“The Girlfriend Experience”: Love for rent

Dir. Steven Soderbergh
(2009, R, 77 min)
★ ★

To watch The Girlfriend Experience is to surrender to a malaise. Scenes drift from one to the next in director Steven Soderbergh’s loose, haphazard structure, and after watching with the commentary by Soderbergh and star Sasha Grey, I think of the late Gene Siskel’s standard for judging a film: Is it more interesting than a documentary of the same actors having lunch?

The advent of DVD has made this criterion more than a witty abstraction. Commentary tracks are a lot like documentaries of the actors having lunch, except the actors — or writers, directors, cinematographers, etc. — are talking about the film and not ham sandwiches, unless of course they’re eating especially good ham sandwiches while recording the track. For this film, Soderbergh and Grey discuss their respective businesses: Soderbergh is the director of mainstream films — and sometimes experimental little indies like this one — and Grey is a performer in adult films. Both are articulate about their work, and Grey’s poise and intelligence suggest Soderbergh might have been better off directing a film about her.

Grey plays Chelsea, a self-employed New York City call girl who specializes in the titular routine, in which she not only has sex with her clients but enacts a scenario of familiar intimacy: dinner and a movie, discuss politics and the economy, sleep together, and then part ways until their next appointment. What is most interesting about her is that she has a boyfriend, Chris (Chris Santos), who not only knows what she does for a living but discusses it with her casually and tries to cheer her up when she has a bad day on the job. Something about Chris makes him willing to undertake such a complicated arrangement, and something about Chelsea — whose real name is Christine — makes her worth the effort. A film about this dynamic — their agreements, compromises, and conflicts — might have been fascinating, but in this story it’s an undernourished subplot.

We spend most of the time with Chelsea in the workplace, sitting in on her “dates.” The problem is that her clients are dull as dishwater. They talk about their jobs. They talk about family members hitting them up for money. They talk about ten-thousand-dollar bar tabs. They talk about the economy — a lot; the film takes place just before the 2008 presidential election, when the bottom fell out of the financial markets, but if that’s meant to provide any meaningful subtext it’s lost on me.

We don’t learn very much about these men, we don’t learn very much about Chelsea through them, and we don’t learn very much about the sex industry either, other than that it involves indulging the tedious stories of men with disposable income. The BBC and Showtime series Secret Diary of a Call Girl had a more compelling perspective on the trade. The commentary by Soderbergh and Grey yields insight into another kind of sex work. The film — not so much.

Making matters worse is the structure. The film was largely improvised and shot in chronological order, but the finished product suggests Soderbergh threw the scenes in the air and reassembled them in random order. What is gained by jumbling the narrative? The story is not made more impactful, and details are confused that needn’t be. Interspersed throughout are scenes of Chris trying to expand his business as a personal trainer and flying to Vegas; I don’t know why these scenes are in the film. I don’t know why a lot of the scenes are in the film. They float around for 77 minutes, absent a guiding purpose.

“Were the World Mine”: What fools these mortals be

Dir. Tom Gustafson
(2008, Not Rated, 92 min)
★ ★

It’s that old story: A young man sings, “Up and down and up and down, I will lead them up and down,” and then sprays juice from his magic flower that turns everyone gay.

Don’t worry, it’s Shakespeare … sort of.

Honestly, I’m not sure what to do with Were the World Mine. It starts as a very conventional gay coming-of-age drama populated mostly by stock characters: Tim (Tanner Cohen), a gay teen bullied at an all-boys school; Donna (Judy McClane), his disapproving mother who gradually learns acceptance; Frankie (Zelda Williams), his queer-friendly BFF; Coach Driskill (Christian Stolte), who would rather his players focus on rugby than on girly nonsense like Shakespeare; and of course Jonathon (Nathaniel David Becker), the possibly closeted jock on whom Tim hopelessly crushes. It’s all completely familiar, from the okay-to-be-gay affirmations to the generic bigotry of the students and townspeople. The story runs on autopilot. I longed for a spark of originality, but when the film goes off the deep end I kind of wished it were still going through the motions.

Tim, cast as Puck in the school’s production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, discovers the recipe for “love-in-idleness,” a flower that produces an elixir to make people fall in love with whomever they look upon next. There’s a campy music video that plays like Baz Luhrmann-lite, and voila! You’ve got a magic flower. He uses it on Jonathon, but angry at his bigoted peers he sprays his love juice everywhere — okay, I’m done now — and creates a gay, free-love revolution in his small town.

