Movie review by Greg Carlson

A total misfire on virtually every level, “Enduring Love” is one of the year’s most disappointing films. Adapted from Ian McEwan’s 1997 novel, the movie manages to get off to a terrific, terrifying start, but runs out of steam so fast that audience members might be surprised by just how quickly they can be overwhelmed by boredom and apathy. Director Roger Michell, who managed to make the pulpy “Changing Lanes” such a gripping entertainment, never finds his way with the source material. Is love an illusion? Can love give birth to unintended, horrible consequences? Considering that “Enduring Love” parades its philosophical agenda within the overly familiar psycho-thriller framework, the answers to those questions are not particularly satisfying.

The movie’s opening scene is gripping. Lounging in a lush meadow outside London, university lecturer Joe Rose (Daniel Craig) produces a bottle of champagne in order to propose to girlfriend Claire (Samantha Morton). Just before the cork is popped, a bright red hot air balloon crashes nearby, skidding along the grass. A small boy remains inside the gondola while a man tries desperately to control the unwieldy behemoth. Joe runs to the rescue. Several others appear virtually out of nowhere. Grabbing the ropes, it looks like the would-be heroes have brought the balloon under control. Then, the unthinkable happens. The balloon begins to ascend, and all but one of the men let go of the ropes. Looking on in horror, Joe, Claire and the others watch the last man swaying on his thread. The balloon climbs higher and higher, and finally the man cannot hold on any longer.

Joe never mentally recovers from the accident, harboring tremendous guilt about his own inability to keep the balloon on the ground. Withdrawing into himself, the strain begins to infiltrate Joe’s relationship with Claire. One of the other accident witnesses, the lanky, disheveled Jed (Rhys Ifans) begins to pop up with unsettling frequency in Joe’s life, and then things really go downhill. Jed is a typical movie bogeyman – the kind who always happens to be watching from the park across the street, or holding up a photo of the protagonist’s girlfriend, or having lunch at the next table in the restaurant. When the movie should be examining Joe’s psychological scars and his relationship with Claire, it descends into cheap slasher territory.

“Enduring Love” does not even make it to the halfway mark before the audience begins to anticipate every predictable turn. Jed secrets himself among Joe’s students and pops up in class to warble a few bars of “God Only Knows” (for which Brian Wilson is surely owed the deepest of apologies). Claire can’t take Joe’s brooding anymore. The editing and photography become so self-consciously arty that seemingly, rain begins to pour in every other scene. Frantic, midnight searches of websites are made. The unavoidable “stalker’s shrine” is discovered. Everything crashes harder than the opening scene’s balloon.

By the time the laughable coda is tagged on, viewers might feel as disconnected from the film as Joe does from his emotions. The actors have been wasted, especially the brilliant Morton, who deserves so much better than her role here as the long-suffering, supportive helpmate. Additionally, Ifans is too obvious as a goony lunatic, which makes much of what transpires hard to take: any normal person would have taken out a restraining order against him after the first nutty encounter. As it is, viewers should make sure to stay at least fifty yards away from this movie at all times.

Movie review by Greg Carlson

Evoking that unique but difficult blend of period charm and contemporary performances, “Stage Beauty” operates with the same anachronistic spirit as “Shakespeare in Love.” Based on the play “Compleat Female Stage Beauty” by Jeffrey Hatcher, the movie version works hard to mine the gender politics of the London stage during the reign of Charles II, when only men could legally appear on the boards (meaning of course, that all female roles had to be essayed by the fellas). The era would see the demise of the men-as-women tradition, and the movie does incorporate fictionalized versions of several historical figures. The result, however, is a mélange of styles and concerns that leave many of the performers stewing in their own overactive creative juices.

