Instead of going to the movies today, I watched one at home. Watching videos has become somewhat unusual in recent months. I don’t know why, but it hasn’t stopped me from buying them, especially the used ones at the Video Room that go for five dollars a pop — about a dollar more than a rental. Most of them are movies that I saw in the theatre, and I’ll watch them when I get around to it; but one of them, Catherine Corsini’s Partir (Leaving), I haven’t seen. Why did I buy a DVD of a film that I haven’t seen? Because, in this case, it stars Kristin Scott Thomas.

How many stars,  if any, have had two such distinct film careers? It’s not that Ms Scott Thomas is bilingual, it’s that she plays entirely different sorts of women in her two languages. In the movie that she made after Partir (2009) — it was the next to be released, at any rate — she played John Lennon’s hyper-respectable Aunt Mimi. Other recent anglophone roles include the exasperated Mrs Whittaker, in Easy Virtue, and Anne Boleyn’s mother, in The Other Boleyn Girl. In the latter film, she is almost as upholstered as Carol Burnett in Went With the Wind. In French, however, the actress is both haunted and passionate.

Partir is the story of an adultery. Suzanne, the wife of a well-connected physician (Yvan Attal) in Nîmes, and  the mother of two student-age children, falls in love with Ivan (Sergi Lopez), a laborer who has just come out of prison for “bricolage.” The affair comes as a surprise to her, because in the course of her marriage she has put sexual satisfaction out of her mind. Once reawakened, her longing spins her life out of control. Her first response to its terrifying power is to confess her love to her husband and to promise that “c’est fini,” but of course it isn’t. Her husband doesn’t want to let her go, and his way of showing his affection is to beat her up — and then to withhold financial support, blocking her savings account and having the laborer fired. Although we are persuaded that Suzanne and Ivan are very much in love, there can have been few depictions of star-crossed romance as dismal as this one. (At one point, the couple are forced to take jobs as migrant workers at a melon farm.) Suzanne’s response to hardship and humiliation is to dig in her heels, but the novelty, perhaps, of having to scrounge eventually inspires her to talk Ivan into doing something stupid.

Ms Scott Thomas, who looks hardly a day over forty, much less her actual age of 48, has rarely, if ever, played anyone as naive and impulsive as Suzanne; her characters usually crackle with intelligence. This gives a movie a strange power, because as you watch it you think, Even Kristin Scott Thomas can’t prevent this awful mess. Suzanne is not very gifted at prevarication, and her persistent belief that her husband will come round to see the justice of her position is almost stupid — as is the childlike pleasure that she takes in Ivan’s company. In her view, the fact that she can’t help loving him makes everything all right, and she suffers no pangs of conscience. She behaves like a passenger who has awakened to find that she has boarded the wrong train, an error that she tries to correct with steadfast determination. Her huaband is the wrong train. Her family is the wrong train. On two occasions, she argues that her husband owes her something for having raised his children. Ms Scott Thomas is radiant, but Suzanne is far from entirely sympathetic.

On the verge of the affair, Suzanne brings a big bunch of flowers to Ivan, whom she has inadvertently injured in a scene that would in almost any other movie be comic. As she walks down the corridor to his low-income apartment, she looks less like someone who might be making a mistake than someone who is unhappy to see someone else make a mistake. This is the moment for Suzanne to stop, but she has no will do so. It is also the moment when she’s about to find out what it’s like to touch Ivan and to let him touch her. Who wouldn’t be apprehensive? Suzanne has no idea of the force that she is about to unleash.

A few years ago, I believe, Ms Scott Thomas was invited to play the title role in Racine’s Phèdre with a French touring acting company. I wonder how much of that performance is on view in Partir. Suzanne is no Phèdre, but she acts with the Greek queen’s intense helplessness and brings everything crashing down around her. That’s what makes this umpteen-thousandth French movie about infidelity compelling. Notwithstanding some sweaty sex scenes, the experience that we share is Suzanne’s alone. Even when she hugs her lover, she is frighteningly solitary, as we all are, at the mercy of fate and circumstance. There are no lessons in this movie. There is only the stunning portrayal of an ordinary, middle-aged woman who has the dramatic good fortune to be played by Kristin Scott-Thomas.

Horrible Bosses delivers on its title: the bosses in Seth Gordon’s first feature film since Four Christmases are so horrible that you’re grateful every time the camera turns away from their tyranny. Not all bad bosses abuse power, but those who do are fully represented here. There is the suave user, the sexual predator, and the drug-addled maniac, played, respectively — and at full throttle — by Kevin Spacey, Jennifer Aniston, and Colin Farrell. All of them will make you cringe in your seat, even the comely Ms Aniston — perhaps even mostly the comely Ms Aniston. Happily, the horribleness of the bosses is this film’s only realistic aspect. Otherwise, it is a compleat farce, a perfectly whipped soufflé whose bubbles lift and lighten material that would be as leaden as the bosses are horrible. Which is to say that the well-written script is acted with acrobatic precision. 

We have the three bosses, their three employees (who are old friends), a “murder consultant” (Jamie Foxx), a fiancé (Lindsay Sloane), a disembodied navigational system (Brian George), and a passel of supporting characters that includes a brief appearance by Donald Sutherland. We have a lot of dark sets and night-time shots, the overall taste of which is pretty dreary. (Among the outtakes played during the final credits is a hilariously naughty line: looking around the cokehead boss’s lair, Jason Sudeikis says, “It looks like Sharper Image took a shit in here.”) This is not the sunny Southern California to which anyone dreams of relocating, but a brown, gritty place with sky-grey offices and bronze-brown homes. At the start, the bad jobs are bad enough, but each one is made insupportably worse, and from this trauma emerges the conspiracy to murder the three bosses. Our boys know that they’re not capable of committing undetectable crimes, so they retain a series of hit men, both of whom prove to be disappointments. Homes are broken into, in search of “intel,” but the success of these missions is largely inadvertant, and when, in the most exciting scene in the film, one of the horrrible bosses shoots one of the other horrible bosses dead, the heroes have no idea that this deliverance was effected by their own sloppiness. Horrible Bosses ought to be unwatchable. 

But instead, it’s mesmerizing. Jason Bateman, Charlie Day, and Jason Sudeikis begin by establishing each of their characters as decent, level-headed guys who really do deserve to get ahead. This is key, because if we didn’t regard them as responsible men in search of flourishing environments, what followed would be annoying. Once they’ve got our sympathy, Nick, Dale and Kurt can embark on a desperate if ill-defined mission that has our complete support. When, as often happens to old friends under pressure, they regress “the eighth grade” (as Dale complains when the other two lock him out of the car so that they can think), we regress right along with them. They shout each other down, vacillate between bravado and timorousness, and largely forget not to leave fingerprints. Kurt, who for some reason thinks that he’s sexy, has a winning way of worrying just how rape-worthy he will be when he and his friends land in prison — specifically, more rapeworthy than Nick, or less? Dale can be counted on to act first and think later (“it sounds bad when you put it like that”) — and to raise his voice higher and higher to protest any criticism. Courtly by comparison, Nick has a spoilsport’s faith in the effectiveness of declining to participate in a scheme deemed hare-brained; he priggishly announces that he will “wait in the car.” These men are the polar opposite of masterminds. As we would undoubtedly be in their place. Although they sometimes do idiotic things, they’re not jerks, and we don’t laugh at them. We’ve see those horrible bosses! 

The bosses are horrible in very different ways. Kevin Spacey’s financial executive, Dave, is a leonine monster whose every move is considered and deliberate. He speaks the language of corporate uplift with the expressiveness of a diva singing Verdi, and we can see that he will always triumph over Nick, who has been slavishly doing his bidding for eight years in hopes of a promotion, because Dave doesn’t have a decent bone in his body. (His Achilles heel, which only their ineptitude brings within the conspirators range, is marital jealousy.) Jennifer Aniston plays Julia, a naughty dentist who is determined to deflower (so to speak) her assistant, Dale. (Dale, unfortunately, has been branded a sex offender because he was caught urinating in the middle of the night — and quite alone — near a playground. I would have tried to come up with a better reason why he can’t get another job.) Like Dave, Julia speaks with a thoroughgoing disingenuousness that makes rubbish of everything she says. (But bosses can declare that rubbish rules.) In one scene that amply showcases Ms Aniston’s comic talent, Julia threatens Dave while wearing nothing but panties and an unbuttoned lab coat; I can’t think of another actress who could have pulled this off without being more embarrassing than her character. Horrible boss that Julia is, her scenario remains a great deal more palatable than the more likely one — genders reversed — that twinkles behind her vamping. Unlike the other two horrors, Colin Farrell’s Bobby doesn’t waste time twisting the truth or manipulating egos. Utterly infantile, he barks preposterous commands with complete indifference to the difficulty of obeying them. But like his two costars, Mr Farrell gives a performance that is loaded with the sincerest self-parody. Strutting about with his regrettable comb-over and his surprisingly slight physique — is he really that little? — Mr Farrell howls through his scenes like a scowling Kabuki actor painted on a windblown kite. 

Horrible Bosses is a farce, but it is also a nightmare. It doesn’t so much come to an end as run one complete cycle; if it weren’t for the outtakes at the end, we might leave with an uncomfortable sense of its starting all over again. But nightmares of often quite farcical — once you leave the theatre of dreams.