From this point, the film stops working for me. The realism of the early scenes is replaced abruptly by total fantasy, with elements of screwball comedy mixed awkwardly with romantic melodrama — there is a montage of characters singing to themselves, “The course of true love never did run smooth”; a similar device was used to great effect in Magnolia and Donnie Darko, but here it just feels indulgent.

The whole film is indulgent. There’s little consistency or focus. The pieces don’t fit together. My thought: They should have dropped the up-front realism and made the whole thing a gay musical version of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, or else keep the realism and have the fantasy play out in his imagination as his method of coping with high school isolation. Either way, director and co-writer Tom Gustafson should have picked a path and stuck to it.

“Sunshine Cleaning”: Sanitary gripes

Dir. Christine Jeffs
(2009, R, 91 min)
★ ★

Sunshine Cleaning, if you’ll forgive the pun, is too neat. It hits its marks and plays its beats with utter competence, but in the end that’s all it amounts to: a series of marks and beats, hit and played but never authentically felt. Everything — from the conflicts to the outbursts to the back stories — feels like it’s been decided ahead of time and arrives on cue. Restlessness sets in by mid-point when we realize the film has nothing new to say to us.

The subject is inherently interesting: a crime scene and biohazard cleaning business. It’s clear that screenwriter Megan Holley was inspired by the dramatic potential of this unusual profession and organized a story around it, to the point where the opening scenes that introduce the premise feel contrived. I envision her process: How do I introduce my characters into this world of crime-scene cleanup? What if I make one of them a single mom who needs money for private school? And what if I make her boyfriend a cop with contacts in the business? Let’s make the cop married so we can explore her intimacy issues. And let’s give her a tragic history that lines up perfectly with her new line of work. The characters don’t make decisions. They are fastened to a one-rail track and embark on a predetermined journey.

The protagonist is Rose Lorkowski (Amy Adams); even her surname is self-conscious in its quirky inelegance. There may be people named Lorkowski out there, but I wager few of them look like Amy Adams. I suppose the name is meant to endear her to us as an unpretentious Everywoman. Look! Up there! It’s Princess Giselle! No, that’s just Ms. Lorkowski.

Rose was once a popular cheerleader, but doesn’t have much to cheer about these days. Now in her 30s, she works as a maid, cleaning the houses of the people who used to look up to her in high school. She has a little sister, Nora (Emily Blunt), and if you’ve ever seen a movie or TV show about adult sisters you’ve probably already guessed that one is level-headed and responsible and the other is impetuous and devil-may-care. Nora is the latter; Rose takes care of her and resents her for it.

Rose has a young son, Oscar (Jason Spevack), who has behavior problems and whose father is out of the picture. Why does he have behavior problems, and why is his father out of the picture? The film isn’t interested in those questions. He fills the adorable-moppet requirement, saying cute or touching things and driving the plot when needed, as when he is kicked out of his public school for acting out.

Rose and Nora’s father is Joe, played by Alan Arkin, who has now cornered the market on curmudgeonly old coots who bond with young kids in indie comedies with “Sunshine” in the title. He gave more or less the same performance in Little Miss Sunshine, which despite its Academy Awards success is only a marginally better film than this one.

The sisters enter business as amateur crime scene cleaners. What fascinating work that is! How is one introduced to it? What personalities are drawn to it? How does one cope with its horrors? Holley’s script contains no such insights. She skims the details — bloodborne pathogen certification, proper disposal of biohazardous waste, and so on — but the job serves mostly as the backdrop for family and romantic conflicts. There is an eleven-minute documentary on the DVD called Sunshine Cleaning: A Fresh Look at a Dirty Business that includes two real-life cleaners who teach us more about the business than the film in its entire 91-minute running time. I would like to see a feature-length documentary about those women, their colleagues, their world view. This material is ripe to be explored by a filmmaker serious about exploring it.

What I wanted more than anything was for Sunshine Cleaning to surprise me. Just once. For a character to do or say something that isn’t set up three or four scenes in advance. To learn something about them we haven’t figured out in the first twenty minutes. It’s not a story. It’s a diagram.

