CriticSociety- film reviews

Review

The Time Traveler's Wife

Director

Robert Schwentke

Year

2009

Rating

Reviewed by

Gon Curiel a.k.a. Groucho

Review date

Tuesday, August 25, 2009

No one can blame me of exaggeration if I state that The Time Traveler’s Wife is an extraordinary film. It’s a perfectly rounded time-travel tale about a little girl meeting a grown man who appears spontaneously in the meadow outside her house and states that he’s her friend from the future, which makes her fall in love with him and introduce herself, years later, to that very man at a younger age, who’s still unaware of her existence, as the definitive love of his life. He doesn’t have a chance to defy this fact; in a way, neither has a choice, but they wouldn’t have wanted one.

After they’re finally together, after they meet in the same chronology, in the one where he’s based, where he’s always bound to come back after a disappearance, their story becomes a typical romance, in the sense that they don’t treat each other much differently than any of us treat our partners, they’re humans after all, but in their lives together they must deal not only with Henry’s sudden and indefinite disappearances, caused by a genetic condition, but with the knowledge of the future, which is not always pleasant.

Henry points out that there’s no way to change history, past or future, since, for example, he’s never been able to save his mother’s life on the day he first time-traveled (from the car that was about to mean his mother’s death). That means that any glimpse he gets from the future, during his sporadic visits, is definite and can’t be changed. What he sees is usually good, not surprisingly, because he and Clare have an awesome relationship that’s been rooting for a lifetime. But sometimes life isn’t pleasant, and when he sees something bad coming up, it’s up to them to stick together and face it as best they can.

There’s not as much grief in The Time Traveler’s Wife as there could be, perhaps because the characters of Henry and Clare are so strong despite the adversity. Also, there’s much reason to celebrate since both are so happy to be together, so willing to make it work, and so supportive during such contingencies as Henry disappearing a minute before their wedding, and an older Henry stepping in to take his place.

However, it is a sad movie overall, but not in a depressing way, but rather because we care so much about these characters that we don’t want anything to go wrong between them. The sadness is bearable only because they face their suffering so well and deal with it strongly, in fact only strengthening their relationship at every step. As I said, however, it’s not about seeing them suffer, but rather seeing them live the miracle and make the most of every moment, even if Henry disappears throughout Christmas and New Year’s, or even if they are visited for a few seconds by a wounded future Henry who can’t even explain what happened, and is gone before he even gets a chance.

Eric Bana and Rachel McAdams are perfectly cast as Henry and Clare. He’s moody and she’s luminous, and it’s perfectly credible that she becomes his greatest happiness and ongoing pillar of stability to lead a more or less normal life. Ron Livingston is a welcome presence as Henry’s best friend, providing some comedy relief during the brightest moments. The whole cast is excellent.

I don’t know what it is, but the film looks and feels exactly like the experience of reading the novel it’s based on. Bruce Joel Rubin, of Ghost (1990) fame, scripted a tight and passionate adaptation of Audrey Niffenegger’s work, and I’m sure she’s proud of the result. Mychael Danna’s music provides the perfect atmosphere for what I find to be a totally fulfilling, and haunting, film experience.

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Review

The Hangover

Director

Todd Phillips

Year

2009

Rating

Reviewed by

Gon Curiel a.k.a. Groucho

Review date

Monday, August 24, 2009

I thought, perhaps rightfully, that The Hangover was not to be taken seriously. I had no intention of watching it soon. However, everyone started to talk about it, and I considered I might be missing on something worth seeing. The success was crazy. Three weeks after its release, my girlfriend and I had to stand in line a half hour before it started to get a good place in the theater. The film started and laughter burst soon enough.

It’s not hilarious, but being what it is, one couldn’t ask for much more. As soon as you get the premise, you expect something and you get it. There are a few details that add something extra, but overall, it is what it is, and that’s good. It’s harmless fun, not a waste of time, but nothing to write home about.

The story is about a bachelor party in Las Vegas where the four guys involved get so wild they can’t remember anything the day after, but there’s evidence that they did more than a few things they should worry about. The bachelor is missing, there’s a tiger in the bathroom, a baby in the closet, and many more signs of Vegas fun taken to the extreme.

The key to this comedy’s success, I think, is its frankness. Though it’s farfetched to say the least, it never treats its characters as anything special. They are what they are and we never see them out of character. We only see the before and the after, not the during, which helps because we don’t really have to believe they would do what we’re told they do, because they don’t believe it themselves.