There’s a lot of talk these days about how Terrence Malick’s latest film, The Tree of Life, is a “personal” film, a curious term to substitute for “autobiographical” that I take to imply a certain opacity; favorable critics seem happy to give depictions of the creation of the universe, the age of the dinosaurs, and other whatnot imagery a pass, on the theory that it means something to the filmmaker. I’m not a Malick fan; Days of Heaven gave me a good idea of what Wagner’s Ring cycle must be like for people who don’t care for late-romantic music. So I’m not one to evaluate “personal” as applied to his oeuvre. When I say that Mike Mills’s Beginners is personal, I mean that Mr Mills has pierced the carapace of autobiographical event with a sureness of touch that allows him to present his distinctly idiosyncratic outlook in an intelligible, sympathetic manner. That’s what I mean by “personal.” 

The nub of Beginners — and of Mr Mills’s life — is that his parents’ helplessly unsatisfying marriage rendered him skittish, if not paralyzed, about committing to relationships. His parents loved one another, and were faithful in their fashion. But his father was gay, and his mother, who knew this before she married him, thought that she could “fix it.” After ten years or so of childlessness, as the sexual revolution was dawning — a moment, in short, in which they might have been expected to give up on a failed, if well-intentioned experiment — they became parents. Many years later, when the mother died of cancer, the father, resolving that late was better than never, came out, and for the first time showed his son what it looked like to be him in love. The lesson came a bit late, but, as Beginners attests, it was eventually learned.

For Beginners is a movie thoroughgoingly about love. It is not about bitterness or resentment or my-parents-fucked-me-up. It’s precisely because the boy felt that his parents loved him, and allowed him to love them, that he grew up to be capable of learning not only not to make their mistakes, but to give up worrying about making their mistakes. That is what Oliver (Ewan McGregor) achieves in the course of the film, which begins a few months after his father’s death. We have a few intense scenes that take us back to boyhood with his his mother (Mary Page Keller, an actress every bit as good as her top-billed costars; the young Oliver is played by Keegan Boos), but what feels like half the of the movie features the grown Oliver and his gay, dying father (Christopher Plummer). (We’re told that Hal died four years after coming out, in his mid-seventies.) Hal has a boyfriend, Andy (Goran Visnjic), a man about Oliver’s age, but Oliver sppears to take a bigger place in his father’s everyday life, even before he bcomes very sick, than you might expect either of these independent professional men to accommodate.

Near the end, Andy nicely accuses Ollie of staying away from him — never calling or visiting — after Hal’s death because of the gay angle. Oliver is able to say right away that it wasn’t that. “It was because my father loved you so.” Again, this is said without bitterness or regret. With Andy, Hal was able to live a life that Oliver hadn’t been able to imagine, for his father or for himself. And this failure of imagination has almost cost him a very good thing, his attachment to another survivor of distubed childhood, a French actress called Anna (Mélanie Laurent).

One of the most delightful achievements of this film is the wit of its nimbly sailing through the easy part and showing, without telling, what the hard part looks like. The easy part is attraction — easy because, almost by definition, it’s involuntary. Sooner or later, a healthy relationship can be sustained only because two people want to keep it going. That’s where both Oliver and Anna have problems. They don’t know what happens when you don’t stick around instead of running away; they know only that it feels awkward and unusual. Registering this ambivalence without dimming her personal charm, Ms Laurent shows herself to be a player in the same big league in which her male costars have been headlining for years (decades, in Mr Plummer’s case). Adroitly interlacing romantic ambivalence with scenes of filial confusion (not the same thing as ambivalence), Mr Mills shows himself to be worthy of his extraordinary cast.

As it happens, I crossed Central Park to see Beginners on one of those rare summer days when the dry, diamond-hard sunlight is painfully strong. I understand that they have days like today all the time in Los Angeles — that’s why people live there. But Mike Mills’s Los Angeles is the least glamorous of hometowns. I felt quite sorry for everyone in Beginners on this point alone — what a shame, to have to live out there in all that shapeless nothing. (The jumbly banality of Sunset Boulevard is almost hard to believe.) The reek of depression that fills Oliver’s house — all the more noticeable because he’s a sophisticated graphic artist — is meant, I’m sure, to express bleak feelings about “home” that his parents’ ultimately loveless marriage inspired, but I wasn’t above attributing it to an urban environment in which style is something that, like health care, you hire professionals to provide.

I loved Beginners, and I look forward to getting to know it better over the years.

 Jason Kasdan’s Bad Teacher didn’t amuse me as much as I hoped it would, for two reasons. First, Lucy Punch’s demonic fury was never unleashed. Second, Justin Timberlake’s cuteness never became ridiculous. That Cameron Diaz never made me laugh was not a disappointment, because I never expected her to. What did surprise me, though, was the intensity of the impression that she made of not acting at all. She left me convinced that if for some reason she were called up to teach seventh-graders, she would be as negligent and uninspiring as Elizabeth Halsey, the gold-digger with no gift for hiding her shovel. I’m not going to say that Ms Diaz is bad in this movie, but she really does put the bad in Bad Teacher. When she’s rude and unpleasant, she is also frightfully convincing. It is the sort of performance that raises doubts about the integrity of pretty blondes to something approaching certainty. 

Justin Timberlake, so adorable in The Social Network, is a curiosity here. As Scott Delacorte, the high-minded but sunny ingénu with a surprising taste for protected sex, he is utterly believable, but there is none of the edgy self-mockery that David Fincher elicited in the Facebook movie. Like Ms Diaz, he seems not to be acting a lot of the time. At best, he channels the clueless nice guys that Cary Grant played in movies like Bringing Up Baby, only without the improbability. I thought that the gist of the Justin Timberlake story was that he had survived his teen stardom as lead singer of ‘N Synch. You’d never guess it from Bad Teacher. While we’re on that topic, let me point out that even Jason Segel, as the gym teacher with an unlikely interest in the bad teacher, has difficulty projecting his role, but at least in his case this makes sense, as his character is not very believable; when was the last time you ran into a guy who dreamed of teaching phys ed at Harvard, settled for a Cook County high school — and likes to mock participants at poetry slams? Maybe this is what “high concept” means — you have to be high to get it. There is a lot of dope-smoking in Bad Teacher, but all it contributes is an unwanted taste of verisimilitude. 

All of this might have been saved by a really good mad scene for Ms Punch, who remains the sole reason for watching Jay Roach’s Dinner for Schmucks. She brings to thwarted affection a demented stubbornness that is truly life-threatening. As Amy Squirrel, she starts out as a goody-goody teacher who is too full of herself to win the trust of her pupils, and it’s clear that her cheerful oppressiveness is what makes students tolerate Elizabeth’s gross derelictions in the classroom. By degrees, Amy’s determination to get what she wants — Scott Delacorte, for one; an annual teaching award that she has becomed accustomed to winning, for another — gets the better of her, and at two points she is warned not to let “what happened in 2008” happen again. Oh, how I wanted to know what happened in 2008! I wanted to see it! But the actress was never permitted to realize the kind of comic meltdown that may, we hope, eventually become her trademark.  Ms Punch does a very good job with what she’s given, gamely shoving her way through the movie’s later scenes threatening “Jail time!” with her cheeks inflamed by poison ivy (contracted from the skin of an apple poisoned by Elizabeth) and retracting her upper lip with Freddy-Krueger-like monstrosity. But at no point is the Elizabeth, or anybody else, in real danger. Personally, I was hoping that Amy would blow up the school out of spite, perhaps using spite itself as an explosive. At least she might have immolated the bureaucrat played by Thomas Lennon in the lurid photographs of his night of shame. Instead, she is carried off stage in handcuffs, demanding that her urine be tested. 

The real failing of Bad Teacher is its vernacular setting. John Adams Middle School, which the principal played by John Michael Higgins constantly refers to as “Jams,” is a generic hellhole of adolescent ennui that would be unimpressive on television. You, too, might consume inappropriate substances and pass out in front of your class if you had to teach there. The clichés — take, for example, the anodyne performance by “Period 5,” the faculty band, at a place called The Midnight Cowboy Saloon, hoo boy what a night out! — are perked up by nothing more than the occasional touch of grossness. It is difficult for a Hollywood movie to have no production values, but Bad Teacher comes close. The worst thing is how oddly appropriate this dulness is: how catatonic would a world have to be to make a guidance counselor out of Elizabeth Halsey? That’s the movie’s final joke. A lot of viewers are going to find it distinctly unfunny. I laughed, but it wasn’t at anything that Cameron Diaz said or did.

J J Abrams’s Super 8 is a pleasant summer movie. It’s pleasant largely because its two young stars, Elle Fanning and Joel Courtney, are not only engaging but engaging in the same way as two older actors, Nicole Kidman and Jason Bateman. Whether there’s a facial resemblance I won’t claim, but Ms Fanning has Ms Kidnman’s ability to make passionate outburst look like the natural consequence of steely reserve, while Mr Courtney has Mr Bateman’s modest but genially attentive charm. The sense of kids playing at being movie stars is of course enhanced by the fact that their characters are making a movie — a zombie movie shot in Super 8 film (Mr Abrams’s film is set in 1979). You can watch Super 8, in fact, as a movie about moviemaking, ignore the Spielbergian science fiction story altogether, and have a perfectly good time. I’ll let you do the unpacking. Let’s just say that watching Charles, an enthusiastic, power-mad fifteen year-old would-be auteur (Riley Griffiths), run around exclaiming an urgent need for and ecstatic appreciation of “Production Values!” is going to be more of a treat for viewers who have actually considered  the movies than it’s going to be for those who haven’t. (The more I think about this kid’s chutzpah, the more I’m put in mind of Charles Laughton.)

