“Happy-Go-Lucky”

Dir. Mike Leigh
(R) ★ ★ ★

Poppy is so upbeat even her name sounds like a celebration — or like an opiate, if you will, and that comparison might be just as apt, depending on your perspective. She’s unflappably chipper, and you, like I, might be waiting for the other shoe to drop: some tragic twist that would reveal that her relentless positivity is a facade, or a symptom of a greater problem. Perhaps that says more about me than it does about her. Perhaps the viewer is his own litmus test; he learns who he is by whether he wants to hug her or have her committed.

Poppy is the subject of writer-director Mike Leigh’s Happy-Go-Lucky, and I love her. As played in an infectious performance by Sally Hawkins, she is a force of nature, joyous. Her outlook isn’t naive; she sees the world with clear eyes and accepts it lovingly. I want to be like her, and spending two hours with her is a pleasure. However, as the end credits rolled, I wondered why I had spent two hours with her. Leigh tells her story without a clear point of view. His film observes her, along with others in her life who represent a broad palette of temperaments, but it does not express an opinion of her. What does her story mean to Leigh? What should it mean to us? He shows, but he does not reveal.

Poppy is a schoolteacher and a good one. Her exuberance helps her relate to her young students, but she is a responsible educator and addresses problems with maturity. In her off hours, she is unleashed. The first scenes show her trying to cozy up to a bewildered bookstore clerk and then partying with friends. When her bicycle is stolen, she observes, unperturbed, “I didn’t get to say a proper goodbye.”

The idea of the film seems to lie with the various personalities of her friends and family how they contrast. She has two younger sisters. One is married and with child; she regards life with strict seriousness and warns Poppy not to be so cavalier. The other is pouty and petulant and lashes out. There is a flamenco instructor who is prone to emotional outbursts. And a student who is angry and violent as the result of problems at home. We notice these things, but what do we do with these things we notice? It’s data in search of a hypothesis.

The film comes most fully alive during the scenes with Poppy’s driving teacher, Scott, played by Eddie Marsan in a marvelous performance that creates a great inner sadness under a thick exterior of cantankerousness. Scott is Poppy’s direct opposite — dark as Poppy is bright, mistrusting as Poppy is open-hearted. She seems impervious to his perpetual bad mood — to a point. They have great confrontation that supplies the climax, though the film’s lack of a cogent theme leaves the scene somewhat adrift amongst all the other scenes.

There is an interlude I don’t understand. It involves a chance encounter with a homeless man (Stanley Townsend). I call it a chance encounter because what else but chance could account for it in the screenplay? I spent much time considering this seemingly orphaned scene. What does it say about Poppy, about the world, or about the man? We see that Poppy is compassionate, but we knew that already. The homeless man rambles and is fearful of his surroundings, but it doesn’t say much about the world because he sees it through the fractured prism of mental disorder. About the man — you’d have to ask him, but I don’t know if his answer would be clearer than mine.

Leigh is famous for his use of improvisation in developing his screenplays. I recommend the film on the strength of the characters he and his actors have collaborated to create. As for the story — you may glean more from it than I.

“W.”

Dir. Oliver Stone
(PG-13) ★ ★ ½

There’s one great scene in Oliver Stone’s W., a controversial biopic in theory but tame in execution: In the War Room, George W. Bush discusses plans for the Iraq War with his staff: Colin Powell (Jeffrey Wright), Condoleezza Rice (Thandie Newton), Dick Cheney (Richard Dreyfus), Donald Rumsfeld (Scott Glenn), and Paul Wolfowitz (Dennis Boutsikaris) — Karl Rove (Toby Jones) glowers ominously in the background.

The discussion moves from justifications to timetables — has to start in March, or else it gets too hot — and finally to oil — says Cheney with unsettling resolve, if the US controls the oil supply in the Middle East, they will be an invulnerable empire. We’re stunned upon the escalating realization that they’re serious; it’s like Dr. Strangelove without the irony. As played by Wright, Powell regards the room with near disbelief and delivers a stirring, sobering speech about “changing the way we do business.” Upon accepting the Secretary of State position for the Bush administration, I think he mustn’t have known what he was getting himself into. Perhaps he is the only one in the room who has seen Dr. Strangelove.