Billy Crudup is Ned Kynaston, one of the very last actors to make most of his living playing women in Restoration Britain. Kynaston draws adoring crowds of male and female admirers, and seems content to find pleasure with groupies of the opposite sex as well as with the Duke of Buckingham (Ben Chaplin), who prefers to treat Kynaston like a lady in most respects. A handful of events unfortunate for Kynaston conspire to pull down his world around him: his haughty young dresser Maria Hughes (Claire Danes, good but not ideally suited for the role) has taken to performing onstage illegally, he insults a wealthy courtier who comes on to him, and he discovers that the King’s mistress Nell Gwynn (a vivacious Zoe Tapper) harbors her own desire to act in the theatre.

Before you can say obsolescence, the pretty Kynaston is fighting for his livelihood, as the lusty monarch has decreed that women are now free to perform in public. Director Richard Eyre navigates these middle sections of the film with welcome balance, and the audience simultaneously experiences Kynaston’s despair at losing his stardom and Maria’s exhilaration at ascending into the favor of the rich and powerful. Not everything works, though. The material’s most relevant subtexts, such as the socially sanctioned acceptability of homophobia, end up ignored in favor of a weird, nonsensical love scene in which Kynaston and Maria discuss the mechanics of straight versus gay sex.

“Stage Beauty” ends up missing the boat because its central characters remain undefined. Questions swirling around Kynaston’s own sexuality are left purposefully ambiguous, but instead of generating opportunities to investigate the man’s complex emotional landscape, the movie adopts an all too easy resolution in which Kynaston can happily abandon his hard-earned expertise as a premier drag performer in favor of accepting the demands that he play it straight from now on. The old mythology that one can be “turned” disappointingly manifests in the most traditionally progressive of places.

While the movie has earned several inevitable comparisons to “Shakespeare in Love,” “Stage Beauty” really reminds viewers who love backstage drama of Peter Yates’ 1983 film version of “The Dresser.” That movie, a modern classic, probed nearly all of the psychological terrain that should have been part of “Stage Beauty” (incidentally, actor Edward Fox appears in both movies). While “Stage Beauty” labors in vain to understand the rivalries, jealousies, and conflicted feelings that so often govern the fragile egos of performers and theatre folk, “The Dresser” succeeded by always putting a human face on the struggles. As it is, the Ned Kynaston of “Stage Beauty” remains opaque, elusive, and frustratingly out of reach.

Movie review by Greg Carlson

“The Yes Men,” an affable and innocuous documentary that should have been made out of lightning bolts and razor blades, might have been great had it been cut to an hour and presented as an episode of “Frontline.” Directors Chris Smith and Sarah Price (joined this time by Dan Ollman) previously made the brilliant “American Movie,” but “The Yes Men” is not even in the same league. Shot on dreary, smeary video, the movie lacks the panache, coherence, and fascinating characters that made “American Movie” such a brilliant film. To its credit, “The Yes Men” does manage a handful of riveting sequences, but the end result is an experience that leaves the audience in need of more information.

Following the bizarre antics of a small group of left-leaning activists whose mission is to raise awareness about the World Trade Organization’s lack of concern for poor nations, “The Yes Men” focuses primarily on Andy Bichlbaum and Mike Bonanno, who pose as representatives of the WTO in order to pull increasingly over-the-top stunts. Traveling the globe to appear at free trade conferences in Finland and Australia, Bichlbaum and Bonanno mount their ruse by reverse infiltration: their gatt.org website looks so similar to the official WTO homepage it is frequently mistaken for the real thing. Once invited to make presentations, all the Yes Men have to do is show up and work their gags.

Two protracted sequences showcase the Yes Men in their element. In Tampere, Finland, they present a jaw-dropping Power Point slideshow essentially advocating slave labor, and end the speech by revealing a prototype of a space-age, shimmering bodysuit that sports a giant inflatable phallus. With an essentially straight face, Bichlbaum explains to the passive audience that the huge golden penis is in fact an “Employee Visualization Appendage,” equipped with a TV monitor that allows managers to keep tabs on their low-wage workers from a distance. If the laborers don’t exercise efficient habits, electric shocks can be administered from the buttons on the leisure suit. Nobody in attendance has any questions.

