once asserted that his Rio Bravo (1959), with John Wayne and Dean Martin in the lead roles, was partly intended as a rebuke to High Noon , which spent most of its running time commiserating with its miserably lonely and forsaken hero, who then proceeds virtually single-handedly to kill the whole gang, after which he drops his badge into the dirt at his feet to express his disgust with all the townspeople belatedly gathered around him after the big shoot-out.

Wayne's sheriff in Rio Bravo , facing hordes of hired killers, pointedly refuses help from law-abiding volunteers because their inexpertness with firearms would make them more trouble than their civic spirit is worth. Zinnemann retorted angrily that Hawks was entitled to his opinion, but High Noon and Rio Bravo were two very different movies. Hawks wanted to remake High Noon to his own specifications, and he went ahead and did so. For his own part, Zinnemann added, he had no desire to remake Rio Bravo . Strangely, I'm more sympathetic to Zinnemann now than I was back during my polemical frenzy with the politique des auteurs .

I am still suspicious, however, of the exalted reputation of High Noon for its allegedly allegorical assault on the McCarthyism of the 50's by soon-to-be blacklisted screenwriter Carl Foreman. The moral cowardice of an entire frontier community is tediously depicted again and again by a steady procession of hammy character actors displaying the same old yellow streak. In Zinnemann's defense, however, I should add that Wayne's sheriff in Rio Bravo actually ends up with three very competent helpers in his deputy played by Martin, a young gunslinger played by Ricky Nelson and Walter Brennan's old geezer, still very handy with a shotgun.

When I interviewed Zinnemann (1907-1997) in 1982 after his last somewhat underrated film, Five Days One Summer , I brought up the sensitive subject of Grace Kelly's singularly pallid performance in High Noon . I say "sensitive" because it was strongly rumored that Kelly had a ring-a-ding-ding with Zinnemann, as was frequently her wont on the sets of her movies. Zinnemann freely acknowledged that she hadn't been very good despite all his efforts, and then he went on to say that Hitchcock had managed to get so much more out of her in Rear Window (1954), Dial M for Murder (1954) and To Catch a Thief (1955). I liked and respected him for his frankness and generosity, and I felt vaguely guilty for having hammered him so hard in The American Cinema .

I still prefer the romanticism of Ford in The Searchers and Hawks in Rio Bravo to the comparatively sober realism of Zinnemann in High Noon , and I still think that Wayne has been as underrated as Cooper has been overrated. Indeed, I firmly believe that Joel McCrea had a wider acting range than did Cooper. I was recently looking at Zinnemann's Julia , and though I didn't like most of the movie, the last few scenes in Germany reminded me of the Zinnemann of People on Sunday (1930), a potentially free spirit too often hobbled in his later career by an excess of prudence and caution, but still more than incidentally a very nice guy.

The committed Mr. Hoffman and Mr. Reilly, more widely known for their movies, are alternating roles in this near-mythic battle between Lee, the white-trash drifter and small-time thief, and his brother Austin, the college-educated Hollywood screenwriter. The two stars, both in their early 30's, have performed together in Hard Eight , Boogie Nights and Magnolia (all directed by trendy Paul Thomas Anderson). They couldn't be hotter in the Vanity Fair sense. Too hot!

The first time I saw the fine, measured production directed by Matthew Warchus, Mr. Hoffman's scummy beer-bellied Lee had only to open his mouth to say the word "coyote" for the young audience to collapse into gales of admiring laughter. It's hip to be trash among the youthful middle class. But the Hoffman-Reilly groupies took the laugh-track strudel that night. At times I felt like the restless character in Ionesco's Bald Prima Donna calling out to strangers: "Stop grinding my teeth!"

So much for prissiness. Sam Shepard's screamfest is funny enough in its own weirdly schizophrenic right, with its dark, absurdist undertow of emotional murders and the death of the American family. It could have been made for these two modern actors, just as a generation ago the 1982 revival of True West made stars of its then unknown leads, John Malkovich and Gary Sinise.

On my second visit-and for me, the more satisfying one-Mr. Reilly was playing the slob Lee, and Mr. Hoffman the neat, meek screenwriter, Austin. It's said by admirers of both versions that you can't tell the difference when they switch roles. But if that were the case, why are they bothering? Why trouble to alternate roles to reproduce identical performances?

