I hustled down Second Avenue to the Beekman Theatre this morning for the first show of John Wells’s The Company Men, a movie that came out just in time to get lost in the Christmas rush. It also did not open wide, which is not surprising, given its extremely thoughtful mood.

Te Company Men is a film that wants us to think about the humiliation of losing your high-status job, but not to wallow in it. Because getting fired is a bummer that we all worry about from time to time — not to mention something that has happened to millions of hardworking Americans in the past thirty-five years — Mr Wells can present the familiar nightmare in loosely arrayed, quickly-drawn details that leave us relaxed enough to consider the reasons for corporate downsizing. There is really only one reason, and it’s stated by the bad guy, James Salinger (Craig T Nelson): “We work for the stockholders now.” If this is true, then nothing is more important than the happiness of rentiers. How do we feel about that? 

The action pivots toward a happy ending when one potential rentier, discharged senior executive (and Salinger’s former best friend) Gene McClary (Tommy Lee Jones), decides that he would rather work than live on dividends. He would rather start his own company than benefit from the success of someone else’s. He would prefer to risk his capital in a manner requiring lots of job creation. Once he makes up his mind to do this, you wonder why it took him so long, but then you see that of course it would take someone in his position a long time to snap out of a lotus-eating career that dulled the social conscience. When Gene confesses to a former protégé. Bobby Walker (Ben Affleck), that he enjoys $500 lunches and private jet flights, you understand why it took a colleague’s suicide to wake him up. 

By this point in the story, Bobby has finally accepted his own fall from grace. Denying it, or believing it to be temporary, was an important element of his make-up at the beginning; he’s the kind of regional sales director who regards the slightest acknowledgment of defeat to be the first step in an irreversible slide toward failure, and the movie focuses on the way in which holding on to stuff — a zippy Porsche, a country club membership, his son’s X-Box — is a vital part of keeping failure at bay. Except, as his wife, Maggie (Rosemarie DeWitt) has to remind him, he is a failure. She does this with all the kindness in the world, hoping desperately to get through to him the need to change their way of life. In Bobby’s eyes, changing their way of life is to abandon all hope. He has to learn to see things differently, and eventually he does, going to work for his brother-in-law (Kevin Costner), a small-time contractor who does his own carpentry. Everything is done to cushion the transition from executive to laborer. We can see that it’s got to be tough, but there are no scenes or tantrums, even though the brothers-in-law have never been friends. Mr Wells trusts Mr Affleck to show us that what seemed too horrible to imagine at the beginning has become almost redeeming. Some viewers will object that the director has pulled his punches, and that is exactly what he has done. He wants to remind us that an decent, ordinary guy can transcend his own drama. 

With regard to the third leading role, that of Phil Woodward (Chris Cooper), Mr Wells is willing to make concessions to the grim realities of ageing in corporate life. The simple fact that Phil is sixty (and looks it) means that he has no future. It is also true that Phil doesn’t have much imagination; nor does he have Bobby’s most formidable resource, a loving wife. The only question about Phil’s downfall is whether he’ll take out anyone with him when he blows. Mr Wells is to be commended for eschewing the sensationalism that might have capped this plot line.

The astonishing thing about The Company Men is the commitment that this handful of very capable actors bring to their roles. I resist the word “intensity,” because melodrama is not on the menu; if The Company Men is about how executives deal, or don’t deal, with the ultimate adversity, it is nevertheless not about how they landed there. The gratuitousness of their discharges — all in the nominal interest of increasing shareholder value, but in the actual interest of preserving Salinger’s hold on power — means that the disaster is not about them. (At the same time, this is not a show about capricious Greek gods whose whims must be accepted by mere mortals. It’s a movie about the derailed juggernaut of financialized capitalism, where you make money not by making things but, essentially, by not spending money.) Messrs Afflect, Cooper, and Jones all do things that I’ve never seen them do before; again and again, they ask, wordlessly but with eloquently troubled faces, if the economic mess that we’re in can be fixed.

The women are great, too — especially Ms DeWitt, who to my mind deserves Maria Bello’s billing, not because she’s better than Ms Bello (who plays the company’s HR hatchet, and also Gene’s mistress — a relationship that survives her firing him), but because her part is so much bigger and more essential a strand of the story’s web. We hope that this will be a breakout role for Rosemarie DeWitt. Another face to watch is Anthony O’Leary, who plays the Walkers’ son. The resigned dignity with which he shows the boy preparing to be tucked in by his father, once the family has relocated to the vernacular atmosphere of Bobby’s parents’ house, is striking for such a quiet moment. He pulls out his earbuds with all the heaviness of a man prepared to hear a terminal prognosis. 

