Gary Dretzka
Noah Forrest
Leonard Klady
David Poland
Douglas Pratt
Ray Pride

December 30, 2003

Here's a brisk overview of the season's movies I compiled for the paper I write for in Chicago. But there's much more in this column, including a consideration of Cold Mountain, some half-finished sentences from Tim Burton about Big Fish, a few sketchy notes about The Return of the King, shorter reviews of Peter Pan, In My Skin, Girl With a Pearl Earring, Paycheck, The Company, House of Sand and Fog, Butterfly, The Triplets of Belleville, Mona Lisa Smile, and another installment of Remainders.

I contributed to two of IndieWIRE's annual list-o-ramas, including their Top Ten list. I'm the next to the last on the roster. The other is a look at the year's best imports, which should be published soon.

Also check out the Village Voice's fifth annual survey of dozens of alternative critics, with terse, generally cranky remarks from the participants. (The commentary leads with a comment I wrote about Lost in Translation.) And next week... an epic list of the year's best movies, running even longer than Richard Roeper's backwards-running 25 Best.

Intimate lightning

Woodrow Wilson supposedly said that D. W. Griffith's Birth of a Nation was "history written in lightning": Cold Mountain is whispered in distant thunder. It's the hurt back home, what's left behind, what's deep inside. It throbs and stings. The characters are human-scaled, and are small against the grandeur of mountains, passes, valleys that would be green and thriving if not for distant warfare.

Cold Mountain is epic yet intimate, strange and shell-shocked: there's simmering perfume in Anthony Minghella's (The English Patient) adaptation of Charles Frazier's bestseller. Sometimes Minghella's work seems too intelligent, too thought-through, tilled under instead of mulled over. I have no such reservations here. It looks great and sounds great--cinematographer John Seale, picture and sound editor Walter Murch, and soundtrack supervisor T. Bone Burnett and composer Gabriel Yared are integral to the movie's memorable ache. Then there's the acting: some performances are steeped in sorrow--Jude Law--and others are crackerjacks: Renee Zellweger's hillbilly sprite, Natalie Portman's lonely widow. And Nicole Kidman, object of longing, a woman who comes into focus as time passes, as hope is in danger of being smothered. It's lovely and tragic.

In the North Carolina hamlet of Cold Mountain, men await "our war." Inman (Law) and Ada Monroe (Kidman) dance closer to each other's bashfulness. They get to tear one kiss from the pages of their as-yet-unwritten history and he is gone. The early battle scene is of far greater awfulness than the one in Saving Private Ryan. It is not derivative, but its teeming slaughter is as terrible and horrifying as any seething nightmare canvas of Breughel's or of post-World War II Soviet cinema (I'm thinking particularly of Elem Klimov's Come and See, a masterpiece of dislocation).

Cold Mountain is episodic. Minghella has said the novel intrigued him, as it's a palimpsest, a document that reveals many stories that came before. The movie's conscious of the literature-steeped spoken language of the South, embellishing the story's borrowing from "The Odyssey," among other texts. It is about goodness and madness and badness and red blood spilled upon black soil. Some have faulted Cold Mountain for not being about slavery, about being the sources of the war everyone's wanting. (I encourage them to go out tomorrow and tell that story themselves, which is not this story, which this story does not pretend to be.)

Kidman strikes poses. She is a wisp unprepared to man a farm, a pallid reed. An angry rooster bedevils her. She ought to eat him. She takes it for the Devil himself. Enter Renee Zellweger's Ruby, who will make over the fallow farm: there is a perfect moment where Ruby is revealed as more than a hillbilly routine. She dispatches the rooster. It is sudden and it transforms her friend, and the film, into something else, stronger.

The Alabama accents in Big Fish, like many movies set in the South, are cornpone. I can't vouch for the authenticity of a century and a half ago, but there are cadences to swoon for in Cold Mountain, similar to ones I heard when I was young, from older women who heard voices firsthand from that era. When a doctor apologizes to a woman entering a hospital full of the fragmented and dying, he quickly drawls, "It's the heat, I'm sorry, they rot." I don't know if it comes from the novel, but it has the poetic blade-edge of the condensed prose of Minghella's friend, Michael Ondaatje, who wrote The English Patient. There is an almost superhuman lyricism in both the concentration and poise of the dialogue. Donald Sutherland, as Kidman's father, knows how to spin a line like, "I lost your mother after twenty-two months, it was enough to fill a life." There is common colloquialism without getting cute: "I wouldn't give an Indian cent. It might turn me hateful", "I was vain about my hair, they cut it off, I deserved it." The fluency of the double negative: "She let them slaves go free, poor soul, now who's got nobody and nothing and waiting on a ghost." And "Look at me! I'm not nothing!" And there's Ruby's "I was like his goat or some critter tethered to a post!"; a seductive siren's "I'm gonna hug him until he makes me grunt"; and the lovely "You can ask why about pretty much everything about me." (As a Southerner born and bred, I am both touched and tickled.)