The rest of the film is an interesting but ultimately underachieving effort to give our widely reviled president the benefit of the doubt, which in itself is a novel approach, especially from such a vociferous liberal as Stone. According to his film, George W. Bush was a troubled young man who could never live up to the standard set by his disapproving father, his predecessor in the White House and namesake George Herbert Walker Bush (James Cromwell). He drank too much, couldn’t hold a job, and was always in the shadow of his brother Jeb (Jason Ritter). Eventually, he found God, found politics, and worked through his daddy issues by entering us into a catastrophic five-year campaign for the purpose of doing what his father couldn’t — or rather, wouldn’t: getting Saddam Hussein.

But Bush isn’t evil or callous. No, he has merely been the genial packaging for the ideas of his neoconservative advisors, whose slash-and-burn approach to foreign policy sounds a lot better through the aw-shucks patois of good ol’ Dubya. It all comes down to who the voters want to have a beer with, explains Karl Rove, and I think even Rove would agree that no one would want to have a beer with him.

It’s an intriguing hypothesis. Unfortunately, Stone’s film, written by Stanley Weiser, is a thin analysis of a complicated man and an infinitely confounding presidency. Thousands of pages and hours of footage and analysis have been devoted to the subject in the last eight years, to the point where even the First Dog ought to have a biography in the works. W. reduces it to two hours, and boils it down so drastically that all the meat has been stripped from the bone. What’s left is a film that skips along the surface without diving into the deeper waters. We get the requisite scenes — his most famous gaffes, a meeting about “advanced interrogation,” embarrassment over the lack of WMDs, and of course the infamous pretzel — but nothing substantial. For the real meat and potatoes, you’re better off renting No End in Sight or Taxi to the Dark Side, or watching The Daily Show on Comedy Central.

The scenes of Bush’s youth are more enlightening, but if the subject weren’t the leader of the free world, would this material be worthy of our consideration? Subtract the name Bush and the story is a conventional one: Spoiled rich kid does poorly in school, spends an unsettled youth bouncing between ideas of who he is supposed to be, rebels against his parents, and becomes an alcoholic before finally settling down with a good woman and going into the family business.

The screenplay includes such familiar scenes as the delinquent son returning home after a bender to tell his father he doesn’t want to go to business school, and the son questioning why his dad is more supportive of his brother’s ambitions. At one point, a reporter asks Bush what his place in history will be; if this overly reductive film is any indication, the answer will be, “Less than meets the eye.”

The film is distinguished by its performances, from an impressive ensemble that could have taken a richer screenplay and run with it. Brolin anchors the film, capturing the Texas swagger and roguish charm that makes Bush such a polarizing figure, along with shades of sincerity, trepidation, and self-doubt that we don’t see in his public persona, but which Stone envisions here. As the women in his life, Elizabeth Banks gives a sly edge to his prim wife Laura, and conversely Ellen Burstyn frays the edges of Barbara Bush, revealing a headstrong battleaxe of a mother.

This time around, Stone’s usual stylistic bombast is limited to a few dream sequences and pointed insert shots — a close-up of a belt buckle with a Christian cross comes as Bush decides to run for President. In a recurring motif, Bush is in the outfield of Rangers Ballpark waiting to make a heroic catch. In one of the dreams the ball doesn’t come. Stone leaves us similarly hanging, announcing “The End” although the story seems incomplete. I think he has made his film prematurely. Bush still has two months until he moves out of White House, at which point he might reach the realization that the ball has already come to the outfield, and he dropped it.

“Slumdog Millionaire”

Dir. Danny Boyle
(R) ★ ★ ★

Slumdog Millionaire is rated R, but it’s not an R movie. To my eyes, it’s clearly a PG-13. The language is tame. The sexuality is virtually non-existent. The themes are mature, but the treatment is not exploitive. There is violence, but none of it is graphic. Part of the film takes place in an Indian call center; perhaps during this economic crisis the MPAA is now taking a hard line against depictions of outsourcing.