In the second featured segment, the boys tag-team a class of college students (the professor is in on the joke) by explaining that the WTO has partnered with the McDonald’s corporation to offer a solution to hunger in Third World countries: human excrement can be reprocessed into hamburger patties and shipped overseas. While half the class munches on burgers provided by the pranksters, a hilariously crude (in several senses of the word) 3D animation of the proposed procedure is projected on the big screen. It is a huge relief when the disgusted scholars speak out against the presenters, as it restores a little bit of the faith that went missing in Tampere.

Whether the Finnish conference attendees were completely stunned into silence, were just being polite, or assumed that the WTO was conducting business as usual, “The Yes Men” chooses to remain mute on several salient points. The directors include far too many scenes of Bichlbaum and Bonanno getting dressed, shopping for business suits at the Salvation Army, and hoofing it en route to scheduled speaking appearances. Instead, it would have been interesting to include some weightier perspectives on the issues at the heart of international labor problems.

Movie review by Greg Carlson

The first Pixar release to earn a PG rating, Brad Bird’s “The Incredibles” represents a step toward slightly more grown-up fare than “Monsters, Inc.” and “Finding Nemo.” Pixar’s movies have always attended to the adults in the audience (in the case of “Toy Story 2,” one could argue that misty-eyed boomers mourning their bygone childhoods were a clear target market), and have been nearly unimpeachable in their dual-edged skill. At just a few minutes shy of two hours, “The Incredibles” is also the longest Pixar movie, which might try the patience of some of the youngest audience members. The film’s length will not likely deter legions of Pixar fans from clogging the box office or from netting the studio huge amounts of cash. A sequel is virtually guaranteed.

Following a flurry of frivolous lawsuits filed by average citizens against do-gooder superheroes, the chosen few have retreated into something akin to a witness protection program, where they must hide their amazing talents and gifts. Working one of comicdom’s golden themes (see: “X-Men”), writer-director Brad Bird – who created the moving cult hit “The Iron Giant” – explores the headier notions of how the truly privileged can inspire tremendous jealousy in the power-impaired. Superheroes have always had to negotiate the problems of being special, which is one of the chief reasons that secret identities are a key ingredient in the genre.

The first of the heroes to be felled by a lawsuit is Mr. Incredible (Craig T. Nelson, absolutely perfect), a massive wall of muscle in the tradition of Superman. Mr. Incredible is exiled to suburbia as humdrum insurance adjuster Bob Parr, and his tiny cubicle can contain neither his gargantuan frame nor his disdain for monotonous routine. Along with his wife Helen (Holly Hunter), the former Elastigirl, and his children Violet (Sarah Vowell of “This American Life”), Dash (Spencer Fox) and baby Jack-Jack, Bob begrudgingly, uneasily, settles into his long journey into the middle. Only some late-night prowling with the former Frozone (Samuel L. Jackson) provides Bob with a fleeting reminder of the glories of his former life.

One day, after being contacted by an enigmatic stranger, Bob agrees to don his old costume on a top-secret mission to a weird volcanic island. The old crimefighter chooses to withhold this information from his wife, which provides both an opportunity for third act heroics and a familiar but well-executed sitcom subplot that trots out the old misunderstanding about an imagined marital infidelity. Bird waits just a little bit too long to get the other Incredibles involved, but when he does, the movie really shines. Especially pleasing is Vowell’s turn as teenage daughter Violet. The manifestation of her own powers, including the abilities to turn invisible (a trick coveted by teens of both genders) and to generate force fields, sets the stage for a boost in self-esteem that encapsulates one of the film’s most pleasant self-empowerment themes.

One of the movie’s greatest assets – its stupendous, eye-popping animation – can also be one of its big liabilities, as the climax practically demands a loud, cacophonous cityscape battle. Sure, superhero movies depend on superheroics, so the complaint is a minor one. Even so, it would have been more impressive had the film cut a little of the action in favor of more exploration of the unique dynamics of the Incredible clan. Each of the family members borrows powers long enshrined on the pages of Marvel and DC, but computer animation is the ideal place to showcase Elastigirl’s supple malleability. Her feats of inventive daring, including a breathless set-piece where her elongated body is trapped in several automatic doors at the same time, fully exploit the imaginative promise that pixels can so readily provide.