Except for the bachelor, Doug, played by Justin Bartha, the guys are peculiar in different ways: Bradley Cooper is Phil, a “cool” schoolteacher who’s more than eager to go wild as he did in the old days; Ed Helms is Stu, an uptight dentist who’s about to marry a controlling, abusive woman; and Zach Galifianakis is Alan, Doug’s extravagant brother-in-law-to-be. They all stay in their place: Phil always proud of what it seems they did, Stu constantly terrified of his fiancée, and Alan providing outrageous commentary on the goings-on.

The guys’ investigation of last night is much funnier, for sure, than the night itself would have been for us, which makes The Hangover rise above most party movies that go nowhere. Whoever has had a terrible hangover, complete with memory loss, understands the fear of having done something regrettable and not being able to remember it or do something about it. This is the only good film I’ve seen about that, and it should be praised for doing it so well.

However, true to its nature, never wanting to be more than it is, despite its potential to be much more, The Hangover stays put inside its boundaries and scores as a summer blockbuster that’s sure to make millions and sell a few DVDs and Blu-Rays and be forgotten in a few years. It’s definitely not memorable, but it’s surely a movie experience to comment with the guys, especially when you’re months away from going to a bachelor party in Las Vegas, hoping to come back with good memory of all the fun.

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Review

Happy-Go-Lucky

Director

Mike Leigh

Year

2008

Rating

Reviewed by

Gon Curiel a.k.a. Groucho

Review date

Tuesday, August 18, 2009

Is this about something? “Seinfeld” comes to mind: a show about nothing, as the tagline went. It wasn’t actually about nothing, it was a situation comedy about everyday life and the smallest things about it that are so common they easily pass for nothing. It seems to me the tagline would be more appropriate for Happy-Go-Lucky because through it and after it I didn’t get what it was about, if anything.

The lead character is Poppy (Sally Hawkins), a woman who goes about as happy as can be. Nothing can disturb her, not loneliness, grumpiness or hardship. She’s OK with life and ready to defend herself if anyone insinuates the opposite. To my eyes, she’s unhappy, living a life based on proving that she’s not by displaying exaggerated and risky examples of compassion and charity that are more awkward than upbeat.

I’m not sure whether writer/director Mike Leigh wanted this to be the case, but I found the adventures of his Poppy more stressing than cheerful. Either exposing herself to a potentially dangerous homeless man in the middle of the night or provoking a clearly deranged driving instructor, her attitude always calls for trouble in the real world. I’m not defending bitterness of course, but it’s imprudent to be so joyous when joy is unwelcome, as it inspires more bitterness because so much happiness seems either fake or presumptuous.

What I described sounds like a story though, like Poppy provokes reactions that teach her that her attitude is not always convenient, but this is not the case. Instead, the film is composed of vignettes, many of them irrelevant, about Poppy dealing with the world and sporting that happy face at all times. Some of these are poignant, like one where she deals with a bully in the school where she teaches, while others come off asphyxiating, like the aforementioned one with the homeless man.

One continuing subplot deals with her driving instructor, Scott (Eddie Marsan), a neurotic man who has no patience, common sense or humor. Poppy being the opposite, jokey, unfocused and carefree, they clash. What she doesn’t know is that this man is developing a strange obsession with her; she pushes the limits, though, not by doing anything wrong but merely by sticking with the teacher who seemed more dangerous every time for compassion. Marsan’s performance is outstanding, but his scenes are intolerable.

There are many moments here and there that are priceless. Some with Poppy’s roommate Zoe (Alexis Zegerman), for instance, contain excellent reflections on life in general. The whole, however, never quite gels and seems much longer than it really is. If the viewer doesn’t consider Poppy an adorable character, I don’t see how he or she can enjoy this as expected.

This didn’t seem to be a problem among the critics who universally adored the picture. I didn’t. Like everyone else, I considered Sally Hawkins’ performance prodigious. Her character was the problem. After all was said and done, I got nothing. Perhaps that was the idea, but truth is, no show about nothing can sustain itself, and to me, this is proof of that.

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Review

Terminator Salvation

Director

McG

Year

2009

Rating

Reviewed by

Gon Curiel a.k.a. Groucho

Review date

Thursday, August 13, 2009

Perhaps the point has been lost by now, or maybe this has always been a story with an unclear point, but truth is, the latest Terminator film has little to do with the original, and yet, there’s still a lot of material to exploit. Much of the mind-twisting time-traveling stuff is out of the picture now, but it’s still interesting to witness what’s supposed to be the fate of humanity, where all has been lost, except hope.

