Turning Myth Into Cartoon

300

The New York Sun, March 9, 2007

Hades, the ancients warned us, is dreary, morose, and subdued, its only pleasure a certain resigned tranquility. However, once news of Zack Snyder's "300," an account of the battle of Thermopylae, reaches the shades of the Spartan dead, even that sad calm will be gone. There will be shouts of rage, muttered, if laconic, threats and most ominous of all, the sound of swords being unsheathed as the finest fighting men of all time set off to hunt down Mr. Snyder, this son-of-a-Helot who should have stuck to the zombies he handled so well in "Dawn of the Dead."

"300" marks the second time the work of comic book maestro Frank Miller has been brought directly to the big screen. The first, 2005's "Sin City," a flawed masterpiece jointly directed by Mr. Miller and Robert Rodriguez, was undercut by poor plotting and incoherent showiness, yet redeemed by a wild visual élan. If "Sin City" was a flawed masterpiece, "300" is just flawed.

For that, much of the blame must lie with Mr. Miller himself. Best known for the way in which his "The Dark Knight Returns" revived DC's flagging "Batman" franchise, he is an artist most effective within genres characterized by excess and self-caricature. "Sin City," an inspired, loopy riff on hard-boiled fiction and film noir, worked in ways that "300," based on real events, never could.

It's telling that Mr. Snyder has described Mr. Miller's "300" as an attempt to turn history into mythology — telling because it reveals how little he understands what Thermopylae means. Fearless, implacable Leonidas already is myth, legend, and dream: He has been since those days in 480 B.C. when he, his 300 Spartans and a few thousand soldiers drawn from other Greek states, took on the vast army (numbering at least 250,000, though other estimates are far higher) assembled by the Persian king Xerxes to invade and subjugate Greece. In the end, Leonidas's tiny force was overwhelmed, but his heroic stand not only helped inspire the Greek victories that followed, but set an example that has shone, scarlet and bronze, grand and bloody, for the best part of 3,000 years.

Leonidas had, wrote Herodotus, "proved himself a very good man." No more needed to be said. The Spartan's deeds spoke for themselves. Compared with this, the bombast and bluster of the Miller version is simply tacky, a transformation of history not into myth, but kitsch.

Under these circumstances, Mr. Snyder's decision to stay so faithful to Mr. Miller's graphic novel ( Mr. Miller is an executive producer of the movie) can only be described as unfortunate. Even more dismayingly, the changes he has made are generally for the worse. Thus Xerxes's Immortals, his finest troops, are reduced to grotesques, stray orcs shipped in from Mordor. The rest of the Persian king's horde now features so many savage freaks and oddball beasts that Leonidas looks to be doing battle not with the might of Asia, but against the worst of Barnum & Bailey.

Yes, the manner in which the filmmaker has reproduced the look and feel of Mr. Miller's work is technically impressive (almost all the sets were "virtual"), but "300" would have benefited from concentrating less on the temptations of the digital backlot and more on old-fashioned storytelling. No less damaging, despite the occasional striking image, "300" is as aesthetically clumsy as it is technologically sophisticated. For the most part its visual style is an unhappy mix of Leni Riefenstahl and Iron Maiden, a ridiculous combination better imagined than seen. Despite some enjoyably gratuitous naked writhing (Oracle Girl!), bringing this tawdry vision to the big screen has almost nothing to be said for it, other, I suppose, than as another useful reminder that slow-motion shots of macho men walking together is a cliché that should have been killed off somewhere between "The Wild Bunch" and "Armageddon."

The cast does what it can, but it's not much. If most of the actors, including the bellowing, bellicose, and ripped Leonidas (Gerard Butler), appear to have been torn from the pages of a comic book, that is hardly their fault. They have been. On the plus side, Lena Headey as Leonidas's Queen Gorgo, fierce, foxy, and sort of feminist (well, they had to do something to persuade a few, you know, girls, to come to this movie), manages to deliver a performance verging on the three dimensional: She succeeds in emerging with dignity, if not clothing, intact.

Meanwhile, Rodrigo Santoro as a Xerxes of indeterminate ethnicity, omnivorous sexuality, and undeniable power manages to steal every scene in which he appears. His god-king may owe rather too much for comfort to Jaye Davidson's Ra in "Stargate," but the final sequences he shares on-screen with Leonidas appear to hint that the tensions between the two men may be erotic as well as military, a concept that cannot be faulted for its novelty.

Intriguing though that idea might be, if there is any genuine interest to be derived from "300," it lies in seeing the extent to which it reflects (or doesn't) the conflict that dominates our own era. The last time Hollywood tackled Thermopylae was "The 300 Spartans" (1962), a blunt Cold War allegory from a time when the threat from the east came from Moscow, not Mecca. This updated version is not so direct. It couldn't be: Mr. Miller's original work predates the fall of the twin towers. But look at the movie a little more closely and the imagery of our current troubles creeps into view, not least in the way some of Xerxes's warriors opt for the Al Qaeda/ninja chic more usually associated with Osama bin Laden's training camps.

Perhaps even more revealing is the way that, like the graphic novel, the movie fails to address the central paradox of Thermopylae: the fact that freedom's most effective defenders cared so little for individual liberty themselves. Of course, in our age of Guantanamo and Jack Bauer, that's a question that still resonates. If Mr. Snyder has chosen to dodge it, he's not the only one.

An English Saint Gets The Story He Deserves

Amazing Grace

The New York Sun, February 22, 2007

"The Lives of Others," the compelling new movie about East Germany currently in contention for an Oscar, is the story of two flawed individuals' quest for moral redemption, but Michael Apted's "Amazing Grace" raises the bar far higher. It tells the tale of William Wilberforce, an unquestionably good man who set out to redeem the honor of an empire and, in so doing, saved millions of lives.

Born in England in the middle of the 18th century to a wealthy merchant family, Wilberforce (ably played here by Ioan Gruffudd) rose to prominence in a nation that had discovered the virtue of reason and the rewards of science but had lost some of its conscience along the way.

A little more than 200 years before, an appalled Queen Elizabeth I had reacted to the news of an early slaving expedition with the observation that it would bring the "vengeance of Heaven" in its wake. As usual, Heaven remained indifferent. The slave trade flourished and Elizabeth's successors were quick to take their share.