Movie review by Greg Carlson

Jonathan Glazer’s new film “Birth” is an engrossing fairy tale filled with tremendous acting, stunning photography, and quite possibly the year’s best musical score. Ruminating on the metaphysical possibilities of reincarnation, or perhaps merely the desire that lost loved ones could come back to us, “Birth” works on nearly every level, despite its rather elephantine demand that we suspend all reason and doubt. Spare, austere, and quiet, “Birth” showcases multiple examples of gutsy, intelligent direction that confirm much of what was said about Glazer following his impressive debut feature “Sexy Beast.” “Birth” is an improvement over that solid film, and should guarantee the filmmaker some plum assignments in the near future.

The movie’s opening sequence, in which Harris Savides’ camera follows a runner in a wintry Central Park, is a beautiful, gliding composition that projects both a kind of elegiac majesty and a sense of foreboding and portent. Glazer takes his time with this jogger, and Alexandre Desplat’s spooky orchestrations underline the ways in which mundane routine can quickly transform into life-changing tragedy. Entering a tunnel, the runner falters and crumples to the ground. The viewpoint then switches to a newborn infant emerging into the world. It is an amazing set-piece, rendered all the more powerful by the title card that moves the story ten years ahead.

Nicole Kidman’s Anna was married to the dead runner, and despite her broken heart, has finally agreed to start over in a new marriage with her longtime, persistent beau Joseph (Danny Huston). Anna lives with her patrician mother Eleanor (played with a cunning combination of stateliness and wit by Lauren Bacall) in a mammoth Fifth Avenue spread, and other family members, including Anna’s sister Laura (Alison Elliot) and Laura’s husband Bob (Arliss Howard) never stray too far from Eleanor’s aristocratic keep. The wealth of the family emerges as a subtle class commentary that Glazer expertly exploits, and the film’s production design is a sight to behold.

Things get weird when a ten-year-old boy shows up at Eleanor’s birthday party claiming to be Anna’s dead husband Sean. Initially dismissed as a strange joke or an awkward coincidence, the lad’s declaration begins to assume disturbing credibility as he reveals more and more information that only Anna’s deceased husband could have known. The young Sean is played by Cameron Bright, and the pre-teen actor does a remarkably convincing job. Glazer enlisted the help of two top-notch screenwriters, Milo Addica (who co-wrote “Monster’s Ball”) and legendary Bunuel collaborator Jean-Claude Carriere, and the scribes really manage to make a preposterous premise resonate with feelings of numbing plausibility.

Kidman is the glue that holds the entire thing together, and her performance is another in a string of smart choices. Only when the movie vacillates between the supernatural aspects provided by Anna’s desire to believe in Sean and the crushing possibility that more realistic explanations are right before our eyes does Glazer’s spell break down. Fortunately, the director handles the denouement with the same conviction attached to everything that has come before. The result is a film that nearly tricks us into thinking it is merely a creepy horror trifle when it actually has much to say about faith, jealousy, and the constant ache of incomprehensible grief.

Movie review by Greg Carlson

David O. Russell’s “I Heart Huckabees” flirts equally with disaster and genius. A loquacious, irreverent romp, the movie juggles an all-star ensemble with deftness and economy, calling to mind a sort of Preston Sturges-meets-Charlie Kaufman genre implosion: anything can happen, and it often does. At the center of the chaos is Jason Schwartzman, (looking very Tom Cruise circa “Magnolia”) sinking his teeth into his best role since “Rushmore.” Schwartzman is Albert Markovski, an environmental activist so at odds with his frustrating existence and its inexplicable coincidences that he hires husband and wife existential detectives Bernard and Vivian Jaffe (Dustin Hoffman and Lily Tomlin) to sort out the mess in his head.