No, the achievement of Mr. Warchus' production is that if you happen to see it twice, you'll have no sense whatsoever of déjà vu . Mr. Hoffman and Mr. Reilly are different actors cut from the same cloth. In that sense, they're like Mr. Shepard's warring brothers on stage. They're opposite sides of the same person. But it is their exhilarating authenticity and aliveness as actors that keep each version of this True West fizzing and explosively different.

The play itself is the third of Mr. Shepard's "family" plays he wrote in the late 1970's with Curse of the Starving Class and Buried Child , and for my money it's his best. It's certainly my favorite, though perhaps I'm overinfluenced by the scene in which Lee clubs a typewriter to death. Frustrated at being unable to type, or write, he smashes it to pieces with a golf club. It's one of the great theatrical moments. True West could be about writing (were it not about more important things). Lee is instinct, Austin is intellect, and caught in the middle is a writer named Sam Shepard murdering his typewriter as he wrestles with a play entitled True West .

The play concerns what develops when the two estranged brothers meet up at their mother's kitsch suburban Los Angeles home with its little Astroturf carpet. Family man Austin has borrowed the place to complete a movie script and take a meeting with Saul, a parodiable Hollywood big shot. By the play's end, the brothers have taken over each other's identities in a lethally fraternal power game, and the cozy family home has been wrecked in a symbolic nightmare of an America trashed.

True West satirized venal Hollywood before David Mamet's Speed the Plough and David Rabe's Hurly Burly . But its central themes are bigger than that, as well as being typical of Mr. Shepard's work-the end of frontiers and the death of family; the illusion of mythic America (the true West) and its empty reality (the wild West of Hollywood cowboy movies); the suffocating need for brotherhood, for fathers, flight, solitude, sanctuary.

The spiritual death of the American Dream goes to the heart of True West . What is real anymore? Mr. Shepard's answer, I suspect, would be zilch is real, except for the stories that are too unreal not to be true. Hence the fantastic tale in True West about the destitute, soused father of the two brothers who lost his teeth twice. His real teeth fell out, and he mislaid his false teeth in a doggy bag of chop suey.

And that great mythic invention, the American family? "We don't even need a family anymore," the dramatist said in a recent interview. "You can have an imaginary family. To even talk about the structure of the family anymore is ridiculous." He meant the limitless brave new frontier of the Internet. If he'd written True West today, the confused Lee would have clubbed an Imac to smithereens instead.

Yet the renowned drama can seem simplistic. Mr. Shepard falters when he flies his messages on a flag. "There's nothing real down here, Lee. Least of all me," Austin confesses (though there's no need). "Here's a thought for you," Lee announces. "Saul thinks we're the same person. One and the same!" Or even, "There's no such thing as the West anymore. It's a dead issue."

Well, not quite dead when the battleground belongs to such incendiary talents as Mr. Hoffman and Mr. Reilly who act so well together. Perhaps I was unfairly influenced by the laugh-track groupies lapping up Mr. Hoffman's every move as Lee, but I much preferred Mr. Reilly's more corrosively dangerous version. Mr. Hoffman is the kind of Method actor who, like Robert De Niro, will gain 500 pounds to do justice to a role, if necessary. Here he actually acts with his belly-taking a little too much exaggerated pride in Lee's own scumfest by sticking out his beery gut like a badge of trailer-park honor. In one wonderfully misguided moment, he lets out his anger on a telephone by diving headlong on top of it, belly first. He bounces up, and does it again! Which isn't an easy thing to do. I wouldn't try it if I were you. But Mr. Hoffman's daring sumo moment brings down the house.

He acts well as the bullying slob, but we see him acting. In his edgy entertaining bravura, he tends to leave little hidden in reserve. Good though Mr. Hoffman is, he never truly frightens us as Lee, whereas the more mercurial, centered Mr. Reilly does. His less showy Lee possesses the crucial ingredient of menace. His ugly mood swings could turn homicidal at any moment. His "I've got some writin' to do here, boy!" isn't just a comic threat, but a psychotic warning. Mr. Hoffman's Lee is a character; Mr. Reilly's the killer.

But, then, I thought that Mr. Hoffman's screenwriter Austin had the edge over Mr. Reilly's version both in his transformation from wimp to murderous drunk and in the wild Gothic absurdity of the play's funniest scenes. Is there a more wacko scene anywhere than when the lights go up on about 15 shiny toasters that meek Austin has stolen to prove some insane point? "There's going to be a general lack of toasters in the neighborhood this morning!"