If God appeared unconcerned and most Englishmen were prepared to either avert their eyes from the evils of the Middle Passage or to profit from it, Wilberforce was undaunted, working tirelessly for two decades to secure the abolition of the slave trade in 1807. Satisfyingly, he lived long enough to see Parliament strike down slavery itself in 1833.

With an exception or two, the filmmakers are honest enough about Wilberforce's rejection of slavery to make clear that the roots of his disdain for the trade lay not only in inherent goodness, but also in his deep-rooted Christianity. Unfortunately, this honesty does not extend to trusting moviegoers with a sufficiently rounded portrayal of that faith. The real Wilberforce was a man of immense charm, but many of his fellow Clapham "Saints" were a joyless bunch, and so opposed, for example, to the idea of a good night out at the theater that they might even have objected to a film as uplifting as this one.

Taking Lives in Stasiland

The Lives of Others

The New York Sun, February 9, 2007

If there is nothing else to East Germany's credit (and, frankly, there isn't), that grim, gray dictatorship did succeed in provoking two of the finest films to come out of a reunited fatherland in recent years.

The first, Wolfgang Becker's sweet, enchanting "Good Bye Lenin!" (2003) used one family's crisis to examine both the year that Erich Honecker's then largely unlamented republic simply faded away and the way that layers of self-deception, "internal emigration," and illusion had helped its citizens to weather those penned-in decades of repression, futility, and waste. Nevertheless, as moving and wonderfully perceptive as that film was, it's impossible to watch it without detecting occasional traces of Ostalgie, the nauseating, sugarcoated nostalgia that some Germans (of East and West) claim to feel for a kinder, gentler Volksrepublik, which never, in fact, existed.

The second of these films, the novice director Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck's "The Lives of Others," shows no signs of falling into that trap. From its concreted landscapes to its muted colors to its clammy betrayals to the black Volvos of the party bosses prowling the streets of their wretched blind alley of a capital, this wrenching, stirring, magnificent movie portrays East Berlin as it was. In this, it undoubtedly helped that Mr. von Donnersmarck was brought up in the western half of the city and was a frequent visitor to the mysterious, unsettling land on the other side of the wall.

Adding further to the film's credibility, a number of the cast began their careers in an East German state that, nearly 20 years after its demise, retains the power to haunt their lives. During an interview last week, Mr. von Donnersmarck told me that Ulrich Mühe, the film's star, had spent more than he was paid for "The Lives of Others" in legal costs incurred after the actor's ex-wife sued to stop publication of a book linked to the film in which it was to be revealed that she had "allegedly" (as, I suppose, lawyers would insist we must say) informed on him to the Stasi, East Germany's secret police. Meanwhile, the father of another cast member was unmasked as a former Stasi officer following publication of the photographs of him that appeared in the press after he attended the film's premiere.

But then that's really not so surprising. East Germany was the most spied-upon society in history. Neither prisons, nor torture, nor executions, nor even that wall were enough to keep it all together. To supervise a population of 17 million, the Stasi, with some 100,000 officers, grew to be more than twice the size of the Third Reich's Gestapo, and, just to be sure, it recruited at least another 200,000 informers, probably many more. In her 2003 book on East Germany, the Australian author Anna Funder dubbed this police state that was more police than state as "Stasiland." She was right to do so.

It's as a model citizen of Stasiland, a skilled interrogator doing his brutal business, that we first encounter Mr. Mühe's Captain Wiesler. He is Stasi, a member of the elect, a true believer, and, yet, even in the movie's early stages, there are hints that all is not well. He is hunched, buttoned-up, withdrawn, his demeanor as much captive as guard. Contrasted with the deprivation that was the lot of most East Germans, Wiesler's bleak, spotless apartment might be a token of his privileged position, but it is little more than a cell. The only sign that anything remains of the captain's emotional life is a brief request to an appallingly unattractive prostitute (assigned to him, we must assume, by his employers) to stay with him a little longer. He knows enough to know that he is lonely.

"The Lives of Others" tells the story of what happens when, at the request of a government minister, Captain Wiesler puts famous playwright Georg Dreyman (Sebastian Koch) under close surveillance as someone who may be disloyal to the republic. Intellectuals, you know. Eventually, Wiesler discovers that the politician's real motive is sexual rather than ideological. He has his eyes on Dreyman's girlfriend (nicely played by Martina Gedeck) and wants Dreyman out of the way. And that's not the most important thing that our Stasi officer discovers. As (courtesy of bugs installed in the playwright's apartment) he sits listening day after day to the minutiae of Dreyman's life, the captain begins to find out some truths both about the evil of the regime he has served so loyally and, ultimately, about his own capacity for good.

Mr. Mühe's subtle, deadpan, and compelling portrayal of a bad man possibly stumbling toward redemption is one of the most profoundly moving performances I have ever been privileged to witness on-screen. He's ably supported by a cast that never seems to put a foot wrong. In particular, it's worth singling out Mr. Koch's Dreyman, a plaything of the regime as well as its playwright, a man who comes to realize that his carefully preserved detachment is no longer enough. Look too for the clever way that Dreyman's milieu is depicted as a licensed, micromanaged Bohemia that, like so many aspects of the German Democratic Republic, is at best a feeble facsimile of what was available in the West and, at worse, a dangerously comforting delusion.

"The Lives of Others" comes to America garlanded with the prizes it has won in Europe. It has now been nominated for an Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film. Win or lose (and it deserves to win), it's already achieved something far more significant than that little statuette.

Sometimes a movie or, even, for that matter, a TV show, can transcend its entertainment value and become a device that compels a nation to reconsider its history. When NBC's "Holocaust" was first shown in West Germany (roughly half the adult population caught at least one episode), it shattered that country's long-standing taboo on open discussion of Nazi genocide. Now "The Lives of Others" has forced large numbers of Germans to start facing the truth about what former dissident Wolf Biermann has referred to as their "second dictatorship."

Defying Death To Save A Life

The Fountain

The New York Sun, November 22, 2006

Darren Aronofsky's "Pi" was, for all its indie buzz and critical approval, muddled, pretentious, and, at roughly 80 minutes in length, roughly 80 minutes too long. His no less pretentious second effort, the morbid "Requiem for a Dream," won even more awards (and, to be fair, a deserved Oscar nomination for Ellen Burstyn) but combined dazzling direction with leaden storytelling, preachiness that would embarrass the Drug Enforcement Administration, and, most unforgivably, ghastly treatment of pretty Jennifer Connelly.