One wonders, however, how good we would consider this if it was a stand-alone film with no relation to previous ones. It is interesting as both a sequel and a prequel, but what if it wasn’t? Would we consider it as intriguing to witness the war against the machines in a bleak future, where the only hope is the survival of key people who will influence the past in order to make things better, if we hadn’t already experienced those past experiences? Furthermore, is there any point in witnessing the war, if what we wished is for it to never happen? In the first films, we knew the war would happen, and had a taste of it in the present; now we’re in it, and it’s not a happy place to be.

If it is to happen though, let’s see it in all its splendor, and that’s an asset of this film. We’re immediately transported into the midst of hell and it’s totally believable. I went along with the visual effects and general ambience like it was real and felt as threatened as these people. Throughout most of the film there are battles filled with so much tension that we pay little attention to the story. When the plot takes over, however, it’s hard to buy into it, and some intensity is lost.

The tale follows a grown-up John Connor (Christian Bale), the prophesized leader of the resistance against the machines, struggling to find a loophole in the enemies’ systems to finally defeat them. When a young Kyle Reese (Anton Yelchin) appears in the map, not knowing his destiny as the time traveler who saves John Connor’s mother in 1984 and eventually fathers Connor himself, things get hastier for the rebellion’s hero. There’s a new addition that makes things more interesting: Marcus (Sam Worthington), a once-human who’s now half-man-half-machine and might or might not be a traitor inside.

Though Marcus has a heart, the story has very little, which becomes obvious when the film attempts to involve us with the characters. Eventually, it becomes quite obvious that there’s nowhere to go, because the fate is here, and there’s little or no way to change it. Is this just one episode in what’s to become a long-running series about the war against the machines? It’s fun, but irrelevant fun, because we all know where this is going, why and how it happened, who’s who, and what matters. The only question is whether the war will be won by the humans, but frankly, it’s not a question we care much about, because this isn’t our reality anymore.

The performances are honest but I still find some difficulty rooting for Christian Bale in general, his characters always seem somewhat cold and detached. Perhaps that’s precisely his drill, but in this case, for example, I rooted for Marcus much more, and not because of the character but because of Worthington’s performance. Bryce Dallas Howard plays Bale’s partner and is as cold as he. Yelchin is great as Kyle Reese, a character we learned to love more than twenty years ago. There’s a gratuitous appearance of one of the most important characters from the previous entries, digitally recreated for a few minutes; it’s so dull and expository that it comes off intrusive. Plus, it reminds us that this doesn’t hold a candle to the original films, at least the first and the second. It’s still fun though.

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Review

Wicker Park

Director

Paul McGuigan

Year

2004

Rating

Reviewed by

Gon Curiel a.k.a. Groucho

Review date

Tuesday, August 11, 2009

That this is a remake, which I found out after it was over, made a lot of sense to me. During the viewing, I kept wondering why the movie seemed so intelligent at its core but was presented in such a dull way, almost heartlessly, certainly detached from what mattered in the story. I blamed the director and I was right in part: it was the whole team who adapted the French film L’Appartement who couldn’t find the right balance between a difficult, European-style tale, and an accessible, American presentation.

However, since the basis is still there, more or less, the movie is enjoyable and rather haunting. It’s a great story and it’s all in how it’s told. What we see is what we get, but sometimes we don’t see the whole picture until we’re given a different perspective. This is a story of incomprehensibly lost love, as Matthew (Josh Hartnett) spends his life wondering why Lisa (Diane Kruger) left him, and can’t quite recover the pace of his life, even after becoming engaged with Rebecca (Jessica Paré).

After a Cinderella-like incident where Matt believes he saw a fleeing Lisa, he retraces that chance encounter and the whole relationship, which becomes a labyrinthine experience that involves much more than he ever expected, including his buddy Luke (Matthew Lillard) and a mysterious girl (Rose Byrne).

It’s all about setup and clarification. During the first act, we find out a bit about the characters and their current situation, and then it’s during the other two thirds where we realize how it all happened and what it actually meant. This is done by showing flashbacks and advancing the current story through them. The best sequences are those where the repetition of a previous scene shows a different angle that sheds some light on it and explains something as yet incomprehensible.

Truth is, though, we get the idea soon enough and some of the rest is drivel. Most characters are suffering and it’s no fun to see how this was caused by ill intentions. However, seeing pieces fall into place is always nice, especially when headed towards a positive ending. A final confrontation between Matt and the person who caused him to grieve is awesome; the last scene with his fiancée Rebecca is laughably bad.