We could smell the toast he made in them. Comforting stuff, hot buttered toast. Even to desperate people lost in unrecognizable places.

The production also has two first-rate cameos from Robert LuPone, as the smarmy Hollywood sleazeball, and from Celia Weston as Mom, who returns to her wrecked home unexpectedly with the idea of meeting Picasso who she says is visiting Los Angeles. She doesn't know Picasso's dead. But then, people believe that the true West is still alive.

Vinnie wants Carter to drop everything and come West to rescue Vinnie from a false charge of harassment filed by a woman named Cecilia (Catherine Keener), who turns out to be a sweet checkout girl at a supermarket counter. Vinnie doesn't actually ask Carter to come, he orders him to come, in a distinctly menacing tone familiar to us from the oddly ominous plays of Harold Pinter. It seems that Vinnie is in possession of a shoebox jammed with pornographic pictures, with which he threatens to blackmail Carter, Carter's wife, Rosie (Sharon Stone), and anyone else who might have been involved in a racing scam many years ago when Vinnie, Carter and Rosie were hanging out together on the fringes of Churchill Downs.

I must confess at this point that I am making Simpatico seem much more linear than it plays, with two separate casts for Vinnie, Carter and Rosie then, and Vinnie, Carter and Rosie now. There is not really that much resemblance between Mr. Nolte, Mr. Bridges and Ms. Stone in the present, and Shawn Hatosy, Liam Waite and Kimberly Williams in the past. By going back and forth in time with dizzying confusion, the makers of Simpatico can invoke the ancient alibi of the avant-garde, simply that the chaos of art expresses the chaos of life, and you wouldn't complain if you weren't hooked on all those silly "commercial" entertainments.

On the plus side, Simpatico is graced with an unusually strong cast for such a marginal offshore project, one in which the individual scenes count for more than the film as a whole. I never saw the play on the stage, but I can recognize in the tortured relationship between Vinnie and Carter a typical male-sibling-or-pseudo-sibling confrontation in which the true worth of human beings is weighed on Mr. Shepard's histrionic scales. It follows that Vinnie begins looking like a derelict, and ends up in a suit and tie, whereas Carter reverses the process by shedding his identity as a C.E.O. with a cell phone to become Vinnie's slovenly mirror image.

Meanwhile, Mr. Shepard's windy rhetoric of guilt and corruption completely engulfs the puny plot that is supposed to drive the characters. It seems that Vinnie and Carter once blackmailed a racing official named Simms (Albert Finney) with pictures of his fornication with Rosie so that he would look the other way when they perpetrated a racetrack betting swindle that became the seed money for Carter's subsequent fortune. An embittered Rosie then blew the whistle on Simms, compounding his disgrace and avenging herself of her own voluntary self-mortification.

When Vinnie tries to get Simms to expose Carter, Simms refuses with a weary shrug of philosophical resignation about the past. He is more interested in the virginal purity of the present represented by the unsullied Cecilia, who wants nothing more than a box at the Kentucky Derby as payment for her Platonic services for Vinnie, Carter and Simms. Mr. Shepard has never lacked a flair for the kind of dialectical theatricality that seduces actors with its aura of cutting-edge absurdism about something being rotten in the state of existence. Movies, however, are too intransigently illusionist to do anything but stare blankly at Mr. Shepard's larger-than-life theatrical conceits. Movies don't really need a dose of stage magic to supplement their own primal capacity to create a second universe out of the first.

Mr. Warchus and his collaborators have tried to transcend their intermedia problem through endless acrobatics with magic-marker montage. "Look," the filmmakers seem to be saying, "this is not just another movie but, rather, a special event for all you smart people out there who have outgrown Hollywood." Past keeps colliding with present to fashion an uncertain future. Curiously, for all its misguided zeal and half-baked ambitions, Simpatico strikes me as an encouraging sign of a trend against all the prevailing wisdom that movies have become more cynically bottom-line and derivative than ever before. Certainly, the turf is covered too much in that fashion journalistically by people who know the grosses of everything and the value of nothing. At the very least, Simpatico is not quite like anything else, and many films around right now can claim the same distinction, for better or worse.