Mr. Aronofsky's latest film,"The Fountain," has so far faced a more mixed reception from the critics (it was booed at the press screening of the Venice Film Festival earlier this year), but for his audience, at least, it may be third time luckier (lucky would be too strong). If an hour and a half of "Pi" called for cocktails, the only reasonable response to "Requiem for a Dream" was a stiff hemlock. By contrast, this latest Aronofsky should leave you soothed, relaxed, and mellow. Think nap. Think Windham Hill Records circa 1986. Think marijuana.

The plot may be as ludicrous as it is ambitious, and the philosophical premise that underpins it is ultimately a downer, but as gorgeous image follows gorgeous image and Clint Mansell's mesmerizing score pulls you in, it's difficult not to be beguiled. Needless to say, it doesn't hurt that the movie's stars, Hugh Jackman and Rachel Weisz, are exceptionally easy on the eyes.

Of the two, Mr. Jackman has the meatier role (or, more precisely, roles).To start with, he's Tomas, a 16th-century conquistador sent to New Spain by the embattled Queen Isabel ( Ms. Weisz) to find the legendary Fountain of Youth. Inconveniently enough, this turns out to be a tree located somewhere in the jungles of the Mayan hinterland, leaving poor Tomas the task of finding a very small needle in a very large and dangerous haystack. All he has to help him are a peculiar map, a determined friar, and the questionable support of fellow conquistadors clearly appalled by the prospect that Mr. Aronofsky's soft-edged movie might be turning into a remake of Werner Herzog's "Aguirre: The Wrath of God." Throw in an onslaught by those few Mayan warriors not already enrolled in Mel Gibson's forthcoming "Apocalypto," and it all becomes a little awkward for our luckless Spaniard.

Fast forward more than 400 years and Mr. Jackman reappears, this time as Tommy Creo, a scientist desperately looking for a cure for the brain tumor that is killing his wife, Izzi ( Ms. Weisz, again). As I understand this movie, Tommy is not the same person as Tomas, although Mr. Aronofsky has suggested, a touch ambiguously, that they represent different aspects of the same character. It is true that for two people living hundreds of years apart they do seem to, well, overlap a lot.

Yup, it's a puzzle, but let's not let that stop us from skipping on another 500 years and renewing our acquaintance with Tommy, except now he's Tom, kitted out like Grasshopper from "Kung Fu" (shaved head and all), and hurtling through the galaxies in a transparent globe that seems more Christmas decoration than spaceship. It appears that Tommy Creo did indeed discover the secret of eternal life (Guatemalan tree bark), but not in time to save Izzi, and, no, that's not a spoiler: From the moment we first encounter her, she has photogenic death written all over her photogenic features. Now, 500 years later, for reasons I can't be bothered to go into, Tommy/Tom is set on transporting a sickly Tree of Life to the Xibalba nebula, an equally sickly nebula that may or may not be the site of the Mayan underworld. I did mention, didn't I, that this movie's plot is ludicrous.

Other than the ailing tree, Creo's only other companion in his globe is an apparition that is either Izzi's ghost, an extremely persistent hallucination, or, who knows, both. Either way it involves Ms. Weisz standing around looking beautiful, wise, and mysterious, which is very much how she also plays the living Izzi and the long since perished Queen Isabel. As roles go, these are not the most demanding, but as they are considerably more flattering than what Ms. Connelly was put through in "Requiem for a Dream" (significantly, perhaps, Ms. Weisz is the director's fiancée and has thus, presumably, managed to keep on his good side), Ms. Weisz will probably have kept any complaints to herself.

But if the dying tree, or dead Izzi, or immortal Tom don't have much to say (he's too busy meditating and munching on Guatemalan tree bark) that leaves us free to concentrate on the bewitching, sparkling, glorious black and gold of Mr. Aronofsky's vision of deep space, a black and gold that echoes the candle-lit chiaroscuro of Queen Isabel's court. It's a color scheme that recurs throughout the film, providing a welcome note of continuity for a movie in which the narrative repeatedly jumps backward and forward in and out of three eras.

As visions of space go, it is, like so much of "The Fountain," simply lovely to look at, but Mr. Aronofsky's Hubble-influenced, almost organic spirals and clouds (suitably enough, the director dispensed with CGI and arranged for the special effects for these sequences to be brewed in a petri dish) also fits nicely into what passes as this film's overall message, a message that might owe something to its director having listened a little too often to the simpering mysticism of the Beatles' "Across the Universe."

More specifically, Mr. Aronofsky wants us to feel better about dying. This film seems to reflect his belief that modern man spends too much time, effort, and spiritual energy dodging the coffin. He offers us instead the role model of the saintly Izzi, calm, accepting, and perfectly content to ignore Dylan Thomas and instead "go gentle into that good night." Frantic Tommy's insistence that science can somehow devise an alternative, less fatal, solution is portrayed as grossly insensitive, and is obviously designed to show that, when it comes to confronting the Grim Reaper, our technological society has its priorities badly skewed.

If it does, this hardly makes us unique. So far as I'm aware, a keen interest in staying alive has been present in every culture since things went so wrong at Eden, and I believe that, with the exception of the lemming, the rest of the animal kingdom feels much the same way. Judging by this movie, Mr. Aronofsky, however, does not, preferring instead to believe, like Peter Pan, that death is "an awfully big adventure."

But then, he's still on the right side of 40.

A Character Sketch Gone Crazy

Stranger Than Fiction

The New York Sun, November, 10, 2006

There are some desserts, just a few, that are perfection itself. There are plenty more, glutinous, sticky, cloying, annoying, that tip over into a sickly sweetness and simply disgust. Then, trickiest of all, there are those that teeter uncertainly along the edge, promising delight on one side, threatening nausea on the other. They generally end up delivering both. In this respect they resemble nothing so much as Marc Forster's sharp, saccharine, original, clichéd "Stranger Than Fiction," a film that infuriates and enchants, and is, without doubt, the best date movie I've seen this year.

So far as saccharine is concerned, a quick glance at the advance publicity materials turned up danger signs by the sachet load. The movie was not just funny, but "sweetly funny." It was also "heartfelt," "deeply moving," and "deeply emotional. "When, to top it all off, I read that Ana the love interest (Maggie Gyllenhaal) was billed as a "free-spirited," "anarchist" baker, there was nothing to do but be apprehensive about the prospect that lay ahead. Deeply.