“Public Enemies”: Cops and robbers

Dir. Michael Mann
(2009, R, 140 min)
★ ★

Directed by Michael Mann (The Insider, Collateral), Public Enemies recounts the crime spree of Depression-era bank robber John Dillinger (Johnny Depp), but it’s all glossy surface, a conventional gangster saga that colors inside the lines.

Dillinger was a folk hero, so we’re told. The public admires him. They harbor him. When he’s arrested, crowds line the street to cheer him on as he’s driven away by the police. He commands a press conference when he arrives at the jail in handcuffs, boasting that he can conduct a robbery in a minute, forty seconds — “flat.” As times become desperate, there is a conversation about expanding to kidnap-and-ransom, to which Dillinger scoffs: the public doesn’t like kidnappings. He’s worried about the bad press.

But why was Dillinger such a hero? There’s an opportunity here to explore the conditions of 1930s America. A title card at the start of the film announces that it is the fourth year of the Great Depression, and after he stages a prison break in the opening scenes a poor woman in front of a derelict-looking house asks him to take her with him. But that’s about it. Missing are the details to truly evoke the widespread economic hardship of the era; the film is more interested in Dillinger the man, who travels in far richer circles than those who revere him.

Dillinger was charismatic, so we’re told. Depp, in general a very charismatic actor, isn’t as charismatic in the role as the screenplay intends. When he barges in on love interest Billie Frechette (Marion Cotillard, Oscar-winner for La Vie En Rose) at her job as a coat-check girl and practically bullies her into becoming his girlfriend, my first thought was, she looks smart enough to know better.

Their romance is rushed. He sees her from across the room, disarms her with his honesty by telling her matter-of-factly who he is, and shortly after sweeping her out of her coat-check booth they’re whispering sweet nothings and exchanging promises of forever. Later in the film, much of our emotional investment depends on our belief that the lovers will go to the ends of the Earth for each other, and on that level it falls short.

Pursuing the outlaw is federal agent Melvin Purvis (Christian Bale), whose profile is high after his slaying of another infamous robber, Pretty Boy Floyd (Channing Tatum). He is appointed to lead the Dillinger task force by self-aggrandizing FBI director J. Edgar Hoover (Billy Crudup), who wants additional funding for his war on crime and hopes the apprehension of Dillinger will convince a Congressional committee. The Hoover character is drawn too broadly; Crudup is stiffly mannered in the role, a parody of arrogant officiousness. Add a pair of floppy ears and he’s Mr. Peabody from Rocky and Bullwinkle.

Public Enemies develops along the same lines as Ridley Scott’s American Gangster from 2007 — an honest investigator pursues a seemingly untouchable criminal mastermind — but Scott’s film was superior and highlights the deficiencies of Mann’s docudrama, particularly in the underdevelopment of the Purvis character, whom we learn little about other than that he is investigating Dillinger. At the end of the film we’re told Purvis’s fate — he left the FBI a year after the Dillinger case and took his own life in 1960 — which suggests a man more interesting than we’ve had a chance to meet.

At nearly two-and-a-half hours, Public Enemies is overlong, and I didn’t do a good job of keeping track of the supporting players or subplots, which include a proposed train robbery and an interstate gambling racket. It’s more troubling, I suppose, that I wasn’t interested enough to try.

Note: The film was conspicuously underlit at the showing I attended, to the point where indoor and night scenes — which is to say, most of the scenes — were often difficult to make out. I am inclined to give the benefit of the doubt to director of photography Dante Spinotti, who has been nominated twice for Oscars (L.A. Confidential, The Insider), and assume instead a problem in the projection room, but as this may have affected my experience of the film, I feel it necessary to report.

“He’s Just Not That Into You”: The rules of the game

Dir. Ken Kwapis
(2009, PG-13, 129 min)
★ ★

The trailers and TV ads teased a romantic comedy for the information age. They repeated, as a mission statement of sorts, a clever line of dialogue about the culture of BlackBerries, email accounts, social networking sites, and cell phones: “Now you just have to go around checking all these different portals just to get rejected by seven different technologies. It’s exhausting.”

Unfortunately, He’s Just Not That Into You isn’t about modern romance or modern characters, and in fact the character who speaks that dialogue, played by Drew Barrymore, is hardly in the film at all save a handful of scenes. Instead, the film feels dated, cynical in an old-fashioned kind of way. It’s not about human relationships, it’s about a set of rules for obscuring human interaction on the dating scene. It plays like Love Actually written by schoolchildren.

