On DVD: “Young @ Heart”

Dir. Stephen Walker
(PG) ★ ★ ★ ★

“We seem to have reached the age where life stops giving us things and starts taking them away.”

That is a line from, of all things, this summer’s Indiana Jones sequel, which is undistinguished except for that line. It’s one of the most eloquent I’ve heard on the subject of aging. But Young @ Heart suggests an amendment to it: Life has begun to take things away from its subjects, a group of elderly singers in an unlikely rock chorus, but it hasn’t stopped giving.

Young @ Heart was promoted as a lighthearted entertainment. Emphasized in the ads were comical scenes founded on a simple premise: old people singing edgy songs by Sonic Youth and James Brown are funny. Are they funny? Yes, they are funny. But the film is also poignant and humane. The chorus members are an exuberant bunch, but with advanced age come illness and death, and the film contains those things as well. Most of us are young and stupid; when we are older and hopefully less stupid, we should count ourselves lucky to have weathered the changes as well as those in this film, in mind and in spirit.

Director Stephen Walker follows the Young @ Heart chorus as they prepare new songs for an upcoming performance titled “Alive and Kicking.” One is James Brown’s “I Feel Good,” on which the singers have trouble finding the words or the lyrics, or both. Another is “Yes I Can Can,” a soulful tongue-twister by Alan Touissant, but the chorus struggles with the song’s seventy-one utterances of “can.” The third is Sonic Youth’s “Schizophrenia,” and the group can’t make heads or tails of any of it. The director of the chorus is Bob Cilman, who is warm and affectionate, but a stern taskmaster when it is required. He does not condescend to them, and holds them to high standards.

Walker interviews the performers. They discuss their lives, their relationships to each other, and what the chorus means to them. In good or failing health, they make every effort to attend rehearsals and performances; it is a place of shared vitality, community, and new experience. Among my favorites is Eileen Hall, who was ninety-two years old at the time of the filming and sadly passed away in 2007. She has a moving scene where she explains her show-must-go-on determination following a tragedy.

Along the way, life intrudes. Illness impedes some. Members of the group pass away. The conversations turn from the chorus to matters of health. Cancer scares. Heart attacks. Mortality. There are events in the film that are heartbreaking. During a hospitalization, ailing chorus member Joe Benoit explains that he doesn’t fear for his health. “Have I convinced you?” he asks. “No,” Walker answers.

The film includes Young @ Heart music videos of songs including the Bee Gees’ “Stayin’ Alive” and Talking Heads’ “Road to Nowhere.” What is striking during these performances and others is how the lyrics resonate in ways we haven’t heard before. We discover renewed vigor in the well worn “I Feel Good.” Bob Dylan’s “Forever Young” becomes a tender elegy. And what Fred Knittle does with Coldplay’s lovely “Fix You” is no less than what Johnny Cash did with Nine Inch Nails’ “Hurt” in 2002; Coldplay front man Chris Martin has a pitch-perfect falsetto, but I think it’ll be some decades before he can sing it with the emotional ache in Knittle’s voice.

I sang along to the film. When it was over, I listened to and sang music with more relish. I am more hopeful about the future. Few movies that claim to be life-affirming know what that means. This one does.

On DVD: “The Fall”

Dir. Tarsem Singh
(R) ★ ★ ★ ★

There isn’t a single shot in The Fall that isn’t interesting. The great majority are beautiful. Several are astonishing. Shot in two dozen countries, the film takes advantage of some of the most remarkable locations in the world and redefines the possibilities of the medium. It has Lawrence of Arabia’s sensitivity to physical space, shown in glorious wide shots of deserts, mountains, and architecturally magnificent buildings. It is equally attentive to color, a broad palate showcased in the remarkable costumes and natural landscapes. There are no green screens. This is an easy bet for my list of the year’s best films.

The director is Tarsem Singh — credited only as Tarsem, but we can forgive his indulgence. He reportedly spent seventeen years scouting the locations and, I think, singlehandedly justifies the creation of an Academy Award category for location scouts. From Muslim mosques, to African dunes, to a Brahmin city painted entirely in blue, Tarsem has found the kinds of places that if they didn’t exist you could only have imagined. He previously directed 2000’s The Cell, a grossly underrated film, and before that was a music video director. It is thus no surprise that he has made a film of visual splendor, but he also has a story to match, which brings the film into the same league as Pan’s Labyrinth.