Sure enough, if it's syrup you're looking for, "Stranger Than Fiction" is a movie splattered with gobs of the stuff, above all in a final sequence that equals, and may even exceed, the repulsive aspartame-saturated conclusion of "Love Actually." The producer of "Stranger Than Fiction" has claimed that the last moments of his film are "a beautiful tribute to the little things in life that are, in the end, our salvation" — a grim boast that tells you all you need to know.

As for clichéd, let's just say we've all been down the boring-corporate-stiff-transformed by-love-for-free-spirited-girl route many times before, even if making the free-spirited girl an anarchist baker is something of a novelty. But if the core love story itself is not particularly original, the same cannot be said of the context within which it is set. Harold Crick (Will Ferrell) is not just a boring corporate stiff (IRS actually, but you get the point), he's also the hero of the latest novel ("Death and Taxes") by reclusive author Karen Eiffel (Emma Thompson), something he only discovers after hearing the disembodied voice of the novelist narrating exactly what the unfortunate taxman is up to. This would be disconcerting at the best of times, but these are not the best of times. As Crick comes to discover, Karen is busily working out how she can kill him off in the final chapter. Somehow Crick, fictional, yet real, has to contact his creator and persuade her to end "Death and Taxes" on a less lethal note.

The script may not be quite as clever as writer Zach Helm likes to think ("From Pirandello, to Brecht, to Wilder, to Stoppard, to Woody Allen, to Wes Anderson," he writes in the press material,"we an see the progression of a contemporary, self-aware, reality-bending and audience-involving wave in dramatic literature … ‘Stranger than Fiction' is simply my abstraction of it."), and the logic of the plot falls apart from time to time, but the premise is so interesting that it cannot fail to intrigue. This is less because of the collision of author and character — an old conceit that is not by itself enough to carry a movie ("Monkeybone," anyone?) — than for what the film has to say (or, just as often, imply) about the way we all have to struggle with the uncertainty of life and the inevitability of death.

As if that weren't substance enough, "Stranger than Fiction" also addresses the question of what exactly the big man upstairs (if He exists) thinks He is doing. The clue that this somewhat meaty topic is part of the movie's agenda comes in a brief aside from Karen, barely audible, and over in a second or two, in which she tells a TV interviewer that she doesn't believe in God. It's a moment that is easy to overlook (perhaps deliberately so), but it's surely a hint that this film's meditations on the nature and responsibilities of creation are intended to take its audience into a more provocative place than the self-indulgence of most Hollywood musings on the creative process.

Karen, unlike certain other creators I could mention, is finally forced to dispense with the dishonest alibi of free will and come to terms both with her creation — her Harold — and with the actual human cost of the destiny she has sketched out for him. She might look at what she has written and see that it is good, but will that be enough for her to live with Harold's tragic, but artistically pleasing, death?

If all this sounds, you know, a little heavy for a date movie, don't worry. Like the far better "Groundhog Day," it's perfectly possible to enjoy popcorn, hormones, and "Stranger Than Fiction" without being bothered too much by the deeper issues lurking just below the sheen of its romantic comedy surface. Besides, like "Groundhog Day," this film offers audiences the engrossing spectacle of a comedy icon (then Bill Murray, now Mr. Ferrell) delivering a performance of unexpected delicacy, subtlety, and depth. Mr. Ferrell disdains the lazy cliché of the solitary, dried-up, and obsessively compulsive tax drone in favor of a far richer, sometimes even tragic portrait. As a result, Harold's growth and transformation (bolstered by terrific set design and clever cinematography) is all the more convincing and, yes, touching.

The former Ron Burgundy is not let down by the supporting cast. Ms. Gyllenhaal's Ana (the anarchist baker) may come across, initially at least, as being as smug, self-righteous, and preachy as all the other anarchist bakers you've ever met, but her warmth, smile, and not-quite-explicable sexiness make it easy to understand just why Harold is so smitten. Ms. Thompson, meanwhile, is splendid as usual, even if, as usual, it's impossible to avoid the impression that her acting is Acting with a capital "A," acting that is trying just that little bit too hard. By contrast, as Jules Hilbert, the professor of English who helps Harold work his way through this most unusual of literary conundrums, Dustin Hoffman's seemingly effortless performance purrs along like the smoothest and most expensive of engines. Even if it's fueled by occasional pieces of ham, it's so entertaining that it would be churlish to complain.

In fact, on balance much the same could be said for "Stranger than Fiction" as a whole, so go and see it, but if you — or your date — are diabetic, cynical, or just lacking a sweet tooth, it might be just as well to leave before the sugary excess of that final scene.

Eat, Drink, and Wait for the Revolution

Marie Antoinette 

The New York Sun, October 20, 2006

There's a strangely wise conversation in 1971's "Harold and Maude," when ancient, youthful Maude explains her radical past to youthful, ancient Harold: "Big issues. Liberty. Rights. Justice. Kings died, kingdoms fell.I don't regret the kingdoms, but I miss the kings."

Sofia Coppola, I suspect, feels much the same way. Her bewitching, delirious, pastels-and-candy "Marie Antoinette" combines a sardonic critique of the Versailles system with a wry, understanding portrait of those kings, queens, and courtiers who were supported, ensnared and, ultimately, doomed by it.

We catch our first glimpse of the great palace as Marie Antoinette (Kirsten Dunst) arrives from Austria to take up residence as bride to Louis (Jason Schwartzman), the dauphin of France. The architectural wonders (lovingly, lavishly photographed, this movie is a treat for the eyes, and flatters a court that was far grubbier than anything Ms. Coppola permits us to see) are an illusion, however, nothing more than camouflage for a complex instrument of social control, carefully sustained by baroque protocol, ornate coercion, and elaborately manipulated human nature. This idea of the court as a mechanism is one that Ms. Coppola underpins with frequent long distance shots of its massive architecture and immense gardens. They dwarf the few humans visible, reducing them all, even that lovely, bewildered queen, to dots, tiny, insignificant, nothing more than cogs in a machine.

But it's a machine that is unable to adapt. Like the fountains we see dancing their perfect dance in deserted gardens deep into the Versailles dusk, the passing of time has reduced the court's immaculate choreography to a wasteful irrelevance. Louis XIV had designed this system as a way of harnessing the pre-modern appeal of monarchy, an institution as old as the apes, to the construction of a recognizably modern, centralized French state, but after 100 years, modernity itself has become the enemy. In an enormously more developed society l'état could no longer be Louis, any Louis. Louis XVI may have been an awkward, amiable dunderhead (Mr. Schwartzman's performance, channeling Robert Morley from the 1938 version of this tale, is sympathetic, touching, and, ultimately heart-breaking), but even the Sun King would have struggled to shine in the France of the 1780s.

