THE SQUID AND THE WHALE
In his third feature, director Noah Baumbach scores a triumph with an autobiographical story about a teenager whose writer-parents are divorcing. The father (Jeff Daniels) and mother (Laura Linney) duke it out in half-civilized, half-savage fashion, while their two sons adapt in different ways, shifting allegiances between parents. The film is squirmy-funny and nakedly honest about the rationalizations and compensatory snobbisms of artistic failure as well as the conflicted desires of adolescents for sex and status. In detailing bohemian-bourgeois life in brownstone Brooklyn, Baumbach is spot on. Everyone proceeds from good intentions and acts rather badly, in spite or because of their manifest intelligence. Fulfilling the best traditions of the American independent film, this quirky, wisely written feature explores the gulf between sexes, generations, art and commerce, Brooklyn and Manhattan. 88 min. USA, 2005.
I AM
An 11-year-old Polish boy, nicknamed Mongrel with casual cruelty, escapes from his bleak foster home yearning to be back with his hard-drinking mother. But she doesn’t want him; he’s a nuisance who gets in the way of her bad romances. So he sets up a patchy homestead of his own on an abandoned river barge, where he is befriended by a little girl no less lonely for having a real family and house to return home to at night. As she showed in Nothing (1998) and The Crows (1994), Dorota Kędzierzawska has a rare gift for working with children, allowing them to be themselves yet also, safely, wholly invented characters within her troubling dramas. And while she draws from them performances of great naturalism and flashes of pathos-free wit, her frequent artistic collaborator Arthur Reinhart offsets the essential harshness of the story with cinematography of disconcerting loveliness. 100 min. Poland, 2005.
CAPOTE
Philip Seymour Hoffman, already hailed as one of our finest actors, delivers an astonishing performance as the infamous, mercurial, supremely gifted Truman Capote. Hoffman gets deep inside his subject— he gives us Capote’s gently insinuating manner; his burning curiosity; his mixture of flamboyance, fragility, and indifference; and, of course, his inimitable voice, halfway between a baby’s rasp and a little girl’s whisper. Bennett Miller’s beautifully modulated and utterly spellbinding film, from a script by Dan Futterman, takes place during a turning point in Capote’s life and in American fiction. We begin with the author’s first trip to Kansas to meet Perry and Dick, the murderers of the Clutter family, and Miller takes us step by step through the painful, ultimately tragic story behind the writing of In Cold Blood. A searing inquiry into the ethics of artistic creation, Capote also features remarkable performances by Catherine Keener as Harper Lee, Chris Cooper as Alvin Dewey, and Clifton Collins, Jr. as the brilliant but hapless Perry. 114 min, USA, 2005.
SOMETHING LIKE HAPPINESS
In the end, nobody gets what he or she wants in Bohdan Sláma’s marvelous, sprawling, humane film— a kind of Coronation Street set amid the modern ugliness of a North Bohemian industrial neighborhood. But what would you expect from a grimly funny Czech drama? And yet, in the end, settling for “something like” doesn’t seem so bad; it seems like life. As Sláma’s slice-of-ordinary saga begins, a young woman named Monika waves a tearful airport goodbye to her boyfriend heading off for America, while the couple’s pal and childhood friend, Tonik— the boy who really loves her, of course— stands by her side. Not quite a slacker but hardly a trailblazer, Tonik turns out to be a mensch and Monika a menschette— and the scenes in which they become substitute parents of two little kids are marvels of warm realism. 102 min. Czech Republic, 2005.
SYMPATHY FOR LADY VENGEANCE
With this thrilling final installment of his revenge cycle (which began with Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance and Old Boy), cult director Park Chanwook has made his finest movie to date. Geum-ja, or “Lady Vengeance” (Lee Yeong-ae), is a pale beauty who was wrongly imprisoned at 19 for the murder of a small boy. Fourteen years later, she is released and wants to begin living a good life— which means, naturally, making the real killer pay. As always, Park displays his talent for capturing subjective experience and flaunts the storytelling panache that has often gotten him compared to Quentin Tarantino. But in its second half, the movie pushes beyond its initial Kill Bill-style exuberance and takes on enormous emotional force. Rather than exulting in spectacular violence, this dazzling film becomes an exploration of the spiritual price of vengeance, however justified it might seem. Park makes us ask: Is it possible to atone for one sin by committing another? 112 min. South Korea, 2005.