Instead of a 21st Century heroine, this film gives us Gigi, a pre-feminist antique of love-starved desperation; she makes Ally McBeal look like Xena Warrior Princess. The idea is to watch her evolve from boy-crazy neurotic to savvy relationship guru. She will learn to stop reading the wrong signs and start reading the right signs, but all I want to do is tell her to stop worrying about the damn signs and forget about dating for a while. A long while. Gigi is played by Ginnifer Goodwin, a radiant actress in other roles, most notably a polygamist wife on HBO’s series Big Love, but here she’s made to play a character so needy that her scenes are depressing instead of funny.

Gigi meets Alex (Justin Long), who has a Jedi-like skill at spotting when a man isn’t really interested in a woman. If he claims he’s going out of town, he doesn’t want to see you again. If he doesn’t call, he never will. Some of these ring of frank, common-sense truth, and the initial message is sound: don’t waste your time on men who don’t want you. But the more deeply we delve into the rules, the colder and more dehumanizing they become. Let me present an alternative: if you’re dating somebody who understands the rules of the game, find someone who isn’t playing.

The film juggles multiple characters. Some are likable, some aren’t. Some we spend too much time with, some too little. Either way, this isn’t the screenplay to properly deal with them. There is a storyline involving a music executive (Bradley Cooper), his wife (Jennifer Connelly), and his potential mistress (Scarlett Johansson). The wife is the most dimensional of the three, but the writing highlights self-pity and irrationality. An especially unpleasant scene has her accusing her contractor’s crew of sneaking cigarettes while renovating her house. She really suspects her husband, and I think we’re meant to laugh at how she deflects her anger onto the innocent man, but the humor is at her expense, and the feeling is mean-spirited.

The Barrymore character, Mary, works for a gay newspaper, The Baltimore Blade. Why does the screenplay put her to work for a gay newspaper? For the sole purpose of providing her with a cadre of Gay Confidantes, who exist in the movies for the sole purpose of providing counsel to straight women. Mary gets a trio, who warn her about the pitfalls of MySpace and insist on listening to a phone message from a prospective boyfriend. Over the course of the film, we don’t see these characters write any news; their office functions entirely as a romantic way station.

At one point, Mary advises real estate agent Conor (Kevin Connolly, of TV’s Entourage) to place an ad to expand his clientele. Conor too is lovelorn, and soon he also has a pair of helpful gay men who tell him how best to score with the woman he loves. If ever a single gay man would say, “Deal with it yourself,” he would instantly become the film’s most interesting character.

One relationship works — works so well in fact that we wonder why the characters didn’t leave to make their own movie. Beth (Jennifer Aniston) has been in a committed relationship with Neil (Ben Affleck) for seven years. Beth wants to get married, but Neil doesn’t believe in it. This is the only storyline that doesn’t feel contrived around juvenile rules and games and signals and tricks. It’s based on how she feels, how he feels, and how they deal with it. They speak like adults. They’re not playing at love, they’re in it. There is a late scene where Beth takes the measure of her sisters’ husbands, and then unexpectedly finds Neil performing household chores. What we learn about their relationship in the space of a single look is so pure and genuine that it puts the rest of the film to shame.

He’s Just Not That Into You is finally not even true to itself. It talks a good game about women not deluding themselves — “You’re the rule, not the exception,” Alex keeps telling Gigi. But screenwriters Abby Kohn and Marc Silverstein back-load the screenplay with exceptions, in order to supply the kind of wish-fulfillment happy endings that encourage women to delude themselves in the first place. Even Beth and Neil, who might have had a sublime ending, are hijacked in the end by an extremely conventional one.

If you follow the rules, you too could be an exception to them, the film seems to tell us, thereby revealing that it has nothing to say to us at all. Viewers looking for insight into relationships would more wisely consult the works of Richard Curtis (Love Actually, Bridget Jones’s Diary), Nicole Holofcener (Friends with Money, Lovely & Amazing), or Woody Allen (Annie Hall, Hannah and Her Sisters). Their films are about people. This one is about warfare.

On DVD: Ingmar Bergman’s “Persona” (1967)

Dir. Ingmar Bergman
(1967, Not Rated, 83 min)
★ ★

Sometimes you just have to say it: I didn’t get it.

