filmbay Reviews

Zero Effect (1998)

More clued out than clue-driven

[6/10 · 22 July 2008]

THE first film from Jake Kasdan, the son of famed director Lawrence Kasdan (Pacific Heights, The Big Chill), is a detective comedy that works off a premise so obvious it's surprising it hasn't been exploited more often.

Zero Effect steals the Sherlock Holmes mystery formula and places it into a contemporary context. The problem with Kasdan's film is that it doesn't get much beyond this modestly clever idea. Mixing excessive plot intricacies and broad, quirky comedy, the film ends up as a mildly puzzling sophomoric diversion.

The self-styled "world's greatest detective" is Daryl Zero, played by Bill Pullman (Independence Day). He's a twitchy character, hair askew, eyes glazed and living in Howard Hughes-like isolation. As is often the case, Pullman seems to be in an acting class of his own, experiencing complicated inner surges and thoughts that don't have much to do with his character.

This is hardly the "cold, precise, but admirably balanced mind" of Arthur Conan Doyle's detective, though the parallels are deliberate. Instead of cocaine, Zero imbibes amphetamines; instead of playing the violin, he plays loud, squawky confessional songs on his acoustic guitar. But armed with the latest in information-gathering technology and arcane knowledge -- bylaws governing motel bed placement for the past 30 years -- Zero solves cases with magical precision. The Watson of the story, Steve Arlo, is played robotically by Ben Stiller (Flirting with Disaster). He's a resentful sidekick who gets drunk and complains incessantly about his employer while trying desperately to have an ordinary romantic life after office hours. He works as a front man for Zero, maintaining strict client confidentiality, and collecting big fees.

At the beginning of the film, Arlo is in a meeting with lumber tycoon Gregory Stark (Ryan O'Neal), a client of Zero's who is searching for missing keys to a safety deposit box, but who is also being blackmailed for a secret he will not reveal. In short order, Zero has figured out who is doing the blackmailing: a paramedic (a tough gamine played by Kim Dickens, who makes a strong impression here as she does in Great Expectations) who works at Stark's health club. In his quest to expose her motives, Zero gradually finds himself falling in love for the first time in his life, a fallibility that never afflicted Sherlock Holmes.

The movie then changes directions to concentrate on the love story, while Arlo continues his quest to break free of his boss so he can enjoy a fling of his own. The plot is complicated, relying on Zero's weird knowledge and observational skills. But the momentum is gone long before the movie ends and one is left only with a faint sense of curiosity. Like listening to Frank Sinatra sing Stevie Wonder, it's interesting, but why bother? Benjamin Miller, Filmbay Editor.

Zero Patience (1993)

Let's all be Empiricists, and victors of the brain!

[7/10 · 22 July 2008]

Film Critic DELIVERED with stinging irony, that lyric is meant as a blanket indictment of empiricism, and of our abiding need to "classify and label," to "banish every doubt." Why? Because a label is a tool that can double as a weapon - what identifies and separates can also isolate and stigmatize. How, then, to describe Zero Patience without falling into the empiricist's, and the critic's, taxonomical traps? A "movie musical about AIDS" is a popular answer - one that's odd enough to be enticing, vague enough to be innocuous. But it doesn't begin to sound the depths of a work that is intriguing, provoking, amusing, offending, demanding, inordinately intelligent, and defiantly resistant of the very thing I'm paid to do.

So let's approach the picture from another angle, from the perspective of writer/director John Greyson. Now Greyson, unlike some artists who happen to be gay, would probably agree that there is indeed a definable "gay culture," an esthetic that goes heavy on irony and camp and outrageous humour and unapologetic theatricality. Clearly, all these ingredients are abundantly evident here. Just as clearly, Greyson (whose background lies in - get ready for a label - experimental video) has positioned his film at a 180-degree remove from a piece like Philadelphia. That movie, a drama about AIDS with a gay protagonist, was the product of mainstream Hollywood culture (unironic, non-outrageous, linear in plot and design), and took enormous pains not to offend a mainstream audience. This one is the product of a gay culture and doesn't give a damn who it offends. This one is smarter and more subtle, but lacks the emotional punch of the other (linear directness has its rewards), and the attendant complexities are hard to grasp at a single sitting.

Perhaps this will help a little: Greyson has reincarnated the Victorian explorer Richard Burton (John Robinson), using him to symbolize the dangers inherent in the empirical approach still taken by the scientific community toward all issues, including the AIDS plague. Burton, who toils in a Natural History Museum, is intent on mounting an exhibit called The Hall of Contagion, with AIDS as the sexy centrepiece. Just as his explorer colleagues once tracked the source of the Nile, he hopes to trace the "cause" of this disease. Causation, of course, is a first principle among empiricists. Rationally, if you find the cause, you may find the solution. Ethically, alas, it's a different matter; there, if you find the cause, you can point the finger - you can affix blame, you can isolate and stigmatize.

Enter another reincarnated soul, a gay ghost known as Patient Zero (Normand Fauteux) - the flight attendant who, in books like Randy Shilts' And The Band Played On, is "blamed" for first bringing AIDS to North America. Much of the film unfolds as an ongoing dialectic between the attitudes embodied in Burton and Zero, between serving a false cause and serving as a false villain. However, the dialectic takes the form of a literal song and dance - zippy production numbers where Glenn Schellenberg's toe-tapping melodies are laid over Greyson's thought- provoking lyrics. Consequently, the decorative fun on the surface (watch, if you dare, for an eye-popping ditty entitled The Butthole Duet) simultaneously competes with and complements the seriousness beneath - it's like tossing a colourful AIDS quilt over a dying AIDS patient. Greyson has refined and desentimentalized that most difficult of genres, the musical tragedy, and with every succeeding tune, he exponentially advances his thesis - other potentially false causes, like the "African Green Monkey" theory, like the HIV virus itself, come under his fire, as does everything from greedy drug companies to grousing AIDS activists. The film spares no one because, well, the disease spares no one.

Philadelphia is American in origin, Zero Patience is Canadian. Each is splendid in its own way, and each reflects the best of the culture (and the industry) that gave rise to it. The former is conventional, straightforward, and all about certainty, including the certainty of death. The latter is quirky, complicated, and all about uncertainty, especially the uncertainty of life. Greyson, and the film he's made, are brave enough to question incessantly, and smart enough to know that "HIV- positive" is a lot more than a medical label - it's a cruel oxymoron. He has zero patience for the blustering apostles of science and even art, and (the ironies abound) has more in common with another eminent Victorian than he might care to admit. Mister Greyson, meet Mister Tennyson: "There lives more faith in honest doubt,/ Believe me, than in half the creeds." Benjamin Miller, Filmbay Editor.