The story proper takes place in a Los Angeles hospital in the 1920s (filmed in South Africa), where a young Romanian immigrant recovers from a broken arm that was the result of a fall while picking oranges. She is Alexandria, and she’s played by Catinca Untaru, a major discovery. She is befriended by a Hollywood stuntman, Roy (Lee Pace), who also suffered a fall, on the set of a movie, and now is paralyzed from the waist down. He entertains her with an epic story, but he has an ulterior motive.

As they shape the story together, it’s shown to us in fantasy sequences set in the beautiful locales. We learn more about Alexandria and Roy. They become closer. And then the stakes are raised. That’s all I’ll describe of the plot, because I don’t want to spoil its secrets. This is a film of discovery for the eyes and the emotions. It’s the kind of film they don’t make anymore, although I don’t think they ever made them quite like this. Special effects have become a crutch for the movie industry. Used unwisely, they deconstruct wonder and piece it back together as empty spectacle. Movies like 300, Speed Racer, and the recent Star Wars films create grandiose images using computers and then parade actors in front of them. At best, we admire the pretty pictures but feel nothing. There is no joy in it. Compare it to the famous scene in Gone with the Wind where the camera pulls back and reveals an entire battlefield full of dead and wounded soldiers. How did they do it? Lots and lots of extras, gathered in real physical space, to make us feel the human reality of the casualties of war.

Special effects have their place, but like all things in film they are tools best employed by artists. Directors like Steven Spielberg, Peter Jackson, and Robert Rodriguez have used effects and green screens with great success. The Fall could have been made with green screens. It would have been cheaper and logistically simpler. I think it might still have been a good film, but it would not have captured my imagination the way it does. In The Bucket List, a good film, the Taj Majal was created with visual effects. In The Fall, they go there for real, and the difference is palpable. The reality of the locations achieves a wonder that effects could not reproduce.

I have been a fan of Lee Pace since the premiere of his television series Pushing Daisies last fall. 2008 has been a breakthrough year for him. He earned Emmy and Golden Globe nominations for the series. He appeared on the big screen in Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day, where he demonstrated a suavity out of old Hollywood. The Fall was filmed before either of those projects and features what may be the best performance of his young career, full of volatile anger directed inwards and outwards.

His co-star Untaru is a revelation. She gives a performance so good I spent much of the film wondering how she was so good. She was six years old when the film was made, but it’s not a precocious performance. She behaves as a six-year-old would behave and speaks as a six-year-old would speak, without affectation and utterly natural, yet the role is also emotionally demanding and she doesn’t miss a beat. How does she do it? It’s a credit to the talent of the young actress, but also to Tarsem’s direction of her. The DVD special features are illuminating: he did not have her memorize lines but rather allowed her some freedom to improvise, and elements of her performance influenced the screenplay. There is a language barrier between the Romanian Untaru and American Lee Pace; rather than work around it, Tarsem uses it, and the actors develop an easy, unforced rapport.

The cinematography is by Colin Watkinson, who remarkably has never photographed another feature film. He previously worked as a focus puller, which proves to be an advantageous skill; during some shots, the actors are on one mountain and the camera is on another. The costumes by Eiko Ishioka are innovative and striking; she’s an Oscar winner for 1992’s Dracula. Robert Duffy’s film editing bridges reality and fantasy and unifies settings from across the globe into a single, mystifying world. Krishna Levy’s score incorporates multiple musical styles and cultures and is at times playful, grand, and solemn. Tarsem is the visionary filmmaker who pulls it all together. This is his first film since 2000. The time was well spent.

On DVD: “Smart People”

Dir. Noam Murro
(R) ★ ★

Smart People periodically brought to mind films with similar subjects and tones: most recent, Tamara Jenkins’s The Savages and Noah Baumbach’s The Squid and the Whale, the latter of which Smart People director Noam Murro professes to have been influenced by. They are also morosely comic films about intellectuals of impressive scholarship who nevertheless are emotional infants, unable to manage their relationships and consequently hiding behind their knowledge. The previous films were better, funnier, more insightful. Smart People is comparatively simplistic in its psychology; the central family’s problems are all traced back to the death of the matriarch, and I’m not sure that quite cuts it. There are wounds here that seem to go deeper, stretch back farther.