If Ms. Coppola's depiction of the consequences is something of a caricature (it is), there's more than a touch of truth in the way she depicts these ill-fated, oblivious aristocrats as up-market, somewhat bitchy Eloi playing their games amid the relics of a civilization that has long since had its day. Their rituals and rules have descended into self-parody and farce, something beautifully illustrated by a (historically accurate) scene in which a naked Marie Antoinette stands shivering as various ladies-in-waiting work out among themselves who has the right to hand the queen her shift. Likewise, while the director exaggerates the extent to which the queen's set lived apart from the rest of the world, she only does so to emphasize just how dangerously isolated they had become from what was going on outside their self-absorbed, parasitical, magical court.

A sequence filmed at the chateau that played host to Marie Antoinette's rural idylls makes this point perfectly: Surrounded by golden greenery, golden friends, and golden sunlight, the golden queen, gorgeous in white muslin, sits happily reading Rousseau's paeans to the simple life, the glories of nature, and, for all I know, the general niceness of mankind. The idea that the writings of that same Jean-Jacques might inspire the revolutionaries who were later to execute her, her husband, and, for that matter, tear one of those golden friends quite literally apart did not, could not, occur to her.

Of course, it's important to understand that this film is not, as Ms. Dunst has admitted, "a ‘Masterpiece Theatre,' educational Marie Antoinette biopic." It is, the actress said, "kind of like a history of feelings rather than a history of facts," a description which is kind of like nauseating, but is also kind of like right.

If anything, Ms. Dunst is too modest. By Hollywood standards, this movie is well researched, its sins mainly those of omission (although not entirely: Contrary to what's shown in the movie, the real queen drank very little), not that those are trivial. This is a Marie Antoinette without the necklace (that scandal is never mentioned), but who keeps her neck. The last three to four years of her life, years in which she finally achieved a certain tragic dignity, don't feature at all, but perhaps they don't need to.After all, we witness her refusal to abandon Louis as the revolution grew, and we see the bravery with which she faced the mob that had stormed Versailles.The rest is history.

This movie is best seen as a wild, inventive and inspired riff, stylized and stylish, on the life and legend of Marie Antoinette. At times it's playful: There's enough cake in this film to reduce even Monty Python's Mr. Creosote to jelly; but purists should relax — it's made clear that she never said, you know, that. At times it's moving, as Ms. Coppola depicts the plight of a young girl (14 when she married), lost in translation (sound familiar?), wrenched from her home and dumped into a strange and sporadically hostile land, a future queen maybe, but a pawn in Europe's dynastic game, and a queen who would have to wait seven years to mate with a king who just didn't know how (his Habsburg brother-in-law, played by Danny Huston, eventually explains). And at times, often involving appearances by the splendid Asia Argento as Madame Du Barry, that most rococo of royal mistresses, it's very funny indeed.

And yes, Ms. Coppola's maligned decision to add 1980s rock music to the soundtrack works surprisingly well. We remember the 1980s, if not always accurately, as an age of abandon, extravagance, reaction, and revolution, impressions conjured by hearing those old tunes again, impressions that do rather well for the 1780s, too. But for all this film's cleverness, it would have not succeeded without the extraordinary, almost hypnotic, performance by Ms. Dunst (her best since, well, Ms. Coppola's "The Virgin Suicides") as the fabulously indulged, fabulously abused Marie Antoinette of Ms. Coppola's vision, driven quite literally to distraction by the weird predicament in which she found herself.

Oh, don't worry that this film was booed at Cannes earlier this year. It means nothing. The French aren't the French unless they have Marie Antoinette to kick around.

Reign Storm

The Queen

The New York Sun, September, 29, 2006

Within a few weeks, American moviegoers will be given the chance to wallow in the glitz, glamour, and guillotines of Sofia Coppola's "Marie Antoinette." For now they will have to make do with a dowdier, more discreet queen, the one who has been reigning in England for more than half a century now, a monarch who shows every sign of hanging on to her crown and, thankfully, the head on which it sits.

In all the decades of Elizabeth II's painstakingly (and sometimes painfully) dutiful, conscientious, and, yes, tenacious reign, there has only really been one brief, bizarre period, of just about a week, when there was the slightest danger that the Windsors might, like so many of their less fortunate relatives in so many less fortunate countries, be asked to pack their bags. It's that interlude, the disturbing, absurd and even slightly frightening days that followed the death of Princess Diana that is the focus of "The Queen," a compelling new docudrama by British director Stephen Frears that opens the 44th New York Film Festival on Saturday. It's easily the best film I've seen this year.

From that tunnel in Paris to Earl Spencer in Westminster Abbey, these events are still so familiar that Mr. Frears is left free to concentrate on the most interesting aspect of the story: the plight of a monarch at bay, puzzled, hurt, and confused by the behavior of a nation, her nation, that appeared to have changed, almost overnight, beyond all recognition. The quiet, disciplined, loyal, stoical Brits of the Queen's youth, of the Blitz, of so much more, had vanished, to be replaced by a volatile, hysterical, and vindictive mob caught up in a self-indulgent bacchanalia of grief for a princess they never really knew. Suddenly Elizabeth's virtues — restraint, self-control, that famous sense of duty — had come to be seen as vices by a population baying for her to show that she "cared" by faking tears over the death of the more "genuine" Diana.

The movie itself begins about four months earlier, setting the scene with Tony Blair's 1997 landslide election victory and then the first audience between the novice prime minister (a puppyish Michael Sheen) and the veteran queen (Helen Mirren), coolly charming, intimidating, and on top of her game. It's beautifully observed and very funny (Peter Morgan's script is a consistent delight, meticulously researched and, I suspect, largely accurate), but Dame Helen really comes into her own (Oscar! Oscar!) as events begin to engulf the embattled monarch.

Helped by the hairdo that launched a million stamps, her own surprisingly strong facial resemblance to the Queen and, dare I say it, more than a little padding (there goes my knighthood), the former Inspector Tennison turns out to make an uncannily realistic Elizabeth II. More precisely, Dame Helen plays a woman playing the Queen, an approach that goes a long way to explaining why she is so remarkably convincing. Monarchy is a performance. The Queen's tragedy is that it's a role she almost certainly never wanted. The Queen's genius is that she does it so well.