While it does not quite do justice to Russell’s imagination to describe exactly how existential detectives earn their living, suffice it to say that Vivian and Bernard are experts in their unusual field, and have been in the business for a long, long time. Existential detective work resembles good old-fashioned gumshoe investigating in several ways (digging through trash, surveillance, interviews with friends and associates of the client, etc.), but a number of the unorthodox methods employed at the agency – including a sensory deprivation technique that allows Russell to have a blast with some truly inventive CGI – are as hysterical as they are far out.

Russell’s neatest trick is cramming in enough character to be shared among all the cast members, without sacrificing nuance, pacing or the breakneck structure of his cinematic house of cards. Schwartzman’s Markovski may be the movie’s center of gravity, but several other actors, including Jude Law as an officious executive, Naomi Watts as a conflicted spokesmodel, Isabelle Huppert as a nihilistic philosopher, and Mark Wahlberg – brilliantly deadpan – as a depressed firefighter, all get their very own moments to shine. “Huckabees” sometimes neglects Hoffman and Tomlin – especially in the second half, when they are desperately needed – in favor of spending time with the couple’s clients, but more often than not, the trade-off is worth it. When Hoffman and Tomlin are allowed center stage, however, their timing is magnificent.

Russell, who wrote “Huckabees” with Jeff Baena, is not afraid to swing for the fences, so audience members skittish about listening to convoluted laments about the meaninglessness of life might not get on board. Viewers have to demonstrate a certain amount of patience with the eccentric activities that unfold on the way to Russell’s point, but by the third act, the filmmaker has brilliantly brought his story full circle, exchanging the fates of two of its central characters in a breathless turn of events. Russell’s splendid juxtaposition of corporate voracity (Huckabees is a juggernaut chain store similar to Target or Wal-Mart) and feel-good eco-friendly advocacy is but one of the director’s spirited commentaries on the schizo hypocrisy of contemporary American society. No solution is offered because no solution exists.

Fans of Russell’s earlier work will take much delight in a dinner table scene with uncredited secret weapon Richard Jenkins. As irascible patriarch Mr. Hooten, Jenkins engages in a side-splitting quarrel with Wahlberg and Schwartzman regarding the pros and cons of suburban sprawl. Russell also gets plenty of mileage out of Bob Gunton and Talia Shire (Schwartzman’s real life mom) as Markovski’s parents in another one-off scene. “I Heart Huckabees” might not hold up as well as “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind,” but the two films certainly deserve to share company as the year’s most inspired and creative cinematic treats.

Movie review by Greg Carlson

The latest curiosity from Trey Parker and Matt Stone, the brash creators of “South Park,” is “Team America: World Police,” a “Thunderbirds”-esque marionette movie in which clunky puppets take the place of cut-out animation. Intended partially as a satire of Michael Bay/Jerry Bruckheimer action movies and partially as a chaotic send-up of Hollywood hypocrisy, “Team America” delivers a handful of hearty laughs, but mostly misses its wide array of easy targets. Fans looking for a movie as sharp as “South Park: Bigger, Longer, & Uncut” will surely be disappointed, as “Team America” hedges its bets by entirely ignoring the Bush administration. The result is a scattershot hodgepodge that commits the one sin for which it cannot be forgiven: it is often boring.

Hidden away inside a secret base on Mount Rushmore, Team America is an elite group of black ops commandos charged with ridding the world of terrorist threats. Never mind that the rough and ready crew usually ends up destroying treasures like the Louvre, the Eiffel Tower, and the Sphinx in the process. Accompanied by a rousing, profane theme song, the squad of super-agents is led by the dapper Spottswoode, a slightly unhinged mastermind with an inexplicable obsession with oral sex. Following the death of one of their own, Team America recruits stage actor Gary Johnston, a performer in the “Rent” parody “Lease,” where he sings “Everyone Has AIDS.”

Gary’s background in theatre and world languages makes him a natural for the team, so Spottswoode packs him off for the Middle East with the rest of the gang. Gary falls for another one of the team members, and their subsequent sex scene is among the movie’s highlights. The couple copulates in every position imaginable, wooden bodies and visible strings adding to the surrealism. The stuffy MPAA was so unsettled by the sight of two dolls going at it, they threatened an NC-17 rating. No doubt Paramount Pictures is already salivating over how much money the unrated version of the DVD will net.

