..Gary Dretzka
..Noah Forrest
..Leonard Klady
..RJ Matson
..David Poland
..Douglas Pratt
..Ray Pride
..Kim Voynar
..Michael Wilmington

Traitor
plus reviews of Hamlet 2, The Grocer's Son, and Alexandra
Plus Quick Hits On This Week's DVDs

..MCN Critics Roundup ..MCN Review Vault

Traitor Two and a half stars
U.S.; Jeff Nachmanoff (Ovation)

Don Cheadle -- who plays a conflicted Muslim American at the throbbing emotional center of the political thriller Traitor -- first made a big impression on me in 1995's Devil in a Blue Dress, where he stole the show as private eye Denzel Washington's off-the-wall crony Mouse. Mouse was a wily little fast-talking hustler full of schemes and moxie, and I thought he was also one of the great modern psychopathic character roles. But as Cheadle has become a bigger, more important major star and an inarguably great actor, he's tended to use that ability to get under your skin and assault your nerves in different, more socially respectable ways -- as he tries to do in Traitor. He's become less of a Richard Pryor or James Woods and more of a Sidney Poitier or Montgomery Clift.

These days, we're more used to seeing Cheadle the lead actor, in his sensitive, ennobled Clift modes: for example, as real-life hotel manager Paul Rusesabagina, who rises superbly to the occasion in the shattering genocide docu-drama Hotel Rwanda. In Traitor, Cheadle is also in his sensitive mode, though he tries to keep us guessing about his true motives and morality. His role as Samir is seemingly just as challenging as Rusesabagina: an American Muslim and ex-Special Operations officer who may be either a turncoat tied to islamicist terrorists -- pulling off murderous schemes with his ex-jail mate and friend Omar (Said Taghmaoui of The Kite Runner) -- or a double agent, reporting to free-lancing C. I. A. agent Carter (Jeff Daniels), the only other guy in the world who knows Samir's secret mission.

It's an interesting idea. But Samir is really only an approximation of a great role in an approximation of a good movie, with Cheadle trying to pump ambiguity and intelligence into a basically bogus story. Shot in multiple locations, from Chicago to Paris to Yemen, Traitor is a would be humanist philosophical/political thriller, a movie that tries to adopt a liberal viewpoint to international terrorism, but keeps getting more and more wildly improbable and finally, goes haywire at the end.

The ending is so bizarre, and so different in mood and feeling from the rest of the movie, that it makes you feel a little sucker-punched. For the first half or so though, Traitor seems more substantial -- another of the new breed of smart, high tech political suspense pictures that includes Traffic, Syriana, Michael Clayton and the Bourne series -- a movie with glossy technique, thrills and something to say.

And Cheadle's Samir, for a while, seems a deeper character, a complex man caught in a deadly trap.

Watching Cheadle as Samir -- his quiet melancholy eyes, his sense of something always simmering beneath an almost unsettlingly well-composed surface -- we wonder: Has he become pathologically consumed by his own religion and idealism? Or, if he really is a double agent, why is he sinking deeper and deeper into such moral chaos -- taking part in bombings and terrorist actions whose only justification (from his viewpoint) is effectiveness in uncovering even worse terrorism?

All the while, as Samir races toward a grisly Thanksgiving-in-America plot cooked up by Omar's jihadist group, and the closer we get to zero hour, the nuttier it all seems. There's another thread dreamed up by writer-director Jeffrey Nachmanoff, the scenarist of the improbable, preachy doomsday movie The Day After Tomorrow. Samir and his terrorist pals are being traced by cool, taciturn Southern-born FBI agent Roy Clayton (Guy Pearce), who, along with his sarcastic partner Max (Neal McDonough), is hot on their trail. These two plot paths ultimately converge -- in my opinion, disastrously (in several senses).

The ending of Traitor almost feels like it doesn't match with the rest of the movie. And maybe it doesn't. Traitor's loopy surprise climax was an idea of executive producer Steve Martin (the comedian-writer-actor), and it became the genesis of the whole project, with writer/director Jeffrey Nachmanoff dreaming up the events that lead up to it. I hate to sound like the usual critical smart-ass, but the great laugh-getter Martin's idea here is closer to comedy -- extremely dark comedy -- than to the terse, nearly humorless realism and liberal humanism that Nachmanoff tries to build up during the rest of the film. Superficially, those early sections work better, strongly aided by J. Michael Muro's hand-held doc-style photography. But when the surprise finally explodes, it seems almost callous and offensive.