Playing like City of God with a dash of Quiz Show, Slumdog Millionaire follows Jamal (played as an adult by Dev Patel), a young man on the verge of winning an unprecedented fortune on India’s version of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? How has he done so well? He is penniless, uneducated, from the slums. He must be cheating, right? He is arrested and interrogated in ways that would have seemed shocking before the Bush administration. His interrogator is a police inspector played by character actor Irfan Khan, who had a breakthrough year in 2007, pulling off a hat trick of noteworthy supporting roles, in A Mighty Heart, The Darjeeling Limited, and, most impressively, The Namesake. If you don’t know his name yet, you will.

How Jamal has accumulated the knowledge to succeed on the show provides the framework for the story. The answers came from a life hard lived; he has been forced to grow up fast. Is it a tad convenient that the trivia questions are so perfectly aligned with his life experiences? Yes. Contrived? That too. I suppose we must look at this as a fairy tale of sorts, and the game show as figurative; the show itself is beside the point — what matters is that Jamal’s experiences have given him the wisdom to deliver himself into a better life.

Question by question, Jamal tells the story of his upbringing: He was born into poverty, lost his mother during a raid on his village, and with his brother Salim was exploited by a man who used children to panhandle on the streets. Through his life has been one constant: Latika, a girl he befriended, and whom he tries to rescue from further exploitation from childhood into young adulthood.

Latika is the kind of love interest who seems to exist mostly in the mind of the hero. Jamal idealizes their love, and since they spend so much of the film apart there’s little for him to do but idealize her. His devotion to her is believable, and they have touching scenes together, but we never really get to know her, and we wonder if Jamal knows her well enough to so declare her the love of his life. She never fully comes alive as a character, so their relationship works more as an idea than as a romance we can truly root for.

More effective is the relationship between Jamal and his brother Salim. As in City of God, the film it most closely resembles, Slumdog shows us how the common upbringing of two young men in the slums produced divergent lives. Salim is the older and stronger of the two brothers, but also a dark figure. He tormented Jamal as a child, but when it counted he was ruthlessly protective. He made hard decisions, some of which Jamal cannot forgive him for, but he sacrificed his innocence to save his brother’s, and that makes the trajectory of both characters especially moving.

Slumdog is written by Simon Beaufoy (The Full Monty, Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day), based on the novel Q&A by Vikas Swarup, and directed by Danny Boyle (28 Days Later). Boyle films with a frenetic style that is reminiscent of City of God, but he lacks Fernando Meirelles’s elegance of camera and narrative. At times, we wish he’d stay still and conjure more of the gentle warmth he brought to his other fable of young boys, 2004’s Millions. Perhaps that explains the MPAA rating: They were expecting a zombie movie.

On DVD: “Transsiberian”

Dir. Brad Anderson
(R) ★ ★ ★ ½

Alfred Hitchcock points the way for good suspense in motion pictures. According to his “Bomb Theory,” a couple has an innocuous conversation when all of a sudden a bomb detonates under their table; that’s surprise. However, if the same couple has the same conversation and instead the audience is shown the bomb, that’s suspense. We anxiously wait for the explosion and desire to warn the couple before it’s too late. We are engaged and participate in the drama.

Transsiberian is a suspense thriller as Hitchcock envisioned it. Director/co-writer Brad Anderson has clearly been influenced by the late, great filmmaker, from the Bernard Herrmann-esque score by Alfonso Vilallonga to the dangers-on-a-train setting. He puts a lot of bombs under a lot of tables and has learned how best to set them off.

The first bomb we are not shown right away, but we know ticking when we hear it. American couple Roy (Woody Harrelson) and Jessie (Emily Mortimer) board the Trans-Siberian train to Moscow upon completing missionary work in China. On the train, they meet a younger couple: Abby (Kate Mara), another American, and Carlos (Eduardo Noriega), a Spaniard. The younger couple appears too mysterious and behaves too genially to be anything but bad news. Soon enough, Carlos shows Jessie a bag full of nesting dolls — to resell for a profit, he says. If your first thought is “heroin,” you’ve probably seen a movie before.