Lingering images abound, such as the historical echo of a town building festooned with tintypes dangling from strings and ribbons, noting the lost, like the walls of the missing in Manhattan in 2001. Or a heart-stopping tickle like Kidman's fingertips playing over a sack of grain she traded her piano for, as if it were her instrument.

There are emotional complexities. Ray Winstone plays the worst of the Home Guard, the weak men who didn't make it to the front, who enforce and bully back home. There is a terrible and great moment where he listens to the music of several men who he seems ready to slaughter, they're musicians, playing and singing around a campfire in the midst of a dark, dark wood. He turns his head, he does, because he knows the song, he sings along, his eyes brim with tears. But he does not put the gun down. (Truffaut called this "the privileged moment": show joy or transport for at least an instant to make more complex the blackest of hearts.)

When Inman and Ada meet again, Kidman is an exaggerated figure of beauty, yet you forgive it, as the camera loves her so. (Look at that pale face and strawberry hair, frizzy against falling snow, above a black wool greatcoat, under a wide-brimmed black picture hat, you see why Lars von Trier had to torture her so in Dogville.) In the closest thing to direct homage, their lovemaking apes the fractured chronology of the classic sex scene in Don't Look Now.

Melancholy, exquisite, I wouldn't fault a frame of it. It is a vision of heart, passion and compassion in the most blighted of times. If there is romance, there is hope. If there is desire, there is fulfillment. If there are dreams, we have reason to wake each morning. I'm grateful for Minghella's gleaming confidence.

Love in Bloom

"I get really emotional watching a movie on a plane," Tim Burton confesses, in his distinctive stop-start style, hands in motion, one leg jittering under the table beside me. " I can be watching anything and start crying. I don't know why that is. On a plane? I just start bawling. I just watched The Hulk on the plane, you'd think it was Love Story or something!"

Big Fish may be even more epic a story of unreconciled father-son relationships than Ang Lee's dogged comic book, with Burton applying his slightly sinister visual whimsy to a best-selling Homeric southern picaresque by Daniel Wallace, substantially reworked by screenwriter John August (Go). Two generations in Bloom: expat journalist Will Bloom (Billy Crudup) returns home to Alabama to figure out if there's any tale at all in all the tall his dying dad Edward (Albert Finney) has blustered all his life. Edward's a terrible narcissist and no listener at all, and with wife in tow, Will (and the audience) hear the highlights of Edward's long life as a fantasist and blowhard. As a young man, he's Ewan McGregor, as forceful and lively as Finney, and he wins over the heart of Alison Lohman (who grows up to be Jessica Lange). Along the way, there are circuses and wars and the titular big fish, and at the most graceful moments, you forgive even Danny Elfman's uncommonly corny score. When McGregor is romancing Lohman, Burton and cinematographer Phillippe Rousselot transform her face a topography of dimples and freckles in golden light against a field of daffodils. Images like that keep the movie from fully steeping in Forrest Gump-style whimsicality.

The 45-year-old Burton refused to think about Big Fish, originally a Steven Spielberg project, as being a shift from his earlier work. "I try to treat it to be more organic and think about-so much is about, sort of, pigeonholing people, even ourselves? So I just try not to do that too much," he says in his easy-to-follow hiccup fashion, running a hand through his long, dark tendrils of hair. "If you get your mind starting to think that way, you can get into trouble, you become more of a thing and less of a person."

His key challenge was physical. "I haven't dealt with a schedule that was as tricky as this, in terms of shooting all over the place, we'd often move locations like three times a day, and shot completely out of order, so I myself am completely amazed that it hangs together at all!"

There's a giant in the story, and a circus run by Danny DeVito, and a Big Top. "There's still a small group of circus people like in the old days, a group of people who still perform what they cal the Mud Shows, traveling from town to town with tents. One afternoon, we were in Northern Florida just watching al these acts, the one that caught my attention was the one that I called 'The Suicidal Cat.' We'd see all these death-defying acts and then this cat goes up on top of the tent and jumps onto a little pillow. I thought, 'Wow, that's the best act I saw all day.' So we used that."