Nevertheless, watch Her Majesty carefully enough (as many of us English tend to do) and it's just possible to detect that the smile, the wave, the small talk, and all the rest of it are acts of will, the work of an actress, a pro, trapped in a role that will last a lifetime. And in her performance, Dame Helen catches this perfectly. Every now and then she lets glimpses of the real Elizabeth, that long-vanished Lilibet, peep through, and then, abruptly, deliberately, the face freezes, the mask is put back on, and safe, comfortable distance returns.

When, in the middle of the crisis, she lets her guard drop just enough to ask her mother (Sylvia Syms, who rather surprisingly chooses to portray the Queen Mum as a sitcom gran) for advice, that advice is, like that of her husband (James Cromwell playing Prince Philip as a caricature of himself, which of course, he really is) absolutely hopeless. An agonized, nervous Prince Charles (Alex Jennings, splendidly twitchy) and her principal adviser have the right instincts, but are too intimidated by her to do much good. The old pro is, she discovers, isolated, alone, adrift. The script no longer works, and the audience is out of control.

Eventually, help, and a new scriptwriter, shows up in the shape of an increasingly assured Tony Blair, a master politician with an instinctive understanding of the new Britain and, critically, what the royals would have to do to win back public favor. He's the self-proclaimed modernizer on a mission to transform what was left of the Queen's old England, but he's also astute enough to want the monarchy to survive, and, despite the gibes of his colleagues and his wife, fair enough to appreciate all that the Queen had done for her realm.

As for the woman whose death triggered the whole crisis, her image flits and flickers through the movie in clip after clip of archive footage, the only one of the film's protagonists not to be played by an actor. It's a clever device: It adds to the sense of authenticity and serves also as a pointed reminder of just how much that lost princess was fantasy, creation, accomplice, and victim. The texture of that footage — faded, grainy, herky-jerky, recognizably different from the rest of the film, almost ghostlike in impact — only serves to underline that Diana had gone, never to return.

In the end, as we all know, the fever broke. The film concludes as it began with Mr. Blair visiting Buckingham Palace. No longer the novice, he is confident, too confident, perhaps, a politician at the peak of his popularity, and angling, maybe, for a word of thanks for all his help. What he gets instead is a warning on the fickleness of our age. "One day," the Queen says, "quite suddenly and without warning, the same thing will happen to you." And now, of course, it has. Meanwhile, the monarchy itself endures and Diana's memory fades. On the fifth anniversary of her death, one writer noted that the gardens of Althorp (the Spencer family home) and Kensington Palace were "deserted."

"The public," he wrote, "had moved on. They were now too busy 'never forgetting' other people."

Burnt Offering

The Wicker Man

National Review Online, September  18, 2006

A remake, yup, another remake: first Miami Vice, now this. To the jeers, hoots, catcalls and snickers of critics across the country, the latest hashed rehash, The Wicker Man, writer-director Neil LaBute’s reworking of a cult British movie from 1973, limped into cinemas over that Hollywood graveyard better known as Labor Day weekend. Clumsy, poorly plotted, and scarred by performances closer to catalepsy than acting, this unintentionally funny film is more Scary Movie than horror pic. The story, such as it is, revolves around Edward Malus (Nicolas Cage), a California highway patrolman left traumatized and tranquilizer-dependent after witnessing a hideous traffic accident. Adding to his gloom, and ours, he’s summoned by Willow (Kate Beahan), his former fiancée, to help find her missing, and equally rustically named, daughter, Rowan. Dutifully enough, Malus shows up at Willow’s home, a beautiful, creepy and very private island somewhere in the Puget Sound. Unfortunately for our haggard hero, this is run by goddess-worshippers with a thing for retro fashion, bee keeping, sinister glances and (it’s hinted) nasty eugenic practices. Poor Malus, things turn out very badly for him indeed, but save your sympathy: It’s even worse for the audience.

It needn’t have been this way. That dismal spot in contemporary culture where feminism, ignorance and superstition collide can always use a little more mockery. In theory, spooky, sanctimonious Summersisle, a place where the likes of Sisters Violet, Thorn, Rose, Beech, Willow, Honey, and Moss preside over mute helot males, might have been the perfect place to do it, and Neil LaBute its ideal chronicler. There’s a bracing streak of misanthropy running through much of his work. As his In The Company of Men did for misogyny what McDonalds does for cattle, his take on matriarchy could have made for an evening of brutal, disturbing fun.

It could have, but it didn’t. Despite an encouragingly irate review in a Seattle (where else?) alternative newspaper describing the movie as “obscene anti-feminist propaganda [in which] the women are mysterious and tricky and beguiling, like evil vaginas [and] Malus is strong and thrusty and straightforward, like a hero-penis,” Mr. LaBute fails, and fails miserably. The script is too crude, and its parable too labored (O.K., Neil, we get the queen bee/drone thing, we really do) to be effective, and with the notable exceptions of Molly Parker (as twin sisters Rose and Thorn) and Diane Delano (Sister Beech), the cast fails to rise to what little challenge there is.

Let’s face it. Neil LaBute doesn’t know how to make a horror movie; the film neither shocks nor thrills nor chills. When the storyline is not chaotic it is cockamamie. Perhaps this was inevitable. An allegory of matriarchal oppression has no place within anything resembling the original The Wicker Man, a film in which the relations between the sexes are, to say the least, amicable. Mr. LaBute would have done better to start afresh, saying what he wanted to say on his own terms rather than trying to squeeze his theme into a new, and unconvincing, reinterpretation of someone else’s idea. What’s more, by taking the remake route, LaBute ensures comparison with what has gone before. When that’s a film good enough to be described by one overexcited critic as “the Citizen Kane of horror”, that’s asking for trouble. If the recent Miami Vice was stalked by the ghost of Crockett past, so LaBute’s Wicker Man is menaced by memories of the original, and its extraordinarily compelling tale of an ardently Christian policeman (Edward Woodward, best known in America as the Equalizer) and his search for a missing girl on a remote Scottish island swept up in pagan enchantment.

It’s true that the troubled circumstances of the first The Wicker Man’s release (there are three different cuts out there) by a cash-strapped, owner-swapping British film company that not only seemed ashamed of what had been shot, but managed to lose much of the original footage (buried, it’s claimed, like some celluloid Hoffa, but under a highway), have added to the mystique of a masterpiece that, if not exactly lost, was certainly abused, neglected and mislaid. However, Robin Hardy’s original (in all senses) The Wicker Man needs neither hype nor its “missing minutes” to be judged a significant work. It comfortably stands on its own merits and deserves a far wider audience (the “long” version has just had its U.S. release on DVD).