I can’t wait to see this extraordinary movie again.

The Fighter, on the face of it, would not seem to be my kind of movie, and I went to it reluctantly. I did think that I ought to see it, and not just because of the Oscar buzz. Mark Wahlberg and Amy Adams are two stars who have never let me down, and I’d heard really great things about Melissa Leo. I’d like to say that Christian Bale was a draw, too, but although his work has always been interesting, it has also seemed intended to cloak the actor in plain sight, as though movie-making were the best way in the world of maintaining a very private life. It is also true that Mr Bale has never to my knowledge played the part of a character whom I’d want to grow up to be. Certainly this last part hasn’t been changed by David Russell’s film. Even after his dramatic conversion experience, Dickie Eklund remains an unattractive piece of work. But I came out of the theatre thrilled to death by the power of what I’d just seen, and I hope that no one will miss The Fighter because it’s “about boxing.” 

And it is about boxing. There were passages of family drama that led me to suspect that the pugilistics might be backgrounded, but that’s not what happens. In fact, I have never seen a movie that made boxing look so interestting. The final bout transformed me into a Mexican jumping bean, swaying with each blow; it’s a good thing that I sit in the back of the theatre. While nothing could ever make a boxing fan out of me, I saw that Mr Russell had always kept in view a distinction that Micky Ward (Mark Wahlberg) makes at the beginning, when he’s explaining boxing to Charlene (Amy Adams). There’s brawling, which is just guys exchanging blows, and there’s boxing, which is more like chess. Comparing boxing to chess might sound laughable, and most filmmakers would ask us to accept it on faith, but Mr Russell provides something close to a laboratory demonstration of the similarities. In almost every boxing scene that I’ve ever sat through, there’s a sense from the start that the fighters are giving their all to trying to win, as quickly as possible. But that’s not Micky Ward’s game, That Ward has a game is interesting. 

But I didn’t care about The Fighter because of the fighting. The multi-credited screenplay is a match of sorts between two venerable story lines. The one is a family tragedy: a heroic character isn’t strong enough, or mean enough, or whatever-you-like enough to step outside a toxic family circle, possibly because he is as addicted to the company of his relations as they’re addicted to trouble. The other is the modern American tale of rehab. The moment in which we find that we believe in the rehabilitation of Dickie Eklund, a former crack addict ( as well as the boxer who taught his little brother Micky everything he knows), the family tragedy story turns into a comeback story, and a very believable one. By this time, Micky has put together a team of supporters who agree on nothing so much as the importance of keeping Dickie out of Micky’s life. When Micky can’t decide between the warring camps (which we’re inclined, even though the movie turns out not to do, to see as good guys versus bad guys), his new friends leave him, and you think, uh-oh, so much for Micky.

But Dickie is awakened by their defection; and instead of taking advantage of his restored command of the field (as Micky’s trainer) he reaches out for the defectors’ support. As Charlene and O’Keefe (Mickey O’Keefe plays himself) understand, Micky’s dependence on his brother’s good advice is not weak or self-destructive: Dickie really does know the best moves. He also knows his brother better than anyone else. They don’t like Dickie, but they know that, so long as he’s clean, they have no good excuse for not working with him, so they undergo conversion experiences of their own. (Ms Adams is so good at registering the course of Charlene’s faith in Dickie that you think that you’re reading her mind.) It’s at this very point that the boxing story sweeps to the foreground for a stirring climax — a climax that would work out very differently if Micky’s various friends weren’t determined to get together to support him. 

Melissa Leo plays Alice Ward, the much-married mother of nine, among them the two boxers and six harridan Valkyries who hang out in her home and amplify her signs and signals. Alice is very much a type, but I’ve never seen the equal of Ms Leo’s impersonation. A hard and brittle hustler who’s too sentimental to grasp that she routinely favors her black sheep son, Dickie, over the straight-shooting Micky, Alice is all but blind to Dickie’s addiction. She’s as out of touch with reality as any of Tennessee Williams’s wilting Southern belles, but, being a lot tougher, she is not broken by the shattering portrayal of her family in an HBO documentary that is shown midway through the film. It’s unclear what she knows in advance about this project; one suspects that she has taken Dickie’s assurance that it’s about his comeback as the pride of Lowell, Massachusetts at his word. In fact, we don’t know different until just before the broadcast. The subject of the documentary is crack, and how completely it can ruin the life of someone like Dickie. It ends with his being led off to prison. In an addled attempt to raise money for Micky’s training, Dickie impersonates cops and shakes down the johns who pick up his tarts. It doesn’t take long for this scheme to come crashing down around him. Even for Alice, though, “documentary” doesn’t mean quite what it ought to, and when Dickie comes out of prison, she is almost eager to resume enabling him. She at risk of helping both of her sons right back into disappointment and failure. If The Fighter has a disappointment, it’s that Ms Leo is never given a scene to correspond to Mr Bale’s. 

