Heartwarming family movie with a little bit of an edge. Nothing near the savvy, knowing vitriol of the book (which was itself rife with contradictory footnotes from the protagonist's erstwhile-estranged son) but told the same basic story, got most of the characters largely right (giving Barney's father and wife larger roles, worthy of Dustin Hoffman and Rosamund Pike, respectively, who delivered back-to-back home runs) and filled the Montreal section with the requisite urban texture.
The cameos and extras deserve comment, particularly from me. Montreal Yiddim from my Shaar Hashomayim choir days, like Burney Lieberman and Jason Lipstein, pop up vividly in the background. Canada's best directors from Egoyan to Cronenberg to Arcand, not playing themselves, are casually bullied by Paul Giamatti's abrasive almost-Richler character Barney Panofsky, to their visible delight. The Alzheimer's theme, which permeates the novel, is quietly introduced into the movie as it goes along, which costs the movie some of the novel's humour and also some of its darkness.
But more profoundly, the movie sands off some of Barney's more loserish, nebbishy qualities. He doesn't have the scene with Duddy Kravitz which shows him to be no Duddy Kravitz (and what I wouldn't give for a Richard Dreyfuss cameo to have been crammed in); he doesn't have the ongoing resentment for McIver, or the go-forward, Garp-like "rest of the story" bits for the other characters from his entourage; and Blair is no longer a draft dodger he'd taken in. Barney is not the novel's arch-schlemazel. Instead, he's more carefully blended with Richler's persona, and as the movie tends toward its climax, it wears its heart on its sleeve.
I mean, it's also a murder mystery, ish. And it pulls that part off just fine. But in the end, unlike the novel, it's not about the unreliability of memory and its two narrators. It's a movie about being a bit of a mess but still doing right by the people you love, even when you fail. My mother made it clear that it's more for "Jewish Guys" than for women, but I think the movie did a better job of protagonizing Miriam than the book, even with Minnie Driver's appropriately insane turn as The Second Mrs. Panofsky.
Polarizing? Clever? Schmaltzy? Perfect for the annual Jewish Family Christmas Movie ritual.
1 comment:
Couldn't agree more. The main thing I found the movie lacked was the sense of Barney fighting vainly against obsolescence - not only his own, but that of his time, his attitudes, his values. Like that scene in the book where he deliberately sneaks an order of brisket and whisky (or whatever) for the wheelchair-bound Hymie Mintzbaum, and Miriam chastises him for the self-centered act that it is. But you're right: DH makes Barney's Dad a rockstar, and Rosamund Pike is also sort of MY future wife, too. Though clearly I'm not bald and fat enough.
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