Mr Abrams is to be congratulated for cloaking his movie in the Aura of Spielberg without suffocating it. It may be that he is simply the better director of actors. The pressboard clichés of Steven Spielberg’s Mittelamerika are all on display. We have a slightly dumpy and sad Ohio manufacturing town that doesn’t know what’s going to hit it — the visitor from outer space will be a benign memory once the offshoring and shuttering starts. We have perfectly nice, normal Americans, complete with their domesticated hostilities about patriarchy and propriety. We have a hero whose mother died in a factory accident the winter before the story gets going. We have a heroine whose mother abandoned her to the care of her shiftless, long-haired father (Ron Eldard, made up to resemble, very spookily, Gérard Depardieu — more references!). We have the overweight Charles, one of ten or fifteen children in a happily chaotic home overseen by a can-do mom (Jessica Tuck). The hero lives with his deputy sheriff stepfather (Kyle Chandler) in the nicer part of town, which wouldn’t be the nicer part of any village in Westchester, while the heroine lives in a more rackety pile that’s reminiscent of New England mill towns. In the climax, the town is destroyed —so maybe its citizens won’t suffer the onslaught of globalization, after all. The important thing is that the hero and the sheriff share a warmly heartfelt embrace at the finish. If the production values of Super 8 were a font, we would call it Spielberg Vernacular Bold.

The town is destroyed by special forces of I forget which branch of the armed services; Air Force probably. It would be misleading to say that Super 8 resounds with echoes of Sixties-era countercultural loathing for the military, because the sounds that you hear are much, much  louder than echoes. The special forces, headed by a tall silent type with bad skin played by Noah Emmerich, are the film’s bad guys. They will stop at nothing to prevent a brachyurous alien of nightmarish allure but superhuman intelligence from repairing its space ship and, like ET, going home. It is not its fault that the weaponry aimed in its direction misfires and destroys the town; it is only acting in self-defense. Mr Abrams insures that the creature’s final departure is a glittering, almost hypnotizing bit of Las Vegas glitz, leaving behind a wreckage of microwave ovens, console television sets, and too-large automobiles that no sane person would want anyway. If the creature does have an unfortunate habit of sustaining itself on a diet of humans, that’s just a gentle parallel of the kids’ zombie movie — which is shown in its entirety during the final credits, so sit still after the happy ending.

Super 8 may unfold in a thoroughly predictable manner, but then so does Midnight in Paris; in both cases, the unfolding is expert. As a Manhattanite, I have a thoroughly predictable preference for Woody Allen’s Gotham Comic Sans, but I had a good time at Super 8, and if you have ever thought about why you like going to the movies, you will, too.

This will be brief — I’m not good for much today. The fusebox was upgraded this morning, in an absolutely painless operation that took about forty minutes at the most. I managed to follow instructions about turning things off and then turning them back on again, and you’d never know that the power was out for a spell. If you checked my blood for traces of stressed-out levels of cortisol, however, you might gather that I was anxious about something. For five minutes this morning, making the bed, I wished I were dead, and no longer subject to contingencies. Meanwhile, a cold front is moving in, which is only making things sultrier; apparently, we’re in for an evening of storms — and drier weather tomorrow. Hallelujah! 

If I’d put in an honest day’s work, I’d have tried a more substantial paragraph or two about Midnight in Paris, because I want to propose that we consider Woody Allen more as a magician specializing in delight than a comedian specializing in laughs. Yesterday, I wrote about the idea for a movie that Gil Pender shares with Luis Buñuel — a one-line concept that we smarty-pants in the audience know will blossom into Le Charme discret de la bourgeoisie. The joke is so elegantly presented (and this is what Woody Allen’s magic is all about) that we don’t stop to think how unnecessary it is for Gil to buttonhole the filmmaker with his idea. Gil knows, after all, that the film has been made; he has undoubtedly seen it many times (he’s a scriptwriter). He might as well save his breath. But the whole business is over long before this conundrum can tempt us into a headachy tangle of metaphysical speculations about causation. We’re not watching Gil; we’re not thinking his thoughts. We’re watching Buñuel shrug as he tries, without immediate success, to make sense of Gil’s idea. The cinematic actuality — Allen’s sleight of hand — is that it might never have occurred to Buñuel to make Le Charme discret, if he hadn’t been given the idea by a strange American visiting from the future. This is no more plausible, when looked at, than the whole confection of Midnight in Paris: the sequence of Gil Pender’s evenings in 1920s Paris. The minute you start thinking about what’s going on in this movie, the spell is as broken as Cinderella’s slipper. But Woody Allen makes sure that you don’t. I’ve said that he’s a magician, but his magic wand is the comedian’s most indispensable tool: an impeccable sense of timing. And even when you can see the timing (and you can; Allen hides nothing), it still works. 

I gave up hunting through my CD library for Sidney Bechet’s “Si Tu Vois Ma   Mère,” the film’s signature tune that plays the same role as Rhapsody in Blue in Manhattan, and just bought a copy of the song from iTunes. And I’m glad I did. If
I squint, it brings Marion Cotillard into my living room. By the way, I know that Cinderella’s slipper doesn’t break. Neither does Woody Allen’s spell.

Before anything else, I have to share my father-in-law’s answer to yesterday’s question: it turns out that veal tenderloin has been masquerading under the name noisette de veau. I’ve certainly seen that on menus, and I may even have known what it was, once upon a time — a time when I was ignorant of meat cuts generally, and “tenderloin” was just a word. I maintain that I’ve never seen it for sale in a shop, under any kind of name. But I’m relieved to know that those tenderloins haven’t been going to waste. “Were they real?”, Kathleen’s father sighed when she told him what we’ had for dinner the night before. Oh, yes; they were real. 

Five or six years ago, at a gathering of bloggers (imagine such a thing now), I heard a number of people complain that they were having a hard time coming up with interesting things to write about. “It’s terrible! All I can ever think of is ‘What I had for dinner last night’!” I’ve written a handful or two of entries about that very subject, but I’ve tried to keep a lid on it — actually, keeping a lid on it hasn’t been that hard, because I’m rarely very interested, the next day, by what I had for dinner the night before, and certainly least of all when I can’t think of anything else to write about. When you have nothing to say, resorting desperately to ‘tried and true’ fallbacks is rarely a good idea, because if you’re not inspired by what’s new and different in your life — that is, if you can’t even see what’s new and different in it — you’re probably not in the best frame of mind for dusting off some old kitchen clichés. The problem with blogging remains, however, that of writing regularly, preferably daily. Even if nobody reads what you write, the habit of turning out a few readable paragraphs every day is one of the best that any writer can have — certainly the best habit that does not involve the judicious reading of other people’s writing. 

I’ve been reading Alan Jacobs’s engaging little book, The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction. I have found it provocative in ways that I doubt the author intended. Quite often, I’m piqued by something that Jacobs has taken for granted — without, I believe, sensing that he was taking anything for granted. In the section entitled “Lost,” he recounts the story of William Cobbett’s intellectual awakening as a teenager. His eye was caught by Swift’s The Tale of a Tub in a suburban bookshop window, and he decided to spend his lunch money to buy it. He was so absorbed by the satire that he forgot his hunger and read until it was simply too dark to make out the words. “The lure of the book so compelled him,” Jacobs writes, 

that he voluntarily gave up a meal in exchange for the chance to read it; and the spell of the book, as he read it, was so strong that neighter hunger nor darkness could touch him. He was “rapt”; anyone passing him would have recognized that “eye-on-the-object look.” 

I have never known this rapture, ever. It is not within the gift of my nervous system to grant forgetfulness of bodily discomforts. I can postpone easing them, and when I do, invariably when I’m reading something exciting, narrative suspense is amplified by a measure of suspense concerning my ability to withstand privation. I don’t lose myself for hours; I am up and about every twenty minutes or so just dealing with the noise that comes from within my skin. I long ago learned how to minimise the disruption caused these distractions, and to suppress ones coming wholly from outside. I keep my house in order, to put very succinctly. The result is that I’m bemused by the trouble that people have with the distraction of the Internet. I don’t know whether to envy or pity the spellbinding enchantments of their pre-digital lives. 

But there’s more to it than refilling the tea mug and running to the bathroom. When I say that I never forget myself, I mean never. When I was young, this relentless self-awareness was crushing, and I look a lot of recreational drugs just to get away from myself (a desire that had nothing to do, I insist, with hating myself). Even LSD didn’t do the trick, though. Now that I’m at the other end of life, being aware of what I’m thinking all the time, of how I’m responding, say, to what I’m reading while I’m reading it, is no longer so crippling; it’s just the way I’m wired, and I’ve learned to live with it. And, as always when you learn to live with something, I’ve found distinct advantages in the persistence of my own company, as it were. It has taught me, for one thing, that pleasure is not a commodity, something that you go out and consume, but a harmony, a congruence between an experience and your state of being. (If you’re not in the mood, in other words, even Jane Austen isn’t going to cut it.) While I don’t believe that our pleasures are so personal, so idiosyncratic — so subjective — that we have nothing intelligible to say about them, I do think that it helps to know something about the context of a critical response. When it comes to writing about a given performance of music — to pick the sharpest case — I think that talking about my recollections of other performances is more illuminating than the attempt to pin analytical absolutes and mood markers on the event, and vastly more useful than an abstract dissection of the piece of music itself. Beethoven’s Eroica exists on paper, and much can be learned from examining the celestial mathematics of its score. But none of us has ever heard that symphony, nor will we ever. We have only heard discrete executions, fallen and imperfect from the point of view of strict realization, but occasionally unbeatably satisfying for all that. 