Whether or not the filmmakers intended any such message, I watched The Fighter as itself something of a documentary, about the failure of our economy to provide millions of Americans with meaningful occupations even as it drowns them in consumerist trash. It is difficult to imagine why anyone with a interesting, well-paid job would take up professional boxing, and The Fighter does nothing to make it any easier.  

You might think, from recent entries, at I’ve been doing nothing but reading The Kindly Ones and other earnest books, but I’ve had a few nights out in the past weeks.

The second Orpheus Carnegie Hall concert of the season featured the stunning British soprano Kate Royal. Ms Royal sang Britten’s Les Illuminations, a song cycle, set to Rimbaud, that gives the composer’s countrywomen a chance to show off their Continental chops. After what struck me as an uncertain beginning, Ms Royal’s voice bloomed into the music, but when a beautiful woman sings “Being Beauteous” beautifully, it is hard to say where artistry stops and good luck begins. A beautiful young woman, I should say; time will settle the mystery. My companion and I, old school gents, felt that a slip ought to have been worn beneath the clinging white satin gown over which the singer seemed always about to trip. (If wardrobe is going to malfunction, let’s get it over with.)

The concert opened with Barber’s Capricorn Concerto. This astringent music, with its oddly chosen scoring for flute, oboe and trumpet, was very well played, as more or less goes without saying for an Orpheus performance. I was carried back into my first radio days in Houston, when I discovered, thanks to music such as this, that there was a difference between the modern and the avant-garde. Barber was unambiguously a modernist who wished to please and entertain, and I remembered trying to imagine the state of mind of a modernist bourgeois listener who would be pleased and entertained by the Capricorn.

After the interval, we had Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony. I had been thinking about the Orpheus way of making music, with its core committees and meetings and endless rehearsals, and I was beginning to realize that most musicians would probably not care to take on so much work. And that’s fine: if Orpheus shows us that you can make great music without a conductor, that doesn’t mean that there is anything wrong with conductors. What it does mean, though — and with blazing humanity — is that there is a big difference between music made by an orchestra executing a single mind’s idea of what’s important, and music made by a group of musicians each of whom has his or her own cohering idea of what’s important. The first tends to be more powerful, but the second is unquestionably more interesting.

The Metropolitan Musem Artists in Residence gave the first of three recitals at Grace Rainey Rogers. First up was Beethoven’s seldom-played Opus 44, a set of variations for piano trio. I knew the work vaguely, as I also knew the concluding Dvorak, because I’d put it on one of my Nano playlists. In between, Edward Arron played Luciano Berio’s Les mots sont allés, about which I don’t remember a thing, not a thing, except that it was evidently written to be played beautifully. Then we had a lovely string trio by Gideon Klein, a Moravian composer who helped to organize the musical establishment among inmates at Theresienstadt (where, one imagines, this work had its premiere) before meeting his own death at Auschwitz. The trio is the transporting souvenir of a mind that is very happy to be alive. As soon as I got home, I ordered a recording from Arkivmusic, because I’d like to see if it’s possible to get to know this music so well that the horrible circumstances surrounding its composition evaporate.

For Dvorak’s Piano Quartet, Opus 87,  Jeewon Park came back out to join the three principals of  MMArtists, who in addition to her husband, Mr Arron, include violinist Colin Jacobnsen and violist Nicholas Cords. The best performances of Germanic chamber music from the Nineteenth Century seem always to suggest that excellence of execution, no matter how manifest, is of secondary importance to the expression of the musicians’ friendship, and Mr Arron and his friends reminded us that this tendency attains its high point with Dvorak.