The themes resonated for Burton. "This story was interesting to me because of the themes of what's real and what's not real, y'know, I've always been interested in, because I've always felt what some people can call unreality is reality to somebody else. In the end, it's all kind of real."

But his father, to whom he was not close, had died before he read the script, and he himself had become a father only a couple of weeks before we spoke (with girlfriend Helena Bonham Carter, on hand in two roles in Big Fish).

"I always sort of just treated, it's about that classic, it's hard to even put into words, which is why I like doing it, that, that, that unique relationship that parents and children have, no matter what age they are," he says, plain as day.

"No matter what age a parent and child are," he says after the briefest of pauses, "They treat each other differently than any other relationship. I wasn't that close to my father, but when he died, I as taken about by the med emotions, the conflicting emotions. I know so many people, the parents were hippies, the children are little straight arrows and vice-versa. It's things I find difficult to talk about, even with a therapist. That's what I liked about the script, it was from left field a little bit. That made it very real to me."

It could have been a sickly-sweet movie if Spielberg had made it. "I had my vomit bag right there next to my chair, just in case. It was something that I always, from day one, we talked with the actors, it was a tricky dance. It's a prickly relationship in terms of the yin and yang of the father-son... I just had my own meter running there to try to watch it. There is sentimentality and emotion in the film and it's out there in some ways, which is fine and that's fine to me, the romanticization of his stories and this sort of idealized version of things is real too, people feeling that way, but it was something we were watching all the way down the line, yes," he says, without needing to stop for air.

Like many films this year, it's about loss and closure, and also a story about storytelling. "I think everything's a story," he says, giggling a little. "I never liked when somebody said, I'm going to sit down and tell you a story or a joke, my mind immediately wanders." Burton, who now lives in London, continues, "But you walk down the street, you hear snippets of conversation, even visually, you see people, things, you make up a story. Everything's a story in some ways."

Remainders

Jessica Lange's Vittel Water (With Straw and Kleenex Dispenser) Waldorf-Astoria Hotel, Park Avenue at 50th Street, New York City, 10:20am, November 22, 2003.	The Religious Online Waldorf-Astoria Hotel, Park Avenue at 50th Street, New York City, 12:15pm, November 22, 2003

 

Docudreamer

A petite little snack of a movie, 76-year-old Robert Altman's glimpse of a few lives in a fictional version of Chicago's Joffrey Ballet is a modest yet charming accomplishment. So many conflicts and moments are merely indicated, taken for granted, raises of eyebrows more than whispers of conflict. The story and script are credited to star Neve Campbell and Barbara Turner (Petulia, Georgia), yet as little happens as you could outline on the back of a drinks coaster. The opening number is beautiful, the music, the dance, the way Altman uses the widescreen frame to embellish the idea of the proscenium. Shooting in digital video for the first time, Altman finds unusual and revealing angles the way he's always used the zoom lens to search out telling elements. (He also obstinately shoots into stage lights, leaving white pulsing pools in the composition.) Campbell's Ry (for Ryan) is rising in the company, even as she still has to work a cocktail shift at Chicago dance club Neo. She meets Josh, a sous-chef (James Franco) in a corner tavern, and before you can say hello, they're an item. Altman uses Elvis Costello's version of "My Funny Valentine"-in a conceit like the recurrent theme in his own The Long Goodbye, three other versions are heard, including, yes, Chet Baker's-when they first eye each other. He's getting a Sam Adams at the bar, she's shooting pool. He pretends to make a call, sitting in the phone booth to watch her work the angles. They exchange looks, smiles. Campbell's charming, Franco's goofy as they're concertedly shy and conceited at once. I could watch "stuff," or process, all day, the evolving logic of documentary-style revelation instead of the lockstep of too-familiar plotting. There are a few grace notes for Josh: wiping a drib from a plate about to be served with a practiced swoosh, a quick hand test of the heat of the flame in Ry's apartment, as if testing a professional kitchen. The Company is halfway between documentary and dream, serene an unruffled. It is as delicate as a dandelion just before you... and poof! It's over. Such a sweetheart of a movie from someone stamped as a cynic. With Malcolm McDowell as the head of the company, a raft of Joffrey dancers, and the choreographers Lar Lubovitch and Robert Desrosiers, whose gaudy, awful final ballet mars the simplicity of the rest of the movie.