Thinking hard about all of this for several months, I’ve become uncomfortable with the patina of objectivity that I know very well how to spread over my commentary. During the golden age of print journalism, professional reporters made a religious tenet of burying personal responses, on the theory that no reader cared what a reporter thought, because who the hell was a reporter? Just a guy with a pencil. We think differently nowadays, but there remain occasions for sticking to the illusion of “the facts, ma’am — just the facts.” I’ve developed a trope for such occasions: I stick a virtual mascot on my shoulder and write in the first person plural. (The first person plural is wonderfully effective at wrongfooting any attempts to squeeze in the individual.) At my much-neglected Web site, Civil Pleasures, I intend someday to plant the reasonably expository pieces that can still be found a Portico, a site that I have abandoned. It will be very helpful, when I write those pages, to be able to refresh my memory with notes and recollection culled from more casual writing here. But in order to write here as often as I do, I have to keep it casual.

Instead of writing about Woody Allen’s Midnight in Paris itself, then, I’m going to tell you how I got from the movie house to lunch. Oh, I loved the movie. I adored it! But that’s about me, not Midnight in Paris. As I stepped onto the pavement, I felt something odd right away. Instead of the usual post-glamorous-comedy letdown, in which I wish that my life were different, I came out feeling very happy about my life as it is. After all, the life that I’m living is such that I had only to walk across the street first thing in the morning to see a very funny movie chock-full of arty references that I grasped easily enough to appreciate the filmmaker’s skill at saving them from mere gratuity — and also a movie that functions even more incisively than any of its predecessors as an object lesson in Woody Allen’s profoundly cinematic sensibility, even as it casts ghostly highlights on earlier pictures (I was especially reminded of Shadows and Fog, but also of the portrait of a bad marriage — here a bad-marriage-to-be — in Crimes and Misdemeanors). I was alive to Allen’s extraordinarily adroit handling of his actors’ gifts; if there were absolutely nothing else to recommend Midnight in Paris, it would deserve immortality simply for the comic haberdashery of matching one of the funniest movie jokes ever with the particular funny-man talents of Gad Elmaleh. I was amazed that two of my favorite actresses on earth, Rachel McAdams and Marion Cotillard, had been dangled before me in a way that left me delighted, not discontented. It may look as though I’m talking about a movie here, but I’m not.

Then I turned the corner of 86th and Second, heading down to the Hi-Life for a club sandwich, and a new song came on the Nano. I knew what it was right away, because even though I had never heard this original version in my life I was very familiar with its Sesame Street knockoff, also featuring the singer-songwriter Feist: “1234.” How cool to learn this neat song from my grandson’s enthusiasm! How cool of Sesame Street, too, of course — but the fact is that I’m living in a world where these very nice things are happening. They start happening out in the world around me, but they end up happening in my head. Midnight in Paris pushed me beyond counting my blessings; it made me feel blessed.

With Bridesmaids, Judd Apatow’s school of middle-American humor opens its female wing; and the maiden flight begins with a wonderful flourish that’s just as funny as anything in the boys’ movies even while it informs us of a slightly different climate. The essence of the joke is having Jon Hamm play a jerk. He’s an amiable, cuddly jerk; he’s no smarmy narcissist. But his ears don’t work. He makes love the way he likes to make love. It’s not great for his girlfriend — who is not only not his girlfriend, as we find out right away, but just his “Number Three,” as he calls out after she makes him let her out of the car and he leaves her in the dust. But we can see right away why this woman would come back for more, because he is, after all, Don Draper. 

And she has nothing better to do. In a briskly summarized back-story, we learn that her real boyfriend left her in the lurch when the two of them were running a bake shop in downtown Milwaukee. Whether it was his defection or the recession that closed the place, Annie (Kristen Wiig) has lost her way since. She’s not good at the jewelry-shop job that an AA member gave her as a favor to his sponsor, Annie’s mom (the late Jill Clayburgh, looking great, considering). She has a scary roommate situation that involves an English brother-sister team that seems dropped-in from an aliens nightmare (What are Matt Lucas and Rebel Wilson doing in Milwaukee?). And now her best friend, Lillian (Maya Rudolph), is getting married. 

Lillian is marrying a well-placed young man from Chicago. His parents belong to a ritzy country club, as does his boss, whose new wife, Helen (Rose Byrne), has gratiously taken Lillian — a poor Milwaukee girl, after all — under her wing. We misspelled “graciously” on purpose, because Helen’s sweetness is as grating as a bed of sugar cubes. It’s unfortunate that Lillian has asked Annie to be her matron of honor, because Helen is second only to Martha Stewart in the expertise department, and she knows how to deploy correct politeness as a deadly weapon. Annie and Helen quickly fall into a duel for Lillian’s soul, and the movie’s second act passes in a blaze of animosity that makes the bitchery of The Women look very antique indeed. 

There are two other nice ladies in the wedding party (played by Wendi McLendon-Covey and Ellie Kemper), and then there is the groom’s sister, Megan, who is played by Melissa McCarthy. Ms McCarthy is built, to put it nicely, like a fireplug, and she has a direct sense of assaultive humor to go with it. (More than once she struck me as the American, female counterpart to Ricky Gervais). The buzz about Bridesmaids is that a good deal of improvisation was encouraged, and Ms McCarthy not only brings the freshness of stand-up to proceedings but she makes it work. Although wildly implausible as any kind of bridesmaid, she throws herself at you with irresistible conviction. (Sometimes, she throws other characters at you.) The air marshals of America, meanwhile, are going to have to work on their cover.

Romance eventually taps Annie’s shoulder in the form of a policeman who pulls her over because her tail lights are out. He turns out to be Chris O’Dowd, who played the sad-sack disk jockey in The Boat That Rocked who was conned into marrying January Jones. (The Mad Men linkages are going to ramify densely in the coming years.) His character, Rhodes, is portrayed as sweet-natured and vulnerable, and we don’t know whose side to take when Annie walks out on him during what ought to have been a nice morning-after scene. His offense? To presume on her baking abilities (he was a satisfied customer of her bake shop). Bridesmaids would have been just about perfect if this cloud in Annie’s past were cleared up — we watch her do enough baking to agree with Rhodes that it’s probably what she ought to be doing, so what’s the big problem? — but we can be thankful that the point is not belabored. 

I found Bridesmaids the movie to be a lot funnier than Bridesmaids the trailer. The trailer includes at least two so-so jokes that got dumped from the final feature, much to its improvement. Still, for all its riotous moments, this is not a sidesplitting movie. Comparisons will be made, I expect, to Mr Apatow’s Funny People, in which Adam Sandler made frequent crossings of the frontier between drama and comedy. Ms Wiig, one of the great character actors of all time, plays Annie more or less straight, which is only fair, since the point of the film is to demonstrate that women can be just as funny at being losers as men can (if they’re funny). But there are bathtubs of momentary pathos that would never be tolerated in a boys’ movie, and it will be interesting to see how well audiences digest the many moments at which Ms Wiig looks like a homesteader lost in the dust bowl. Without saying a word (almost), she conveys the awfulness of being the one who isn’t getting married, the one whom nobody wants to marry. These moments don’t last long. Bridal mayhem persistently intervenes. And when Annie begs Rhodes to turn on his patrol car’s siren at the end, you wonder if there are any justices of the peace in the neighborhood who are working late.

Jumping the Broom is a movie about a poorly planned wedding. I don’t mean the arrangements for the service and the reception (although the latter are in the care of a frazzled blonde, played by Julie Bowen, whose comic potential is scratched deeply enough only to be cringe-making). I mean planning as something that you do for people whom you care about. Only idiots would wait until the rehearsal dinner to introduce parents of such wildly divergent social backgrounds, and neither Sabrina (Paula Patton) nor Jason (Laz Alonso) is an idiot. Their oversight and/or wishful thinking is never explored, because the wild divergence in their social backgrounds, aside from being something that they have personally triumphed over, is there for comic effect only. But the laughter never really muffles the cruelty of the embarrassment to which the mothers of the happy couple are subjected. 

The duel of the mothers, played by Loretta Devine (his, poor) and Angela Bassett (hers, rich) calls for the two actresses to do everything they can think of to make themselves unsympathetic. Ms Devine looks mean and dowdy most of the time, and Ms Bassett always looks like Medea. You just wish that they could don a couple of T shirts and get down to the mud wrestling. Instead, the rich mom speaks French and declares, with odiously unsociable conceit, that not only were her forebears never slaves, they owned slaves. Happily, I suppose, the beady self-righteousness of the poor mom is enough to keep your dislike of these witches in perfect balance. Postal workers and Martha’s Vineyard homeowners had, until Jumping the Broom, little common ground for outrage, but this screenplay, by Elizabeth Hunter and Arlene Gibbs, has filled the lack. 

Ms Patton is adorable in the same way that Amanda Peet is adorable in Something’s Gotta Give; close your eyes, and you would never guess that these girls didn’t grow up in the same well-tended garden. Mr Alonso’s performance is awkward in exactly the manner of a jeune premier in a Broadway musical comedy; when he tries to sound sincere, it would be better if he could just sing. I mean it as a compliment: it’s only right that an actor should cough and burp when his character is asked to declare respect for a fiancé’s silly primness. The couple’s more estimable achievement is holding center stage while competing love interests sprout to either side, between his mother’s colleague, the genuinely funny Tasha Smith, and her cousin from Yale, played by Romeo Miller; and between her bridesmaid, Meagan Good, and the catering chef, Gary Dourdan. (The ineptness of the latters’ love scene in the kitchen, while pone burns, ought to be taught, prophylactically, in film schools.) Valarie Pettiford, Mike Epps, DeRay Davis, Pooch Hall, and a rather tired-looking Brian Stokes Mitchell do what they can to push the stone uphill, while a pixieish Vera Cudjoe cajoles one into wondering if Cicely Tyson is doing another cameo. All in all, the cast gives this bad film the visual pizzaz to make it well worth sitting through. It’s only when the screen goes dark that you ask yourself what all that was about.