I’ve written this review before. But then the movie was called Synecdoche, New York, or Inland Empire, or Eraserhead, or Brand Upon the Brain, or take your pick. It’s always the same review, because I always end up talking about myself. I can’t satisfactorily talk about the films, because I can’t engage them. I find myself on the outside while the filmmaker goes through his postmodern, existentialist, deconstructionist motions. I’m in my seat, and the film is up there on the screen, and there’s no bridging the gap.

In this review that I’ve written before, I talk about having an entry point, a means of becoming involved in the film while it contemplates its navel. If the filmmaker cannot make his navel interesting to me, why should I bother; the filmmaker could just as easily have the same discourse in a room by himself.

Persona is such a film. It’s a closed circuit, going round and round and round in a endless philosophical loop. There’s no room for me in it. Directed by Ingmar Bergman, it’s about — and do take the word “about” with a grain of salt — a nurse, Alma (Bibi Andersson), and her patient, Elisabet (Liv Ullmann). Elisabet has lost her ability to speak, or refuses to. With Alma, she retreats to a secluded cottage where she hopes to recover from … I don’t know exactly.

Beautiful cinematography by Sven Nykvist accompanies their story, during which Alma and Elisabet’s personalities distort and merge. There’s a funny audio commentary on the DVD, by Bergman biographer Marc Gervais, who spends much of the film asking my questions for me: “What is happening here?” “Does this make sense?” “What is Bergman getting at?” It’s funny because when he asks the questions he’s enthralled, but when I ask them I’m aggravated. I observed the film’s mysteries, its self-references — the film opens with flashes of light and images of a film reel, and at times Elisabet seems to assume the role of director, training a still camera at us and at Alma — considered its themes of split personalities and doubles, which I think must have been a strong influence on David Lynch’s truly exhilarating Mulholland Drive, in which another pair of interconnected, vaguely Sapphic women have their identities overthrown midway through. But I reacted to them only as vague curiosities, and my eyes glazed over despite myself. I wasn’t involved emotionally, so the film’s intellectual puzzles left me rather cold.

Bergman reportedly wrote Persona while recovering in the hospital from a nervous breakdown and credited the film with saving his life. Indeed, it plays like the product of a nervous breakdown, so full of jagged edges, unanswered questions, angst, and despair. There’s a feeling of him working through contradictory ideas and impulses. For him, the end result was salvation. But as I watched it, there was just me, the movie, and the vast space between.

On DVD: “Brand Upon the Brain!”

Dir. Guy Maddin
(Not Rated) ★ ★

I had heard a lot about Guy Maddin, mostly from Roger Ebert, who has long been an admirer of the Canadian director. But Brand Upon the Brain!, from 2006, slipped further and further out of my grasp. I watched at first with fascination, but as the minutes wore on I found myself pushing back against my chair, leaning away from the film. It inspires great interest until it tumbles so deep down the rabbit hole of Maddin’s imagination that it finally inspires indifference. It raises a “Keep Out!” sign for an audience that ventures near.

The story is about a man named Guy Maddin (Erik Steffen Maahs), who I hope is not an autobiographical character or else there should be a sweeping investigation of Canadian child-care services. The making-of documentary on the DVD is called “97 Percent True,” describing the story’s psychological and emotional veracity, but where to draw the line between Maddin’s life and his fantasies I can’t say with confidence. As told by the film, his parents ran an orphanage out of their lighthouse and were guilty of deplorable crimes against the children: the mother is a grotesque tyrant, and the father is a scientist performing human experiments. Guy (played in childhood flashbacks by Sullivan Brown) and his sister Sis (Maya Lawson) were also subject to their parents’ abuse.

The movie is made in the style of silent films; the stark, high-contrast black-and-white footage appears as though the stock has survived decades of age and neglect. The editing is choppy; staccato images flash across the screen to eerie effect, further elevated by Isabella Rossellini’s evocative narration and Jason Staczek’s score. Rossellini’s is only one of nearly a dozen narrator tracks available on the DVD, but I confess to only having had the strength to sit through one.

The adult Guy returns to repaint the lighthouse at his mother’s request, and the place reignites memories of old traumas; I find that films about memory are best told in unconventional ways (Persepolis, Waltz with Bashir), and Maddin’s antiqued, silent-film approach conjures the fearsome specters of childhood anxiety, early sexual curiosity, and claustrophobic dread.