Floored by the rings

Until last week, I was a Lord of the Rings virgin, hoping that the pre-release marathon of the extended versions would happen before my first deadlines. I had avoided trailers and clips from the film, wanting to take it all in as short a period of time possible, in part due to a pronounced disinterest in the world of Hobbits and elves and talking trees. Did I really want to immerse myself in filmmaking that is staggering in its vision, yet in the service of elves?

I've always had a tremendous respect for Jackson's gifts, including mature work like Heavenly Creatures, and even oddities like The Frighteners. Part of my reluctance to see the movies as they were released came from greed. If he were going to pull this feat off, I wanted to enjoy it as one groaning buffet.

The way I'd planned it worked out differently, yet the end result is what I had hoped: Dear reader, my ears are still ringing from the ten hours and odd minutes of Peter Jackson's relentless epic. On a Saturday afternoon, I took in the digitally projected DVD version of Fellowship of the Ring at AMC's River East, sat down with Two Towers on Sunday, then joined a couple hundred other media types at 10am on Monday morning. (Members of the Chicago Film Critics' Association-which I do not belong to--were taking the three-hours-plus in for a second time in a week.)

Yikes!

That'd be my one-word review, with maybe a few dozen additional exclamation points. Of all I've read about the trilogy, from incomprehensible comparisons of J. R. R. Tolkien's books to Jackson's compressed narrative, I think I like best Nation critic Stuart Klawans' phrase, that the 42-year-old native of Pukerua Bay, New Zealand has a surfeit of "superior exuberance."

Demonstrating vision without arrogance, with a Wellesian grandeur and generosity, Jackson is a maestro of ceaseless and varied visual raptures, but I suppose you've said something like that yourself if you've seen any part of the trilogy. The annoyances were few and dispensable: icky wigs with strenuous widows' peaks, incomprehensible names and conflicts piled on with no pity for the impatient, and a strain of affectionate Hobbit twinkliness that seems to fear speaking its name.

While Jackson may have grabbed hold of something from the first half of George Lucas' career, he's become a movie master that Lucas could never have become. When Lucas grows serious, he's grave, funereal, unbearable. Even though it's a fantasy world, one beloved and studied by many people before him, Jackson manages to dose the telling with emotion in the most unexpected moments. (He's good at jokes, too, as anyone who's seen Bad Taste, Braindead and other early Jackson films can attest.) Sometimes it's a matter of casting a Sam Shepard-like face like Viggo Mortensen as the weary yet hopeful king, at others, it's catching a quicksilver expression while all manner of costumes, sets, models and computer-generated effects are completing the frame. The Return of the King is also rife with visual splendors, and it's satisfying emotionally even if the stakes are sometimes unclear. There is a sequence where "beacons" are lit, pyres on many mountains that rise to the sky, accompanied by Howard Shore's ubiquitous score, which becomes less like Nazi architect Albert Speer's architectural visions than an illustration of how gloom can lift from Middle Earth, or of W. H. Auden's timeless poem, "September 1, 1939," which concludes

Defenceless under the night
Our world in stupor lies,
Yet, dotted everywhere,
Ironic points of light
Flash out wherever the Just
Exchange their messages.
May I, composed like them
Of Eros and of dust,
Beleaguered by the same
Negation and despair,
Show an affirming flame.

Brilliantly mournful, the poem's sentiments were taken up by many after September 11, 2001, yet Jackson manages to capture its heart, as well as Tolkien's, as well as a kind of Shakespearean sprawl and sorrow. A pretender to a throne, enrobed in yellow flame, snowballs off the battlements off a fortress into a swelling world-changing battle of thousands, a tiny pfhhhht of life-and-death in one pinwheeling packet about to go out for good. In a slaughter of tens of thousands, a daughter, furious, appears to save her wounded father, to the point of confronting a winged serpent with long neck and snapping teeth. Armies of the dead seek honor, cascading, insurgent in green vapor like contagion itself.

In 2002, there were writers who debated whether the incarnation of Gollum, a greed-spoiled creature partly composed of actor Andy Serkis and partly intense and compelling CGI work, could be nominated for Oscars. After seeing the trilogy in one long draught, and particularly after Return of the King, the answer ought to be "Yes, yes, Precious wants more gold." The father-daughter scene on the battlefield may be the most moving thing I've seen all year, but Gollum (once a Hobbit named Smeagol who was transformed after coveting the Ring everyone's so damn worked up over) has a soliloquy to his own reflection in a puddle atop a dark, icy mountain that is chilling, thrilling and something great.