What happens from there I won’t reveal, but if the setup seems a bit obvious, the payoffs are anything but. The pleasure of the film is how cleverly Anderson misdirects us, how he subverts our expectations, and how his bombs count down with the utmost dramatic urgency.

The key figure is Jessie. It is her decisions and deceptions that fuel the suspense. The casting of Mortimer is in its own way a subtle misdirection: She has a soft, snowy beauty that belies Jessie’s wild-child past. Drugs, alcohol, transience — and then she met Roy as the result of a drunk driving accident, and he reformed her. But the devil-may-care Carlos reminds her of the excitement of her past, and then … see for yourself. Suffice it to say that Mortimer gives a performance of perfect ambiguity, concealing dark impulses underneath a placid exterior.

The last piece of the puzzle is Ben Kinglsey as Russian narcotics officer Grinko. In an early scene, a passenger tells Roy and Jessie the story of how the Russian police cut off his toes in response to a clerical error in his documentation — and those are the good guys. When Grinko arrives in these claustrophobic train cars, the walls start to close in and Jessie is always a half-step from disaster — a camera, a bag, and a compounding list of secrets may lead to her imminent downfall. Says Grinko, “With lies, you may go ahead in the world, but you may never go back.” Tick, tick, tick, tick …

On DVD: “WALL-E”

Dir. Andrew Stanton
(G) ★ ★ ★ ★

WALL-E is a singular achievement in filmmaking, animated or otherwise, and the film to beat as the best of the year. It references 2001: A Space Odyssey and the works of Charlie Chaplin and is worthy of those references. It opened my imagination like Dark City, A.I., and the Lord of the Rings films. It contains ideas expressed with images of stunning eloquence. I was overjoyed by this film. It’s a masterpiece.

The director and co-writer is Andrew Stanton, best known for his previous film, Finding Nemo. This is a hell of a followup. He’s downright brave to borrow from silent film for a kid’s movie, where his target audience will be oblivious to his allusions. His main character has no dialogue at all, except his name (WALL-E, which stands for “Waste Allocation Load Lifter: Earth-Class”) and the name of his love interest EVE. But how expressive he is! With large, sad eyes and a mechanized body — fingers, arms, wheel treads — that quivers with anticipation and wonder. There is a shot of WALL-E with EVE, and his eyes reflect the flame of a pocket lighter; it’s one of the most romantic shots in memory.

WALL-E was built by the Buy-N-Large corporation, which suggests Wal-Mart run amok. Buy-N-Large controls every aspect of life, including government, and now that the human race has abandoned Earth, WALL-E is left to do just what he has been programmed to do: allocate waste. There is virtually no dialogue in the first act, so most of the exposition is accomplished visually. WALL-E compacts garbage into cubes, and we are shown vast skyscrapers he has created out of them; concisely and beautifully, these shots tell us all we need to know about how mass consumption has overwhelmed the planet.

EVE is a probe designed to locate vegetation; if Earth can once again sustain plant life, it will be time for the human race to return. Lonely WALL-E forms a connection to EVE and follows her back to the Axiom, a cruise ship of sorts that is celebrating the 700th anniversary of its five-year voyage. There, we see what has become of the human race: they are fat and virtually formless, floating around in fully automated chairs that do everything from brush their teeth to change their clothes. We don’t need to be told how this lazy, sedentary species is connected to the wasteland Earth; Stanton’s images speak for themselves.

The social commentary is apparent. I am reminded of how very recently I criticized Happy Feet for its failure in approaching the same theme: conservation. I stand by those criticisms, now more than ever, because the poetry of WALL-E’s scenes is a direct rebuttal to the amateurish preaching of Happy Feet’s hapless penguins. Stanton doesn’t preach. He doesn’t set his titular robot on a mission to save the environment or redeem the human race. Rather, Stanton vividly shows us the world, and his images express his ideas with such clarity that we don’t need them explained for us, and with such beauty that we are emotionally enthralled by them. They say a picture is worth a thousand words; any one frame of WALL-E is worth a thousand of Happy Feet.

