Albert Nobbs (***1/2)

Taking on another identity can be a liberating act, but for Albert (Glenn Close), it’s a self-negating one. Close first played the role, a waiter in a Dublin hotel circa 1900, 30 years ago on the New York stage. In addition to touching on issues of class and gender, the story is about a life constrained, how  the passage of years can render one unrecognizable, and how a chance occurrence can cause lasting change. The rest of the hotel staff regard Albert as a curiosity, or as a fixture. The humble waiter has retreated so far into an assumed identity that she’s almost forgotten herself. Albert simply works and saves, squirreling years of wages away in the hope of buying a small shop. It is only when a strangely sympathetic house painter discovers Albert’s identity that she imagines other possibilities for herself.

I envied the theatergoer who might have stumbled upon the production and been surprised that the character—and the person with the male-sounding name playing him—was a female. Of course, the character would have been much younger. Here, she is supposed to be 40, but looks older; the effect of this is to make Albert’s courtship of the young servant played by Mia Wasikowska faintly ridiculous, but probably also to make Albert more pitiable as one who has wasted so many years. In any case, it is a heart-rending portrayal. The fine screenplay, by Close and novelist John Banville (from a novella by George Moore), gives shape to the lives of the working-class characters. The story depends on two coincidences, but the motivations of the characters are still very much believable.

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viewed 2/12/12 1:05 pm at Ritz 5 and reviewed ?–6/3/12

World’s Greatest Dad (***)

There are two Robin Williamses, one the manic comic who gained fame with Mork and Mindy, and the other the Oscar-winning star of serious dramas such as Awakenings, Good Will Hunting, and One Hour Photo. I never found his zaniness all that funny, and his comedies have tended to dreck like License to Wed and Death to Smoochy. Now he’s teamed up for a comedy with writer-director Bobcat Goldthwait, another former stand-up comic I was never wild about. (I’m not one for annoying voices either.) So what do you know, this is pretty decent.

It’s a little more edgy than many films Williams has done. He’s the well-intentioned single dad to a teen (Daryl Sabara of Spy Kids) who’s truly obnoxious, and not in a snarky, Ferris Bueller sort of way, but in a creepily sex-obsessed, nobody-likes-me sort of way. Right when it seems like the movie is going to be about Williams’s milquetoast, teacher/unpublished author trying to bond with this hard-to-love boy, it turns into something else. It would be a disservice to give away the key plot point, but it gives the middle-aged man an unexpected way to achieve his literary ambitions, and the boy an unexpected, and probably undeserved, reassessment by his classmates.

From a comic drama it becomes an almost over-the-top satire of American culture at its shallowest. If you don‘t mind the change in tone and some crudeness (i.e., Dad discovering his son’s autoerotic habits), Goldthwait and Williams have created a fairly funny look at perception and self-perception.

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viewed 8/11/09 [screening at Ritz Bourse] and reviewed 9/10/09

Lust, Caution (***1/4)

Ang Lee’s Brokeback Mountain follow-up trades rustic Wyoming for stylish Shanghai in an erotic thriller set as the Japanese are consolidating their occupation of China just before World War II. All of Lee’s films are evocative of place and time, and I was drawn into this world from the opening scene, which crackles with maj-jongg tiles being tossed about like the conversation of the women playing, talk of business deals, black market consumer goods, and romantic gossip. One woman is significantly younger than the others, a seemingly naive recent bride. She’s not, but that gets ahead of the story, an adaptation of a novella by Eileen Chang that is loosely based on fact.

The young woman, played by newcomer Tang Wei, is a university student recruited by an acting troupe who are also self-styled revolutionaries who amateurishly plot to assassinate a collaborator. Given a pseudonym, a false identity, and some clumsy, comical lessons in seduction, she becomes acquainted with the powerful man and her own sexuality.\

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reviewed 11/02/07

Freshman Orientation (***)

The title is a pun that refers to its main character’s ploy to cozy up to his college classmate—he pretends to be gay so he won’t seem threatening to her. While on its face as silly as the similarly premised I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry, the humor’s more similar to other teen comedies like, say, Superbad. Besides the main storyline, the movie wittily satirizes various campus types ranging from homophobic jocks to politically correct lesbians. There are a few familiar faces, including John Goodman as a matronly tavern owner. The abbreviated art-house release, a couple of years after then movie played the festival circuit, seems odd. Its primary appeal would seem to be with an audience that may not even notice it.