Of The Savages, I wrote, “It’s a marvel that [writer-director] Jenkins takes such unhappy people and finds the humor in them … It makes the whole story palatable, keeps it from descending into a dreary recitation of grievances.” Smart People does not have the same success. Production designer Patti Podesta has given the film a very deliberate palate of browns, grays, and faded tones. You will be hard pressed to find a vivid color in any frame, and the characters seem to have been drawn with the same brush. This is a story of depressed people, but the film is too often depressive, and we grow weary.

The main characters are a mopey bunch; they grumble their way through their lives. Lawrence Wetherhold (Dennis Quaid) is an English professor at Carnegie Mellon who hates his students and his fellow faculty. He wants to be the head of the English department, if only to assert his superiority; the actual job hardly interests him. His teenage daughter Vanessa (Ellen Page) is sophisticated beyond her years. She is cold and ambitious; upon learning that her father has been hospitalized with a concussion, she explains that she can’t visit because she’s studying for the SAT. Lawrence has an adopted brother Chuck (Thomas Haden Church) and always makes a point of saying that he is adopted; Chuck is underachieving, strapped for cash, and bouncing between get-rich-quick schemes, though possibly slightly better adjusted than his brother. James (Ashton Holmes) is Lawrence’s son; we see less of him because he stays as far from his family as possible.

A fifth character comes from outside of the family. She is Janet (Sarah Jessica Parker), a medical doctor and Lawrence’s former student. She also has baggage, but she’s got a good head on her shoulders, which makes it difficult to understand why she had a crush on him as a student, or why she begins a relationship with him in the present. There may be a good man hidden deep, deep, deep beneath his slouching posture and pompous lecturing, but it remains hidden for the majority of their courtship. She has a funny line about a paper she once wrote for him: “You said that the writing was sophomoric. I was a freshman.” His response is to correct her word usage, which should have been her cue to run far and run fast. It’s tough to invest in a romance when we have unbalanced sympathies; Janet could do better.

On the DVD commentary, Murro and writer Mark Poirier boast that Lawrence does not have any third-act epiphanies. They regard this as realism and call him nuanced, but it strikes me as a lack of character development. He is a sad sack from beginning to end. Ostensibly it is because of his wife’s death seven years ago, but I think not. Janet was his student before his wife died; he was miserable then as well, and Janet has the scars to prove it.

Careful not to reveal the plot, I will say that by the end things have begun to change, but these changes seem to manifest themselves without cause. What is the catalyst? The beginning of his romance with Janet? The arrival of the adopted brother, who Lawrence has never liked or respected? Possibly, but I’m not quite convinced. I needed more from the screenplay, more depth in the characterizations. The actors are not at fault; this is a very well acted film, particularly by Parker, who makes Janet serious-minded, sad but not self-pitying, and level-headed. We learn the least about her, but I found myself the most interested in her life. I think the other characters should aspire to her, in spite of her dubious taste in men.

The third film I was reminded of was Curtis Hanson’s Wonder Boys, the masterpiece from 2000 that starred Michael Douglas as a college professor in a mid-life crisis. It is unlucky for Smart People that the films so resemble one another, because most movies of any subject suffer in comparison to that great film. Wonder Boys was warmer, with a hopeful glow in its photography and a screenplay by Steve Kloves overflowing with humor and wisdom. But the greatest difference, I think, is its protagonist, Grady Tripp, who is disheveled but paternal, despairing but charismatic. We see him struggle and root for him, sometimes in spite of him. He too is the object of affection for a younger woman, but unlike Lawrence, we don’t wonder what she sees in him.

On DVD: “Teeth”

Dir. Mitchell Lichtenstein
(R) ★ ★ ½

Writer-director Mitchell Lichtenstein’s Teeth is ostensibly a horror film, but its intent is satirical. Inspired by B-movies, this comedy — a black, black, black, black, black comedy — is built on a great premise: A teenage girl must cope with the fact that she has developed a mythical deformity, vagina dentata, meaning “toothed vagina.” But where the myth dictates that a male hero must defeat the creature, Lichtenstein levels his cold, hard indictment against the male gender, as well as the patriarchal film industry, which frequently casts women as victims. He reserves his sympathy for the girl, who is not a monster but the product of evolution; she represents womankind’s biological response to a culture that fears and represses female sexuality.

Unfortunately, despite Lichtenstein’s unabashedly feminist point of view, he loses sight of his main character. He settles into ironic detachment so deeply that he confuses her for himself. Would she be so glib so soon after being traumatized? Would she weild her sexuality so confidently after hiding for her entire life behind chastity and Christian idealism? I don’t buy it, and so I regard the rest of the film with an ambivalent shrug. It’s a put-on.