I feel somewhat impertinent criticizing Jumping the Broom, because it struck me as sending a fusillade of coded messages to an intended black American audience. Without atttempting any deciphering, I’ll just point out that the movie is given to pretending that its true subject is pre-marital continence. At one awful moment, Sabrina apologizes to Jason’s penis for arousing an erection that cannot be — what’s the word? “eased”? — until the next day’s ceremony. At another, equally awful moment, the bridesmaids speculate about Jason’s fortitude in the face of Sabrina’s virginal vows; maybe he’s on the down low! The juxtaposition of raunch and respectability curdles the fun; Jumping the Broom is neither the farce nor the comedy of manners that it might have been. The whole idea of “saving it for marriage” seems wrong-headed if not delusional, resting as it does on the presumption that, since two sexy-looking people are sure to find erotic satisfaction in one another’s arms, they might as well wait until they’ve bound themselves together. I no longer live in a world in which such a view seems moral; indeed, it seems quite immoral. What a message! 

Francis Lawrence’s Water For Elephants is a very old-fashioned movie at heart — and on its sleeve as well. The darkness of life in the circus has been a movie trope since Freaks; you might almost say that movies were invented not so much take us behind the scenes as to persuade us that we want to go behind the scenes. All the glamor that circus performers know, after all, they know when they don their spangly costumes and perform. The rest is rehearsal or worse. (Tightrope artists don’t go out on the town after the show.) So why would anyone want to peer into the world of underpaid drudgery on the other side of the canvas?

The answer is, “nobody but a kid who dreams of running away with the circus.” Jacob Jankowski doesn’t run away with the circus, exactly, but when he does run away — from the void left by his loving parents’ sudden death in an automobile accident — it’s a circus train that he hops on to. Having left Cornell within an inch of graduating as a veterinarian, Jacob brings some useful skills to his new berth; as an Ivy Leaguer, he brings a gentlemanly polish that the manager and master of ceremonies finds congenial — until, of course, the manager’s wife responds to his ardent glances, whereupon the manager’s sideline as a sadist takes over. Or is it the plot of I Pagliacci? Mo matter, because — and this is what’s really old-fashioned about Water For Elephants — the film is not about the circus at all. It’s about the rescue of a lovely woman by a pure-hearted young man. And it is set in the distant past, when even roustabouts were better-dressed than most people today.

I’m going to have to see Water For Elephants a few more times before I can tell if it’s any good. Reese Witherspoon, as I say, is the reason to hold out hope. Her Marlena — an abandoned child, raised in a hell of foster homes until her escape into the circus manager’s arms — shimmers with luminous waves of goodness even when her face is set with hard smarts. When Marlena strikes her triumphant poses atop Rosie, the elephant that her husband buys in order to buoy up the circus’s fortunes, you see someone who is very pleased to be doing something well. Christoph Waltz, as August, the manager, looks perhaps too pleased to be doing what he’s doing; no one brings a more enthusiastic, authoritative glitter to the art of cruelty. What saves his performances from seeming typecast is the fact that Water For Elephants is nowhere near as much fun as Inglorious Basterds, the Quentin Taratino fable in which Mr Waltz stole every scene in which he appeared. As for Robert Pattison, the vampire heart-throb who plays Jacob, it’s impossible to tell whether it’s he who’s the mess or his part, which may have undergone unfortunate tailoring to suit the actor’s fan base. Mr Pattison has dreamy eyes, a great smile, and the frame of a genuine Hollywood Everyman. But his wounded air may not wear well; he too often seems too debilitated to withstand the hardships of circus life. It may be that his career needs a fatal accident that will seal him in imperishable amber.

At the movies this morning, I saw the remark of Arthur, and I liked it about a million times more than I did the original. I’ll get round to saying why a little bit later today…

1. This version of Arthur works because Russell Brand is a boy. True, he’s a very tall boy, and a boy with five-o’clock shadow. But he’s a boy, not a man. This makes the new Arthur a lot more appealing than the old one, where the title role was played by a sad short thirtysomething who wanted access to boobs more than he wanted fun.
2. Helen Mirren. La reine des reines.
3. Greta Gerwig. Greta Gerwig conducting a tour of Grand Central Terminal. All we could think of was her collaboration with Joe Jervis, touring Grand Central Station. The compass rose and all that. Joe’s first kiss, tickle tickle. Greta Gerwig is the poster-person for sexual honesty today, no small feat.
4. The Pierre. Oh, and Nick Nolte, playing a thick bad guy. Fun!
5. Jennifer Garner. Garner has the cheekbones, in several scenes, of a great Forties movie star, think Rita Hayworth except Garner is better. Her beauty jore than compensates for the fact that nobody loves her character; that, in fact her character is awful. That, HEY!, Jennifer Garner is the Bad Guy in Arthur. Obvious, yes, but thinks!
6. What is it about boobs? Is breast-feeding the problem, or the solution? Guys!
7. Geraldine James, whom we have never seen enough of since The Jewel in the Crown.
8. More anon.
9. Have you been drinking?

There was a moment, during an early escape sequence, when I half expected Lady Gaga to pop out from behind a concrete bunker. Lights were flashing, troops were trotting, and a young woman was fleeing within their midst: it looked like any number of music videos, and sounded like a music video as well, but for the singing (there wasn’t any).

Hanna works very much like a music video in a more important way: it feeds entirely on its star power. Cate Blanchett, Eric Bana, and, most of all, Saoirse Ronan hold the camera in fierce close-ups that help you forget that Hanna doesn’t make a lot of sense. Happily, the screenplay is similarly discreet; the characters do not engage in discussions that would highlight the nightmarish absurdity of the story, which takes a very European view of the CIA (the same mad scientist rap that American filmmakers used to lay on the nation’s Cold War opponents). I say “nightmarish” for a reason: Hanna proceeds like a highly-styled bad dream with interesting episodes and a “happy” ending.

Which is to say that it’s a gripping film, for the most part. Sometimes the episodes take over, and threaten to run away with the main story, while the stylization threatens to render the movie precious in a Sixties sort of way. But you want to know how it comes out — or in any case you want to see Marisa Wergler (Ms Blanchett) get what’s coming to her. Even though you don’t know what she did, or — correction — you know what she did, but you don’t know why.  (Not really.) To my knowledge, she is the first person from Texas ever to be called “Marisa,” and, again, the overlap between wicked East-European Mata Hari and the role that Julia Roberts played in Charlie Wilson’s War provides a certain cognitive-dissonant fizz.

Joe Wright, who directed her in Atonement, is obviously taken with Ms Ronan’s looks — and why not? With Gemma Jones’s trascending gaze, and a fine-boned reserve that seems inherited from Helen Mirren and Vanessa Redgrave, Saoirse Ronan has a beauty to be reckoned with, and her Hanna is gorgeously feral. Long before we learn that, thanks to DNA tampering that the Marisa person would like to keep hush-hush, Hanna is every bit as unusual as she seems to be — she can wrestle Eric Bana, whom she thinks is her father, to the ground — we have given up expecting Ms Ronan to be just another pretty face.

That’s why the movie’s most extended episode, in which Hanna hooks up with an English family caravaning its way from Morocco to Spain and beyond, bogs down: it tells us what we already know, which is that Hanna is not just another teenaged girl. Having spent her entire life on the edge of the Arctic Circle, she has never seen gypsies dance, or worn a tutu, or kissed a boy. This is what Hanna might have been about, making it an entirely different picture, one that would put to better use its fantastic little ensemble of actors cast as the English bobos, Olivia Williams, Jason Flemyng, Aldo Maland, and the deliciously jaded Jessica Barden. But since this is a thriller, we can’t get into the class struggle that the parents wage while bringing up their children as free spirits; we’re just annoyed with them for being unaware of the danger that they’re in. We fret for their safety every moment that Hanna spends with them, uneasily convinced that they will not escape the twisted attentions of Marisa’s hit man, Isaacs (Tom Hollander,) and his minions. That we are spared their untimely demise is not something that we can feel quite grateful for; it’s almost worse that they’re dropped into limbo.

Another episode — and more of this might have strengthened the movie’s thriller spine — takes place at an abandoned theme park devoted to the stories of the Brothers Grimm.  This relic of the DDR makes an appealing ruin, and Joe Wright makes the most of its ironies. (The one souvenir that Hanna has of her mother is a book of the fairy tales, told mostly in drawings.) But I came away thinking that what this episode needed was not an artiste like Wright but a Hollywood hack who would not let interesting cinematography get in the way of heartstopping action. As it is, the episode (which is also climactic) feels both confused and truncated.

Perhaps the theme park offers a clue: what Hanna really is is a fairy tale. What’s riveting about the movie is the archetypal antagonism between Hanna and Marisa, which blazes through the film even though it is only at the end that the wicked stepmother and the innocent angel come together. This is a duel that we know very well, and from one of the best-known Grimm tales, that of Snow White. 

No, I had not been wondering how long it would take for a filmmaker to apply the conceit of Groundhog Day to a terrorist threat, but now that Source Code has come out, I’m surprised that it took so long. Instead of learning how not to be a jerk, the hero simply has to identify a mad bomber on a commuter train. As he has only eight minutes to work with, it’s no surprise that at first he does not succeed, but unless we’ve crawled out from under a rock, we’ve paid precisely for the fun of watching him try, try again. 