Zelary (2003)

Very satisfying and well directed 8 out of 10

[8/10 · 22 July 2008]

As long as there are wars and womenfolk to revere, the feisty spirit of Scarlett O'Hara will never die. The story of a privileged beauty who is transformed by war and sacrifice into a paragon of resilience keeps popping up in film: Catherine Deneuve in Indochine (1992), Sandrine Bonnaire in East-West (1999), Nicole Kidman in last year's Cold Mountain.

Zelary is the Czech version, an old-fashioned character-driven domestic epic which was adapted from an novel by Kveta Legatova. Set in the Second World War against the background of the German occupation, the film was selected as the Czech Republic's Oscar nomination last year. A return to directing for Ondrej Trojan (Let's All Sing Around) after more than a decade as a producer, Zelary is a trite but sturdy offering, a showcase for popular young Czech actress Anna Geislerova, as well as the beautiful Moravian countryside, shot in glowing earthy tones.

Geislerova plays Eliska, a medical student who has been denied a chance to finish her degree because of the German occupation. She works as a nurse, but is also involved in the resistance movement with her lover, a surgeon named Richard (Ivan Trojan). One night a sawmill worker, Joseph (Hungarian actor Gyorgy Cserhalmi), from a rural community is brought into the hospital badly injured. Eliska provides the blood he needs for a transfusion. Shortly after, the Gestapo uncovers the resistance group that Eliska belongs to and she is forced to escape. Joseph, or Jova for short, agrees to take her back to his rural village of Zelary.

Initially the conditions, a dirt floor and no running water, shock her but she has no choice but to stay. She takes on an assumed identity, as Hana, and goes through a marriage ceremony to avoid suspicion from the local villagers.

Hana becomes acclimatized to her new housewifely life surprisingly quickly as she discovers, as women so often do in romance novels, that a hulking, taciturn man can meet nearly all her needs. Jova proves himself both a font of compassion and pillar of strength, providing Hana with a wooden floor and defending her from a rapist before they eventually become lovers.

While Hana bonds with her woodcutter, the script provides some welcome additional village texture. There's that Czech cinema staple, the precocious child (Anna Vertelarova) and her pragmatic widowed mother, as well as a bureaucratic school principal and his friend, a compassionate priest. There's also an ancient midwife (Jaroslava Adamova) who teaches Hana folk medicine. The most trenchant subplot concerns the local drunk who beats his wife and son: Their imprisonment serves as a contrast to the caring imprisonment that Hana faces.

The German army, lurking in the nearby hills, pops up periodically to add a jolt of suspense. Unfortunately, Zelary doesn't end with the war.

Soon the ruthless Germans are replaced by the loutish, drunken, raping soldiers of the Soviet army and Zelary is in for a whole new round of problems. By this point -- well past the two-hour mark -- the endlessly episodic nature of Eliska/Hana's trials begins to provoke fatigue more than sympathy. "Too long a sacrifice can make a stone of the heart," wrote the poet William Butler Yeats. And too much history can make any long-suffering heroine overstay her welcome. Benjamin Miller, Filmbay Editor.

Zebrahead (1992)

Mixed response, some strong points though overall 5/10

[5/10 · 22 July 2008]

Film Critic AS a primer on race relations, what makes Zebrahead unique, and uniquely fascinating, is its point-of-view. The film begins with an assumption largely ignored in the works of Spike Lee or John Singleton - a belief that young white Americans are being heavily influenced by urban black culture, by the music and the language and the dress, by the mania of Arsenio Hall and the magic of Michael Jordan. So the script takes an admittedly extreme example of that influence - a white teen-ager reared in the predominantly black environs of Detroit - and examines the implications. Can cultural conditioning yield tolerance and empathy as readily as it generates prejudice and hate? The question itself is hopeful, and the movie delivers a complex answer with subtlety and style. Making his feature debut, writer-director Anthony Drazan has done his homework well - he too is the product of a "culturally mixed" background, and a man with an obvious zest for research. Shooting over 60 hours of video footage in New York City high schools, Drazan used that raw material as the basis for his fictional screenplay, changing the setting to the urban fringes of the Motor City and finding his alter ego in the youthful character of Zack (Michael Rapaport), a Jewish kid who, by sheer dint of exposure, is "more on the home-boy side than the white-boy side." The result is a vibrant picture that, from the rough dialogue to the hip-hop soundtrack, from the electronic "hall-monitors" to the washroom crackheads, resonates with the ring of truth. Certainly, for Zack, his "home-boy" side is not an assumed pose but a nurtured fact - he naturally loves the music that flows around him; his best friend is black because so are many of his classmates; ditto for Nikki (N'Bushe Wright), the new girl in town, the one with the sassy manner and the sweet smile. When Zack and Nikki go out on a Saturday night, it feels natural, inevitable. Of course, that single date becomes the pebble tossed in the pond, and the rest of the film traces the tragic ripples.

The revealed patterns are intriguing. The fortysomethings, the teen- agers' parents and teachers, are wholly incapable of viewing the relationship through anything but a racial lens. Some are more laissez faire than others - Zack's philandering dad (Ray Sharkey) seems to have transcended bigotry by abandoning any emotion - but all are fearful, pessimistic. The same is largely true of the kids' peers, yet there are a few telling exceptions - young adults who, as a way of life, not as a matter of principle, have genuinely broken through the colour barrier. It may be sentimental to argue, as the film does, that hope rests with the young. But it's not sentimental to show exactly how and why. Despite some small flaws (a few too many plot complications and a recurring visual image that seems tacked on), that's Drazan's real triumph here - within the turmoil and the tragedy he explores, there emerges a glint of hope that doesn't smack of wishful thinking.

And hope breeds hope. One wants to believe that, by extension, the glint can become a beacon, and that a racially mixed high-school can double as an educational microcosm - a troubled hotspot that grows the seeds of a solution from within the very problems it creates. Yes, one dearly wants to believe, and Zebrahead gives us a reason. Benjamin Miller, Filmbay Editor.

Avalon (1990)

A very fine drama, good plot and story (Solid 7 of 10)

[7/10 · 21 July 2008]

On paper, writer-director Barry Levinson's semi-autobiographical Avalon, which begins with the arrival of Polish Jew Sam Krichinsky (Armin Mueller- Stahl) in the Avalon area of Baltimore, Md., on July 4, 1914, and ends when he is in his dotage on another July 4 sometime in the sixties, is an intellectually crystalline epic about the demise of the extended family, the erosion of traditional American and European values, the growth of alienated suburban culture (organized around television) and the hegemony of materialism.

That's on paper. On screen, Avalon is unconscionably sloppy (the leaves of deciduous trees in Baltimore at Christmas are green on one block, yellow on another and non-existent on a third), structurally amorphous (the movie could end at any time or go on forever, which it seems to do), and gummily sentimental (grandparents and children are psychologically saintly). The lovely moments and fine performances in the picture can't redeem Levinson's technical carelessness - the editing is without rhythm, momentum, or even logic - nor can they compensate for Avalon's ethnographic toothlessness: imagine Mordecai Richler without the bite.

