Human Capital (***1/2)

A must-see for fans of parallel storylines…. Dino (Fabrizio Bentivoglio) is a social-climbing real-estate investor who can’t wait to buy into a hedge fund run by his wealthy new friend, Giovanni (Fabrizio Gifuni), whose teenaged son is dating Dino’s daughter Serena. The movie begins, almost, with Dino’s story, but then retells the story from two other points of view, starting with Giovanni’s wife (Valeria Bruni Tedeschi), who spends her days shopping, but once dreamed of a career in theater.

The film’s central event is a bicycle rider’s collision with an SUV on a dark highway near Milan. Besides the mystery of who the driver was, the title suggests the greater theme of money. Social class is only a subtext, but it’s a big part of what’s intriguing about the film, a seamless adaptation by director Paolo Virzì of a novel by American writer Stephen Amidon.

IMDb link

viewed 10/20/14 3:20 pm at Ritz East [Philadelphia Film Festival]

La Nostra Vita (***1/4)

My Brother Is an Only Child director Daniele Luchetti returns with the story of a construction supervisor (Elio Germano, also of My Brother) whose wife suddenly dies in childbirth. Left alone with three sons, including a newborn, he pours his efforts into a large project meant to provide for his family but that instead threatens his financial ruin. Though this isn’t a dark film, it’s a realistic story about everyday struggle. The widowed father is, though likable, flawed, and the inequities of Italian society are a subtheme. Illegal immigrant laborers are used on the construction site, taxes are evaded, and casually derogatory references are made toward foreigners. Yet overall the movie takes a kind view of human nature; ultimately, it’s a story about values and relationships.

IMDB link

viewed at Ritz 5 [Philadelphia Film Festival] and reviewed 10/20/10

Please Give (***1/2)

Nicole Holofcener’s fourth film as writer director might be her best. Like her last one, Friends with Money, it’s also about money, in a way, though not about friends. Kate (Holofcener regular Catherine Keener) and her husband (Oliver Platt) have money; they make it by taking the furnishings of the dead to resell at a profit. She feels guilty about this, and he doesn’t. The other main characters are sisters whose elderly grandmother lives next door. Neither sister particularly likes the grandmother, who can be blunt. But one sister (Rebecca Hall) feels guilty about this, and the other (Amanda Peet) doesn’t. Holofcener’s last two movies were set in Los Angeles, but she returns to a Manhattan setting here. In such dense locations, where wealth and poverty are closer together, it’s harder to avoid noticing the difference. Kate routinely gives $5 bills to homeless people. She seeks out volunteer opportunities that she doesn’t particularly like but feels like she ought to.

The scene I most remember from Lovely & Amazing, Holofcener’s second film, is the one in which Emily Mortimer’s character asks her boyfriend to critique her figure, body part by body part, as she stands naked before him. This film also stands out in the way it looks at women’s relationship to their own looks. This is primarily, but not solely, seen in the character of the teen daughter, who frets over her body too, but particularly her acne. Wondrously, the actress who plays her looks like, or is made to look like, a genuinely pimpled teen girl. Less believable is the primary sexual liaison in the movie, which serves some story functions but seems unlikely.

These themes all mix in the same kind of character-driven story as in Friends with Money. There is, in the aggregate, less self-absorption on display, but some of that, and some unkindness too. It’s not a great movie for people who want the characters to always be likable, though again it’s better than Friends with Money on that score. However, only the sister played by Rebecca Hall is particularly admirable. The story has a natural ending to it, but doesn’t try to resolve all of the issues it brings up. This is an approach I find quite appealing.

IMDB link

viewed 7/1/10 at Ritz Bourse and reviewed 7/1–6/10

Becoming Jane (**3/4)

With each of Jane Austen’s mere six novels having been adapted for the screen in recent years, some of them more than once, the burgeoning market in all things Jane has widened to encompass modern reworkings (Bride and Prejudice, Bridget Jones’s Diary), and now this imagined biography. (Forthcoming will be The Jane Austen Book Club, the novel adaptation that beatifies the 190-years-dead author as a continuing font of inspiration, or at least a good excuse for gossiping over coffee.) Extrapolated from references in letters, it uses a rumored romance with a young lawyer as the basis for a movie that is very like a Jane Austen adaptation, especially like Pride and Prejudice. The Jane here, played by Anne Hathaway, is forthright, independent-minded, and plucky, though within societal norms. She is given the familiar choice between wealthy but dull and poor but exciting. For about five minutes she pretends, or thinks herself, to be offended by the lawyer’s brash manner and superior attitude. (A “metropolitan” young man, he has been sent by his uncle to stay in the the country where Jane resides with her parents and siblings.) The transition from supposed offense to romantic attraction is perfunctory, less convincing than her heroine’s similar transition in the 2005 version of Pride and Prejudice. The rest of the movie plays out the war of practicality and passion. I couldn’t help but feel that had the author herself scripted it her triumphs would have felt a little more triumphant and her heartbreaks more heartbreaking. The movie is a nice trifle for the Jane junkie, but not up to most of the adaptations of her own novels.

IMDB link

reviewed 9/06/07