Helped by the remarkable performances of Woodward as the agonized Sergeant Howie and Christopher Lee (he continues to believe that it was the finest performance of his long, long career) as the suavely menacing Lord Summerisle (“A heathen, conceivably, but not, I hope, an unenlightened one.”), possibly the greatest naked dancing sequence ever seen in British cinema (thank you, Britt Ekland, thank you) and, critically, a musical score that brilliantly conjured up that Arcadian idyll of a vanished Albion that is among the most persistent of English myths, The Wicker Man is a dream-like evocation of one man’s destruction and a thought-provoking meditation on the nature, purpose and consequences of religious belief.

The script itself operates at two levels (warning: spoilers ahead). The basic plot is conventional enough. The hunter, Howie, becomes the hunted as he descends deeper and deeper into a labyrinth of deception designed to lure him to the savage rendezvous that earns this (difficult to categorize) film its label as horror. More profoundly, however, The Wicker Man contrasts and compares two very different religious traditions. The first, Christianity, is the very essence of Howie: central both to how he sees himself, and how he believes the world should be. He’s devout, and he’s devout in a killjoy, finger wagging, all too Scottish way. Ordinarily, this could have been expected to pave the way for a clichéd contest between dreary old Christianity and bucolic fun-loving free-loving music-loving pagans (the film was shot, after all, at the tail-end of the hippy era). That it doesn’t is a tribute to the subtlety of this movie’s creators.

For all his narrow-mindedness, the censorious and rather whiny Howie is portrayed as a good man, romantic in his inhibited way (in a test that would have tried St. Anthony, he puts fidelity to his fiancée above succumbing to lovely Britt’s naughty advances), and brave too, as he risks his life to, he thinks, save Rowan. For all his charisma and charm Lord Summerisle, the pagan-in-chief, is altogether different and, ultimately, much less likeable. His ‘love’ for his islanders is, at best, the cold affection of a benevolent despot for his dullard but devoted subjects. The paganism he peddles is, he knows, nonsense, nothing more than an expedient mishmash of old traditions revived by his grandfather as a way to manipulate his workforce. As opiates of the people go, it appears benign on the surface and it’s certainly effective, but from fairly early on in the film, there are hints of a darker undertow.

Before we discover quite how dark it can get (very), director Robin Hardy, and his scriptwriter, Anthony Shaffer, men presumably well-schooled in The Golden Bough, take care to emphasize the strong underlying similarities between Howie’s Christianity and Summerisle’s paganism, as well as the obvious distinctions between them. That’s smart. Mankind appears to have evolved with a need to believe in, and worship, some form of supernatural authority, a need that has found expression in almost every culture. The key question that remains is not as much what we worship, as how. The devil, or God, take your pick, is in the details. Contrary to the claims of ecumenical parsons, all religions are not the same.

The Wicker Man makes it clear that Sergeant Howie’s Christianity is, despite its fervor, house-trained, reasonably civilized and adequately compatible with a modern, humane society. For all its easygoing appeal, Summerisle’s alternative is not. While we see (particularly in the movie’s ‘long’ version) that ritual has a vital role to play in both religions, it is a ritual (specifically a sacrificial ritual) that ultimately exposes the crucial difference between them. Holy Communion (a ceremony pointedly included in the movie) may make some anthropologists shudder, but for practical purposes (I’ll leave the theology to others), it’s a symbolic, life-affirming ceremony, designed to commemorate a single sacrifice intended to suffice for all time. By contrast, Summerisle’s rites reduce a human life to a bribe to be paid to greedy and temperamental gods. Such gods need feeding, and usually more than once (just ask the Aztecs). As Sergeant Howie is dragged off to be sacrificed, he warns Lord Summerisle that, if the crops fail again, it’s he, the laird, who will be the next offering. And we know that he’s right.

The worst of the horrors of this film’s famous final scenes is that none of this will make any difference. A giant wicker effigy has been set ablaze, with Howie imprisoned high up inside it. As the smoke and flames rise, the desperate policeman, pious to the end, shouts out prayers and a psalm, but to no avail. His God is nowhere to be seen. Imprisoned, meanwhile, in the prison that is their creed, the islanders counter the dying man’s cries with an ancient song they dedicate to their sun god. As they sway, and as they sing and as they smile with a joy that looks a lot like desperation, fire consumes the wicker man, and the film ends with a long shot of the setting sun, gorgeous, magnificent, and utterly indifferent to all that has gone on below.

The Descent

The New York Sun, August 4, 2006

If you're taking a horror buff, psychopath, or someone who is too sedated to care, "The Descent" is an ideal date movie. The work of Neil Marshall, a British director best known for 2002's "Dog Soldiers," "The Descent" (a UK hit last year) is a cut, slash, and a gouge above Mr. Marshall's earlier effort — a dank, dreadful, and weirdly popular werewolf movie that, tellingly, seems to have a found a regular berth on the Sci-Fi channel. A savage drama of spelunking gone awry, Mr. Marshall's new film covers some of the same underground as 2005's "The Cave," but with far more style, chills, thrills, panache, and gore. Admittedly that's no great challenge, but there are times, notably in its tense and claustrophobic first half, when "The Descent" ascends to the level of classic horror.

There's nothing particularly unusual about the story line. Six yuppie women — spunky but too headstrong to learn very much from "Deliverance," "Wrong Turn," "Pumpkinhead," or any number of other cautionary tales set in Appalachia — decide to bond with a caving trip to that peculiarly dangerous part of the world. Making matters worse, the not-so divine Juno (nicely played by Natalie Mendoza), the rather problematic leader of the group, secretly decides to change the destination to a remote cave complex that has never been explored before. Or so she thinks.

The descent itself, deep into the caves and deeper into trouble, is brilliantly and grippingly filmed. You'll feel that you're there. You'll wish you didn't. Then it gets even worse for our six luckless ladies as they discover that uncooperative geology and one really nastily broken leg are the least of their problems. They have company down there, bad company, a tribe of feral Golems, descendants of cavemen too idle to leave the cave, who have evolved in a thoroughly violent direction.