Dawn (Jess Weixler) gives an inspirational speech about virginity. She represents a group called the Promise and wears a red promise ring that she will wear until she trades it in for “that other ring.” As Lichtenstein explains on the DVD audio commentary, Dawn — aptly named, to imply a new beginning — grew up with a subconscious understanding of her unusual anatomy and chose a chaste lifestyle to avoid a knowledge of herself. But it also represents a societal standard that demands its women be virginal, objects of purity, undefiled by sexual thoughts, sexual feelings, or sexual acts. The suppression of femininity is also evident during health class, where not only can the teacher not bear to utter the word “vagina,” but where even the textbook is censored: the female diagram is covered by a gold sticker, while the male diagram is exposed, as if to say that male sexuality is acceptable and female sexuality is not.

The story is set in an idyllic Texas suburb, with a nuclear plant’s cooling towers standing ominously in the background. Could these be the source of Dawn’s mutation? Probably, but of greater import is how they come to resemble a pair of breasts, yet another symbol of feminine sexuality. How fitting that these should be the source of her new feminine power.

Weixler is the highlight of the film. Her performance, which won a Special Jury Prize from the Sundance Film Festival, grounds all this strangeness in emotional reality. The warmth of her first scene, explaining the Promise with a sureness of purpose, dissolves into self-doubt and self-loathing upon her awakening. The meeting is echoed later in the film’s finest scene, where she addresses a second Promise group. Lichtenstein re-establishes this setting with severe lighting and extreme close-ups of Weixler, while her audience stands rigidly, chanting about the evil inside her, the serpent. The scene is dream-like, and Weixler is astonishing in the way she expresses Dawn’s terror, dazed, unsteady, standing under the unsparing light of her peers’ judgment — God’s judgment.

But then it goes off the rails. After a series of traumas, Dawn seeks solace with her classmate Ryan, and her behavior becomes inconsistent. Her reaction to that behavior is even stranger. I wonder if Lichtenstein even remembers the girl who addressed those Promise-keepers with such dread. I imagine what Quentin Tarantino might have done with this story; he has a singular gift for turning pulp genre material into high art with a feminist bent (Death Proof, Kill Bill, Jackie Brown). He knows good camp, has a terrific ear for dialogue, and a stronger sense of character than Lichtenstein demonstrates, despite his obvious talent for subversive humor. There are raucously funny scenes that delight in the absurdity of the concept — a gynecological exam gone wrong is my personal favorite — but in the end, it’s the character who gets compromised.

The DVD includes scant extras: trailer and TV spots, and a thirty-minute making-of featurette. The feature-length commentary from Lichtenstein is mildly satisfying but doesn’t offer much more insight than can be gleaned from the film itself.

On DVD: “Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day”

Dir. Bharat Nalluri
(PG-13) ★ ★ ★ ★

Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day comes as a surprise. It is a romantic farce, set in the 1930s and styled as if from the era, but it becomes something richer. Director Bharat Nalluri, working from a fine screenplay by David Magee and Simon Beaufoy, based on a novel by Winifred Watson, digs deep into the material to reveal an undercurrent of sadness and the foreboding of a nation on the eve of its entry into World War II. Underneath the comically mannered performances and romantic entanglements, this is a film about class, about loss, about gender, and yes, about love.

Guinevere Pettigrew (Frances McDormand) is an English governess, but not a very good one. She was fired from her last position, and several more prior. But if she’s poor at her job we can sympathize. We learn that a tragedy during the First World War forced her to change her plans; this is not the life she counted on. There is a running gag in which Pettigrew struggles to eat, but finds that food is always just out of reach. This is humorous but also establishes the current state of her life; for her the stakes are high, no less than the difference between survival and starvation.

In her desperation, she connives her way into a position as social secretary for a vain American singer/actress, Delysia Lafosse (Amy Adams), and her first minutes on the job involve cleaning up after Delysia’s romantic indiscretions. The ingenue has three lovers: Nick (Mark Strong), the owner of the nightclub where she works and a cold-hearted charmer she can’t resist; Phil (Tom Payne), the son of a producer who can secure Delysia the lead role in a show on the West End; and Michael (Lee Pace), a penniless musician who is hopelessly in love with her.