A Very Obscure Map Of the World

Scott Elliott's A Map of the World , from a screenplay by Peter Hedges and Polly Platt, based on the novel by Jane Hamilton, piles more mystifying misfortunes on Alice Goodwin (Sigourney Weaver) than most movie protagonists are in the habit of having to endure. But nothing seems to pierce her mood of surly detachment and disenchantment. From the outset, she seems unable to communicate with her two small children and her farmer-husband Howard (David Strathairn). She does seem to bond with Theresa Collins (Julianne Moore), her next-door neighbor with whom she exchanges baby-sitting duties with the four small children they have between them. Alice's first catastrophe occurs when one of Theresa's children dies in a pond while Alice is upstairs looking at a map of the world she once made for her mother. Theresa says she doesn't blame Alice, but the two families are temporarily estranged.

Hard upon the heels of this disaster, Alice, a school nurse, is accused by an unpleasant young waitress named Carole Mackessey (Chloë Sevigny) of sexually molesting her bratty son, and is immediately clamped in the local hoosegow. The local people immediately believe the worst, paint obscene graffiti on the Goodwin house, and even spit on the husband in public. Unable to raise bail, Alice languishes in jail with an assortment of other females, most or them black, most accused of capital crimes. Alice sets herself apart from her cellmates by reading Dostoyevsky in her spare time, and being as sassy and superior with them as she has been with almost everyone else in her life.

Ms. Weaver has been iconically one of our most likable actresses, and we desperately want to know what is really eating her Alice. But she never deigns to tell us. If Simpatico is overwritten for the screen, A Map of the World is woefully underwritten. Alice and Howard never have an honest-to-goodness heart-to-heart conversation even under extreme duress. Does she resent farm life with a husband who has only recently left the city to take up this activity? Does she resent Howard's rich and intrusive Mother, Nellie, especially as played by Louise Fletcher, who is in fine One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest form as the most infuriatingly reasonable person on the planet? Alice is mostly mum on these and all other subjects.

Yet, things get curiouser and curiouser when the trial finally begins, and Alice's tough defense lawyer, Paul Reverdy (Arliss Howard), begins destroying the reputation of Alice's apparently sluttish accuser. Instead of being grateful for the helpful ferocity of the beleaguered Alice's lawyer, Alice's husband expresses disgust with the lawyer's tactics as if his wife's freedom is of secondary importance. This I don't get. Normally, I would consider it grounds for divorce. But there is nothing normal about the behavior of the characters in A Map of the World . Of course, Alice is acquitted, though we never actually see the jury delivering its verdict or, for that matter, all that much of the trial. We do see some graphically topless marital love scenes, but only as a means of building to a cooling of desire in the marriage as still another cross Alice must bear on her way to an ending that is less happy than vague and haphazard. Still, Ms. Weaver, Ms. Moore, Mr. Strathairn, Ms. Fletcher, Mr. Howard and Ms. Sevigny are hardly chopped liver as an acting ensemble.

Bhutanese World Premiere

Khyentse Norbu's The Cup is reportedly the first feature film from Bhutan, and you may well ask, so what and where is Bhutan, anyway? According to my copious program notes, Bhutan is located somewhere in the foothills of the Himalayas, and borders Tibet and India. The director is described as "one of the most important lamas in the Tibetan Buddhist tradition, who at age 7 was recognized as the incarnation of the great religious reformer and saint Jamyang Khyentse Wangpo."

Although Mr. Norbu counts among his mentors the 14th Dalai Lama, his film mentor is Bernardo Bertolucci, for whom he served as a consultant on Mr. Bertolucci's 1993 epic film, Little Buddha . What is most interesting about The Cup is its good-natured demystification of the unalloyed spirituality attributed to the Tibetan refugee monks in India and elsewhere by such Western celebrity admirers as Martin Scorsese, Brad Pitt and Richard Gere, along with the aforementioned Mr. Bertolucci. With a cast drawn mainly from members of the Chokling Monastery, Mr. Norbu tells a simple but affecting story of a group of soccer enthusiasts trying to raise enough money to rent a television set and satellite dish during the summer of 1998 championship match. Mr. Norbu has summed up the real-life monkish mania for soccer with the following aphorism: "You might say football is their religion and Buddhism is their philosophy." The biggest game of all in The Cup is a cosmic humanism expressed with kindness and humility.

'Twas ever thus. After all, it was only yesterday when Sam Shepard's 17-year-old Pulitzer Prize-winning drama, Buried Child , was nominated for best new play-as opposed to best revival of a play. Obviously, to sensible souls such as you and me, a 17-year-old play cannot be a new play. It must be a revival. Because it's an old play. And there we would be wrong.