Levinson would have made Duddy Kravitz a mensch.

Avalon is more irritating than most ambitious failures because Levinson, winner of the best directing Oscar in 1988 for Rain Man, is wildly talented, and his two earlier semi-autobiographical films set in Baltimore, Diner and Tin Men, were twin peaks of Proustian purity. Structured lightly but soundly, in the esthetic version of aluminum, they vaulted over the twin valleys of bathos, sentimentality and nostalgia.

Avalon is a bridge made of lead.

But students of performance will want to see it for a quartet of reasons. The first is Armin Mueller-Stahl, the East German actor who came West in the late seventies and has not been within spitting distance of mediocrity since, whether as the tortured politician in Rainer Werner Fassbinder's Lola, the complex farmer in Angry Harvest or Jessica Lange's mysterious father in Music Box. As written, Avalon's Sam Krichinsky is fundamentally a grandchild's adoring projection of a grandfather, but Mueller-Stahl's Prussian blue eyes bespeak more depth than the character is permitted to articulate; when the script does become bluntly pedantic, Mueller-Stahl subtly softens the blows. Sadly, even this great actor is done in at the end when he is plastered with outrageously inept old-age makeup. He looks like nothing less than a blue-eyed, Teutonic E.T. about to sing a geriatric variation of Cabaret's Nazi hymn, Tomorrow Belongs to Me: Yesterday Vas Mine.

The second extraordinary actor is Joan Plowright, the British widow of Laurence Olivier; she plays Eva Krichinsky, Sam's Polish-American wife, with a flawless accent, as if she had not done Shakespeare, Chekhov, John Osborne or Peter Greenaway, all of whom she has, of course, enlivened. But technique aside, she follows Mueller-Stahl in toughening up the soft edges and in softening the rough edges of a character verging on caricature; while certainly Jewish, her meddling mother-cum-grandmother is no stage- bound Jewish mother.

The most fully dramatized conflict in Avalon involves the grandparents and their relationship to their son Jules and his wife Ann (and eventually to the young couple's children), all of whom live together. Aidan Quinn, as the cautious and contemplative Jules, and Elizabeth Perkins, as the fun-loving but responsible Ann, complete the foursome of exceptional performances: he infuses an introvert with exterior life and she captures the spirit of femininity in the fifties with eerie exactitude, as if Life had come to life (it's an asset that she looks like the Judy Garland of that period).

Four fabulous musicians, less than fabulous music for them to play: the resonant sequences (an on-going Thanksgiving argument, for example) are regularly intercut with comic schtick, the most egregious instance being the purchase of a television set - would people interested enough in TV to buy one not know that during the day there were no programs? The purchasers sit in front of the box, watch the test pattern, get disgusted, and leave it to the kids. It's a funny bit, but it's fraudulent, and it corrodes Avalon, which is trying to do something new, with the stuff of deja-vu. There are two lines delivered by Eva that express the irritation Avalon engenders: "How many times do we have to hear this story? We all heard it before." Benjamin MIller, Filmbay Editor

At First Sight (1999)

In this case, seeing is not believing, 6 out of 10

[6/10 · 21 July 2008]

Between the tear-jerking excesses of two of the Christmas season's biggest movies, Patch Adams and Stepmom,you'd think that even the staunchest fans of those caring-and-sharing medical weepers would have reached their limit. But here comes At First Sight,which is not quite so life-and- death, but it's just as determined, in its modest way, to milk those tear ducts dry. In this case, though, the scientific context of the movie -- about a blind man who regains his sight with unexpected repercussions -- makes for a subject considerably more interesting than the romantic drama to which it is attached.

At First Sight is based on the writings of neurologist Oliver Sacks (the movie Awakenings was adapted from his work as well). It tells the true story of a 50-year- old blind man named Virgil who works as a YMCA masseur. On the eve of his wedding, he has cataracts removed, which allows him to see for the first time in 40 years. The experience, however, turns out to be more painful than joyful. As Sacks notes, the questions raised are profound, and have interested philosophers from John Locke to George Berkeley. Is sight a learned activity? What is the relationship between a world understood through touch and one understood through sight? The basic facts have been moulded into a trite romance that could easily fit between a pair of Harlequin covers. Unfortunately, the film glosses over the science and deliberately avoids some of the odder aspects of the original case. Virgil, on gaining his sight, also managed to pack on about 50 pounds; stress made him eat. Somehow, though, you don't expect a star of Val Kilmer's magnitude to take the Raging Bull route to character authenticity through poundage.

Instead, what we have is a story of a woman who discovers the perfect man, almost loses him, and then regains him. Mira Sorvino plays Amy Benic, a hot-shot New York architect, who heads off for a spa weekend in a charming New England village. Before she knows it, a hunky masseur has her calf muscles in his hands and has her melting like warm butter under his probing fingers. Entranced, she returns for further rubdowns until one day she approaches Mr. Magic Fingers as he's getting on a bus and discovers -- omigod! -- he's blind.

After a brief Internet search, Amy discovers that Virgil doesn't necessarily have to be blind, and she lands a top surgeon (Bruce Davison) to cure the problem. It turns out that Virgil is a bit reluctant, and his sister Jennie (Kelly McGillis) is downright hostile to the idea of improving her brother's lot. Love wins, though, and Virgil agrees to undergo the treatment. Soon, Virgil and Amy are sharing her New York apartment. But Virgil, who has accommodated himself quite well as a blind man, is now a very inadequate sighted man, who can't read or write or interpret even the most basic social signals. He's miserable trying to learn how to see again, and the relationship goes into a tailspin.

Much of the dialogue, during these dreary lovers' quarrels, focuses on blindness in love and living with one's blind spots and limitations (she has a too-symbolic chunk of unfinished sculpture she started in college). Nathan Lane pops up in the role of a wise and funny counsellor, the sort of part that usually goes to Robin Williams. "Isn't seeing wonderful," he says to Virgil, when he takes him to a strip club. "Seeing sucks," says a disconsolate Virgil. Roll over, George Berkeley, and tell John Locke the news.

Director Irwin Winkler (Night and the City)is rarely better than pedestrian in handling this story. At worst, the dramatic elements are plain clumsy.

The most interesting moments in At First Sight have nothing to do with the love story, but rise instead from Virgil's struggles with the social rules of seeing. What do facial expressions mean? How do we learn to look away from the homeless? There are a few moments that try to capture Virgil's viewpoint -- lights, glare, moving shapes -- that are as useful as anything the movie has to say about the conventions of seeing. Given the rich visual opportunities of such a topic, it seems a great waste the movie wasn't directed by someone with a more astute eye. Benjamin Miller, Filmbay Editor.