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reviewed 9/14/07

I Now Pronounce You Chuck & Larry (*1/2)

Adam Sandler stars in this scathing, hilarious satire of American sexual attitudes…is how I’d have liked to begin this review, so I did. Unfortunately, what I actually saw was another dopey Adam Sandler comedy. He and Kevin James, of TV’s The King of Queens, star as Brooklyn firefighters who pretend to be gay to take advantage of a domestic-partners law. Understand, Chuck and Larry are so homophobic that they’d never actually do this, especially for the incredibly phony reason they’re supposed to here, but I guess that’s part of the hilarity.

Notwithstanding the gay twist, Chuck and Larry follow the well-trod path of movies like Tootsie and Soul Man. In the former, Dustin Hoffman learns to be a better man by pretending to be a woman. In the latter, C. Thomas Howell learns to be a better white guy by pretending to be a black guy. Here, Chuck and Larry, but mostly Sandler’s Chuck, learn to be better straight white guys by pretending, badly, to be gay white guys. The gay aspect isn’t all that new either; in 2001’s far funnier The Closet, Daniel Auteil spreads a rumor that he’s gay to avoid getting fired. His character doesn’t change his behavior, but watches others change in response, lampooning both homophobia and political correctness. Possibly the only intelligent sequence here is when James’s Larry confronts his fellow firefighters about their sudden chilliness, pointing out that Chuck was the same person as before. Up until then they’d spent the entire movie reinforcing stereotypes, not objecting to them. They don’t act like people pretending to be gay so much as people pretending to do a sketch comedy show about people pretending to be gay. With a city inspector trying to suss out their sham marriage, they worry that their trash isn’t gay enough. Interviewed by a lawyer (Jessica Biel), Larry says, “we’re big-time fruits,” when asked to reassure her that they’re not just pretending. Apparently, this does the trick. You’ll know the actual gay characters, though, because they’re either hitting on Chuck, wearing drag, or singing “I’m Every Woman” in the shower.

By virtue of being the only non-bimbo female character, Biel serves as the obvious heterosexual love interest for Chuck. Just like Dustin and Jessica Lange in Tootsie, or Tony Curtis and Marilyn Monroe in Some Like It Hot, she and Chuck become great gal pals, and so comes the inevitable moment in every mistaken-identity comedy, where the hero must expose himself as a liar yet convince the love interest that he’s become worthy of her. (It’s always a her; someone should do it in reverse.) Here the script draws upon the deep well of sympathy that Americans have for felons (see also John Q), resolving the storyline in perfunctory fashion. This actually leaves the heroes with the original dilemma that led to the ruse in the first place, but it’s doubtful anyone thought of that.

Surely, some sort of comedy sinkhole surrounds director Dennis Dugan, whose last Sandler comedy was Big Daddy. (In between, he helmed the awful Saving Silverman, the terrible National Security, and the lame Benchwarmers.) As it happens, this closely follows the frequent Sandler formula, exemplified in Big Daddy: two parts Sandler as a loveable jackass, then one part blubbery sentimentality. I have to wonder what the contribution was of Alexander Payne (Sideways), one of the four screenwriters. If you’re one of Sandler’s legions of fans, I wouldn’t want to dissuade you from seeing this. It’s the same sort of broad humor that made hits out of The Waterboy and Mr. Deeds. I’ll just leave you with this litmus test: Rob Schneider, the least of several Saturday Night Live alumni in the supporting cast, dons bad make-up and a bad accent to play a Chinese(?)-Canadian wedding official. If imagining that tickles you, the rest will have you rolling.

IMDB link

reviewed 7/23/07

She’s the Man (***)

Amanda Bynes gets the laughs in this teen comedy in which her character has to pretend to be a boy if she wants to play soccer.

What do when you’re a female soccer player and your high school cancels the girls’ team? I guess a lawsuit would take too much time, so instead our perky heroine (Amanda Bynes) dresses up as her brother so she can play on the boys’ team. She has to remember that boys talk differently, don’t openly lust after their heterosexual male roommates, and, of course, don’t cry—except when a soccer ball hits them in the crotch. I think the scenario would have been slightly more believable if all the other students in the school hadn’t looked to be in their mid-20s, but Bynes herself does a good job. In the end, this is basically still just a typical teen movie. (If you’ve seen Tootsie, the same romantic complications ensue.) Still, it makes the most of the premise, and made me laugh.

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posted 9/6/13