But then the film finds the deep end and goes off it. From the intriguing material of childhood repression, Maddin’s screenplay, co-written by George Toles, drifts like a plastic bag in the wind to reanimation, youth potions, trances, androgyny, and at one point I think maybe cannibalism. It’s a headlong rush into unmitigated weirdness, and there came a point where I couldn’t follow him any further.

Brand was distributed uniquely, as a national tour; the film was not only shown but performed, with the orchestra, narrators, and Foley artists accompanying it in exhibitions across the country. I suspect a large part of its appeal is the live experience, which is lost in the private solitude of a DVD viewing. In a theater setting, it’s not only a story in the style of silent films, it’s a time machine transporting the entire audience to another era, an era that never existed in quite this way.

Ebert’s review sums it up well: “In a sense, you will enjoy Brand Upon The Brain! most if you are an experienced moviegoer who understands (somehow) what Maddin is doing or a naive filmgoer who doesn’t understand that he is doing anything. The average filmgoer might simply be frustrated and confused.” I consider myself an above-average filmgoer, but there you have it. Those of you who are more closely attuned to films of this sort probably already know who you are. For those who aren’t, you may want to take my word for it.

On DVD: “Flight of the Red Balloon”

Dir. Hou Hsiao-hsien
(NR) ★ ★

I am not well suited to review this film. When I watch a movie, I still expect it to be a movie and not an inert diorama about life that purports to contain the Meaning of It All. I do not mean to be unduly derisive of Hou Hsiao-hsien’s Flight of the Red Balloon; I have no antipathy for it, only apathy. It floated across my screen for two hours, and I sat there attentively viewing it, distinctly aware that I couldn’t see inside of it. Like British filmmaker Mike Leigh, Hou wrote his film without dialogue, and collaborated with the actors to shape the characters and story, but I strain to identify any story at all, and its characters are undeveloped occupants of the cavernous narrative space.

Here’s what I know: Juliette Binoche stars, in an effective performance, as Suzanne, a frazzled voice-actress in a puppet theater, while her son Simon (Simon Iteanu) is cared for mostly by his new nanny, Song (Fang Song). Suzanne has an estranged husband living in Montreal, a daughter living in Brussels, and is in a legal dispute with her downstairs tennant, who has not paid his rent for a year. Meanwhile, a red balloon floats mysteriously through their lives — like an observer, or a specter, or a memory? Roger Ebert says, “If you have to ask what something symbolizes, it doesn’t,” and I’m inclined to take his advice.

When the end credits rolled, I was still waiting for the movie to begin. It all feels like a prelude to … something. I looked into the film on MetaCritic, where it scored a whopping 86, but the reviews from its most passionate fans are not edifying; they are equally obtuse. John Anderson of The Washington Post says, “… [Hou’s] movies are like the ocean — rhythmic, hypnotic, seemingly pacific yet roiling with color, motion and drama.” Manohla Dargis of The New York Times writes of the director, “In Flight of the Red Balloon he makes particularly expressive use of glass, as when Simon stares out a window and his gaze is met by his own reflection, a doubling that echoes the scene before, when the red balloon pauses next to its painted twinned image floating on a mural” — an expressive use of glass, Dargis says, but she doesn’t indicate what Hou is expressing.

I quote these critics not to belittle their opinions, but to observe that they are on a different wavelength from me. Of the balloon, Dargis writes that it “invokes the spirit of liberty and its elusiveness” and is “like a prowler (or an angel).” Boston Globe’s Ty Burr says, “It seems to be telling us something.” To Anderson, it “plays a far smaller role that in its predecessor, but it means the same thing: happiness.” Chicago Tribune’s Michael Phillips adds that it is “like a surrogate nanny.” I take from this that no one really knows what the heck it means, that it means everything or nothing depending on the feelings of the viewer. What matters is that it was meaningful to those critics, but not to me.

This review amounts to taking the long way to reach a simple conclusion: I didn’t get it. Inspired by the beloved 1956 French film The Red Balloon, Flight of the Red Balloon is written in invisible ink, and all I can see is the blankness of the page. It is composed of long, languorous shots, but where others have attributed great emotion to them I found Hou’s camera indifferent, uninvolved. But if I am wrong, it wouldn’t be the first time; there may be great beauty in it … somewhere.