Kathleen begged me to wait to see The King’s Speech until she could see it with me, and I did. I liked it and was very heartwarmed, but I was surprised at how brown and quiet-looking it was. Every attempt appears to have been made to strip the picture of regal flash. Home Life at “The Firm” would make a good subtitle, if smart  movies had subtitles (why is that only the most brainless ones do?) Colin Firth, although a very handsome man, does not have the interestingly sleek, quasi-“Oriental” features of George VI; nor does he project majesty. Well, of course not; this is a movie about a stammerer who is taught the confidence to speak plaintly by a failed actor just this side of a mountebank. The movie’s funniest moment is also its most rude: the Duchess of York (the magnificent Helena Bonham Carter) trills that dinner with the family of her husband’s helper would be delightful and then immediately rolls up this prospect in the claim of a “previous engagement.” Without ruffling her composure in the slightest, the actress projects the alarm of a cat in free fall.

Geoffrey Rush, as the self-taught speech therapist Lionel Logue, is grand and craggy enough to anchor the story through its gales of potential uplift; there is also a terribly important scene in which the Duke of York (as he then still is) berates and spurns Logue with a heartlessness that makes you want to summon the RSPCA. And yet the story does not follow in the footsteps of The Madness of King George. This King George actually apologizes, which is also terribly important.

I wanted to see more of Eve Best, who plays Wallis Simpson with breathtakingly impudent self-assurance; what I’m probably clamoring for is a series of movies in which Ms Best and Guy Pearce enact further adventures of the Windsors. Mr Pearce is thoroughly convincing as “David,” a man who, all who knew him seem to agree, was fundamentally childish and inconsequential but also blessed with a godlike grace that his brother lacked. I also wanted to see more of Jennifer Ehle, who plays Mrs Logue; but then I always want to see more of Jennifer Ehle. Don’t you sometimes think that Jennifer Ehle is the Meryl Streep upgrade?

Another true-story movie that I saw but did not get round to writing up was the one in which Ewan McGregor plays a cutie by the name of Philip Morris — I Love You Philip Morris turns out to have nothing to do with smoking. Not a frame of this frolicsome film went by without my wondering, bewildered, how it ever got made. Where is the audience for a romp about a nutty gay con man?  Jim Carrey’s brio is so extreme that his scenes feel animated, to accommodate cartoonishly stretched limbs and leers — but we expect this of Mr Carrey. Philip Morris is a must-see movie because of the bashful glances that Mr McGregor casts through the magnolias of his eyelashes. 

¶ At MTC, we saw Spirit Control. (Kathleen also saw The Pitmen Painters; Ms NOLA took my ticket to that show.) The interesting thing about this play by Beau Willimon is that it works very well as a theatre piece but fails again and again as a formal structure. At the very beginning, Adam, an air-traffic controller, attempts to guide an inexperienced woman through the landing of a small plane. This increasingly hair-raising scene ends in a way that guarantees the audience’s sympathy with and concern for Adam, and a plainly naturalistic sequel would have been satisfying. As it is, Spirit Control ought to crash as disastrously as a misguided plane, but the performances are so strong that it doesn’t matter that we can’t go along with the playwright’s arty meta complications. We still care.

Darren Aronofsky’s Black Swan is a movie about a delusional ballerina that, very daringly, does not appear to cue the audience as to how delusional she is. In other words, viewers who want to know what “really” happened will leave the theatre disappointed at best and delusional, themselves, at worst — as they try to locate code to decipher. Where does the story end and the nightmare begin? Does Nina (Natalie Portman) suffer an inadvertently self-inflicted wound at the end? Is Lily (Mila Kunis) a scheming competitor or an ingenuous colleague? Is Erica (Barbara Hershey) a loving mother or a demented enabler? How much of Nina’s relationship with the ballet company’s director, Thomas (Vincent Cassel) is wishful? Does anything at all in The Black Swan really happen?

If questions such as these oppress your mind as you leave the theatre, then Mr Aronofsky’s movie will have failed you — or you may have failed it. If, in contrast, you’re upset by the extremes of vulnerability and fragility that Ms Portman projects in every scene, then you’re far more likely to give the picture a satisfactory rating.

But allow me to propose a third test: if, after seeing Black Swan, listening to a performance of Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake is a new and shocking experience, then you’ll be really delighted that a friend dragged you to a movie that you hadn’t really intended to see.