The other characters, uniformly well-acted, are also uniformly somewhat clichéd. Daniels, as C. I. A. prankster Carter, plays the sort of wild, somewhat screw-loose professional he's mastered elsewhere. (Lenny Bruce once immortalized this type: Straight teeth, crooked smile. It's Daddy!) Taghmaoui as Omar pumps some reality into that melodramatic standby: the vulnerable villain who falls in love with the traitorous hero. (Remember Harvey Keitel and Tim Roth in Reservoir Dogs.) Aly Khan, as Fareed, plays a smoothie jihadist moneyman with a George Sanders flourish, and as the FBI team, McDonough and Pearce (the latter playing another L.A. Confidential-style straight arrow), buddy it up in classic bad cop-good cop Lethal Weapon style.

Pearce is the key figure here, since he's ultimately going to act as the movie's, and Samir's moral judge -- another wrinkle that seems clichéd. Though Traitor is well-acted, extremely well-shot, and tears along at a brisk clip, and though the whole idea of a man trapped between two warring cultures is a potentially rich notion, this movie doesn't leave you with much that's truly deep or interesting, beyond the idea that seemingly good people can maybe do monstrous things. Too bad, because Cheadle is one actor who's really up to the task, especially in this morally shadowy context, of giving us something memorable and provocative, or blowing us away.


 

Hamlet 2 Two stars
U.S.; Andrew Fleming (Focus)

Making an unfunny movie starring Steve Coogan, that daffily articulate comic actor who, like Peter Sellers, seems to have an almost flawless instinct for getting the laugh --might seem a truly amazing achievement, especially since Coogan is backed here, in writer-director Andrew Fleming's Hamlet 2, by a gifted supporting cast that includes inveterate scene-stealer and chuckle-inducer Catherine Keener, along with David Arquette as a confused-looking stud and Elisabeth Shue, playing herself -- or perhaps playing an Elisabeth Shue fantasy.

But talent isn't everything, as Fleming sometimes seems to be suggesting, although perhaps his real message and theme is Lack of talent is everything-- which, in this case, seems like wishful thinking. Hamlet 2 -- whose title is its funniest part -- is an arch, forced, febrile tale of the doomed, idiotic Tucson Arizona high school production of an apparently witless script by a dopey, hysterical drama teacher named Dana Marschz (played by Coogan), who senselessly imagines himself as both Hamlet and Christ, while his life seemingly falls apart on all levels.

Not only has the school fired him and given him a mixed-ethnic class of Anglo brown-noses and Latino troublemakers, but his annual school play -- a slot usually devoted to Marschz' banal staged adaptations of corny inspirational movies (like Dangerous Minds) -- has becomes a Tucson cause celebre, protected by a truculent ACLU headline-grabber and attacked by a bevy of right wing stereotypes. (Truth to tell, the stereotypes don't seem that far from reality.)

All this is somewhat reminiscent of The Producers gone wrong, and also of that classic political moment when Vice Presidential legend J. Danforth Quayle, misremembered the black college fund slogan A mind is a terrible thing to waste, and somehow came up with It's a terrible thing to lose your mind (or something like it). Fleming is trying in Hamlet 2, to satirize Hollywood and the dopey inspirational movies that Marschz adores, although what he's actually done is make an even dopier inspirational movie. Meanwhile, Coogan tries virtually everything to make us laugh, including running into class in drag and flashing everybody. (Even that left me grinless.)

Unfortunately, Coogan's contract apparently also required him to speak his lines, which, in this case, can't be improvised into any kind of quasi-humor. Only one thing could perhaps have worked: recycling the gag from Tropic Thunder where Coogan the director gets blown up in the first ten minutes or so. That would have saved the estimable star of Twenty Four Hour Party People. He could have escaped into something funnier -- albeit without Elisabeth Shue. It wouldn't have saved the movie though.



The Grocer's Son Three and a half stars
France; Eric Guirado

Life in Provence, in the French countryside, presented with a realism and affection that wins your heart. The writer-director, Eric Guirado, is, like the Dardenne Brothers, a documentarian turned fiction feature maker. Like the Dardennes, he excels at seemingly low key realist portrayals that beat with inner intensity. His protagonist here is a Parisian guy, Antoine (Nicolas Cazale) who comes home to his village to help take care of business for his mere and pere (Jeanne Goupil and Daniel Duval), when his dad (Daniel Duval) becomes ill. Part of that business is a traveling grocery van which Antoine takes over, helped by the woman he adores, late-blooming college student Claire (Clotilde Hesmen) who has come to the country with him to study and prepare for entrance exams.