The film’s best moments are among its simplest. Note the expression of a woman whose communication device is inadvertently damaged by WALL-E. Taking in her surroundings for perhaps the first time, she experiences wonder. A similar scene comes later, when a man and woman touch hands. The look they share is more than just two people meeting — it’s a look of discovery. Momentarily freed from their automated machines, they rediscover what it is like to connect with another person and with the world around them. These moments are brief, but overflowing with wisdom.

I could go on and on, listing scene after wondrous scene, but I can hardly do them justice. They need to be seen to be believed.

“Synecdoche, New York”

Dir. Charlie Kaufman
(R) ★ ½

“Synecdoche” is defined by Merriam-Webster thusly: “a figure of speech by which a part is put for the whole (as fifty sail for fifty ships), the whole for a part (as society for high society), the species for the genus (as cutthroat for assassin), the genus for the species (as a creature for a man), or the name of the material for the thing made (as boards for stage).” I quote it in full because I don’t think I could boil it down. It’s one of the most confusing definitions I’ve ever read. The dictionary entry needs its own reference guide. Or maybe it’s just been too long since high school English.

What I do understand is that it’s about representation. You reference the sails to stand in for the ship and the boards to stand in for the stage. Perhaps Synecdoche, New York stands in for a movie.

The film is the directorial debut of one of my favorite writers, Charlie Kaufman, the man responsible for three of the most original scripts of the last ten years: Being John Malkovich, Adaptation, and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. Like his previous works, Synecdoche is more concerned with the fractured workings of the mind than with objective reality. His subject is Caden Cotard (Philip Seymour Hoffman), a theater director from Schenectady, New York, who receives a prestigious grant and hopes to use it to create a performance piece of great truth. (Many of Kaufman’s subjects have been beleaguered artists; methinks this dour, reoccurring figure reveals much about Kaufman himself.)

As he sets out to create his labor of love, the film comes apart. Reality blurs and merges with his creative process. Like the title suggests, it’s all about representation. Seeking truth from his own experiences, he builds sets based on places he lives and works. He casts actors to play himself and the people he loves and then casts more actors to play the actors. Eventually, he puts so much into his representative world — his warehouse set becomes a city unto itself — that it seems nothing represents anything anymore, and everything is meaningless. But I don’t know if that’s a criticism of the film or just a description of its themes.

What I know for sure is that I don’t like the film. It is visually drab. Its tone is relentlessly dreary. Scenes are short and clipped. Time passes erratically. The dialogue doesn’t connect. The characters don’t connect, if you can call them characters. It is filled with such self-pity and misery that I wanted to escape. And some motifs seem without basis — a house on fire, the home of Caden’s lover Hazel (Samantha Morton), is at first absurdly funny, but finally becomes aggravating. This is a torturous film to sit through; it may be the longest two-hour movie ever made.

It is the kind of movie that seems to be talking to itself. Challenging, avant garde films can be brilliant, but they need an entry point, a means by which the audience can become involved, or else it’s not filmmaking, it’s masturbation. David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive was like that; he hooked us with a noir mystery before pulling the rug out from under us. Synecdoche plays more like Lynch’s Inland Empire; it alienates the audience almost from the start. It closes itself off to us, and we can only watch from a distance — an impenetrable oddity. I cannot dismiss the film, and I admire its ambition, but frankly I am weary of unbearable films with admirable ambition.

Sadly squandered are a promising character and a great performance. Caden is a fascinating man: his wife Adele (Catherine Keener) has left him and taken their daughter to Europe, his relationships crumble under his increasing depression, and all that is left for him is to transform his pain into art, but even that crumbles. Hoffman anchors the film as well as he can; the depth of anguish he brings to Caden is heartbreaking. I wish I could have seen this character and this actor brought together for a film better able to communicate him to the audience. There is great beauty and sadness in the last scene, but by then my patience was spent, the narrative had collapsed, and there was no way back from it.