Atanarjuat: The Fast Runner (2001)

The sublime North: Atanarjuat: The Fast Runner

[9/10 · 21 July 2008]

Forget its awards and honours, the Camera d'or from Cannes and that raft of Genies and a bagful of other festival citations. For now, there are only three things you need to know about Atanarjuat: The Fast Runner: (1) It is a superb film; (2) It is both intriguingly exotic and uniquely Canadian; (3) Although based on an ancient myth, and set on a distant shore a thousand years ago, it speaks eloquent volumes about the way we live now. The abiding myths are like that, of course, but few movies have managed to harness their timeless power -- this movie does.

The setting is the far north, that white expanse embedded in today's consciousness as a totem of all that's virginal and solitary and silent, a romantic escape from the hubbub of modernity.

Well, think again. Even at the dawn of the first millennium, the Inuit lived there, and they lived through a matrix of social and political tensions that will seem hauntingly familiar -- tensions that the subsequent centuries of apparent advances and creature comforts have done nothing to change or resolve.

This enduring dialectic is the subject of the re-enacted myth. Actually, the filmmakers prefer the term "relived," and with good reason. That's because, shooting on location with native actors talking in the Inuktitut language, director Zacharias Kunuk has contrived simultaneously to give the picture the realistic look of a documentary and the dream-like feel of a fable. So we're plunged directly into the daily minutiae of this other world -- its frozen geography and its igloo dwellings, its food and utensils and weapons and clothing, its little jokes and its chronic rigours. However, as the narrative gathers momentum, as the myth unfolds, its themes seep out of the recreated past and into our smug present.

Certainly, the story's initial note will ring a bell. The first sequence depicts the fall of this icy Eden. If the opening appears a bit confusing, even disorienting, so be it -- what can be more perplexing than original sin? Or as the script (by the late Paul Apak Angilirq) puts it: "Evil came to us like death -- we never knew how it happened." Yes, evil -- a word that isn't exactly underemployed these days; and a concept that the myths of religion were invented to explain, and to control.

The picture is mythic in content but never in presentation. These people aren't just icons in an old saga; they're living, breathing folks who belch and break wind, who giggle and flirt, who strut and posture and, between bites from a caribou steak, sing bawdy songs that embrace timely truths. (Sample lyric: "Even a big man can't bring home enough food/ If what's hanging between his legs gets too stiff.") This brand of realism is no accident. Instead, it's the long-practised method of Kunuk and his cinematographer Norman Cohn, who share an extensive background in video art, the slow-paced kind that emphasizes watching over telling. Alternating from sweeping panoramas to stark close-ups, from hunters mushing a sled over crevassed ice to a woman's gnarled hand holding a bone needle, their camera is keenly observant to both sights and sounds. It hears rhythms in the winter at its harshest (the incessant crack of footfalls on rock-hard snow); it sees beauty when the seasons change and the harshness briefly relents (a lone kayaker paddling over still waters glinting in the midnight sun).

That's not to say these guys can't shift into a kinetic gear when action is called. In fact, they have the skill to animate cinematic clichés. There's a chase sequence here that's as good as any I've seen in a decade. And there's a ritualistic punch-up, black and bruised, that puts any studio western to shame. Also, as with every paradise-lost myth, the violence is paired with an ample helping of sex -- sometimes brutish, often loving and, on more than one occasion, wonderfully erotic.

Naturally, a film with such a broad range demands a lot from its actors. They respond impeccably, professionals and amateurs alike. Natar Ungalaaq in the heroic title role, Pakkak Innukshuk as the resident villain, are both playing nicely rounded characters -- the one has his flaws, the other has his merits, and the performances reflect these duelling sides of the moral equation. With her flashing smile, Lucy Tulugarjuk is a delightfully designing woman, the kind of born drama queen who can somehow make even the most selfish act seem ingenuous. Finally, poignantly, Sylvia Ivalu weeps real tears as the beleaguered wife, streaming rivulets that bisect the tattooed lines on her swollen cheeks.

Too often, our Western response to aboriginal culture carries a strong whiff of the sentimental, of the patronizing and the politically correct. But Atanarjuat steadfastly resists that. Rather, it demands both to be heard in its own voice and to be appreciated on its own terms -- not as a quaint native artifact, but as a damn fine and a truly distinctive and a deeply pertinent film.

That pertinence is no more apparent than during the resolution, where the myth offers up its answer to the troubling riddle of evil. Only when the Fast Runnner slows down can he reach, and understand, his epiphany. Significantly, it comes before the practical matters -- and this is a practical society -- of meting out punishment and tempering justice with mercy. More important still, it comes from a man wielding power at the business end of a knife, and it wells up as a cry from the depths of his anguished heart. Bold, brave, direct, decisive, the cry doubles as an assertion, cutting through the clamour of the centuries and their cycles of violence, cutting through all the unholy dins in all the holy lands. Shouted in an ancient tongue, his four words speak to every age, none more forcibly than our own: "THE KILLING STOPS HERE." Benjamin Miller, Filmbay Editor.

Assault on Precinct 13 (2005)

Remodelling a classic noir: Superbly executed

[8/10 · 21 July 2008]

Ostensibly a remake of John Carpenter's cult favourite, the new and improved Assault on Precinct 13 acknowledges its debt to Rio Bravo early on with a couple of lazy Dean Martin Christmas jingles.

Martin was a deputy drunk in Howard Hawks's 1959 western classic, which is where Carpenter borrowed the plot for his 1976 cop drama. Hatchet-faced tough guy John Wayne played a bossy sheriff in the original; in that film, Dino and Duke keep a passel of bad guys from breaking into jail and grabbing their prisoner.

Same story here, except this time out we're in a condemned Detroit precinct on New Year's Eve, and the prisoner is a drug lord played by the lethally cool Laurence Fishburne.

The film's real departure, and gamble, is that Ethan Hawke, dweeb aesthete from Before Sunrise and Before Sunset, is now playing the Duke's and Dino's cop characters. Hawke's Sergeant Jake Roenick is both drug addict and precinct boss. That's a lot of character acting for a perpetual juvenile 25 pounds shy of either Cagney or Lacey.

Screenwriters Carpenter (he'll be redoing films at 100) and James DeMonaco wisely get us used to Ethan as a tear-away action adventurer in a ferocious pre-credit drug sting. Sgt. Jake throws himself around with nervous athleticism. Nevertheless, two fellow officers go down. And Jake catches one in the pin. Then, suddenly -- quick cut -- we resume action eight months later. Our limping hero is now a wisecracking junkie (Scotch and Seconal), trying to forget about A Time When He Cared.

Making matters worse, the force shrink (Maria Bello) shows up New Year's Eve, wanting to know why Jake is still hiding behind a desk in a soon-to-be abandoned precinct. Everybody else is long gone, except for a party-girl secretary (Drea De Matteo) and an aging cop, "Old School" O'Shea (Brian Dennehy).