I’ve never seen Swan Lake danced. There’s a lot of ballet that I haven’t seen. I always have a good time when I do “go to the ballet,” and I make a point of seeing the Paul Taylor Company every year, but by the time I’m done with concerts and plays, I’ve run out of steam. Once, in my radio days, I was asked to present an armful of roses to a ballerina at the end of a performance at Houston’s Miller Theater, and that was an eye-opener. Standing backstage, I watched the corps’ beaming smiles rise and fall with the curtain; when the audience couldn’t see them, the dancers were not happy campers. That was one of several experiences that intensified my determination to remain on the audience’s side of the proscenium. I know that artists suffer for their work, but I don’t want to see the suffering, because it’s not the point. The point is the finished artwork or the performance. Which is pretty much why I didn’t intend to see Black Swan. The bleeding toes, the grinding repetitions and the twittering malice, the total commoditization of a pretty dancer’s body — these are not the things that make ballet interesting or enjoyable. They make it seem more like an unfair labor practice, or an undesirable one, even, one not unlike prostitution.

Thanks to Nina’s delusions (however extensive they may be), the bleeding toes and so forth are moved to the background of Black Swan, and will impress and/or shock only those viewers who have never given a thought to ballet. Mr Aronofsky intends us to take them for granted to the same extent that dancers themselves do. It’s what happens beyond the normal agonies — what the rigors of dance can do to the psyche, not to the body — that interests him. And he has chosen to explore the violence and damage of ballet in terms of what is arguably its most celebrated examplar. He amuses himself by twisting the narrative elements of Swan Lake — the evil spell, the doppelgänger, the thwarted love — into a movie about a hardworking girl who lives with her mom on the Upper West Side. The score is a rich blend of Tchaikovsky’s original and Clint Mansell’s eerie variations on it. It is impossible to imagine a more darkly gleaming matrix for the drama of Nina’s breakdown.

Which is, curiously, what Swan Lake seemed to be about when I listened to the music the next day. Forget Rothbart and the Prince and the cygnets and the fustian moonlight. The music seemed to voice a more invasive nightmare. As it soared and glittered and plunged, now sparkling, now tragic, I inhabited Nina’s troubled mind, in which bogus souvenirs of an innocent childhood jostled with one of the most gruesome metaphors for sexual maturation imaginable: spiky feathers poking horribly through raw, scratched skin. I felt that I was inside Natalie Portman’s contorted face and wracked body. The wretchedness was unendurable but also transfiguring: so this was what Swan Lake is really about! By paying compelling but inventive homage to a great work of art, Darren Aronofksy’s Black Swan re-creates it.

Until I read Manohla Dargis’s snarky review of The Tourist in the Times, I had no plans to see the picture, but when I saw that the Orpheum Theatre would be showing it, a block away, at ten o’clock in the morning, I thought, why not? Why not give Ms Dargis a chance to be right for a change — to write a review that I could agree with. The tedium of sitting through a mediocre movie would be more than made up for by the world-historical excitement of seeing the world through a pair of eyes that long ago struck me as overdue for the attentions of an optician. But it was not to be. Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck’s second feature film turned out to be huge fun, and once again I was left wondering why the Times keeps assigning movies that a ten year-old could predict she won’t like to Ms Dargis for review. That’s what bugs me. It isn’t that I never agree with her; never agreeing with her is useful and reliable. To be a little less snarky myself, I was encouraged to see The Tourist because Ms Dargis didn’t like it particularly. What bugs me, though, is that they make her sit through so many unsympathetic movies, and to what end?

The Tourist is a caper film, so I can’t say very much about its plot. It belongs to that sub-genre of caper films that I label “gambit,” in recognition of the very entertaining film of that name. The elusive Elise Ward is being followed through Paris by Scotland Yard, in hopes that she will lead the law (represented by Paul Bettany) to Alexander Pierce, a shadowy banker who is wanted by the British government for a staggering amount of back taxes. He’s wanted by a thug named Shaw (Steven Berkoff) for having stolen the even more staggering taxable sum. At the beginning, Elise is instructed by Alex to take the next train to Venice and to pick up (and make a decoy of) any guy who is more or less his size and build. So that’s what she does, more or less silently but with great panache. The measure of the director’s sense of cinematic humor can be taken when, pausing at the top of a Métro staircase, Elise consults her wristwatch and then confers a pitying smile upon her pursuers. With all the the nonchalance in the world, she descends the empty flight of stairs, but before the lieutenants can reach it a horde of exiting passengers blocks their passage as if on cue. It’s impossibly droll.

(Another instance: assault rifles are fired from a great distance. Nothing seems to happen to the targets, but suddenly the windowpanes turn to snow and three men drop to the ground, removed from the action with a dispatch that undercuts the idea that they were ever as dangerous as they seemed; Mr Henckel von Donnersmarck wants us to know that he would never dream of boring us with yet another gunfight.)