The film is blessed with a remarkable cast that also includes Dianne Wiest, Emily Watson, Michelle Williams, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Hope Davis, Robin Weigert, and Lynn Cohen. I won’t describe their roles, because I’m not sure I properly can. Surely Kaufman can make sense of this material. Perhaps only Kaufman can. But then he should have made it a journal entry and not a movie.

On DVD: “The Incredible Hulk”

Dir. Louis Leterrier
(PG-13) ★ ★

That’ll teach them to impugn the good name of Ang Lee.

One thing is striking about The Incredible Hulk, a reboot of the oft derided 2003 version by Lee: Bullets don’t work on the Hulk. Neither do most cannons or rockets. They have never worked and never will work. The creature is impervious. But gosh darn it, the military keeps shooting it with bullets, rockets, and cannons, causing untold property damage and endangering the lives of countless civilians. During a battle at a well populated college campus, the army breaks out something clever: They batter the creature with sound waves, but only after unspeakable destruction by other means. A sane army commander might have opened with the sound waves and not used any firearms at all; the danger of ricochets off the Hulk’s skin alone is an irresponsible risk, especially when you already know that bullets don’t work.

How about containment? It is difficult to find Bruce Banner (Edward Norton), a mild-mannered scientist who is good at hiding from the US government, but when they track him down and he turns into the Hulk, isn’t it a smarter idea not to shoot at it, but rather to disengage and follow it until it calms down and becomes mild-mannered Bruce Banner again? By sending a tank after it, you further endanger the populace, because the Hulk will pick up the tank and throw it at the populace.

This is the kind of movie where characters don’t exhibit common sense because common sense would negate the action. If the army guys realized that violence was counterproductive, they would catch Bruce Banner, stuff wouldn’t blow up real good, and there wouldn’t be a movie. Or at least, there wouldn’t be this movie. If this is what comic book fans had hoped for when Lee made his Hulk movie, they should raise their standards. From a summer that gave us The Dark Knight, this just doesn’t cut it.

The film opens with a helpful montage that establishes the premise without subjecting us to prolonged exposition or an origin story. Bruce is a scientist. He tested an experiment on himself. The experiment backfired, and thus the Hulk was born; he turns into the beast whenever his pulse reaches two-hundred beats per minute. In hiding in South America, he searches for a cure while spending his days working at a soft drink bottling plant. The government tracks him down, the Hulk is unleashed, and they fire lots of pointless bullets and cause lots of pointless damage. Repeat as needed to fill 112 minutes.

Leading the hunt is General Thaddeus “Thunderbolt” Ross (William Hurt). Among his troops is Major Emil Blonsky (Tim Roth), whom Gen. Ross imbues with some of the same radiation used to create the Hulk, to level the playing field. But Blonsky becomes power hungry and wants more and more radiation until he becomes an abomination called, well, Abomination. Ross’s daughter, Betty (Liv Tyler) is sympathetic to Bruce — she is his ex-girlfriend and aids him as he evades capture.

The film is directed by Louis Leterrier, whose only previous credits are the action films Transporter 2 and Unleashed. Here he demonstrates a grandiose, adolescent sensibility that pumps up the action even where it needs no embellishment. Note the silliness of the college campus scene, where trucks and Humvees are shown leaping through the air even though the terrain is mostly flat. Note also the shaky, Cloverfield-lite camerawork at the beginning of an attack scene in New York City.

Leterrier is partial to rain-soaked romantic tableaus, which include an overwrought reunion between Bruce and Betty on a bridge. But his romanticism is so pronounced that he misses the obvious. At one point, Bruce and Betty need money, but can’t use their credit cards or access bank accounts for fear of being found, so Betty sells a precious necklace given to her by her mother. Yet in the next scene, we see her taking a picture of Bruce with a compact digital camera. This doesn’t seem strange to either of them. If in need of fast cash, I think most of us would sell mass-market electronics first and hold on to priceless heirlooms. (My first impulse is to blame it on product placement, but we never get a good look at the brand, and any company worth its salt would make damn sure we know exactly what product Betty is selling out her mother for.)