But there’s more to it than that. The hero is actually a comatose war veteran whose head and thorax have been preserved in a pod at a remote military installation, for the purposes of a highly speculative research project. A team of scientists headed by one Dr Rutledge (Jeffrey Wright) has figured out how to hook up the mind of the soldier, Colter Stevens (Jake Gyllenhaal), to a re-run of a dead man’s last eight minutes of life. The dead man is, or was, a passenger on the doomed commuter train, and Stevens is channeled into those final minutes in search of vital information. This is not, we are told by Dr Rutledge, time travel. It is “time re-assignment.”

Dr Rutledge wants to know who the bomber is not so that the train and its passengers can be saved — they can’t; that’s why the dead man’s mind is “available” — but in order to forestall the bomber’s next, far more devastating attack. A mumbling, authoritarian government contractor, Dr Rutledge delegates his dealings with Colter Stevens to a lieutenant, Colleen Goodwin (Vera Farmiga). Goodwin’s job is to put Stevens through his moves as efficiently as possibly, but, since he’s the hero — a bad guy would just do as he was told; in American movie language, unquestioning obedience is the badge of evil — Stevens wants to know what the moves are. He wants to know why he’s not in Afghanistan with his crew. He wants to talk to his father, unaware that his father has buried what he thought were his ashes. Eventually, of course, he’ll want to save Christina (Michelle Monoghan), the pretty girl in the seat opposite him — on those eight-minute excursions in a dead man’s body — from a fate that, Goodwin assures him, is sealed. 

Director Duncan Jones seems to know what he’s doing, although I have to lodge an impatient sigh at the bad Off-Broadway set that Stevens’s imagines he’s strapped into. I’m going to blame the set rather than Mr Gyllenhaal for the tedium of the scenes in which an angry Stevens confronts Gooowin via flat-panel display, because in his scenes on the train the actor radiates excitement. Indeed, he appears to be making things up as he goes along (which is of course what his character is doing). Mr Gyllenhaal is also convincing as a guy who knows how to do stuff, such as breaking a lock or defusing a detonator. 

Ms Monoghan suggests Sandra Bullock-type reserves that go unsounded; it’s difficult to play smart when your character hasn’t got a clue as to what’s really going on, and there are only so many ways of cocking your eyebrows at the surprising behavior of your everyday commuter friend (especially when you don’t know that he’s dead — as are you!). But the job here is to play a woman whom Colter Stevens would like to know better, and that Ms Monoghan is more than capable of doing. The dramatic weight that’s usually carried by the romantic opposite has here been placed on the shoulders of a woman who does know what is going on, and there are few actresses better endowed to bear up beautifully under such circumstances than Vera Farmiga. 

Vera Farmiga has liquid blueeyes that seem always to have just stopped weeping; they are set beneath eyebrows of Hellenistic eloquence. Her expression updates the tragic sense of life from noisy dismay to sorrowed insight. As the interface between Rutledge and Stevens, Goodwin experiences the soldier’s fear and loss first-hand, and her inclination is to take his side. But time is running out on that second blast, and she is obliged, to her obvious pain, to be impatient and bureaucratic with him. She sticks to the program until Stevens successfully retrieves the bomber’s name. Then, without Rutledge’s authorization, she lets the hero go back in one more time, to try to save Christina. This lands her in the embrace of the military police. Ms Farmiga plays this suspenseful scene not as a woman in danger of getting caught but as someone who is doing the right thing. She doesn’t care what happens to her as long as she’s able to keep her word to Stevens. (Anybody familiar with Wagner’s Die Walküre will clearly see the outlines of the Todesverkundigung scene in Act II.) While Jake Gyllenhaal flies through the story’s outward emergency, Vera Farmiga burns with its dramatic intensity.

Happily, Source Code believes in itself deeply enough to end on just the right kind of note, but we can’t say anything about tha.

Brad Furman’s snappy legal thriller, The Lincoln Lawyer, has one thing in common with Gregory Holbit’s 2007 Fracture: both stories spring from the idea of someone rich who, in lieu of planning a clever crime, plans instead a clever abuse of legal process. In Fracture, the bad guy, played by Anthony Hopkins with unparalleled arrogance and contempt, seeks to put double jeopardy to his advantage by saddling the prosecution with a lot of inadmissible evidence. The Lincoln Lawyer is kinkier. A rich kid, played with equally unparalleled odiousness by Ryan Philippe, tries to force a defense attorney (Matthew MacConaughey) into securing what amounts to a second acquittal. 

And that’s where the similarities end. The Lincoln Lawyer has the look and feel of a really good television show from the 1970s. I mean that as a compliment, because the movie is very good at what it wants to do, but I also mean to suggest the things that it’s not interested in. Don’t expect the interesting visuals or haunting moods of a fim like Fracture. The Lincoln Lawyer is about different kinds of confrontations, but not about the implications of those confrontations — in the way that, say, every encounter in Chinatown seems to involve the whole history of Los Angeles. It’s certainly not about the oddity of practicing criminal defense law from the back seat of a Town Car. Rather, The Lincoln Lawyer is a sort of legal kung fu picture, its characters engaged in one outsmarting maneuver after another. Thanks to great star power — Matthew MacConaughey has never done better work, and he’s assisted by the top talents of Marisa Tomei, Ryan Philippe, Josh Lucas, Frances Fisher, Bob Gunton, John Leguizamo, Michael Peña, William H Macy and Laurence Mason — and a well-crafted story line, The Lincoln Lawyer crosses the finish line as fresh as a daisy. But it could easily have been awful, with its made-for-television values. 

Happily, Mr MacConaughey and his director know what they’re doing. We watch with mounting dismay as Mick Haller, a blithe jouster who still keeps a surfboard at home, realizes not only that he has been set up to defend a very guilty man but also how far he will fall if the guilty man succeeds. Haller doesn’t have a lot of friends; almost everyone in his world thinks that the sleaziness of his clients has rubbed off on him. But when you’re the sort of person who is asked, in a crowded elevator, how you can sleep at night, you may be able to tap special resources. Being Matthew MacConaughey, Haller is loaded with the kind of charm that, when it works, makes believers out others. Haller’s team believes in him. His ex-wife (Ms Tomei) almost believes in him; she’s still happy to have sex with him. But Haller also has a restlessness that takes the place of panic. He’s gifted at thinking his way out of tight spots. 

We only wish that Frances Fisher’s part had been a bit bigger. There’s a corker of a final showdown that, masterfully, comes soon after a false ending, and although no small part of its power comes from its being quick and deadly, it left me wanting more of Ms Fisher’s suave but haggard matron. I we suspect that Gregory Holbit would have had a field day directing her.

One of my favorite movies from last year was Anton Corbijn’s The American, starring George Clooney and a lot of Italian scenery reminiscent of the Spanish locations used by Sergio Leone in his famous Spaghetti Westerns. Who knew? I thought that The American was an update of the classic European “existentialist” anti-drama of the 1960s, full of brooding silence, unexplained plot points, and disaffected fatalism. It turns out that Corbijn was updating the classic European Western of the 1960s, full of — well, I guess it comes to the same thing. The director tells us, in the running commentary that accompanies the DVD, that he wanted to call the film “Il Americano,” which, he notes, is incorrect Italian — it’s what the American, Jack (George Clooney) calls himself, before a neighbor corrects him (“L’Americano”) All this to highlight the Americanness of an originally British character, drawn from a British novel, Martin Booth’s A Very Private Gentleman.

As you can probably tell, I’ve been on a jag with this film, so it was inevitable that I would listen to the commentary eventually, no matter how bad it was. Corbijn’s commentary isn’t bad, exactly, but it is fairly idle, full of compliments for the actors playing the minor roles and generous lashings of admiration for the big star. One absolutely crucial bit of mystification was cleared up; I’d always thought that it is Pavel (Johan Leysen) who kills Mathilde (Thekla Reuten, shown above). I couldn’t figure out why Pavel did such a thing, but process of elimination ruled out other explanations. What would never have occurred to me, because I’m ignorant about guns, is that Jack sabotages the weapon that Mathilde has commissioned, so that it backfires, killing the shooter instead of the target. Well, it was nice to have that cleared up! But the more Corbijn went on about this and that, the more surprised I was that he had nothing to say about the extraordinary contrast between the film’s two big female roles. Who could be less like Mathilde than Clara (Violante Placido, shown below), the prostitute with whom Jack falls in love?

Indeed, I’m writing this in hopes of banishing Ms Reuten’s image from my mind’s eye, or at least turning down the intensity of her presence. I have never seen an actress radiate  the deadly erotic allure that Puccini’s music imputes to Turandot. She captures everything that is dark and dangerous and “European” about The American. Her Mathilde is everything that a man dreads in a woman. Smart and self-possessed, she exudes doubt that the men with whom she has to deal will be up to her mark. In the scene from which I’ve taken Ms Reuten’s image, Mathilde is explaining what kind of a weapon she wants Jack to make. She speaks softly but briskly, like a fairy-tale princess laying down cruel conditions for the hero’s ordeal. Jack’s responses are evidently satisfactory, but it’s obvious that the effort of satisfying her is wearing him down. She actually asks him, “Can you do it?” Later, we will see Mathilde in a knit white dress with a prim turtleneck collar that nevertheless trumpets the physical endowments that it drapes. Mathilde would be a terrible tease, if you imagined for a moment that she gave a damn. She may, in fact, give a damn, but you don’t want to dwell on what that might be like. In any case, you don’t get to see any of her naughty bits.