Since the film attempts to conceal explanations until it’s impossible to do so anymore, the characters come off cold and apparently insensitive. This helps the character of Lisa, who’s such a mystery both in flashback and in actuality, becoming not only the object of affection and melancholy for Matt but a true enigma for the viewer. It’s a breath of fresh air when true feelings are evidenced, but that happens so late that there’s a risk the viewer might have lost interest by then. It happened to me, and even though I kept watching, fully interested in knowing how it would end, I struggled to maintain a connection with the characters and couldn’t manage to do so with most.

When there’s no way to root for the characters, an inevitable search for logic ensues. Many stories facilitate suspension of disbelief by making us care much for the protagonists. This one, however, exposes its gaps in logic and likeliness, causing us to question how on Earth what happened could happen in the real world. I did my best to impede this from marring the experience, and managed to, but I had to fight against the film’s nature, and that’s not what watching a movie is about.

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Review

Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince

Director

David Yates

Year

2009

Rating

Reviewed by

Gon Curiel a.k.a. Groucho

Review date

Friday, August 07, 2009

It’s a mistake to expect much from the “Harry Potter” films after reading the books, I know that now. The novels are fantastic, there’s no way around it, and the films almost always leave something to be desired, be it because they want to adapt so much or because they leave out important elements. The one film that found the exact balance to create a cinematic experience without betraying the source was Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (2004). What we should expect now, it’s been proved once and again, is a good time and not much more. Disappointment is the alternative.

I gotta get it out of my system, so here are my complaints: “The Half-Blood Prince” is my favorite entry in the series and the movie simply doesn’t do it justice. It’s not that things are left out or that too much is included, but that what’s included doesn’t have the right focus. During his sixth year at Hogwarts, Harry (Daniel Radcliffe) finds a textbook that has an inscription stating it belonged to the Half-Blood Prince, whoever that is. In the book, this is a big mystery because the textbook is full of notes that either help or hinder Harry, and the Half-Blood Prince’s identity is a puzzle that the three main characters try to solve, driving us to a shocking revelation towards the end. The impact of all this, in the film, is inexistent. Another subplot that is ruined is the romance between Harry and Ginny Weasley (Bonnie Wright). There’s no emotion, passion or apparent attraction here. It’s just obligatory, and I find that unforgivable.

On the other hand, the meat of the story is there, which helps. Professor Dumbledore (Michael Gambon) hides a dark secret he must share with Harry if they are to uncover Lord Voldemort’s secret weapon—the key to his immortality. To achieve this, he hires Horace Slughorn (Jim Broadbent), an old professor who takes pride in having been close to some of the best students of Hogwarts, and probably won’t resist the temptation of teaching Harry. In fact, what Dumbledore wants is for Harry to gain Slughorn’s confidence and extract a shameful confession that’s key to achieve their goal, one that involves one of Slughorn’s favorite students: Tom Riddle, before he became Voldemort. Broadbent is simply ideal as the new professor.

The other standout is Alan Rickman as Professor Snape, the double agent whose conflict is great no matter what side he’s really loyal to. Sad to say, the script and direction spoil this a bit, as it seems pretty obvious which side he’s really on. Adding some intensity to the evil team, Tom Felton is at his best as Draco Malfoy, finally giving in to his family tradition.

Aside from the dark side of the story, made rich by some flashbacks showing the history of a young Tom Riddle before he became Voldemort, there’s a lot of light in this movie in the form of budding romances and bursting hormones. Mainly, Hermione Granger (Emma Watson) is now quite into bumbling Ron Weasley (Rupert Grint), who keeps breaking her heart unwillingly. There are lots of laughs and tears in these scenes, and they’re highly welcome.

The ambience is moody as ever and made all the more special by the music of Nicholas Hooper, probably what I enjoyed most of all. I’m not sure what to expect from the next two entries, half and half of the seventh book’s adaptation. I didn’t like that book that much, and splitting it in two never seemed a good idea to me. Perhaps I’ll like them, though, since I expect so little. Exactly the opposite of my Half-Blood Prince experience.

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Review

Beetle Juice

Director

Tim Burton

Year

1988

Rating

Reviewed by

Gon Curiel a.k.a. Groucho

Review date

Wednesday, August 05, 2009

I couldn’t remember the exact storyline of Beetle Juice after so many years, but I clearly recalled that it was a bombastic experience loaded with fun ideas and hilarious performances. Indeed, it is. After seeing it again, I’m certain that I’ll forget the story once again not too long from now, but I will always remember how good a time I had with it, and how willing I am to revisit it anytime.