Ang Lee’s Hulk was five years ago, too far back in my memory to fairly make a one-to-one comparison, but I remember that it was better — problematic but thoughtful, adult. Leterrier’s film was not made with adults in mind. It has no ideas. It’s goofball action spectacle, but even the action flounders because the combatants are simpletons (see above: bullets). Lee’s film wasn’t great, but remaking it this way is like reinterpreting a Monet with an Etch-a-Sketch.

On DVD: “Paranoid Park”

Dir. Gus Van Sant
(R) ★ ★ ★

There are a lot of empty spaces in Paranoid Park. Writer-director Gus Van Sant favors slow-motion, hanging moments, and silences. He is less concerned with plot than with delving into the internal life of his main character, Alex (Gabe Nevins, one of the film’s many debut actors). The film is told from Alex’s point of view, but few films are as effective at expressing a character’s psyche from the inside out.

Alex tells his own story. He is a teenager with a passion for skateboarding, though by his own admission he is not very good, certainly not as good as the tougher, hard-living kids who frequent the East Side Skate Park, known as Paranoid Park to those who go there. One night, he accidentally kills a security guard. As he tells the story, he dances around this event, not to bury the lead but out of fear of reliving the trauma. The film doubles back, jumps ahead, repeats scenes. It’s an unfocused narrative, but it’s a focused lack of focus. It unfolds as a confused teenager might tell it, and Van Sant stays true to Alex’s voice.

There are great scenes along the way in which Van Sant gets to the heart of Alex’s crisis. An early scene, which takes place after the event, features Alex being informally interviewed by Detective Richard Lu (Daniel Liu). In a long, unbroken shot, the camera very slowly pushes in on Alex as he answers questions. We don’t know how much the detective knows, and Alex’s demeanor is steady, but the push-in expresses his mounting anxiety, his feeling of being closed in upon.

A later scene is of Alex taking a shower immediately after the accident. In a few static shots in extreme closeup, we see his head downcast, and then sinking out of the frame. Dissonant tones on the soundtrack and the rushing water combine to express Alex’s psychological and emotional distress. These few wordless shots speak volumes about Alex’s fear and guilt.

There is a perceptiveness about the film. Alex’s parents are in the midst of a divorce, and their combined handful of brief scenes give us a sense of the family relationships: the father, a tattoo-covered bad-boy in appearance, expresses guilt and affection for his son, and the mother, who feebly inquires about her son’s activities, seems concerned but disconnected. In a film told so fully from Alex’s point of view, the minimal presence of his parents is itself telling; though well meaning, their separation has caused them both to withdraw from their son’s life.

However, Van Sant’s style can be as much a liability as an asset. A listlessness sets in. At times the deliberateness of the film’s pace turns into sluggishness. There are long slow-motion sequences of skateboarding, dreamy in their effect, but excessive in their duration. They seem to represent a kind of respite for Alex away from the reality of his circumstances, but they linger, and the mind wanders restlessly.

We don’t expect a tidy resolution to come from this material, but we hope for a more satisfying one than Paranoid Park offers; the open ending is so open, it’s barely an ending. I reacted to it with a shrug and wondered where Van Sant had hoped to take me, and where he thought he had arrived.

Thoughts on President-Elect Barack Obama

This is not a political blog, but for a moment permit me to be political.

Thank you voters for proving that policies of torture, fear-mongering, cowboy diplomacy, condescension, dishonesty, deregulation, secrecy, and Constitutional upheaval will not stand in the United States of America. Thank you voters for seeing through the rhetoric of fear that catered to the lowest of human instincts; not Obama the socialist, or Obama the terrorist, or Obama the secret Muslim — now Obama the President-Elect. Thank you especially to the people of Florida and Ohio for demonstrating, after the malfeasance of 2000 and 2004, that merit still trumps connections.

After a campaign that was too negative on both sides, thank you John McCain for your gracious concession speech. Now that you are no longer running for office and no longer need to tow the party line, return to the Senate and be the maverick you once were and have spent countless weeks claiming you still are.