Clara, on the other hand, is quite often gorgeously naked. The first thing she does, when Jack takes her for a picnic, is pull off her top and beckon him to join her in the stream. Corbijn gives the audience plenty of opportunity to develop an appreciation of the beauty of Ms Placido’s breasts; it might be going too far to claim that they never upstage her, but in any case they do nothing to check our sense that Clara is a genuine ingénue, a girl who has fallen for Jack and who is ready to give him whatever she has. She wants to enjoy him, and she wants him to enjoy her. When she sallies with him, in the scene that I’ve clipped, about meeting for dinner at “the usual place” — the phrase just slipped out of Jack, but of course their regular place is the bordello, so he can’t mean what he said — her expression is warm and playful. There is nothing challenging about Clara, and by the end of the story Jack can’t believe his good luck in finding her. Unfortunately, by then, he’s also dying.  

In the commentary, Anton Corbijn speaks of Ms Reuten’s wigs. Wigs never crossed my mind, either. I noticed well enough that in the course of her three appearances in the story, Mathilde’s hair goes from ironed-straight to Medusa-permed, with a wavy intermediate coiffure for her knit-dress scene that is at ironic odds with her mission at the moment, which is testing a rifle in a deserted field. (In that episode, she arrives and departs on a sad little train that her presence makes sinister into the bargain.) But I didn’t see anything that a good stylist couldn’t arrange. Who needs wigs? The artifice in Mathilde’s character is bone-deep.  

Several years ago, I decided to give Jane Eyre a try. It was an effort. When Jane finally made her way to Thornfield Hall, I set the book down. There seemed to be nothing in it for an adult. I neither liked or disliked Jane, but the landscape oppressed me. Charlotte Brontë’s Yorkshire seemed no closer to London than New South Wales. The writing was hard going. 

The chamber looked such a bright little place to me as the sun shone in between the gay blue chintz window curtains, showing papered wals and a carpeted floor, so unlike the bare planks and stained plaster of Lowood that my spirits rose at the view. Externals have a great effect on the young: I thought that a fairer era of life was beginning for me, one that was to have its flowers and pleasures, as well as its thorns and toils. My faculties, nursed by the change of scene, the new field offered to hope, seemed all astir. I cannot precisely define what they expected, but it was something pleasant: not perhaps that day or that month, but at an indefinite future period. 

This sort of thing threatened to stretch into some other indefinite future period. Also, I thought that I knew what was going to happen next. So, midway through Chapter XI, I stopped, with uncharacteristic deliberateness, reading. 

Now that I’ve seen Cary Fukunaga’s adaptation, though, I’m tempted to go back and give the book another go. I shall now at least have a face for Jane. Mia Wasikowska. who hails from a town not far from New South Wales and who looks just about old enough to be reading Jane Eyre for the first time — she is in fact 21 — has discovered somewhere a trunk full of old actress tricks, and she blazes through the movie with a yearning self-possession that Olivia de Havilland might be proud of. Of course she trails none of the musky glamour of the old stars; she’s actually credible as a plain girl who has been kept down by circumstances. But her self-respect is never priggish or off-putting, and you don’t doubt for an instant that Rochester would fall in love with her. It is frightening to watch a slip of a girl exercise such formidable powers of magnetism. 

The screenplay, by Moira Buffini, is intelligently laid out. It begins with Jane’s flight across the moors and her refuge with the Rivers. This has the effect of turning down the melodrama a few notches. A poor girl huddles in the elements, her plight awful enough but yet unknown. When bits of this episode are reprised in their rightful narrative order, we understand what Jane is running from, but we’ve already seen what she’s going to find at the end of her ordeal. Jane’s childhood miseries — retailed with a welcome briskness and acted with a surprising power by Amelia Clarkson — are thus enfolded in the adult Jane’s drama. (And how adult Jane is! There is a wonderful moment in a garden when Jane steals a kiss from Rochester with the sudden darting of her neck, while at the same time her eyes acknowledge her right to it. Never has a romantic heroine been so free of gauzy uncertainty, or better known her own mind.) 

Ms Wasikowska shines the more brightly for the concern shown by the filmmakers to recall that hers in the leading part. Charlotte Brontë wrote no Edward Rochester. We are not invited to share in Jane’s mooning attraction to her employer, who in Michael Fassbender’s spirited but light-handed performance is not a monument of brooding ferocity. Mr Fassbender’s hero is brittle and caustic but not suffocating; as a younger and more attractive man, moreover, than a close reading of the novel would seem to allow, he presents Jane with less to feel sorry for and more to be drawn to. Judi Dench does her part as well, flustering about sweetly as if she had spent her entire career in supporting roles. Her reward is to recite the ostler’s narration at the end, recounting the catastrophe that frees Rochester from his grim marriage. 

I always thought that “Reader, I married him” was the last line of the book. It’s the first line of the concluding chapter, is what it is. It’s a thrilling line, pushing up as it does against the very limit of the pretense that a real Jane Eyre has been setting forth her life’s story; never has a happy ending been more succinctly encapsulated. It’s a pity that Ms Buffini couldn’t see her way to incorporating it in her screenplay. In every serious regard, however, this Jane Eyre is one of the finest adaptations of a literary classic that I’ve ever seen, and I hope that I’m not the only one that it sends back to the original.

It’s hard to imagine what Limitless would be like without its star, Bradley Cooper. I know nothing about the actor himself, but in all of the films that I’ve seen him in he projects an inborn air of the smart guy who never met a corner he wouldn’t try to cut. At the start of Limitless, Eddie Morra has pretty much run out of corners. He can’t get started on the sci-fi novel for which has received a modest advance, and he can’t seem to do anything else, either, except sponge off his lovely girlfriend, Lindy (Abbie Cornish) and sip whiskeys through the afternoons. He and his Lower East Side apartment vie for unkemptness. 

No sooner has Abbie pulled the plug on her support for Eddie than he runs into his former brother-in-law (long story), who used to be a drug dealer. Vernon (Johnny Whitworth) has left the old hard drugs behind, and is now peddling something that is not only just as addictive but farm more likely to render its user a prosperous member of society. Trading on the old eyewash about how we use only twenty percent of our brainpower, Limitless invites you to imagine what it would be like to remember everything that your senses have ever scanned (forget study!), not only effortlessly but correctly. It unfurls a vast turkey carpet crowded with the good things that such powers might effortlessly attain: primarily — and in this I find the screenwriting acute — the interest and attention of other smart people. It also reminds us of what life is like when such powers drain away, as they do every day if you don’t take your nifty little pill. It’s hard to say which vision Mr Cooper plays better. His smiling Eddie is unabashed by wealth; he behaves as if to the manner born. His deperate Eddie, craving the transparent tablets without which he is less endowed than Cinderella in her ash-heap, will do anything for the drug, right up and including the drinking of another man’s blood — a scene that, for all its grisly horror, Mr Cooper infuses with a faint virtual smirk. 

Eddie has two opposite numbers in these proceedings. The first is a tycoon, Carl van Loon, played by Robert de Niro with suave earthiness. Carl never misses the chance to remind Eddie that he has not worked his way up the ladder of success, but flown to the top on the wings of miraculous gifts. There is another, darker movie implicit in this performance: although purportedly unflappable — tycoons don’t do flap, after all — Carl smolders with resentment even as he picks Eddie’s brain. In the end, when he thinks he has Eddie in his pocket, it’s very agreeable to find out that he’s wrong. More overtly antagonistic is Gennady (Andrew Howard), a Russian thug whose penalties for non-repayment of loans are predictably barbaric. Once he gets hold of the wonder drug, Eddie is in a lot of trouble. 

The best thing about Limitless is that it ends on a note of redemption; we are spared the Hollywood ending. Eddie Morra is clean but still smart, and very successful, too — the sky’s the limit on his career. But this fabulous resolution is over before it begins. We don’t have time to decide that the now virtuous hero, having become a straight-arrow, honest worker, can really be Bradley Cooper. The film ends with a wink that acknowledges the problem — and then the screen goes black, and “it’s only a movie.”

Of the ten movies nominated for Best Picture Oscars, I’d seen nine — all but Toy Story 3  (which I’m sure that I’ll enjoy on DVD at some point) — in the course of last year’s moviegoing. I’d like all of them — not equally, certainly; but without having any standout favorites. The Social Network turned out to be one of those movies that packs its greatest wallop the first time you see it. The King’s Speech bemused me — or, rather, its popularity did. It’s a perfectly nice movie, with a stringingly honed performance by Helena Bonham Carter; otherwise, it’s pretty much all uplift, and a mousy-looking uplift at that. (I have never seen so much brown; even the green trees in the park scene seemed brown.) The Fighter surprised me, given the almost complete lack of sympathy that I have for its milieux (and my disapproval of attempts at glorifying same): not only was I wholly engaged by the drama of the piece, but the boxing was actually interesting to watch!

I could go on. I’m happy enough that Colin Firth won Best Actor, because he deserved it for A Single Man. But my passions ran low at this year’s Oscar awards because two movies that I liked very much were out of the running. True, Jeremy Renner was nominated for his supporting role in The Town, and you can’t expect Hollywood to reverse course on Ben Affleck on the strength of one movie. But the other movie I more than liked. To my mind, it was easily the best picture of the year: Roman Polanski’s The Ghost Writer.

If there was a more thrilling movie in 2011, I didn’t see it and I never heard of it, either. The Ghost Writer shows Polanski at his most disciplined; if anything, the first viewing is likely to be underwhelming, at least until the final ten minutes or so. It’s when you know what’s going to happen that movies like this open up and swallow you. The first time, you don’t know what’s going on any more than does the poor hero, played with an almost businesslike understatement by the typically flamboyant Ewan McGregor. The second time. you know a little more: you know how the movie ends. It’s only with the third viewing that you begin to see how it’s done — especially by the witchily engrossing ladies in the cast, Olivia Williams and Kim Cattrall. When The Ghost Writer came out on DVD, I slipped it into my kitchen apparatus and watched it, stopping and starting, about twenty times. I stopped only when prudence warned that one more viewing might make me stick and unable to watch it again.