Elsewhere, a mobster with a dangerous secret (Fishburne) is on his way to jail. Someone's trailing the van. Just as the expedition nears Jake's station, snow turns to ice and the cop car skids out of control. Driving is impossible. Detroit has been shut down. The van and its captives will have to hole up at Precinct 13 for the night.

One of this enlightened B-movie's many pleasures is French director Jean-François Richet's handling of atmosphere and setting. Shot almost entirely at night in a blinding snowstorm, the crime drama is an intriguing remodelling of a classic film noir. It's a black and white movie by function of climate and time of day, with vivid stabs of colour -- a spreading stain of blood in the snow, Bello's flashing gold hair and Jake's frightened blue-green eyes.

Richet also knows how to shoot action scenes. And his screenwriters scatter just enough bits of business and tough-guy patter around. Fishburne does a newspaper crossword puzzle for the first half of the film. And at one point a prisoner mocks a junkie inmate who, like Jake, is going through withdrawal by snarling that he's "sweating more than Mike Tyson at a spelling bee." Another plus -- the supporting cast has been shrewdly chosen. Ja Rule and John Leguizamo score as petty criminals locked up with Fishburne. Gabriel Byrne, who decorated the crime classics Miller's Crossing and The Usual Suspects, is walking the beat. And it's good to see Drea de Matteo working her eyebrows and hips again after getting bada-binged on The Sopranos.

The film is not without fault. Hawke only holds his own as an action hero. And Maria Bello overplays a badly conceived character. Most of all, the film needs another player as potent as Fishburne.

Still, Assault on Precinct 13 is a smartly assembled noir package. Canadians in particular might find it perversely satisfying to watch somebody else curse and fight their way through a deadly winter storm. Benjamin Miller, Filmbay Editor.

Atlantic City (1980)

A natty numbers runner certain that everything is outbound (8/10)

[8/10 · 21 July 2008]

As Lou, an almost prissily natty numbers runner certain that everything - even the ocean - has deteriorated, Burt Lancaster gives the performance of his life in Louis Malle's Canadian-financed film Atlantic City (opening today at the Imperial).

It might be fairer to call the picture a John Guare film, for Malle, best known in Ontario as the director of the unseen Pretty Baby, has entered entirely into his gifted playwright's episodic, jazzy view of the universe - Guare's script for Atlantic City is a commodious comic masterpiece, but it's also a serious fable about the dangers of dreaming.

Everyone in the picture, placed affectionately in an evocative Atlantic City devolving from tasteful faded glory to tasteless refurbished glitter, dreams of getting ahead. (Is Atlantic City a metaphor for the filmmakers' America? Probably.) For the renegade sixties couple Dave (the talented Canadian actor Robert Joy) and Chrissie (Hollis McLaren, the schizo of Outrageous]), the boardwalk is a substitute for the San Francisco of 1966, buried as completely as Atlantis. The pregnant Chrissie wants to take LSD "so we can learn from the baby's wisdom" and Dave, a coke dealer, wants to dump his stash and his past.

Sally (Susan Sarandon), who is both Chrissie's sister and Dave's estranged wife, shovels shrimp behind the counter of a casino oyster bar but meanwhile sees to her dream by attending dealers' school - "I gotta develop my blackjack; I'm gonna deal my way to Europe" - and, total woman that she is, works on improving her body with lemon juice and her soul with a cassette of Bellini's Norma. When she becomes romantically involved with Lou, she has one request: "Teach me stuff." Near Sally's tattered domicile (Sally would use that word, rather than the mundane "apartment") Lou waits gallantly on Grace (Kate Reid), a former beauty queen and mobster's moll reduced by time and Lou's lack of discipline to a state of kitschy caterwaul.

Grace, lying in a bed strewn with ribbons and poodles and other fussy things, bitches at and about Lou; if she were an inanimate object, she'd be a battered pink plastic lawn flamingo, but Lou, a romantic to the tips of his carefully ironed silk ties, cherishes the memory of what she was, while mildy grousing at the monstrous Baby Jane she is.

Lou's most notable characteristic is his tolerance: a man old enough to have "run numbers for the dinosaurs," a man who can say wistfully, "The Atlantic Ocean was something then" - this is not a man apt to be angry long at infirmity, senility or even cruelty.

Lou's dapper, chivalrous, compassionate existence informs the sensibility of Atlantic City with something very much like love; the movie's unpredictably explosive, joke-like tone can be inferred from the fact that Lou's splendid reviviscence is made possible by murder. Atlantic City is a cautionary comedy about a place where dreams can come true. Too true. Benjamin Miller, Filmbay Editor.

Awakenings (1990)

A stunning film, must-see for all 9 out of 10

[9/10 · 21 July 2008]

Director Penny Marshall's Awakenings is being promoted as a "hurrah for the handicapped" movie, but it's much more than that. Derived from an account published in 1973 by neurologist Oliver Sacks, this too-strange- not-to-be-true story is magical because it doesn't really try to be - as Dr. Malcolm Sayer (Robin Williams), the miracle-working character based on Dr. Sacks, says, "We have to adjust to the realities of miracles." The realities, as dramatized in Steven Zallian's script, are these: In 1969, Dr. Sayers accepts employment at a chronic-care hospital in the Bronx and is mysteriously drawn to a group of catatonic patients referred to as "living statues." Convinced that the patients are cognitively and emotionally alive, despite their external fossilization (some have been immobile for more than 30 years), he investigates their histories. At first, he is stymied by the guesswork diagnoses on record - "atypical schizophrenia"; "atypical hysteria" - and mutters to his nurse (Julie Kavner), "You'd think at a certain point, all these 'atypical' somethings would amount to a 'typical' something." They do: Dr. Sayer discovers that the statues have in common an episode of viral encephalitis.

The miracle is this: Aware that the experimental compound L-DOPA has proved effective as a treatment for Parkinsonism, a disease Dr. Sayer believes resembles the condition in which his statues find themselves, he proposes using the drug on one of them, Leonard Lowe (Robert De Niro), a middle-aged man who began "disappearing" into brief episodes of paraylsis at the age of 11 and was permanently hospitalized nine years later, in 1939. When the drug "awakens" Leonard, Dr. Sayer asks for permission to prescribe it to the rest of his post-encephalitic patients.

At this juncture, Awakenings itself awakens - it sloughs off the "hurrah for the handicapped" genre and becomes a movie about the handicap of the human condition in general. Unfortunately, it's impossible to discuss what transpires next without giving the story away, but it can be reported that the subsequent events, for all their atypical specificity, become a blanket metaphor for typical human life (much of which is spent sleepwalking) - it's evident that Dr. Sayer was "mysteriously" attracted to the statues because he is one of them.