The Return of the King has many endings. They are all sorrowful. The characters have lived, others have died, and Jackson has demonstrated their powerful and painful self-knowledge. "You can't go back," a character learns at the end. "Some wounds won't heal." But the heart, even scarred, can beat still, know regret and understand the worth of life.

Abercrombie & Fitch go to Neverland

A movie like Peter Pan, is, for all intents and purposes, an animated movie - a world where anything can happen, rules can be invented or suspended, and there are few, if any, stakes, beyond the financial. Lit and designed within an inch of its life, starting with the Darling childrens' Maxfield Parrish-like coved ceiling in their bedroom, with peach clouds against deep robin's egg blue. P J. Hogan's first movie since 2002's little-seen Unconditional Love, remains faithful to J. M. W. Barrie's story and play, yet also has a troubling, dewy, prehensile sexuality to most of its scenes. Peter Pan (Jeremy Sumpter) has tousled, bleach-tipped California curls, a little too Abercrombie & Fitch for comfort. The equally lubricious young Wendy Darling (Rachel Hurd-Wood) is a big-toothed, blue-eyed lovely who longs to kiss the lad. Fairy dust is a levitating narcotic, and Pan spirits Wendy and her two brothers to Neverland, confronting strange weather and Jeremy Isaac's ripe, genuinely threatening Hook. The Wild Boys are all spunky little ephebes a few months from becoming dirty little skateboarders, and everyone from Pan on down has twines and vines of garments and accessories like the primitive and Celtic tattoos familiar from the last couple decades of young grown-ups. There are lovely instants, lost in the soup of design, such as the sky as an undersea of stars to cup palms into as you fly past, but more than the overly precious adolescents, there is the mute yet whimpering, exclaiming Tinkerbell. Tink is a frantic little lunatic, a mad sadist, a six-inch tall Ludivine Sagnier, barelegged and barefoot with an ankle bracelet and myriad wide-eyed expressions delirious with meanness. (Darting upward and pooching her butt out, she farts in Wendy's face.) "You can't catch me and make me a man!" Pan insists. No, I don't think we can, but P. J. Hogan believes in fairies. "Oh! The cleverness of you!" indeed.

Fast forward

A crisp programmer, much like something that would emerge from the old Hong Kong cinema in which he was trained, John Woo's Paycheck is an agreeable lark. Drawn from a 1950s short story of the same name by Philip K. Dick, Woo and credited screenwriter Dean Georgaris tighten the screws on a Hitchcockian construction of a typical Dick conceit about time and memory. In 2007, software engineer Michael Jennings submits himself to memory erasure after each feat of reverse engineering he performs for competitive corporations. Charlie Kaufman's next script, The Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (due in spring 2004 from director Michel Gondry) traffics in similar notions: could we live with selected highlights instead of the organic mass and mess that is our mind? His latest job, a three-year stint under Bill Gates-like college buddy Rethrick (Aaron Eckhart), leads to an intrigue where he can't remember his lover, Rachel (Uma Thurman, sturdy, weathered and wonderful) and has left himself an envelope with twenty clues from beneath and beyond his memory. Thurman's utilitarian jumpsuits have a Helmut Lang-like cut to them, and it's typical of the near-futurist design of the entire project. Almost today, almost the future, plus motorcycle chases through Vancouver, passing for Seattle, as if in 1980s Hong Kong, or on horses in the 1880s southwest. A tightly plotted Memento-like puzzle, it's pleasing even with the nondescript Affleck at its center. Paul Giamatti is on hand as a peculiarly invasive sort of personal manager.

Going Dutch

Pretty as a picture and twice as slow, Peter Webber's directorial debut is an agonizingly patient, quiet, self-assured attempt to use Tracy Chevalier's bestseller as the foundation for an imagining of a lost time: the Delft of the great seventeenth century Dutch master, Jan Vermeer, as captured in only a few dozen extant canvases. Kate Hudson was originally slated to play the indentured maid whose introduction into the Vermeer household prompts another of the painter's elevation of the ordinary to godliness, yet she would have been an anachronistic mistake. Scarlett Johannson, face rounded by starched white caps, is hardly more than wide, almost bovine eyes and her preternaturally overscaled mouth, yet the character manages to captivate Vermeer (Colin Firth), the light in his eyes matching the light in hers and the hard, horizontal shafts of afternoon light raying into his rooftop studio. The best scene may be Vermeer demonstrating his camera obscura to his pout-mouthed, nearly-mute, pale model-to-be.I was bored and I was thrilled by the production design, the loving light and the memorable quietitude of the thing.