One guess as to why The Ghost Writer received no nominations.

***

Just Go With It will not be nominated for an Oscar, although it may be mentioned in some late-in-life accolade of Nicole Kidman’s career. Did you know that Nicole Kidman is in Just Go With It? I didn’t. At first, when the comely redhead waved across the beach to Jennifer Aniston, I thought that Christina Hendricks had landed a nice little part in an Adam Sandler vehicle. But as the figure approached, she grew taller and slimmer — and taller. What were the odds, I wondered, of finding a Nicole-Kidman look-a-like who’s as tall as Nicole Kidman? I couldn’t let the question go, because what was Nicole Kidman doing in this movie? Having fun, you could say. Playing a brittle and competitive sorority sister, Kidman makes Aniston look as soft and cuddly as Audrey Hepburn.

Which is all the more interesting because it’s the other Hepburn that Aniston calls to mind. Despite a relenteless blizzard of sophomoric crudities, Just Go With It is a genuine screwball comedy with a romantic drift that’s not unlike that of Bringing Up Baby. The guy’s in a jam; the gal tries to help him out but only makes things worse. One is not altogether startled when it turns out that the gal wants the guy for herself. All right; I exaggerate. There is nothing ditzy about Jennifer Aniston’s Katherine. She may be a little bit exhausted, what with raising two high-concept children on her own while serving as nurse/office assistant to Danny, a  Beverly Hills plastic surgeon (Adam Sandler). But she makes up for the missing looniness with her trademark ability to make herself over, going from Plain Jane to Impossible Dream, with movie-star ease.

In a way that’s the-same-as-but-opposite-to Irene Dunne’s role in The Awful Truth, Katherine transforms herself from a pleasant woman to a terrifying bacchante, but in Just Go With It the metamorphosis comes much earlier. For reasons too ridiculous to go into here, Danny needs Katherine to impersonate the wife whom he is in the process of divorcing — a person who does not in reality exist. Once Katherine has socked Danny for the price of plausible threads from Rodeo Drive boutiques, she shows up for drinks with Danny and the girl whom he wants to marry (and who wants to be sure that he’s getting unmarried) bathed in the aura of killer glamour that she brought to her bad-girl role in Derailed. And that’s just what she looks like. The minute she sits down, she aims a fusillade of belittlements at Danny that would be unpleasant if it didn’t underline the already established fact that Katherine and Danny (who loses no time giving tit for tat) like being together. 

It quickly becomes obvious that Katherine is a lot more interesting to Danny than his girlfriend Palmer (Brooklyn Decker) is. Just Go With It probably wouldn’t have anywhere to go, in fact, if it were blandly formulaic instead of racketingly miscellaneous. From among the abundant choices, I will point to Nick Swarsdon’s encounter with the sheep — does administering the Heimlich Maneuver to animals constitute bestiality? — as a scene that does not really belong in this movie,  or that wouldn’t belong if there weren’t so many others like it. And we must hope that young Bailee Madison will live down her flourishing cockney accent. In any case, these distractions are there to be enjoyed on a kind of dare. Don’t stay away for fear of them.

 

 

What’s the good of having a refrigerator without someone to play with the magnets?  

Here in New York, the weather is unseasonably warm, and no joke. Thinking it a bad idea to overdo the spring-feverish liberation from heavy clothes, I wore what I’ve been wearing lately, minus the sweater and the scarf. A mistake; I got quite hot, running an errand up to Carnegie Hill. I was tempted to take a taxi home, but I couldn’t decide what to do for lunch. The Shake Shack, as you can imagine, was crowded, with a line threading along the window from the door — and then down the stairs, of course; it would have taken forever to do lunch. And I’d left my copy of the London Review of Books at the movies, dammit.

That’s not like me, but I was so bowled over by Unknown that it was all I could do to collect my jacket and my shoulder bag. I’m not going to appraise the plausibility of the screenplay; the best thing to be said about it was that it is never implausible. That’s because what happens to Dr Martin Harris seems so implausible to him, and Liam Neeson knows how to make Martin’s befuddlement so agonizing to us, that we’re not inclined to evaluate the likelihood of anything. The acting is superb all round — even January Jones is riveting — and Berlin provides a sleek and cosmopolitan setting. (The famous Adlon Hotel lends its services, presumably suffering no damage that CGI can’t undo.) The action is breathless but never incoherent.

Unknown depends upon the audience’s misreading of the opening scene, in which Martin and his wife, Liz (Ms Jones) fly into Berlin, where Martin is to make a presentation at a science conference. If you’ve seen the trailer for the film, then you know that Elizabeth is going not only to deny knowing Martin at the conference but also to claim that another man (Aidan Quinn) is her husband Martin. It’s quite the nightmare, but only if you make the assumptions about Martin and Elizabeth that the film wants you to make.  In this way it is different from the Bourne movies, where Jason Bourne, like a patient in analysis, seeks to retrieve memories of a past that trauma has erased. Martin Harris’s trajectory goes in the opposite direction. He wakes from a coma, four days after an accident, alarmed to discover that only he knows who he is.

Diane Kruger, who played the vampish counterspy in Inglourious Basterds, is fierce rather than glamorous this time; she playsGina, an illegal immigrant from Bosnia whose palette of hardscrabble jobs run from driving a taxi to waiting in cheap restaurants. Although Martin promises to make it up to her for bringing so much trouble into her life (and, in the end, delivers on his promise), Gina comes across as Martin’s scrappy protector, almost a patron saint. She’s physically fearless (at least behind the wheel of a car), and she has enough common sense to make up for Martin’s lack of it. Among the supporting actors, Bruno Ganz stands out as a ruminative former Stasi detective who meets his own end with courage; he seems to have seen everything and thought about it all at least twice. Other German actors who make Unknown a first-rate entertainment include Sebastian Koch, as a brilliant genetic biologist, Rainer Bock, as the Adlon’s manager; and Karl Markovics and Eva Löbau as the doctor and nurse who care for Martin during his coma and afterward. All I can about Frank Langella’s contribution is that you know that he’s playing a very bad man just by the way that he sounds like a really nice one.

I always sit in the back of movie theatres because I don’t want to risk blocking someone else’s view, but today I had another reason to be glad that there were only one or two people sitting in rows further from the screen: it hit me at the end that I must have put on quite a show myself, what with all my flinching and ducking and wincing and eye-hiding. If possible, Unknown is even more viscerally challenging than Mr Neeson’s last adventure, Taken. You can see why I forgot my LRB.

The picture of Will that I wish I’d been able to take would have shown him darting about the apartment with his left hand in his father’s and his right hand clutching a yardstick with the authority of a rudimentary Wotan (or Siegfried, maybe). At one point, he stood still enough for his mother to determine that he is 31 inches tall. He is thirteen and a half months old.  And quite pleased with himself: when he replaced a refrigerator magnet after having just pried it loose, he applauded himself in his soundless way — he doesn’t bring his hand all the way together. In my own soundless way, I applaud his parents.

 

The Mechanic is a bouncy film about a hit man. You wouldn’t think to call him a killer, really, because killing implies passion and hit men are, apparently, all business. Arthur Bishop (Jason Statham) is one of the best: he can make a death seem accidental, or he can “send a message.” He develops his fastidious plans in a modernist aerie lost in the Louisiana bayous, and likes to listen to Schubert on a very high-end LP player. (For fun, he soups up an old Corvette.) Determined to have none but satisfied customers, Bishop is perhaps overly inclined to believe what his paymasters tell him. Even though anyone in the audience over the age of ten can see that Tony Goldwyn is the bad guy, we have to admire Bishop’s ability to put assignment ahead of sentiment.

At the burial of Bishop’s mentor, McKenna (Donald Sutherland), our hero runs into  McKenna’s ne’er-do-well son (Ben Foster), who has so many issues that he can’t hold a job — but he can shoot. Bishop adopts him as a partner while Junior (his actual name is Steve) thinks about how to run down the man who killed his father — who is of course &c. Hair-raising adventures climax in the only possible way, and then go onto climax, once and for all, from there.

The Mechanic is not a mannered movie, but it is all about style — the masculine style of speaking softly while carrying deadly weapons. For that reason, it’s good to get Donald Sutherland out of the way early, just as it was in the remake of The Italian Job; Mr Sutherland has always been a scarily expressive actor and is not about to retire as such. And, again as in that film, he is once again closer to one of his colleagues in crime than he is to his own flesh and blood. Steve McKenna’s sulking is tolerable because it’s laced with astringent and even cocky self-hatred. Also, unlike his father, he is not wheelchair-bound. Mr Statham inhabits a role that was obviously conceived with him in mind — brooding, stoic, afflicted with painfully good mental health, and impressively articulate at those times when he has something to say. If Jason Statham is a favorite actor of mine, it’s precisely because he is able to make this bundle of masculine attributes interesting, and I admire his director, Simon West, for creating a film in which swaggering would be in bad taste. Mr West is also to be applauded for deploying the story’s weaponry and other matériel without showing off.

I had the feeling of watching a James Bond movie in 3-D, for full-dimensional characters. Even Bishop’s targets, odious as they may be, come to us as fully realized human beings. They don’t “deserve to die,” and there is nothing cartoonish about their deaths. (Their bodyguards are of course another matter.) Only an odd person would call The Mechanic a “feel-good” film, but its pieces come together with a very satisfying click — even if it’s a click that goes “boom.”