Marshall, director of Big and, in another life, Laverne on Laverne and Shirley, elicits performances from Williams and DeNiro that are exceptional. The former, who can't help being funny, is profoundly serious as the emotionally stunted physician unable to heal himself, and the latter, who can't help being serious, is profoundly funny as the emotionally open patient able to heal his physician. The two strong men are complemented by two stronger women, Kavner as the doctor's sympathetic nurse, and the aged Ruth Nelson (her career began in 1926) as the patient's patient mother. Awakenings is a small, simple movie about a large, complex issue, the waste of human opportunity. It could have been made by Thornton Wilder's Emily, who dies at the end of Our Town and from the cemetery exhorts the living to come fully alive. Benjamin MIller, Filmbay Editor

Australia (1989)

A Solid Screenplay by Jean Gruault and Jacques Audiard

[7/10 · 21 July 2008]

Australia, the film not the country, is a multi-national production. Really multi - England, Belgium, France, Switzerland, and yes, Australia, the country not the film, all have a financial hand in the matter. A good thing, too: blame is a lot easier to bear when split five ways. That's not to say the picture isn't watchable. In fact, it has devised a singular method of sustaining our interest: we simply cannot believe something that seems so murky is so murky. So we listen, we watch, certain that clarification is just a scene away. Of course, that scene never comes and our confusion never goes. This film doesn't end; it expires.

Before then, the script (by Jacques Audiard and Jean Gruault, who wrote for Truffaut in earlier and clearly better days) tries to get some new world"old world action going. We open in the outback of South Australia, 1955, where Edouard Pierson (Jeremy Irons) buys and sells wool hot off the shears. He lives a quiet and profitable life, a good dad to his motherless daughter, Sattie (Danielle Lyttleton).

Meanwhile, back in the Belgium he left before the war, Edouard's own mother and brother run a wool treatment plant, a failing family enterprise in dire need of revamping. Eddie gets summoned to help; Eddie hesitates; Eddie goes. Instantly, the language of choice switches from English to French (after all, this is a multi-national production), and Belgium's landscaped claustrophobia contrasts sharply with Australia's wide open spaces.

But wait. Seems that Eddie's famille is unaware of the very existence of Eddie's daughter. Why so darned secretive? Hmm, surely that will all get cleared up shortly. In the interim, Eddie falls hard for Jeanne (Fanny Ardant), who is very conservative and very married and very adoring of her only begotten son. Nevertheless, Eddie takes a flier. Eddie invites Jeanne for what amounts to a dirty weekend in London. Jeanne slaps Eddie; Jeanne hesitates; Jeanne goes. Why? Gee, maybe we'll find out in the next scene.

Except that the next scene finds Eddie's brother taking a flier too - literally, swooping and soaring in a glider plane. Indeed, planes of all sorts keep popping up here. That's called a symbol - you know, getting away from it all, fleeing the traps of tradition, slipping the surly bonds sort of stuff. Heck, Eddie was even a pilot during the war. "The war changed a lot for me," says Eddie. How? Another question, another wait.

Waiting too, the splendid cast all look slightly anesthetized, almost stunned, like patients straight off the dental chair. Worse, director Jean-Jacques Andrien (he's from Belgium) clings to a pace that is, well, slow. How slow? Finally, an answer: if this behemoth were going head-to- head with the ice age, I'd put heavy money on the glaciers. No matter. The expiration date finally arrives, at which point Australia, the film not the country, is down under, way down under. Benjamin Miller, Filmbay Editor.

Austin Powers in Goldmember (2002)

Truly Gilding the silly: Austin Powers in Goldmember

[6/10 · 21 July 2008]

Say anything three times and it's funny, according to the secret rules of sure-fire comedy (the same rules that say the word "chicken" is unfailingly a rib-tickler). Austin Powers in Goldmember, Mike Myers's third incarnation of his gormless but irrepressible swinging sixties British spy, really is pretty funny.

After three movies and six years of the shagadelic, flouncy-shirted, buck-toothed homunculus and his ever-expanding cartoon world, it's become easier to surrender than resist. Place it against Men in Black or Mr. Deeds or any of a host of other barren summer comedies and the difference is obvious: Myers's sheer fertility of invention is of a different order, and even if he misses as often as he hits, he's definitely a swinger.

Even if the gag-to-wince ratio isn't high, there are enough punchlines thrown here to make a sphinx smirk. Father, forgive me, I must confess: I sprayed my popcorn.

Powers, the self-adoring spy whom Myers says he invented one day while riding back from hockey practice and listening to Dusty Springfield sing The Look of Love on the radio, is not so much a spy spoof (the sixties were already crawling with spy spoofs) as nostalgic sixties anglophilia: Think of it as James Bond crossed with the Carry-On Gang, or maybe Jerry Lewis imagining he's Cary Grant. The character(s) -- Myers plays four parts here, three of them villains -- finds that tightrope between enviable childish narcissism and obnoxiousness where much comedy struts.

The successor to the massive success of the $200-million second instalment of the series, The Spy Who Shagged Me, starts off with a large bang, and not, this time, of the sexual nature. Instead, it's a series of scenes from a film within the film, featuring a cast of stars way too famous to be named and an action stunt that should make the James Bond franchise pack up its product placements and go home.

Dr. Evil, Myers's best character, with his pinky-chewing and air quote signs and poor ability at higher numbers, takes centre stage early. Having found a way of taking his unscrupulous behaviour into legitimate business by taking over a Hollywood agency business (he charges just 9 per cent instead of the usual 10), he's stationed himself in a lair above the Hollywood sign and is concocting one of his usual plans to blackmail the world's leaders for a largish amount of money.

The entire evil cast (with the exception of the bald cat, Mr. Bigglesworth, who seems to have dropped out between trailer and movie) is back -- Dr. Evil's annoying son, Scott (Seth Green); Dr. Evil's silent clone, Mini-Me (Verne Troyer), who proves he has a mind of his own, and the rest of the Evil cast, including Number Two (Robert Wagner) and Frau Farbissina (Mindy Sterling). Myers hides himself under a couple of tonnes of makeup as an obese Scotsman, Fat Bastard, who is in love with his own body effluents.

Myers also plays a new Dutch villain called Johann Van Der Smut, a middle-aged seventies playboy nicknamed Goldmember (regrettable smelting accident), who enjoys roller-skating, disco dancing and eating strips of his overtanned skin.

The best piece of casting falls on the side of good, with Michael Caine as Nigel, Austin's swinging, and insufficiently paternal, spy dad. Caine (who himself played a bespectacled spy in The Ipcress File) looks the part, and turns on some real actor intensity, especially in his raging declaration that he hates intolerance and Dutch people.

Austin, for some reason, has to travel back to swinging Manhattan to "Studio 69," to rescue his dad, who has been captured by the evil Van Der Smut. There, he teams up with Pam Grier-inspired Foxxy Cleopatra, played by pop diva Beyoncé Knowles of Destiny's Child, who has great abs and a way of looking at Austin as if she just scraped him off the bottom of her platform shoes.