Now that the Democrats have reclaimed the White House and made gains in Congress, it’s time for the work to begin. Democrats, you have inherited a catastrophic mess, and it is yours to clean up or screw up. Get it done. Bring us away from petty partisanship, return us to measured diplomacy, welcome Republicans and Democrats alike into the cabinet, restore our reputation in the world, get us out of Iraq, get us out of the recession, reverse our growing national cynicism, and remind us that all of America is real America, and that “intellectual” and “elite” should not be pejorative.

And George W. Bush … oh Georgie. You’ve run roughshod over this country for eight years. Don’t let the door hit you on the way out.

On DVD: “Bigger, Stronger, Faster”

Dir. Chris Bell
(PG-13) ★ ★ ★

The scariest thing revealed by the documentary Bigger, Stronger, Faster: Congress devoted more time to hearings about the Major League Baseball steroid scandal than on Hurricane Katrina. If it’s true that the American culture is preoccupied with winning, it’s equally preoccupied with talking about it. If a Mark McGwire home run had breached the levees, the US government might have made it to Louisiana before the Royal Canadian Mounted Police.

Directed by Chris Bell, the film uses Michael Moore-ian techniques to address steroid use in America — comic animation, snarky narration, and an oft confrontational interview style support or challenge various experts on the subject. His interest is personal: He and his two brothers are dedicated athletes who have all used anabolic steroids to improve performance. But his film isn’t a bleak confessional about drug abuse, as we might expect. Intelligently, he questions whether steroids are as bad as their hype.

The biggest problem with Bell’s approach is his ambivalence. The early portions of the film defend steroid use. It has benefits in treating illnesses such as AIDS. Its adverse health effects are exaggerated; acne, body hair, and fertility problems are verified side effects, but more dire consequences like heart disease, stroke, and “roid rage” are unsubstantiated and have been egregiously over-reported. And it is only one drug in a culture that medicates its way to success at every opportunity; he likens steroid users to musicians who use beta-blockers to combat anxiety during performances and auditions.

But later portions of the film emphasize cheating. The American dream is to win at all costs — no wonder steroid use is widespread. Bell makes a strong case for and against, and if he approached the topic objectively his film might be admirably nuanced. But he is too close to the material to be objective, and his film argues both sides without committing to a point of view. As a man who has struggled with the physical and moral implications of steroid use, Bell’s impulse is to be even-handed, but where does his film stand? Everywhere, and nowhere.

The film improves dramatically in the second half. Bell turns his attention from steroids specifically to American hypocrisy in general, and as his focus improves, so does the quality of his argument. He takes Arnold Schwarzenegger to task; the California governor denounces steroid abuse while turning a blind eye to steroid-users in body-building competitions he sponsors. He targets George W. Bush; he gave a speech about cheaters in sports sending the wrong message to American youth, but as the former owner of the Texas Rangers, he employed admitted steroid user Jose Canseco, who testified that the team leadership knew about the use of performance enhancing drugs by the players.

Most memorable is Bell’s indictment of the nutritional supplement industry. Rampant deregulation has allowed companies to bypass the FDA, and secrecy about “proprietary formulas” allows companies to skimp on ingredients while making top dollar for their product. In a shocking scene, Bell demonstrates a method of manufacturing his very own supplement that involves undocumented day laborers cutting active ingredients with large quantities of rice flour, like drug dealers. The manufacturing cost is $1.50. They can charge $60 for the finished product. This is entirely legal.

These supplements are promoted using fitness models on steroids. Before and after pictures are taken the same day and digitally manipulated. This is material worthy of its own film, and Bell handles it with the right mix of humor and outrage. He has learned well from Michael Moore.

Bell demonstrates convincingly that supplements are a racket and a fraud, worse than steroids because at least with steroids you’re likely to get what you paid for. That’s cheating too, but an entirely different kind. Steroids give you an unfair advantage. Supplements give you perhaps a slight advantage along with unknown dangers and saves its greatest benefits for the coffers of a corporation. If that’s the American way, then America needs a new way.