Dignity and darkness

Commercials director and Russian emigre Vadim Perelman has managed to make one of the most steadfastly beautiful and tragic films in memory, an almost unremittingly grim set of intertwining downward spirals for two characters concerned with land and identity, and for two actors who are offhandedly brilliant at each. Jennifer Connelly is Kathy Nicolo, a woman who's just inherited part-ownership of a small northern California bungalow. She's a reformed alcoholic, a little scatty, doesn't open her mail, and her house is sold for back taxes. A simple bureaucratic foul-up that would have been easy to correct before it was sold, to Massoud Amir Behrani (Ben Kingsley), a former colonel in the Iranian Air Force. He keeps up appearances for his wife (Shohreh Aghdashloo) and young son. Menial jobs, keeping him as tightly coiled as when he wore a uniform each day at the Shah's bidding. Kathy wants the house back. Behrani doesn't yield. A deputy sheriff (Ron Eldard) implicates himself into the case, getting involved with Kathy. The results are tragic. The acting is magnificent. Working mostly with silence or in Farsi, Aghdashloo, whose career began in a film by Abbas Kiarostami, is a marvel. Kingsley's precision astounds. Connelly is a beautiful, walking bruise. The House of Sand and Fog is searing, haunting, worthy. I'll try to publish a conversation with Kingsley soon.

Quel fromage!

I caught The Triplets of Belleville a few nights ago at a sneak preview at a local Landmark venue, and it was a good crowd for a helium-high screwball, nutjob bit of French animation that's also inspired, wicked, musical and Terry Gilliam-style peculiar. Sad to report, another reviewer who'd apparently seen it at a film festival was there, laughing suggestively to himself a few seconds before some of bit of craziness. The surprise? Shot. Gone. Shall we go so far to say, "Va te faire foute?" Let me describe a little of the movie and not give much away then, in the spirit of that self-satisfied, snickering killjoy. A little French boy, Bruno, is adopted by his grandmother, Madame Souza, and he grows up to be a champion cyclist. His puppy Champion grows up to be an obese, train-hating mutt. Evil French vintners kidnap Bruno and take him to Belleville, a metropolis across the sea partly Paris and partly Manhattan. Souza and Bruno take off in chase, encountering three enormous female triplets, the Triplets of Belleville, 1930s music hall stars whose scat-musique concret doo-wop dazzle the brain as much as the inspired and inventive surrealism of director-designer Sylvain Chomet. An unlikely mix of Disney movies like 101 Dalmatians and The Aristocats and Max and Dave Fleischer's syncopated work on Betty Boop, it is weird, unforgettable and magical. It's showing at Landmark locations with an utterly superfluous six-minute piece of bunkum, Destino," a never-finished 1946 collaboration between Walt Disney and Salvador Dali that should not have been completed in 2002 from Dali's storyboards and paintings by director Dominique Monfery.

By a nose

I held few hopes for Mona Lisa Smile to be anything more than a typical Julia Roberts star vehicle--her production company made the movie--yet there are sweet and wry moments throughout this earnest little number. It's a "Dead Princesses Society"-style story of a California teacher (Roberts) who clashes with the aims of the marriage factory that the movie presents Wellesley College to have been in the fall of 1953. (With a dash of Goodbye Mr. Chips and The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie thrown in for good measure.) While the attitudes expressed in the script by Lawrence Konner and Mark Rosenthal are mostly anachronistic, more reflective of 2003 California than 1950s New England, I didn't mind, thinking of the exhortation of the Hippocratic Oath: "First, do no harm."

As history goes, Mona Lisa Smile is mostly bunk, but as an entertainment with points about art, tolerance and how to define just what a choice is, it's charming. Plus it's filled with moments like Giselle, Gyllenhaal's fast Jewish outsider insisting, "Everything is erotic." (Bad guys are indicated by exultations like "Don't you just love chintz?") At one of the movie's several party scenes, Giselle clutches a bottle of Moet, saying of a man, "He's a morsel!"