The producers of Buried Child pointed out to the rapt Tony Awards administration committee that there were 1,151 lines in the play, but that Sam Shepard had cut, or rewritten, 519 of them for the new production. It was, therefore, half a new play, and half a Pulitzer Prize-winning play. The half that counts got the Tony nomination.

Members of the 24-strong Tony administration committee include every major Broadway producer, and the lads have exceeded themselves this year. But praise where praise is due: The committee wisely came to the decision this season that the Broadway production of Swan Lake could not be entered for best musical. They thought, and they thought, and they ruled: While Swan Lake has music, the ballet itself is not a musical.

So far, so good. But then the Tony Awards nominating committee went and spoiled it-nominating Swan Lake 's Matthew Bourne for best direction of a musical, and its lead dancer, Adam Cooper, for best performance by a leading actor in a musical.

Not since Buried Child was declared new, or half-new, have we had such fun. The spokesman for the Tonys is Keith Sherman, and each year I like to drive him insane by asking him to explain how black is white, or vice versa. He holds up well, considering. "We're here to serve," he said, anticipating the worst.

I asked if he could kindly explain to us how Swan Lake is ruled not to be a musical, yet its director and lead dancer are nominated for their work in a musical. The most patient Mr. Sherman replied: "The committee wants to recognize individual contributions. So while Swan Lake isn't eligible for a Tony Award as a musical, Adam Cooper, for example, can be recognized for best performance in a musical."

"Except he isn't in a musical," I couldn't help but insist. "He's in a ballet. Why not recognize a performer who is in a musical?"

"That's up to the nominating committee," he replied.

There is a certain neat Orwellian logic to all of this. The British dramatist Pam Gems was no doubt a little surprised to be nominated for best book of a musical for Marlene , particularly as it closed virtually overnight, alas. Marlene -with the usual Dietrich songs-was billed as "a New Musical Play." Mr. Sherman explained: "We needed to decide, was this a play or a musical? We decided it was a musical."

Well, why not? It's clear-they need to make up the numbers. It Ain't Nothin' but the Blues doesn't have a book. It is therefore nominated for best book of a musical. They say it's got a book, just as they say Marlene is a musical. They say lots of things.

Fosse can't be nominated for best choreography because the choreography isn't new. Rules are rules. The show is a re-creation of Bob Fosse's choreography over his lifetime. How, then, can it be nominated for best new musical when the music isn't new, either? "Because," Mr. Sherman explained, "the sum of its parts creates a new musical."

Maybe so. Let's see: Fosse has no book, no plot, no characters. The choreography isn't new; nor is the score. It isn't a revival. It's a new musical!

If an actor is billed above the title of a play, he's eligible for the category leading actor in a play. Same for actresses. The excellent Elizabeth Franz is named above the title of Death of a Salesman . But Judi Dench is felt to be a shoo-in to take the Tony for leading actress. (If not her, then Zoë Wanamaker for the role of her career in Electra .) The producers of Death of a Salesman therefore asked the administration committee to make Ms. Franz a "featured actress." She now qualifies for a Tony as best featured actress in a play, which she will win.

It could be worse. Not too long ago, Joan Rivers was nominated for best actress in a play. True to its longstanding tradition of reversing all logic, the nominating committee solemnly asked itself: "Who is an actress who isn't an actress?" So they nominated Joan Rivers as leading actress in a play that wasn't a play. Sally Marr … and Her Escorts -who could forget it?-was a monologue.

Incidentally, that's why Jackie Mason returned his honorary Tony. Because he believed that his own Broadway monologue had been egregiously overlooked as best play.

Last season, Cabaret was ruled eligible for the Tony Awards in spite of being produced at the old Henry Miller Theater, which isn't eligible for Tony Awards. ( Cabaret went on to win four Tonys.)

This season, another musical, Rollin' on the T.O.B.A. , was produced at the same theater, but it was ruled ineligible for the Tonys. Why?

"They weren't in an eligible house," came the answer.

Nor, of course, was Cabaret .

And by now, you will believe, as I do, that the earth really is as flat as a mad pancake. I wouldn't dream of hinting that the people who administer the Tony Awards have even the teensiest conflict of interest. Nor do I say that the nominating committee in its wisdom makes little or no sense even to those of us who are partially sane. No, siree. I say Swan Lake is a musical-and the envelope, please!