I’ve never been a fan of Angelina Jolie; I’ve seen only one or two of her pictures. But I’m a fan of her performance in The Tourist. She shakes up one part Rita Hayworth, one part Ava Gardner, two parts Christina Hendricks, and pours out the results in a low purring voice that I couldn’t get enough of. She eats up the scenery with a gusto that suggests compensation for all the real food that her diet does not permit, but her relish is brilliantly disguised as understatement. It’s as though Elise has been blasted by a vision, an actual experience of the concentrated glamour that the grand fashion models merely catalyze. Elise has been transformed, and you guess that life for her can only be a disappointment from now on — now that she has resolved to put Alexander Pierce behind her. As the hick whom she decides to exploit on the train tells her, she is the least down-to-earth of people. And yet, as if to make a little joke of her godhead, the director divides our attention between the glory of Angelina Jolie and the roach-like ubiquity of the male gaze that she excites. What a ratty little species we men are! But how she makes us ache to hear one true thing from those resplendent lips.

Johnny Depp, as the hick, plays a regular guy for a change — but of course he doesn’t, not really. Every regular-guy tic is calibrated with precision, and meant to be noticed as such. He gives us Jack Sparrow for grown-ups; he plays his part as if it were the gambit. Mr Bettany makes the perfect foil. In Public Enemy, the manic gangster played by Mr Depp was pursued by Christian Bale’s impersonation of an automaton. Here, the polarity is reversed. Mr Bettany is consumed by the righteous need to nail Alexander Pierce, no matter what the cost (and even though his superior, played by Timothy Dalton, has pulled the plug on the too-expensive investigation). You’re in no doubt that Inspector Acheson would eat one of his limbs if it would bag the renegade banker. Johnny Depp, meanwhile, is relaxed and bemused, at least when he’s not being shot at. As well he should be.

As for Venice, it has never looked more gloriously meretricious, and I do mean this as a compliment. Venice has been abused by a lot of movies, but this one treats it very sweetly. Naturally, there has to be a vaporetto chase in a canal at some point, but this one is not long and it has a few interesting wrinkles. The Hotel Danieli is made to look preposterous. There are no pigeons, and no churchbells. There is no attempt to experience Venice. It is seen as it has always wanted to be seen by outsiders: as a gigantic set. And sets, rather than bits of real Venice, are what we get for the most part. And why not have it serve as the set for two of American cinema’s most sacred monsters? The Tourist is set in a tourist’s idea of Venice. It’s perfect.

No more can be told you until you have seen The Tourist for yourself — which we do not encourage you to rush out and do right now, as that would not be cool. The movie unaccountably reminded Manohla Dargis of Hitchcock (a comparison that’s never flattering to anyone), but to me it was James Bond without the sadism and the self-importance. And the ending was happy to a degree unknown in Ian Fleming’s fantasies. (December 2010)

It was my firm intention to watch the DVD of Francis Veber’s Diner des cons before seeing Jay Roach’s Hollywood remake, Dinner With Schmucks. But it didn’t work out. The remake was the only film showing conveniently, so I fit it in. As it turned out, there was no need to compare and contrast, because the two movies have almost nothing in common. Oh, a lot of superficial story points. But nothing fundamental. Diner des cons is a classic mordant European farce, laughing truth to power. Dinner With Schmucks is a classic American folk tale, trumping intelligence with good-heartedness. The French film scolds its elitist snobs for not paying more attention to what they’re doing: they’re the fools in the end. The American film is all about being nice, and not hurting people’s feelings. While Diner des cons gives rein to some pretty unattractive impulses, Dinner With Schmucks suggests that American civics never really outgrows the priorities of kindergarten. It was bad enough that Hollywood producers didn’t understand Diner des cons well enough to know that they would never be able to reproduce it for Anglophone audiences. The actual adaptation is much worse, a deeply shaming infantility.

So much for Dinner With Schmucks as viewed in compare-and-contrast mode. I’d really like to know how many ticket buyers will have seen Mr Veber’s original. Another way of putting this: I’d like to know how many Americans wanted to see this picture even though they hadn’t seen, or known about, Diner des cons. Steve Carrell is a beloved comedian, sans doute, but how many of his fans want to see him with prosthetic teeth and a geeky haircut? He is genuinely unattractive in Dinner With Schmucks — unless, of course, you’re looking at him as a kind of persistent lapdog — but he is also not Jim Carrey, master of disguise. Of course, I’d also like to read somebody’s master’s thesis about Hollywood’s bizarre tennis match with French comedy, a game played by Pourquoi and Pourqois Pas. (Nobody ever wins.)