The early scenes are pleasingly manic, a fast-paced whirl of close calls and fast thinking as Delysia tries to dismiss one lover under the nose of another. Adams shines especially brightly in the early going; her high-pitched chirp is reminiscent of Marilyn Monroe, and her skill at broad comedy recalls Lucille Ball.

As the film settles in, it develops a darker subtext. War is on the horizon. Boutique mannequins come dressed in the latest fashions — finished with gas masks, the must-own accessory. The sight of military planes overhead causes an excited stir in naive youngsters, but not in Miss Pettigrew, who says with ache, “They don’t remember the last one.” According to the filmmakers, Watson’s novel did not reference the war, but it is a welcome addition to the story, giving it added weight. It makes the film not only farce, but the last hurrah of a generation nearing a loss of innocence.

Nalluri and his crew give the film vivid visual life, even though the story takes place in one day and is limited to a handful of locations. The costumes by Michael O’Connor, the production design by Sarah Greenwood (Atonement), and the cinematography of John de Borman are especially worthy of note. Consider the scene where Michael walks towards the camera and towards Delysia in a luxuriously decorated dressing room. It’s a simple shot, and brief, but it evokes a classical era; actor Lee Pace becomes Cary Grant before our eyes.

The film’s best scene comes soon thereafter, and is utterly perfect: Delysia and Michael perform “If I Didn’t Care,” a love ballad that has special meaning to both — he sings with longing, and her voice cracks with emotion. Using closeups and slow pans, Nalluri takes us into their insulated world, and the surrounding nightclub audience seems to fall away — except for Miss Pettigrew, who the film cuts to for reaction shots that are equally filled with feeling. The lives of these women — their loves, losses, and regrets — are revealed in this scene.

McDormand and Adams are well cast in their roles. McDormand, with her unflagging dignity and intelligence, keeps the dowdy, prim Miss Pettigrew from drifting into caricature. She speaks familiar wisdom (“Your heart knows the truth, Delysia. Trust it, for life is short”), but they’re more than platitudes. As spoken by McDormand, they’re lived-in; we sense history and experience in the words.

Adams, as Delysia, is ostensibly a comic foil, but is much more than that. Her Delysia is more self-aware than she at first seems. When we learn of her humble roots, we recognize that her megawatt smile is itself a performance, part of the delicate veneer of glamour she puts on to will herself into show business, or else end up on the street. Adams’s performance works on both levels; we see the blitheness of her girlish flitting, and the melancholy just underneath.

Adams announced herself as a notable talent three years ago with her Oscar-nominated performance in the little-seen indie Junebug. She has since appeared in Enchanted, Charlie Wilson’s War, and this, and in her performances I have yet to see her strike a false note (this refers both to her acting and her impeccable singing voice). She surely has an Academy Award in her future, and given the buzz for her next film, this fall’s upcoming Doubt, it may be the very near future indeed.

“The Dark Knight”

Dir. Christopher Nolan
(PG-13) ★ ★ ★ ★

Let’s begin by being brutally honest. The plot of The Dark Knight is preposterous, even by superhero standards. I will not go into specifics, in the off chance that I am not in fact the last person alive to see this film, but the film’s principal villain, the Joker, commits crimes that are not merely implausible, but astronomically impossible. The extent of his logistical planning, the vast network of cooperative underlings required in key positions, and the time and labor needed to put it all together — the Pentagon couldn’t pull it off, and even if they could the government would have to borrow another several million dollars from China just to pay for it. Let me stop you right now before you accuse me of bringing too much logic to a superhero movie: A film as serious-minded as this opens itself up to logical criticism, and on a purely logical level it doesn’t make a lick of sense.

But here’s why it’s a great film anyway. While a lesser film might use its gimmicks to set up empty action sequences, this film uses its devices in service of character and theme. It is the rare kind of summer actioner that has ideas about the world and the people in it, that features comic book heroes and villains but is more interested in human nature. It asks us to suspend our disbelief generously, and we do because the reward is so great. This is one of the best films of the year.

Batman (Christian Bale), the caped crusader, is still crusading. His friendship continues with Lt. Gordon (Gary Oldman), and the police welcome his help; their official position is that he should be brought to justice, but they keep the Bat-Signal in regular use. Crime is still rampant in Gotham City, but there are now people willing to fight it. His former flame Rachel Dawes (Maggie Gyllenhaal, assuming Katie Holmes’s role from the previous film) is dating the new district attorney, Harvey Dent (Aaron Eckhart). Batman admires Dent because he is able to in the open what Batman can only do in the shadows.