There's also a nice turnabout that the least popular girl pursues a nerd-nervous guy who, when he takes his glasses off, turns out to be the one who's shy-nervous-beautiful, instead of the well-worn woman librarian cliche. Director Mike Newell also makes a fascinatingly diverse study in women's noses. The types range from Roberts' coltish, perky ski slope to Juliet Stevenson's thickly elegant one, as staunch as the stanchions of the Williamsburg Bridge. Then there's the tip of Marsha Gay Harden's lovely, chunky, cartilage-free nose, Gyllenhaal's little turned-up thing, and Kirsten Dunst and Julia Stiles as two of the most stinging little WASPs, doing a battle of the button noses. Spasmodically episodic, Mona Lisa Smile is still a pretty, delicious shell.

Nature's not natural

Philippe Muyl's Butterfly (Le papillon) is a compact, richly colored story of Julien, an aging lepidopterist (butterfly collector) and cranky upstairs neighbor (Michel Serrault) who involuntarily befriends Elsa the 8-year-old girl (Claire Bouanich) downstairs. Brisk, tender and lovely, it's an odd but assured portrait of a latchkey kid meeting an artisanal solitary. Muyl's command of Paris' luminous, crepuscular light starts the picture, but moves on to nature. The girl's never been outside the city. "I'd like to see mountains, real birds that fly, cows that give milk... ... Butterflies!" Elsa and Julien are two no-nonsense creatures in search of a beautiful thing-a butterfly, nature, understanding. Bouanich is an unassertive little performer, no Victoria Thivosol, like in Ponette, just a glorious kid. There's so much to made of blue eyes and freckles. The movie is talky. I like that: "When love demands proof, there is no trust and if there's no trust, there's no love." Julien describes a butterfly as "a mailman who delivers only love letters." She tags along. They try to reach her mother, who's left her alone a couple of days. Against his better judgment, Julie allows her to tag along. Butterfly indulges the sentiment of rurality, extant forest and unimproved fields. (There's even a shooting star.) The dialogue makes Neat equations about time and mortality. When the real-life, latter-day consequences of this sort of adventure are faced, Muyl gets past them with admirable dispatch. There's also a sweet moment where a little boy gets to enact the most virtuous, most selfish of little boy fantasies-saving the girl! And at movie's end, when Elsa's mother's accepted Julien and Julien's accepted Elsa into his life, Muyl shoots downward on the pair through several floors of stairwell, involuted like the ribs of a chrysalis. Something's gotta evolve.

Jumpy cuts

(Dans ma peu) French writer-director-actress Marina de Van has worked as a screenwriter and actress for Francois Ozon, notably in both capacities in Ozon's truly creepy childnapping fable, See the Sea (Regard la mer). With the compelling and strangely hilarious In My Skin, de Van works an uneasy allegory about a woman who becomes fixated on her body in dangerous ways while trying to establish a career in the cold, cold world of business. De Van can talk the theoretical talk: "It is through my body that I am in the world, that I am connected with others. If I am no longer my body, what am I? Where does this desire come from to want to see what the body is and if I am `inside`?" But the view taken by In My Skin of her character's self-mutilation is far more troubling. After an accident leaves Esther (de Van) with extreme gashes, she becomes aware of her body, touching and pinching herself and playing with her wounds. If David Cronenberg were to act in one of his own films, I'd hope he would have the same courage in torturing his body-and body image-as de Van does in her feature debut. Those with fear of knives, razors and dark humor, beware.

Too modern for me

Every four or five years when I see Charles Chaplin's Modern Times, I'm not struck so much by the sight gags or the marvelously sustained singing waiter scene or the satire of mechanization or the nods toward the eternal head-pounding fate of protestors against the police, but by Paulette Goddard, who's identified in Chaplin's 1936 semi-silent as "Gamine." She's meant to be an underage runaway, who shares California dreams with The Tramp, yet she's the enthralling embodiment of adult voluptuousness, a rebuke to Chaplin's recorded fondness for the nubile who were not yet of majority. Flashing eyes, searing smiles, blinding incisors, barefoot and barelegged in a ragamuffin dress, Chaplin's then-girlfriend sears the screen. Laughter? Tears? It's all about the sex when Goddard's on screen. Va, va and voom. The restored version, authorized by the Chaplin estate and French distribution concern MK2, is crossing the country, and is available on DVD. It closed the 2003 Cannes Film Festival.

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