Pride Unprejudiced: Three for the Weekend

Hancock ***

Essentially a shaggy-God story, the riotously primal Hancock makes for a swell ride with a brusque take on a comically disheveled superhero. Where Wanted is a splendid bauble of heartless Eastern cruelty, what's on show in Hancock is instead something surprisingly heartfelt, going way beyond mere sentimentality, with a level of investment and inflection that teems with glorious incaution.

Among the levels that jostle are a satire of shallow self-realization philosophizing, with the idea of destiny versus choice considered as if O Magazine where a trade journal dispatched from atop Olympus. Stewart Brand, who spearheaded the Whole Earth Catalog, the Internet avant le letterin a bound foolscap tablet, liked to say, "We are as gods and might as well get good at it." Hancock's had a while. He's not gotten good at it. That's what the perennially hung-over Hancock (Will Smith) wakes to each day: expectations and responsibilities he cannot even remember the source of, squinting from beneath a scraggly watch cap on a bus bench, reaching for his customary quart of Gentleman Jim's Bourbon.

And he makes a mess of Los Angeles: he's the superhero who couldn't land straight. Liabilities and warrants ensue. Hancock opens with a cross-cut action scene that's in media res embodied: what's the need for an origin myth in your opening reel if you can fling all the contradictions of the character in mid-air? Soon, Hancock saves the life of Ray Embrey, an idealistic public relations guy, played by the ineffable Jason Bateman. (We've just seen Ray's good works shot down in a Big Pharma boardroom peopled by co-producers Akiva Goldsman and Michael Mann as jaded corporados; a Biograph theater reference later on, alluding to Mann's forthcoming Public Enemies is one of many throwaway in-jokes amid the vivid frames.) Hancock gets Ray home after the literal trainwreck of his life, and Ray's convinced that he can turn his skills toward making people understand Hancock. (As if he understood himself.) He can be a good guy. He's not to be taken for granted, sneered at. Over dinner, Hancock meets Ray's son, and his wife, Mary (a fleet, complicated Charlize Theron), the "angel" who changed his life at its lowest point.

The easy equipoise of Bateman's on-screen characters, if you put aside the wonderful speed-freak run-a-rant he had in Smoking Aces, run in Hancock to his expressions of slight and hunt when certain things sour: indicated but not underlined, bolded, capped. A picture is a flicker in itself. There's a duplicitous charge in a number of scenes where characters withhold knowledge, don't correct misperceptions, don't disclose. (You'll know what I mean when you see it; I don't even want to hint.)

Berg, emerging as one of the most ambitious and jumpy directors who dares hopscotch across genres (Very Bad Things, The Rundown, Friday Night Lights, The Kingdom, TV's 2000 Wonderland), racks the same notions visually: a dance of eyelines of matched looks that suggest one thing, are in fact are another, and when we eventually return to the first impression, are electric. (Tobias Schliessler's cinematography, meshed with John Dykstra's special effects, lay on grain or gloss depending on the needs of the scene; tonal insolence that's not heedless is always fine to witness.)

Even at his most jocular, Berg understands the elemental mythos that these sorts of stories are supposed to be good for. Hancock bursts at the seams with the silly and the serious, the inspired and the grandiloquent, but in ways that ought not be even hinted at, but discovered, managing to honor the essential iconic elements that comics of long-standing strive to capture in their big-screen adaptations. And amid the baroque jokes and stunts, Berg still wreaks readings from the smallest of lines, such as "I'm telling!" and "You didn't!," the summer's two most delicious terse-words to date. They're out of nowhere and say everything.

With a style more febrile and antsy than the Mannerisms of his mentor and co-producer Michael Mann, Berg is generous and dexterous and Hancock goes places you wouldn't expect, including singular romcom-plications of epic complexity. In the end, intelligent action-film tweakery produces results with the brutality and clarity of Greek myth. Destiny? Choice. Can Hancock find peace? Walk among men with his head held high? That would be a happy ending.

Diminished Capacity ½ *

Steppenwolf hand Terry Kinney gets behind the camera for this actor-y take on mortality and the slow waning of one's faculties with Diminished Capacity, essentially a two-hander sitcom (adapted by Sherwood Kiraly from his own novel), between Matthew Broderick as an unlikely Chicago newspaper columnist and Alan Alda as his uncle in rural Missouri, whom he visits after suffering a concussion. Uncle needs to go into assisted living; script needs to go for rewrite. Alda's a marvel, and I hope he lives to be in half-a-dozen if not more Martin Scorsese movies, but despite his best instincts here, crap plotting about Cubs baseball cards and other such awfulness make this lethargic movie ultimately less than trivial. With Virginia Madsen, Bobby Cannevale, Dylan Baker.

Gonzo: The Life And Work Of Dr. Hunter S. Thompson ***

Alex Gibney's Gonzo: The Life And Work Of Dr. Hunter S. Thompson captures the good doctor in his younger days, before madness filled the corners and crannies. Gibney's responsible for some piercing, essential documentaries, such as Enron: The Smartest Guys In the Room and the Oscar-winning Taxi to the Dark Side, as well as No End in Sight (as producer). (He worked on Gonzo alongside Taxi to The Dark Side.) While it's a strong choice to downplay the diminished years of Thompson, some early imagery attempting to parallel the 1960s with the madness of the early twenty-first century is superficial. Yet in orotund readings from Thompson pal (and alter ego as well as fellow son of the Commonwealth of Kentucky) Johnny Depp and in personal recordings of Thompson at his gonzo-est, Gonzo sings the body lysergic. At the end of the movie, a lovely skyrocket ascends the sky. "I hate to advocate drugs, alcohol, violence or insanity to anyone, but they've always worked for me": maybe that doesn't count a philosophy, but certainly it was a life. A score might have worked better than the familiar music choices. With Gary Hart, George McGovern, Jann Wenner, Jimmy Buffett, Jimmy Carter.

July 6, 2008