This was a big French hit, and it captured me completely. As Orson Welles said of Shoeshine, "when the story starts up, the camera disappeared, the screen disappeared. It was just life." Creating life is not an inconsiderable feat. This movie makes us a present of it. In French, with English subtitles.



Alexandra Four stars
Russia; Alexander Sokurov, 2007

A lovely, sad film from one of the world's greatest living filmmakers -- and from a director all too often neglected by American moviegoers. (The exception: Sokurov's incredible one-tracking-shot-in-the-Hermitage masterpiece, Russian Ark. Alexandra is a seemingly small drama, but a powerful one, in the stream of Sokurov's Mother and Son and Father, about the visit to her soldier son (Vasily Shevtsov) on the Chechnyan front by an elderly, determined woman who has seen him rarely in recent years and will probably never see him again, no matter what the fortunes of war.

She arrives by train. They meet several times. The soldiers are kind to her; she's a little testy. Her son goes off on a patrol. She visits (without permission) a Chechnyan village, makes friends with a woman (Raisa Gichaeva) there. Though she hasn't been there long, she must finally leave. The train departs. That is the Chekhovian stuff from which Sokurov weaves his deeply touching story. The soldier's mother Alexandra, sturdy, plump and heartbroken, is played by famed opera singer Galina Vishneskaya, the widow of Sokurov's previous film subject, the supreme cellist Mistislav Rostropovich. We hear opera in the background, part of the world of art and the soul of life that war so often subverts or even destroys.

This is a fine, great film, currently somewhat ignored. Don't.
 
 

MW on DVD
Picks of the Week

NEW RELEASES

Recount Three and a half stars
U.S.; Jay Roach, 2008 (HBO)

Redbelt (Three stars)
U.S.; David Mamet.

If David Mamet isn't the world's best active English-language screenwriter, he's definitely part of a select group that includes Woody Allen, Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, Ronald Harwood, Jean-Claude Carriere, Rafael Azcona and just a few others.

The good thing about Mamet-as-director is that he has respect for Mamet-the-writer. Mamet preserves his own texts, in all their testosterone-driven, four-letter-word-soaked, intellectual tough-guy glory. The bad thing is that he sometimes has too much respect; he gets far too finicky about avoiding overlap and hearing all his own words -- as if he wanted to apply Bertolt Brecht's epic theater style to scripts that would work better as classy film noir or Sidney Lumet-style social drama.

Redbelt has another fine machismo-drenched Mamet script. It's about a martial arts teacher named Mike Terry (Chiwetel Ejiofor) who finds his business in jeopardy when he and a cop-student try to help a nervous lawyer (Emily Mortimer) in a jam -- and create problems compounded later when Mike trusts a corrupt movie star (Tim Allen). All these miscues lead the highly moral Mike into a fixed fight, in which the hero must discard his principles to salvage his life.

Mamet is dead serious about all this, which is all to the good. But the turnabout climax doesn't work, morally or dramatically -- not only because it's a weird idea that needs some craziness to put it across, but because it's too stiff and unspontaneous. The movie redeems itself, as do almost all Mamets, because the writing is so saltily eloquent and the acting, even when a bit over stylized, is so intelligent. The supporting cast includes Mamet regulars Joe Mantegna, Ricky Jay and Rebecca Pidgeon. But while the whole ensemble is fine, Ejiofor surpasses them all. Nobody can make that guy a robot.

CLASSIC RELEASE

Orson Welles' Don Quixote Three and a half stars
Spain/U.K.; Orson Welles' Jess Franco, 1992

Orson Welles' troubled production of Don Quixote -- Miguel de Cervantes' literary masterpiece, the great Spanish novel of chivalry and illusions -- is, even in this diluted version, an extraordinary film blending a brilliant evocation of the book with boisterous modern (1950s) Spanish scenes, featuring an onscreen Welles-the-director, that emphasize the Don's timelessness. It was begun in the '50s and never completed. Welles was the director-writer-narrator, Francisco Reiguera played Quixote and Welles' frequent compadre Akim Tamiroff, is a visually perfect squire Sancho Panza. And the production, self-financed by Welles, dragged on so long that Reiguera finally begged Welles to complete it so that the old actor could die without guilt. (Welles outlived them and finally had to dub them both.)