“Team America” leisurely rolls around to a showdown involving Kim Jong Il and the Film Actors Guild, led by Alec Baldwin. The filmmakers save much of their venom for Tinseltown’s activists, and along with Baldwin, they skewer Sean Penn, Matt Damon, Susan Sarandon, and Tim Robbins, among others. Parker and Stone grossly miscalculate the humor that their horrible voice acting generates; the impressions of celebrities are so intentionally bad as to become ineffectual. Parker even uses his Cartman voice for Kim Jong Il. What works with the kids of “South Park” does not work here. The movie would have been significantly better had Parker and Stone farmed out some of the “acting.”

Like “South Park: Bigger, Longer & Uncut,” “Team America” resembles a musical, and some of the songs transcend the limitations of the phony action genre in which they are trapped. Marc Shaiman teams up with Parker once again, and the music works as the strongest element of the movie. One tune, “Freedom Isn’t Free,” is a hilarious send-up of the overwrought patriotism of Country music anthems, in the vein of Lee Greenwood and Toby Keith. In another ballad, the pranksters eviscerate Bay’s “Pearl Harbor.” Other than the songs, the movie occasionally capitalizes on its low-tech puppetry to generate visually arresting humor. House cats become vicious panthers, Gary blows chunks in what has to be one of cinema’s most sustained depictions of projectile vomiting, and a cockroach scurries into a spaceship and takes to the skies in the movie’s most memorable shot. “Team America” is not terribly satisfying, however, and unlike the “South Park” movie, it will not be remembered when Academy Awards nominations are made.

Movie review by Greg Carlson

It was too much to hope that somehow, “Friday Night Lights” would be significantly different from other high school sports movies, because in that final quarter, just like clockwork, it all comes down to one play. Sure, the movie squirms around with some of the difficult realities of the football-equals-everything logic that nearly destroys the young men of desolate West Texas towns, but when you peel back the top layer, everything looks awfully familiar. Does a star athlete get injured? Yup. Does the coach deliver a rousing locker room speech? Check. Does the team forge an emotional bond that transcends the boundaries of typical adolescent relationships? Maybe.

Based on H.G. Bissinger’s noteworthy book, “Friday Night Lights” tries really hard to question the value system that places unyielding pressure on students to perform like seasoned pros. The movie is directed by actor Peter Berg, and stars Billy Bob Thornton – in another excellent performance – as coach Gary Gaines. Thornton is a marvelous performer, and his offbeat choices are always infused with a sublime sense of authenticity. Gaines may be quick to cut loose with amusing outbursts of “my goodness gracious” when a player does something foolish, but underneath, he has the instincts needed to cope with a town where the team-makers will have your job if you fail to deliver a state championship.

The players are quickly sketched, and only a few manage enough screen time to develop identifiable personalities. Lucas Black plays quarterback Mike Winchell, a morose downer who takes care of his ailing mother even as he dreams about escaping Odessa, Texas for a better life. Winchell doesn’t seem to care about football all that much, and that alone distinguishes him from most of the other characters. Boobie Miles (Derek Luke) is the cocky, talented running back who has already started to pick out the expensive cars that will be his once he joins the NFL. Don Billingsley (Garrett Hedlund) tiptoes around his abusive father (a quite good Tim McGraw), a former state football champ whose alcoholism poses a real threat to his son.

“Friday Night Lights” is more serious-minded than “Varsity Blues,” but both movies cover a lot of the same turf. Like the book upon which it is based, “Friday Night Lights” covers the ups and downs of the Permian High School Panthers during the course of the 1988 season (love the mileage Berg gets out of acid-washed jeans and Boobie’s Public Enemy jacket), but the film could really be set in any year. Gridiron crunches are the main draw, and as a result, female characters are left underdeveloped at best, totally ignored at worst. The townspeople who delight in hassling Gaines are depicted as drooling rednecks; the best line is overheard on a radio call in show when an angry fan moans that maybe too much learning and not enough football is going on at the school.