The story is not bad at all, it’s only so simple it serves more for uproarious gimmicks than it does for dramatic impact, but for once, I don’t care. We’re transported into such an extraordinary universe that we’re awe-struck enough as to not worry about the twists and turns of the plot, or how effective they are. Even the title character, who we’d suppose is protagonist, shows up scarcely, and has nothing to do with the most famous scene, for instance.

It’s all good-natured though the premise per se is tragic. It deals with the death of the young Maitlands, Adam (Alec Baldwin) and Barbara (Geena Davis), who find themselves stuck as ghosts in their beloved home, which is soon “invaded” by the new owners whose tastes aren’t appreciated by the old ones. The Maitlands are horrified by the fact that since they can’t flee their house (giant worms hunt them if they try), they must coexist with the new people, the Deetzes.

In a twisted Tim Burton world, it’s not surprising that the ghosts are normal people and the living are eccentrics. The Deetzes turn a simple, normal house around with weird décor and unusual lifestyles. Delia (Catherine O’Hara) in particular is obsessed with the abnormal, along with her friend Otho (Glenn Shadix), who helps her reinvent the house. Jeffrey Jones plays the husband who goes along, not quite convinced, but trying to have a good time. A young Winona Ryder plays Lydia, his daughter, who’s still mourning her mother and quite in touch with the dead.

There are two plots in fact: one that deals with the Maitlands coping with death and meeting the afterlife, and another that does with their coexistence with the Deetzes.

The former is the one that provides more fun at first, as it shows life after death as a sort of bureaucratic world that’s not entertaining in the least from the inside but provides many laughs for those who watch it from the outside. The production design is outstanding; there’s imagination to spare. And one couldn’t ask for a more inspired music score than that of Danny Elfman, which seems heaven-sent for this riotous movie.

The latter is where the character of Beetle Juice (Betelgeuse, in fact) comes in. He’s a dead man who’s been around much longer than the Maitlands and offers a service he calls bio-exorcism, consisting of a system to scare the living out of a haunted house. The now-famous key to calling him is saying his name three times, which spells trouble.

Though Michael Keaton’s crazed performance as Betelgeuse is amazing to say the least, the character itself is irrelevant. He’s there only a few times, every one memorable, but never quite affecting the story. It’s all in good fun though, and good nature, so it’s OK, but there are some things in the film that are more significant.

One moment that has become a modern classic in itself is the dance around the table scene. Many times throughout the movie, Harry Belafonte’s music plays, Adam being a big fan. So, after some failed attempts to scare the Deetzes off, he and Barbara decide to give them the ultimate fright by making them dance creepily to the tune of Belafonte’s “Day-O”. The result is one of the most hilarious scenes in a Tim Burton film, perfectly executed and interpreted by all. If only for that, this is a must-see.

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Review

Basic Instinct

Director

Paul Verhoeven

Year

1992

Rating

Reviewed by

Gon Curiel a.k.a. Groucho

Review date

Tuesday, August 04, 2009

I was quite young when this film came out, and it wasn’t easy to convince my mom to allow me to see it. I was pre-adolescent, in fact, so even though the content shocked me, I must say I wasn’t yet aware that it was so potent. Only years later, at revisiting it, did I realize how highly charged it was with sexual tension, both through the devoted performances and the double-entendres that the great script is full of.

The screenplay by the much-criticized Joe Eszterhas is shameless in its sexual exposition and deliberate convolution but totally effective as it is taken seriously by performers and filmmakers alike. There’s not one moment where the male lead, Detective Nick Curran, considers what a fool he’s making of himself, or one where the protagonist, Catherine Tramell, pauses to realize she’s exaggerating her femme fatale nature. This is their lives and how they set to live them, and they just do it like it’s natural. That the film pulls this off is its greatest asset, because when we realize they mean business, we also forget how goofy it all is, and beg for more.

The film starts with a bang and never lets go. The first scene, which is masterful, combines the two main themes, sex and murder, in a brutal way. When Detective Curran gets involved in the case, he investigates the main suspect, psychologist and mystery writer Catherine, who wrote a book years before that featured an identical murder, a perfect alibi for her since no one would believe she’s so stupid as to kill someone the same way. Or would she? Is it possible she did it because of her alibi? She’s certainly not scared of being suspected, one could even say she’s turned on by it. Curran decides to play her game and gets involved with her in more ways than one.