There's no doubt that Goldmember has its long flaccid stretches, and a good deal of repetition of familiar gags: shadow play, inadvertently obscene subtitles and an assortment of euphemisms for genitalia. At times, Myers's toilet-bowl humour overfloweth.

The strategy here is the basic Mel Brooks string o' gags school of comedy. While it's not high wit, it never stops trying and, occasionally, as in the prison-rap number inspired by Hard Knock Life from Annie, the results are inspired.

A flashback to Austin and Dr. Evil's early days at the Intelligence Academy, for example, shows a savvy such scenes rarely manage; the young actors are close enough physically to the adult characters, but what makes it work is Myers's dubbing in their adult voices.

Fourth-time Austin Powers is a spectre that can only arouse apprehension. No one can look forward to a bigger role for Van Der Smut (or bigger rolls for Fat Bastard). Who cares if Mini-Me decides to talk? But taking a page from the International Man of Mystery, let's not worry about the future when the present (and past) are groovy. When it comes to Austin Powers, three's a charm. Benjamin Miller, Filmbay Editor.

Ayn Rand: A Sense of Life (1996)

Ayn Rand movie suffers a bit from a lack of objectivity

[6/10 · 21 July 2008]

The memorable, and ultimately appalling, thing about Ayn Rand: A Sense of Life,the new film biography of the right-wing novelist-philosopher, is that it is perfectly true to its subject. Just as Rand, who was born in 1905 in Leningrad as it was convulsed by revolution, declared that she had not changed her ideas about anything since the age of 2½, this reverential documentary presents her thoughts as uncontested truth.

The evangelical tone is set by filmmaker Michael Paxton, quoted in the press material as saying that he first found Ayn Rand when he was an adolescent trying "to find a book that would answer all of my questions and give my life meaning." A Sense of Life contents itself with interviewing her friends and acolytes. It acknowledges that she was much criticized, and even considered a crank, but her critics don't appear on screen and their views are not explained.

But neither Rand nor the film should be dismissed, if only because she is widely read and her ideas have been deeply influential. They lie behind much neo-conservative commentary, which recasts democracy -- essentially an untidy contest of ideas and interests -- as a secular religion (she called it Objectivism) where competing points of view are greeted with adolescent impatience.

But more particularly, Rand's influence helps explain the concealed romanticism of much right-wing commentary, which replaces iconic figures from other belief systems with buccaneering businessmen and entrepreneurs. As this film unwittingly makes clear, Rand herself was one of the great romantics. A worshipper of Hollywood, and partly successful screenwriter, she laments that the film version of her novel The Fountainhead "lacked the Romanticism of the German films she had loved as a youth." That these films were the precursors of fascism seems to have escaped the notice of Rand and her disciples.

This appealing simplicity, a charming oblivion to her own contradictions, gave Rand a widespread following among those looking for answers, even as it exasperated intellectuals. She believed that each individual has a sacred core of personal talents and dreams which can be expressed in a free society. People may choose to co-operate, but these choices must ultimately serve their self-interest. If an action is truly selfless, she often said, it is "evil." Her reasoning was that selflessness in one's own life can be enlisted by political systems such as communism that call on human beings to sacrifice themselves for the state.

These views were apparently burned into Rand's consciousness by the horrors she witnessed during and after the Russian Revolution -- a period the film recalls through family photographs and archival film footage. She decided that capitalism was the only hope for mankind. "Capitalism leaves every man free to choose the work he likes," she declares on screen, oblivious to the deadening monotony of most people's jobs, not to mention unemployment.

Like her spiritual successors she prefers the grand and distant vista, and does not approach closely to see the outcasts and victims who are part of every great undertaking. She loved "the view of the skyscrapers where you don't see the details," declares the film, unselfconsciously.

This made her a formidable popular writer. She was seriously able to declare that Marilyn Monroe seemed to have come from an ideal, joyful world, that the star was "someone untouched by suffering." The hero of her last novel, Atlas Shrugged,was the direct descendant of Cyrus, the hero of a boy's adventure story she read at the age of 16. Like most libertarians, she had a deeply childish world view.

Never beautiful, Rand's intensity (and searching black eyes) seduced more than a few men. According to Harry Binswager, one of her academic admirers, "her idea of feminity was an admiration of masculine qualities." This was also Hitler's idea of feminity, and Rand's screenplays invariably include an idealized hero or heroine standing on a distant promontory, Leni Riefenstahl-style, but these fascinating parallels are of course not examined in A Sense of Life.

Rand had a powerful, if not searching, intellect. In many on screen interviews seen in the film, she gives apparently convincing answers to her critics. But the answers are always framed in absolutes -- "man wants freedom, suffering has no importance" -- which are essentially empty postulates. But they have an attractive ring.

A Sense of Life is worth seeing because its naive presentation of Rand is consonant with Rand herself. In fact, it feels like nothing so much as an in-house biography of the founder of some fundamentalist religious sect. It acknowledges its subject's imperfections (her infidelity to her husband of 50 years, for example), but only to declare them redeemed by her quest for truth.

Rand was, of course, a lifelong atheist. But her work is a testament to the yearning for belief. The film concludes on a lingering shot of a poster for Atlas Shrugged,"Don't call it hero worship: it's a kind of white heat where philosophy becomes religion." Or, perhaps, the ashes that are left when you turn up the temperature on a new belief system to the point where human community and compassion are burnt away. Conrad Alton, Filmbay Editor.

Oh, Carmela! (1990)

A good cast, script could be better though 7/10

[7/10 · 21 July 2008]

Spain, 1938: The Republicans (the good guys) are at Civil War with the Nationalist Fascists (the bad guys), led by General Francisco Franco (the baddest). Entertaining the good-guy troops is a rag-tag theatrical troupe consisting of Carmela (Carmen Maura), her lover Paulino (Andres Pajares) and their gofer, the mute Gustavete (Gabino Diego). Carmela & Co. aren't all that intellectual or idealistic, but their narcissistic hearts are basically in a politically correct place and they seem to enjoy giving the Republican guys a few laughs and the odd tear; no one appears to notice, or to mind, that they aren't really all that good.

Directed by Carlos Saura, best known for the caliente flamenco films Carmen and Blood Wedding, Ay, Carmela! has rather too much in common with Carmela's company. It's technically rag-tag and droopy, neither analytical enough to be challenging nor sensual enough to be exciting. Conceived as a cross between Bye Bye Brazil and Mother Courage, it ends up a politicized Goodbye, Dolly!. That's a movie that the dazzlingly talented, irreverent pixie Pedro Almodovar (Women on the Verge of a Ner vous Breakdown) might have been able to bring off, but not the relatively flat-footed Saura.