In comes the Joker (Heath Ledger), and here I can begin to discuss how the film distances itself from its predecessor and every other superhero movie ever made. The Joker is a criminal genius, an anarchist (ironic given his penchant for rigorously staging his disasters), and he believes that the populace, when pushed to the brink, will “eat each other.” Batman believes otherwise, that goodness can prevail, and they battle for the soul of the city.

The question: Does the city belong to chaos or to order? It’s more than an abstraction. The heart of this film is not in its action sequences but in conflicts like the one between two crowded ferry boats, who must decide either to kill each other or have both boats sunk as a consequence of their indecision. And the one in which the Joker demands the murder of an innocent man or else promises to blow up a hospital. The decisions don’t come easy; these sequences have extraordinary suspense.

I think of 9/11, how great tragedy pulls the rug out from under us and can bring out the best and the worst in us. I think of No Country for Old Men, in which Cormac McCarthy and the Coen brothers consider a similar dilemma. Is the world falling to chaos? Is there a means of enduring it with your humanity intact? This is another film to stir such thoughts.

It’s disheartening that this is the last performance of the late Heath Ledger, because his work in Brokeback Mountain and in this film demonstrate the talent of a man who had a long career ahead of him. His Joker is spellbinding. The actor is unrecognizable behind his ghoulish makeup, but it’s really the voice and the movement of the eyes — rolling erratically, quizzically in their sockets — that generate the effect. His pitch is high and his tone is mannered, urbane. He tells stories about how he got the scars on his face and it’s never the same story twice. I wonder if maybe he cut his own face on a whim, because he was bored.

The screenplay is by director Christopher Nolan and his brother Jonathan Nolan. The latter brother did not participate in Batman Begins, and I suspect his contribution to this film is meaningful. He previously collaborated with Christopher on Memento and The Prestige, remarkable films that are also concerned with men who might destroy themselves to destroy each other. “I’m not a monster, I’m just ahead of the curve,” says the Joker, who thinks monstrousness is the true nature of humanity; Batman Begins also considered whether there is any hope for mankind or if it should be purged by hellfire, but its morality was simpler and less compelling, a battle of right versus wrong. This film’s morality is complex; it’s about problems that come down to picking the best of bad solutions. It’s about compromise.

The technical credits are outstanding. The editor is Lee Smith, Oscar nominee for Master and Commander, who allows Nolan to keep his narrative in order, especially in the ambitious second half, which moves swiftly and with great suspense. Cinematographer Wally Pfister has shot all of Nolan’s films since Memento and earned nominations for The Prestige and Batman Begins; he might get another for this film, which features memorable, foreboding images like the Joker in an interrogation room and a distraught, disfigured man with his face half-shrouded in darkness. The score is by veterans James Newton Howard and Hans Zimmer; whichever of them is responsible for the sustained musical note that punctuates the possible turning of a key deserves special praise.

I have seen a lot of superhero movies. I have liked a lot of them, but wondered with the more popular films if there was something I was missing, if I could ever appreciate one as much as the mass of critics and audiences. Spider-Man 2 came close, but this is the film that most completely fulfills the potential of the superhero genre.

“Vicky Cristina Barcelona”

Dir. Woody Allen
(PG-13) ★ ★ ★ ½

Woody Allen’s Vicky Cristina Barcelona, my favorite of his films from this underachieving decade of his career, is a romantic comedy about love, but it isn’t romantic about love. It’s too neurotic for that, which is par for the course for the Allen oeuvre. In its gently cynical way, it wonders if there is a right way to love among all the wrong ones.

The leads are established as polar opposites from the first scene. Vicky (radiant Rebecca Hall, who is among my favorite young actresses) is rational to a fault, approaches love with the same practicality, and is engaged to marry a man who is reliable. Cristina (Scarlet Johansson) is passionate, approaches love as an epic struggle, and doesn’t know what she wants, only what she doesn’t want. The women are introduced by an omniscient male narrator who describes their exploits throughout the film, which indicates an unsentimental approach to the material. It places us at an objective distance from these women and emphasizes Allen’s theme: love is confounding, from any approach.