How the story plays is intriguing. It goes around the premises replaying them under different circumstances so that everything gets a different perspective each time. There’s a very popular scene where Catherine uncrosses and crosses her legs, revealing her lack of underwear, in which she speaks provocative lines that challenge her interrogators. Later on, Curran speaks the same lines in the same setting and also under interrogation, only of course, and thankfully, without the legs maneuver. What we get there is the same speech by a different person, which shows that the same things can play differently under different circumstances. That’s more or less the theme of this story: how some things appear to be a way, but could be completely different, if looked closely.

The leg-crossing scene is the most famous, and with good reason, but it’s definitely not the only one where director Verhoeven goes for the exposition, every time with Sharon Stone’s good cooperation, and it works great. It’s never tacky, and that’s a tribute to everyone involved in the making. Stone in particular is so elegant and mystifying that she’s to thank for most of her scenes’ success, because what we see is not what we get—we get much more.

The first-rate filmmaking is accompanied by a now-classic Jerry Goldsmith score. The performances are uniformly good, with such names as Jeanne Tripplehorn, Wayne Knight and Stephen Tobolowsky in the cast. Michael Douglas and Sharon Stone are outstanding as the leading characters in a game of passion and murder that seems as addictive as it is deadly. Only the ending goes a bit too far, but by then, we’re more than willing to forgive.

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Review

Infamous

Director

Douglas McGrath

Year

2006

Rating

Reviewed by

Gon Curiel a.k.a. Groucho

Review date

Monday, August 03, 2009

Infamous is not as much the story of how Truman Capote’s “In Cold Blood” came to be as it is a deep and ruthless analysis of the writer himself, who after many years of shallow fame in a socialite world, came to face his demons after meeting the affecting case of two murderers convicted to death, one of whom turned out to be a sensible, sensitive man Capote fell in love with.

The format of the film emphasizes the transformation by telling its tale both in a dramatic way and in mockumentary style to allow fictional insight from the people who met Truman the socialite, and those who were closer. To those who knew him as this funny creature who’d nonchalantly comment about anything and everything, making everyone around burst into laughter, were eventually shocked by his transformation after the experience of researching for his book “In Cold Blood”. Those who were close friends or lovers, however, quickly realized that he finally found an exit for all that was haunting him inside—an outburst he was unable to handle.

The story of the murderers and how they came to kill a whole Kansas family during a break-in and robbery isn’t as compellingly told here as it is in Capote’s book, which is a respectful way of keeping the focus on what matters here: the writer. It is, however, quite gripping anyway, as we get to know one of the two men, Perry Smith (Daniel Craig), from the eyes of Capote, who sees him as a man so valuable it’s just unforgivable he willingly descended to what he eventually became.

We witness the flamboyant writer become a creature hidden amongst shadows. He only comes out once in a while to be center of attention as he has always been, only to conceal himself again after the show is over. Even his best friend, Nelle Harper Lee (Sandra Bullock), can’t help him for long. She is able, as he is not, to put herself before others, to pursue her sanity if it means sacrificing other people’s. This happens after her novel “To Kill a Mockingbird” becomes a hit; one of the child characters in it was based on Truman, which must have made it poignant for Nelle, to say the least, to see his lifelong friend become so obsessed with and subdued by the man on death row. As I said, however, even she was unable, and eventually unwilling, to help much.

The flavorful colors and overall panache of the New York socialite scenes is dramatically contrasted by the scenes in Kansas, where everything’s so simple it’s gray, while gray isn’t a color in the clubs of Manhattan. Rachel Portman’s score plays with both sides too. Truman’s interaction with the people of the town of Holcomb is quite valuable, as it continuously gives him extra perspective on everything that life is about. How he also manages, willingly or not, to give them this, is beautiful. One character pops out of the bunch, and that’s Special Agent Alvin Dewey (Jeff Daniels), whose simple mindset contrasts Capote’s, yet proves that two very different men can have a lot in common, and share it.

Toby Jones is spectacular as Capote, grasping the voice, the mannerisms, and the sensibility. No one could’ve done it better, he’s a great actor. Other performers in the stellar cast are Sigourney Weaver, Gwyneth Paltrow, Isabella Rossellini and Peter Bogdanovich. And though the mockumentary scenes diminish the impact of the tale being told, the actors are game, and it’s great to see them all. This is a good alternative to Capote, a very different film about the same subject, made simultaneously and released a year before.

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