Sadly, this cinematic masterpiece-to-be, which clearly would have been one of Welles' greatest achievements, was still incomplete at his death. This version, released in Spain, in 1992 was assembled, edited, redubbed and in some cases, reshot, by Welles' second unit director, Jess Franco. The visuals, overwhelmingly, are by Welles. Much of the dubbed dialogue is too. But some of the picture print quality is mediocre, and some of the dubbing of all three major roles, is by non-Welles actors.

I can understand why some critics call it a travesty. It's also a great film: like the usurped release version of The Magnificent Ambersons, a mutilated movie that is still packed and seething with pure genius and incandescent creativity. I'm not exaggerating when I say that no movie this year gave me more enjoyment, and there's none I loved more -- for its compelling images, robust voices, its spectacular land and cityscapes, its sublime visual and literary poetry -- even if occasionally, I had to fill in the blanks and imagine what could have been.

This release is not the last word on Orson Welles' Don Quixote. Nor should it be. But, for us, it's the first glimpse -- and I was immensely grateful and gratified. It should be a task at the top of every film-lover's agenda to see an improved Don Quixote, and, finally, to get the best possible release versions of Quixote and the other incomplete Welles films: of The Other Side of the Wind, The Deep, The Magic Show and The Merchant of Venice. Would we ignore a new Beethoven symphony, a new play by Shakespeare? The unfinished legacy of that matchless, prodigal, often unjustly unsupported maker of movies Orson Welles is essential as well. Let's bring them all to the light, all those movies, all those treasures -- beginning with the magnificent mad knight and his richly human squire, Don Quixote de le Mancha and Sancho Panza. No extras.

BOX SET

The Marco Ferreri Collection Four stars
Italy/U.S.; Marco Ferreri, 1960-1988 (Koch Lorber)

This eight film, eight-disc set brings back one of the holy terrors of '60s and '70s Italian cinema, the ferocious satirist and unbuttoned comedian Marco Ferreri, capped by his outrageous classic, La Grand Bouffe, in which four great actors -- Marcello Mastroianni, Philippe Noiret, Michel Piccoli and Ugo Tognazzi -- eat, swill and fornicate themselves to death. Nobody but Luis Bunuel and a handful of other filmmakers, could match Ferreri in belaboring the bourgeoisie. Here are eight explosive examples. Extras: Documentary, interview with Ferreri.

Includes: El Cochecita (Spain; 1960); The Seed of Man (Italy; 1969); La Grande Bouffe (France/Italy, 1973); Don't Touch the White Woman (France/Italy, 1974); Bye-Bye Monkey (U.S., France/Italy; 1978); Seeking Asylum (Italy, 1979); Tales of Ordinary Madness (U.S./Italy, 1981); The House of Smiles (Italy, 1988).
 

- Michael Wilmington
August 29, 2008

August 15: Tropic Thunder, Star Wars: The Clone Wars, Henry Poole is Here, and Lola Montes
August 8: Pineapple Express, Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants, Hell Ride, and Brideshead Revisited
August 1: The Mummy 3, Swing Vote, Step Brothers, and X-Files
July 25: A Superhero Summer, American Teen and CSNY Deja Vu
July 17: The Dark Knight, Space Chimps, Mamma Mia!, Encounters At The End Of The World
July 10: Hellboy II: The Goilden Army ,Journey to the Center of the Earth, Kit Kittredge, Wanted, The Wackness, The Heartbeat Indicator, Monsieur Verdoux
July 3: Hancock, The Mother of Tears
June 26: Wall-E
June 19: Get Smart, The Love Guru, The Duchess of Langeais, Glass: A Portrait of Phillip in Twelve Parts, Up The Yangtze, The Passion of The Mao
June 12 : The Incredible Hulk,War Inc., Shotgun Stories, It Always Rains on Sundays
June 5 : Kung Fu Panda, You Don't Mess With The Zohan, Mongol, 'Tis Autumn, At The Death House Door
May 29: Sex & The City, The Strangers, Irina Palm, The Fall
May 22: Indiana Jones 4, Postal, Contempt
May 15: Prince Caspian, How The Garcia Girls Spent Their Vacation, DVD: Indiana Jones Collection
May 8: Speed Racer , Redbelt, What Happens In Vegas
May 1: Iron Man, Son Of Rambow, Flight of The Red Balloon
April 24: Tuya's Marriage, Chapter 27
April 17: My Blueberry Nights
April 10: Shine A Light, Plus Young @ Heart, Smart People, and The Forbidden Kingdom

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