The star of Ay, Carmela!, Carmen Maura, became famous through her work with Almodovar, of course, and she's fitfully amusing here, doing her Carmen Miranda"Susan Hayward routine, but Rafael Azcona's see-through script merely serves to expose her flaws as a dramatic actress (she's great at extremes, not so hot at normal behaviour).

The rest of the cast falls victim to that same flimsy script, which wafts toward a teary climax as easy to forecast as rain in Vancouver. For indigenous audiences - the picture has been a big hit in Spain - the movie is no doubt important and moving, presenting as it does the reality of a war hidden for many years by Franco's repression. But for the rest of us, it's merely an attempt to translate a history we already know into a kind of entertainment we've seen too many times. Ay, Carmela, and adios. Conrad Alton, Filmbay Editor.

Author! Author! (1982)

That this comedy is not funny is bad enough

[6/10 · 6 July 2008]

There are two good things to be said of Arthur Hiller's Author! Author! (at the Plaza): Tuesday Weld and Dyan Cannon. The former plays Al Pacino's wife, the latter his mistress. Both are actresses of distinction. Both look terrific. Both should be reminded that this too shall pass.

As Broadway playwright Ivan Travalian, an Armenian Neil Simon, Al Pacino is another matter. Pacino is an actor of distinction, but he does not look terrific - he looks, in fact, unaccountably dissipated, like mid- period Leonard Cohen - and he has retained the leaden lifelessness he brought to Cruising. Because Israel Horovitz's abominable script was apparently conceived with Richard Dreyfuss in mind (Ivan Travalian is a twinkly, manic shouter), Pacino's lugubriousness sabotages whatever infinitesimal chance the movie might have had for success (it's not what you'd call a great loss).

The much-married Ivan is rearing, $ la Dustin Hoffman's Ted Kramer, five children abandoned by Ivan's various wives. He is a loving father and is so devotedly altrustic he is lacking an artist's ego - the reason this mother hen wants the newest play to become a hit is so there will be enough money to feed the chicks.

The brood is composed of the most appalling set of exhibitionistic child actors this side of Eight Is Enough; the delicately modulated characterizations achieved from the young performers in E.T. and Poltergeist by Steven Spielberg appear to be the products of another species.

That this comedy is not funny is bad enough; that it is resolutely and maliciously anti-female is unforgivable. Miss Weld's witless wife is so self-absorbed the audience actually applauds when Pacino tells her to stay out of the ocean and "give the sharks a break," while Miss Cannon's Broadway actress is so selfish she can't stand more than a week with the playwright's kiddies. (I know why: as a performer of sensitivity, she is tortured by the bad acting in the house.) Kramer vs. Kramer's mild sentimentality about single fathers has become a full-blown disease in Author! Author!: Israel Horovitz hasn't written a character; he's put Mother Teresa into a townhouse. Benjamin Miller, Filmbay Editor.

At Play in the Fields of the Lord (1991)

Savagery accelerates, 8/10 stars overall

[8/10 · 6 July 2008]

Savagery accelerates. It took European immigrants several centuries to "pacify" - convert, slaughter and segregate - the native populations of North America, but Brazilians have accomplished the same feat in less than 50 years. It is estimated that by the end of the century not a single native in the state of Amazonia will be living under traditional conditions. The issue is almost academic: Thanks to European-introduced diseases, forced relocations and outright genocide, relatively few natives will be around to live under any conditions.

That's the subject of At Play in the Fields of the Lord, adapted from Peter Matthiessen's prescient 1965 novel, and it's an extraordinary one, but Brazilian director Hector Babenco's three-hour, $36-million morality play trivializes it with caricatured performances and crowd-pleasing comedy. Babenco, best known for Pixote and The Kiss of the Spider Woman, has said that Matthiessen's novel was "critical and intense" when dealing with two white missionary couples, the Hubens and the Quarriers, but that the Indians, a fictitious composite tribe called the Niaruna, were "cartoonish." Hence, Babenco has evened the score: in his film, the natives are presented with intensity and the missionaries are cartoons.

Although put into production before Dances With Wolves and Black Robe were released, At Play combines their story lines. The Dances With Wolves scenario is played out by the half-Cheyenne mercenary Lewis Moon (Tom Berenger); hired to bomb the Niaruna, he instead parachutes into their compound and becomes one of their near-naked, idyllically happy number.

Meanwhile, the missionary couples enact a Protestant version of Black Robe. Leslie Huben (John Lithgow) is a ridiculously rigid martinet who dismisses the Catholic Church as "the opposition" and even tries to wrest a statue of the Virgin Mary from the arms of a native convert. His wife Andy (Darryl Hannah) has no personality - she appears to be present to give voyeurs in the audience something nice to look at. But toward the end of the epic, she goes skinny-dipping and then - still starkers as the day she was born - sticks her tongue into the mouth of the now thoroughly native Lewis Moon, who has conveniently popped up to ogle her long-limbed nudity. (In the concupiescent camp sweepstakes, the scene rivals The Blue Lagoon.) The embrace has dire consequences. It gives Moon a minor case of the flu, which he in turn passes along to the Niaruna, who have no immunity to the disease. Talk about kiss of the Spider Woman.

The other couple, Martin (Aidan Quinn) and Hazel Quarrier (Kathy Bates) , have other problems. She is a puritanical hysteric - "Everything here is dirty," she screeches of a town on the border of the wilderness, as if a would-be missionary would expect anything else - who is anxious that her child, Billy (Niilo Kivirinta), retain his Midwestern mores. Her husband, however, is a somewhat sensitive true believer (like the priest in Black Robe) who is anxious to help the natives without harming them. This is the single complex character in the film, so it's no surprise that Quinn gives the single multidimensional performance.

Babenco's attitudes toward Hazel Quarrier, as a character, and toward Kathy Bates, as an actress, are inexcusable - Bates' weight and Hazel's hysteria are callously used for comic relief, even after Hazel undergoes a nervous breakdown brought on by grief. Compared to what Babenco does with her, director Rob Reiner treated Bates as a sacred object in Misery.

At Play in the Fields of the Lord is not without rewards. The aerial Amazon vistas, shrouded in mist, are startlingly beautiful; the daily life of the Niaruna is depicted with a glossy, picturesque clarity that brings to mind National Geographic; and the sequences in which the boy Billy goes native are sweetly humorous. But the tribe remains an enigma - we understand far more about the 17th-century native cultures in Black Robe than we do about these contemporary people. With the exception of the inappropriately Christological conclusion (I am being deliberately vague), we are never encouraged to understand the missionaries, only to laugh at, detest and feel superior to them. Surely it's not that simple. Endeavouring to bring salvation, they brought only suffering; there should be a tragic human drama there. Endeavouring to bring insight, At Play in the Fields of the Lord brings only obfuscation; there should have been a great movie there. Benjamin Miller, Filmbay Editor.