As a narrative comedy, Dinner With Schmucks is wholly without merit, even if you haven’t seen the original. It would bruise me to retail the shoddiness of its plot. Such charms as the movie blandishes are borne entirely by its cast. I will not comment on Mr Carrell’s appeal, as I’m not susceptible to it even when the actor plays nice guys. (I don’t think that I will ever be able to forgive and forget the stillborn Dan in Real Life.) I will say, though, that I’m deeply charmed by Paul Rudd’s increasing resemblance, not exclusively facial, to Paul Newman. Anyone who has seen The Oh in Ohio, or even Knocked Up, knows that Mr Rudd can be, well, distant. But he seems to be on a career-smart diet of fundamentally good-natured smart-asses who are the first to see the error of their ways. If it’s typecasting, bring it on. That anyone (okay, me) would want to see Role Models a second time is testament to Paul Rudd’s leading man magic.

Then there is Lucy Punch. I wish that there had been more of Lucy Punch in Dinner With Schmucks. I used to dislike Lucy Punch, but that was only because I disliked Avice Crichton, the opportunistic schemer in one of my favorite movies, Being Julia. By the time that I’d watched Being Julia for the twenty-fifth time, however, I’d come round to liking Ms Punch a lot, and I’m already looking forward to studying her work, so to speak, in Dinner With Schmucks, once the DVD comes out. I am going to come out and say that you really ought to see Dinner With Schmucks on the strength of her supporting role alone. You can shoot me if you don’t like it.

Well, no; you can’t.

Eat Pray Love is said to be a chick flick, but nothing could be further from the truth. Somehow, Ryan Murphy, Julia Roberts, and who knows who else in Hollywood have managed to turn out a kind of movie that MGM could never figure out how to make in the old days and that Warner Brothers lacked the resources to attempt. We will call it the Diva Rapture. Julia Roberts bears a slight resemblance, in her acting, to Joan Crawford, and none at all to Bette Davis, but she carries her new movie with a triumph that they were never allowed. Eat Pray Love, for most of its run time, is a gripping movie about Julia Roberts — and we don’t mean this sarcastically. Forget Elizabeth Gilbert’s story, even if its scenery is honored. Eat Pray Love explores the existentialism of being Julia Roberts, a woman who is both the biggest female movie star going — a role that she has commanded for well over a decade — and yet also a mere human being just like the rest of us, subject to fits of loneliness and uncertainty and self-reproach. She is just like us in the privacy of her own selfhood, but her public aspect partakes of a Bourbon grandeur, not because she’s at all stuck up but precisely because she isn’t. It turns out that watching Julia Roberts contemplate the mysteries of life is genuinely riveting. She’s grave, she’s elegaic, she’s in tears. You don’t want it to stop; you want to go on feeling her pain. The gorgeous backdrops (once she leaves Manhattan), the convivial Italian dinners, the awesome Indian rigors — everything functions as a series of extraordinary lighting arrangements for the beauty of Julia Roberts’s character. To deny the grandeur of the first three-quarters of Eat Pray Love is to be blind.

But then — well, the movie doesn’t entirely crumble into tarballs when Julia is asked to fall in love with Javier Bardem. But it becomes pretty trite. Julia in love is a giddy schoolgirl, more gifted with snappy comebacks than you might expect (not all of them verbal) but hopelessly eager; the majestic restraint of the earlier film is smashed like a piggy-bank full of Krugerrands. It doesn’t help that Mr Bardem brings nothing to his performance that wasn’t on view in his trickster turn in Vicky Cristina Barcelona; this has the effect of making Ms Roberts look a bit like a dope. Eat Pray Love would have been a masterpiece, if only it had ended on the same note as the first installment of Cate Blanchett’s Elizabeth. Lets face it: you don’t have to be gay to understand that Diva Rapture requires Renunciation.

In closing, we must note that we are looking forward to seeing a lot more of Tuva Novotny. Maybe even a remake of Down With Love.