Vicky and Cristina spend the summer in Barcelona (my suggested title for a South American sequel: Vicky Cristina Bossa Nova), and they are quickly propositioned by suave Spanish painter Juan Antonio (Javier Bardem), who would like to whisk them away for sightseeing and lovemaking. Juan Antonio has a formidable ex-wife, Maria Elena (Penelope Cruz), who has tried to kill him once and may be inclined to try again, depending on her mood. These four become entangled in various sexual and romantic permutations, but the film is deceptively serious-minded and doesn’t exhibit the wackiness of a farce.

The characters are witty and self-aware. They navigate their relationships the best they can, and when a plan of action doesn’t work, they try something new. In one of the funniest interludes, a frustrated Cristina experiments with a complicated but highly functional three-way romance. And Vicky, the pragmatist, is clever enough to figure out that she needs to let a little spontaneity into her life. When she is tempted to deviate from her course, she says “I’m too scared,” and that’s more perceptive than most characters in romantic comedies are allowed to be about themselves.

What does Allen ultimately decide about love? To call his outlook bleak would overstate it, though to call it hopeful would be generous. One character calls love “transient,” and another claims that the only romantic love is the kind that is unfulfilled. By that standard, the film is very romantic, because its characters are nothing if not unfulfilled. They rationalize, give in, deny, or run away from their feelings, but they’re trying valiantly to make love work for them. One of my favorite quotes about love is from Buffy the Vampire Slayer: “I may be love’s bitch, but at least I’m man enough to admit it,” said a vampire who wanted to win back his beloved with a love spell. If all else fails, Vicky and Cristina might give that a shot.

On DVD: “The Bank Job”

Dir. Roger Donaldson
(R) ★ ★ ★ ½

Roger Donaldson’s nimble thriller The Bank Job presents a novel predicament. It’s about a conflict between criminals and lowlifes — and the innocent bank robbers caught in the middle. Alright, innocent is a stretch, but you’ll agree that the robbers, at worst pawns of a power struggle more insidiously contrived than they could conceive of, are the least corrupt of the crooks. It is said there is honor among thieves; here, the thieves are the only ones with any honor.

Jason Statham is the star, in a role that requires more than the characteristic flexing of his muscles. He plays Terry Leather, a small-time crook who we first see supervising the doctoring of used car odometers. He is foolish and short-sighted, and he is in debt to an unsavory character, but we can sympathize with his motives. He has a wife, Wendy (Keeley Hawes), and two daughters who look as though they were cloned from Reese Witherspoon. He wants to give them a life free of debt and unsavory characters.

In walks Martine Love (Saffron Burrows), a former acquaintance who has designs on a bank robbery and invites Terry to lead the operation. For “old times’ sake,” she says, but of course there is more between them than that.

Once the groundwork is laid, the story explodes its scope. We’re introduced to members of MI-6, a black-power radical named Michael X (Peter De Jersey), and members of a corrupt police department. The government wants to bring Michael X to justice, but he keeps incriminating photos of Princess Margaret as blackmail. Other characters appear whose involvement in the plot is at first unknown: the madam of a brothel that serves high-powered politicos, and a pornographer, Lew Vogel (David Suchet), with secrets to hide. There are more that seventy speaking roles, and perhaps as many agendas.

The breakneck pacing of these intersecting conspiracies leads to some confusion if you’re not fast on your feet, but you’ll get the general idea, even if you’re fuzzy on some of the details. What you need to know: unbeknownst to them, Terry and his gang are stealing the Princess Margaret photos for MI-6, but their heist — and the other secrets they steal — puts them at odds with a number of criminals, spies, and politicians. The irony is that the purpose of the heist has nothing to do with the perpetrators, but they find themselves stuck in the middle, trying to survive it.

The film is based on the true story of the 1971 Baker Street Robbery in London. Many of the details have meticulous accuracy, while others are based on supposition and dramatic license. But regardless of its ratio of truth to fiction, it is entirely plausible as a thriller. The chaos that unfolds is organic. Behavior is rooted in character. And our protagonists are not superhuman schemers, but reasonably smart people contending with their circumstances one setback at a time.

Donaldson was the director of Thirteen Days, another true story turned high-stakes thriller — in that case, the Cuban Missile Crisis. This film has the same urgency. The editor is John Gilbert, who is largely responsible for the film’s propulsive pace and keeping orderly the winding screenplay by Dick Clement and Ian Lafrenais, which is about as clear and concise as we could ask of a screenplay with so many conspirators and conspiracies. Most heist movies have a simple motive; this one has a dozen.