Eventually so does the movie, as it swaps suspense for splatter, slaughter, cannibal snacking, and some of the most satisfying images of human-on-monster combat since that bus ride in the remake of "Dawn of the Dead." Adding to the merriment, Mr. Marshall throws in a few film geek moments with references to "Aliens," "Pitch Black," and, less predictably, "Carrie." For my part, I couldn't help thinking of the cave-dwelling Morlocks preying on the Eloi in George Pal's version of "The Time Machine." On this occasion, however, the Eloi are smart, in great shape, and have clearly studied "Buffy the Vampire Slayer." They know how to fight back.

Mann Overboard

Miami Vice

The New York Sun, July 28, 2006

It would be nice to believe that someone, somewhere, someday is going to do a good job translating a much-missed, much-loved television series of my youth onto the big screen, but it's proving a long, long wait. "Bewitched" failed to enchant, "Charlie's Angels" was the work of the devil, "Lost in Space" was adrift in self-importance, "Starsky and Hutch" turned a decent drama into a bad farce, and "The Dukes of Hazzard" transformed a likable hayseed comedy into, well, words fail me.

Despite this dispiriting track record of mediocrity, junk, and exhausted imaginations, it was impossible not be intrigued by the news that Michael Mann, the executive producer of the original "Miami Vice" and the man most responsible for that show's extraordinary panache, was teaming up again with Anthony Yerkovich, the series' creator, to bring Ricardo Tubbs and Sonny Crockett to the movies.With its groundbreaking visual imagery, use of music, and sheer sense of style, "Miami Vice" was television as it had never been seen before: It transformed the notions of what the medium could achieve, and, while it was at it, triggered a fashion revolution and helped define an era's idea of itself.

As if that wasn't enough, Mr. Mann has repeatedly demonstrated that there is more than one clip to his Uzi. "Miami Vice" was followed by the underappreciated "Crime Story,"and, with his effective and unsettling "Manhunter," he gave moviegoers their first taste, so to speak, of Hannibal Lecter.While not all the films he has directed have worked (the last of "The Last of the Mohicans" couldn't come too quickly for me), "Heat," "Collateral," and (despite its preachiness) "The Insider"all confirmed that Mr. Mann's distinctive aesthetic vision and narrative flair have made him one of the most interesting presences in contemporary American cinema.

Maybe it's yet another sign of Mr. Mann's willingness to innovate that this new "Miami Vice" bears so little resemblance to the original show. On the other hand, he may simply have felt that he had no choice: A retro movie set in the 1980s would have been pointless (what more was there to say?), while too literal an updating would have run the risk of turning Sonny Crockett into an Austin Powers in linen, pastel, and stubble. But why stick with the "Miami Vice" name at all? Sadly, that, at least, must have been an easy decision: It remains, deservedly, a powerful brand, and the entertainment industry is nothing if not a greedy business. Mr. Mann's new movie is thus being marketed as the "contemporization" of an old favorite, an ugly word for a worse idea, and something that will give audiences an utterly misleading impression of what they are about to see. It may, of course, make commercial sense, but reviving the old name distracts from what Mr. Mann has done (and detracts from what he could have done) with this film and is, artistically at least, a mistake.

Even more damagingly, Mr. Mann seems to have used the brand's revival as an excuse to revert to the original series' emphasis of style over content.Within the time constraints of an under-an-hour television show, that didn't matter: Style alone could be content enough. But during the course of more than two hours of movie, the absence of a compelling story line might be enough to drive some of the film's audience to the drugs that its heroes are trying so hard to impound.To be sure, when it comes to images of startling loveliness, this movie (helped by the inspired and, that word again — groundbreaking — use of high-definition cameras), does, typically for Mr. Mann, not disappoint, even if his highly romanticized paean to Havana (actually filmed in Uruguay) will probably jar with anyone familiar with the realities of life under Castro. But images, however gorgeous, are not enough, even when punctuated by the spectacularly choreographed gunplay that has long been another Mann trademark, to sustain a full-length film. And in "Miami Vice," they don't.

As for what plot there is, Mr. Mann doesn't go into details and nor will I, but suffice to say it involves drug smuggling, the Aryan Brotherhood, undercover sleuthing, corrupt governments, international criminals, portentous dialogue, speedboats, and a doomed affair. It's also painted on a far broader canvas than the Miami 'n Medellin of the old series, a gesture apparently intended to show that crime, like so much else, is globalizing rapidly, something that should be a revelation to only the slowest among us.

But the key theme of this movie, supposedly, is what going undercover can mean to the cops who choose to do so."You can go too deep," Mr. Mann has explained,"and you have to rely on your partner to pull you back from the edge. As Tubbs says to Crockett,‘There's undercover, and then there's which way is up?"' This could be an interesting enough, if not exactly novel, topic (it featured, incidentally, in the original TV series), but Mr. Mann never gives it the attention it deserves. Compared with the subtle examination of the personalities of the principal characters in "Heat" and "Collateral," Crockett's supposedly existential angst is treated cursorily and comes across as little more than a moment or two of indecision, irritation, and sadness.

Much of the fault for this lies with Colin Farrell's leaden Crockett (an impression reinforced both by his somewhat Neanderthal appearance and a most unfortunate moustache) and his amazing lack of chemistry with his love interest, the strikingly attractive Gong Li (the Chinese actress so remarkable in "Red Sorghum" and "Raise the Red Lantern"), who herself appears forlorn and confused throughout this film. For that matter, there's not much of a bond either between Crockett and Tubbs (Jamie Foxx), that much-vaunted partner of his, who is, remember, meant to care enough about his pal to be "pulling him back from the edge," despite the fact that a more natural response to some of Crockett's behavior would be to shove him over the nearest convenient precipice.

Equally — and it's an example of the way that memories of the old show detract from the new movie — Jamie Foxx, so good as the cabbie in "Collateral," essentially reprises much of that role in a fine performance as a straight-arrow detective that will still leave the nostalgic pining for Philip Michael Thomas and his quirky, more oddball Ricardo. Fans of the TV series will have to make do instead with another "Collateral" graduate, Barry Shabaka Henley, whose impressive (if underused) Lieutenant Castillo hints at the memorably daunting Edward James Olmos of two decades ago.

But if they are to make the most of this movie, those fans would do better to leave nostalgia to re-runs and DVD collections and just try to accept Mr. Mann's movie on its own merits — as a lesser, flawed, but reasonably entertaining and occasionally intriguing police procedural by a director who has shown that he can do far, far better than this.

And next time he probably will.