“The Reader”

Dir. Stephen Daldry
(R) ★ ★

Perhaps I am easily distracted; I spent an inordinate amount of The Reader wondering what time it was. An intertitle at the start of the film identifies that we are in Berlin, Germany, but it does not tell us when. Consequently, as the screenplay tosses us about the 20th Century, I attentively watch the wrinkles: wondering why Kate Winslet looks so old in one scene, and why Ralph Fiennes looks so young in others, and why young David Kross still looks sixteen even when he should have aged ten years or so from one point of the film to the next. Later on, Winslet’s character is in her mid-sixties, but the makeup artist went a little nuts with the prosthetics so instead she looks like the creature from The Mummy Returns.

Winslet plays Hanna Schmidt, who in 1950s Germany — yes, it is the 1950s, so I’ve learned — aids young Michael Berg (Kross) when he falls ill with scarlet fever. When he recovers, he returns to her to thank her, but the adolescent boy is transfixed by her, infatuated, and the two begin an affair that lasts throughout the summer, until without warning she leaves.

Michael does not see her again until he is a law student attending the trial of SS guards accused of murders at the Auschwitz concentration camp during the Holocaust. Hanna is one of the defendants. (Apparently, the trial ends in the mid-‘60s, but I could have sworn the trial started in the mid-‘50s — oh, never mind.)

The above storylines are intercut with later scenes involving an adult Michael, played by Fiennes at various points from the 1970s to the 1990s. He has a daughter whom he has been distant from, a wife he is divorced from, and he has never come to terms with his feelings for Hanna — the love he felt for her as an adolescent, and his hatred for her participation in the evil of the death camps.

So now we have the time line sorted out. The film is directed by Stephen Daldry, and the screenplay is written by David Hare, based on the book by Bernhard Schlink. The last collaboration between Daldry and Hare was 2002’s The Hours, a film much more elegant in its balancing of multiple time periods.

The most interesting part of the story is the trial, which examines one small cog in the wheel of one of mankind’s greatest atrocities. Hanna and her fellow guards are guilty of selecting prisoners to be killed, because there was no longer room for them when new prisoners arrived. That’s how it worked. “What would you have done?” Hanna asks her inquisitor, and he doesn’t have an answer. If she had not been the one to choose, it would have been someone else.

In-between these scenes, Michael and a small group of fellow law students discuss the implications of the trial with their professor (Bruno Ganz), but these conversations are less interesting. They play like Hare interrupting his screenplay for a self-conscious workshop on the movie’s themes — “Don’t forget, class, your papers on complicity in Holocaust-era Oscar bait are due next Thursday.”

Daldry’s direction is effective, though overly sentimental. This quality was well suited to the more subjective material of The Hours, which coupled with an evocative score by Philip Glass created a nearly dreamlike effect. For this film, however, it is sometimes a burden. Reading is an essential part of Michael’s relationship with Hanna, and there are late scenes in which they communicate via audio tapes — the film cuts between them underneath an ostentatious score by Nico Muhly — that feel a bit like an Afterschool Special about literacy. Daldry shows a conspicuous interest in nude bodies; his intent early on may be to convey the budding sexuality of Michael’s adolescent mind, which is excited by encounters with an older, more sophisticated woman, but there are moments where it is an unnecessary distraction. Consider the scene where Winslet rises out of the water while swimming, and the focus, perhaps unintentional and almost comic in its effect, is on her prominent nipples under her wet bra.

There is a great scene that is distinguished by its relative simplicity. The older Michael visits a Holocaust victim whose mother was a witness at Hanna’s trial. She is Ilana Mather, played by Lena Olin. The reason for his visit provides inherent dramatic tension, and the actors are excellent in the way they show their characters feeling their way through, especially Olin, who expresses suspicion mixed with sympathy.

The film is well acted, particularly by Winslet, who in addition to the role’s emotional demands must contend with the oppressive makeup. She plays Hanna as neither a villain nor an innocent victim, but rather as a woman who doesn’t know what other decisions she could have made and only gradually comes to understand their consequences.

There are few bad scenes in The Reader. Several good ones. Many that don’t quite work. And the persistent feeling throughout that you should be getting more out of them than you are, that you should be focused on character and story but instead are preoccupied by nagging problems in narrative structure, strange distractions in its style, and telling the time.

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.