On Saturday afternoon, Kathleen and I went to see The Girl Who Played With Fire — the second installment of the Stieg Larsson adaptations. Kathleen was very annoyed by some changes that, in her view, were not only unnecessary but also distracting — perhaps “detracting” is the word. For myself, the movie was pleasant and engaging; Noomi Rapace has one of the truly great screen presences. (Although gifted with generally lovely features and truly amazing cheekbones, she can look plain and used up.) But, perhaps because I don’t think that it could stand on its own — which isn’t so much a fault as an accident of its mode of release — I wasn’t prompted to comment. The Girl Who Played With Fire certainly lacks what was for me the most powerful thing about The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, that haunting photograph of the young Harriet Vanger (Julia Sporre) burning like a lighthouse at its center. Rarely has a still image been so evocatively deployed in a movie. (The only thing that comes to mind is the portrait of the missing heroine in Laura.) Niels Arden Oplev’s use of that photograph amounts to a kind of contract: no one with Harriet’s piercingly intelligent gaze could ever be murdered and dumped. But reassurance is missing from the second movie. Even though we know that she has to make it to the third installment, we can’t count on the survival of Lisbeth Salander herself. There is no hope within the movie. And if you know that the third and final installment picks up right where the second one ends, with Lisbeth and her monstrous father, Zala, in the same hospital, it’s difficult to see The Girl Who Played With Fire as having a genuine ending. It’s more a series of interesting episodes. Which is fine! But nothing to write here about.

The itch to see a film that would make me want to say something persisted, and this morning I succumbed to curiosity about Inception. I’m not going to waste much time distinguishing Inception, which I enjoyed, from Avatar, which I wouldn’t see; it’s enough to say that I wasn’t afraid that the new movie would offend me. As, indeed, it did not. But it did bore me, here and there. The ennui got particularly thick during the Alpine shoot-out scenes that I think were to represent an attack upon the subconscious of a godfather. I felt as though I were being forced to stare over someone’s shoulder at a video game. There was nothing in it for me. My interest in the good guys dropped to zero, so much so that I didn’t bother to sort out who was where or doing what. The gunfire was an obvious insurance policy, hedging against the risk that the story’s inventive theory of dreams would lose the young men in the audience. Actually, explicating the mechanics of invading the dreams of others risked losing everyone, because the job was assigned to Leonardo DiCaprio. I’m afraid that it is spectacularly difficult for me to connect Mr DiCaprio’s Cobb with the kind of sustained intellectual effort that mastering the art of “extraction” would require. And he was woefully shown up by the electrically bright Ellen Page, who as Ariadne plays the only character who is even halfway privy to her team leaders dark secrets, and who was able (as an actress) to put us in the picture every time she was obliged to scold Cobb for putting his people at uninformed risk. If Ariadne had been the one to tell us all about “Limbo,” I’m sure that we’d all have been far more terrified of the possibility of winding up there.

It’s a pity that Christopher Nolan doesn’t trust his cinematic virtuosity enough to have made what this movie might have been: a coruscating adventure story without either guns or spiels. He comes close, or at least he did so for me, in the layer of the climactic dream sandwich of dreams that takes place in a swank hotel. While the other characters dream down one level, their wool-suited bodies defenseless,  Arthur (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) remains behind to protect them. I had no idea what Mr Gordon-Levitt was doing throughout this sequence, but I didn’t mind; I was happy to watch him scramble about the corridors (sometimes along the ceiling) and up and down an elevator shaft, satisfied that he seemed to know what he was doing. (Mr Gordon-Levitt would have made a great Cobb, but I’d hate to lose him as Arthur.) The scene in which Cobb and Ariadne stroll through Paris, in a dream in which she re-invents the city while he populates it, is great visual fun, as is the crumbling city-by-the sea that represents the failure of the dream that Cobb shared with his late wife, Mal (Marion Cotillard). But Mr Nolan’s adherence to the action-thriller playbook guarantees that the buds of his visual creativity never fully bloom. It seems churlish to complain about this; what’s wrong with a beautiful action-thriller. Well, nothing, except that, as an action-thriller, Inception is not very inventive.

We learn, at the end of Inception, that Cobb knows that it’s possible to plant an idea in someone’s brain because he has done it before, to his wife. The guilt that he feels flows from having so well convinced her that what seemed to be real life was also just a dream that she lost interest in it and took her life. Thus she bowed to the same Panglossian morality that assures us that people who could live forever would come to regard immortality as a curse. Life may be tough, but if it were any easier, we’d be really miserable. If life were a dream, it would be unlivable. Is this an interesting proposition? Most of us would unhesitatingly agree that mistaking life for a dream is a kind of pathology, an illness to be treated. We’re somatically rooted in a life that does not seem dream-like at all. But what if it were a dream? What if we could live forever? (Living in a dream world for eternity is, of course, the Abrahamic afterlife.) These are not grown-up questions, and making Marion Cotillard look wretched because she has been betrayed by one of them is sad diminishment. I’d have liked it better if she’d just been an all-out bad girl.