The film would have been more interesting if its skepticism had been allowed a stronger voice. With sports movies, though, you cannot bite the hand that feeds. Football, therefore, is center stage and Berg depicts the action on the field with color and intensity. Fans of the game will likely ignore any of the uglier side-effects that small town football brings out in its acolytes – the game footage is much too dynamic to let that happen. “Friday Night Lights” does quite well, however, with the details and the moments. For the audience members who are not sports fans, the movie has enough criticism to affirm the underlying assertion that high school athletes are disposable. Seniors inevitably graduate, and there is always hope for next year’s team.

Movie review by Greg Carlson

Truncating the John Irving novel upon which his movie is based, and changing the title from “A Widow for One Year” to “The Door in the Floor,” director Tod Williams manages an impressive feat of good moviemaking. Irving rarely makes it to the screen without an abundance of the florid sentimentalism that somehow works better on the page (think “The Cider House Rules” and “Simon Birch”), and for the most part, Williams steers clear of the obvious traps provided by a story that could so easily wallow in the loss of innocence, the loss of children, and the loss of a marriage. “The Door in the Floor” is by no means perfect, but it is entertaining, and features at least one performance that should not be missed.

Veteran actor Jeff Bridges plays children’s book author Ted Cole, an alcoholic and part-time nudist whose marriage has collapsed in the years following a freak accident that claimed the lives of his teenage sons. Ted’s separation from wife Marion (Kim Basinger) corresponds with the hiring of aspiring writer Eddie O’Hare (Jon Foster), an Exeter student who has arranged a summer internship with Ted. It doesn’t take Eddie long to discover that Ted only needs him as a driver, but Eddie is a polite kid, and he is also more than a little attracted to the practically catatonic Marion.

Before you can say Oedipus, Marion is instructing Eddie in the finer points of lovemaking, but the movie is resolute that sex is only one thing worth considering in this fascinating tableau. The principal trio deceive themselves as much as they deceive one another, but Williams (like Irving) is not terribly interested in generating any suspense related to dangerous liaisons. Instead, the filmmaker takes the time to explore the process of mourning, the discovery that one’s hero can be less than heroic, and the reality that grief is dealt with in unique ways by different people.

“The Door in the Floor” only falters toward the end, when a strange shift in tone makes room for a goofy slapstick sequence that would have worked better if more humor had been allowed in the first sections of the movie. Nearly all of the other details in the film are expertly observed, however, and Williams capitalizes on several visual motifs, including the quiet clicking of a turn signal, the fetishizing of undergarments, and the hallway shrine of photographs that makes the house feel like a mausoleum. Additionally, the misty environs surrounding Ted’s rambling Hamptons estate are beautifully photographed by Terry Stacey.

Even though plenty of plotting surrounds Eddie’s relationship with Marion, Williams ultimately settles on Ted as the central figure of the film (the final shot alone, a wordless summary of all that has come before, is thoughtfully linked to the new title). Bridges, who is surely one of the finest, most underrated actors of this or any other generation, provides Ted with unforgettable personality traits. Ted is larger than life, but somehow familiar: he is unfaithful to his wife, but is a good father to his daughter. He can be generous one second and completely vain and self-involved the next. It is only when you realize that Ted’s narcissism operates (like Marion’s silence) as a defense mechanism shielding him from his pain that the story comes into sharp focus. Many actors would embarrass themselves trying to deliver Ted’s rambling monologue that recounts the deaths of his sons. Bridges makes it look easy.

Movie review by Greg Carlson

Patrice Leconte’s filmography is peppered with many excellent, entertaining movies, including “The Girl on the Bridge,” “Ridicule,” and “The Widow of Saint-Pierre.” His latest, “Intimate Strangers,” is not nearly as good as those three, but for patient audience members, it still manages to stimulate the senses in satisfying ways. Written by Jerome Tonnerre, “Intimate Strangers” operates like a stage play, with much of the action limited to the flat/office of William Faber, a lonely, middle-aged tax lawyer, played expertly by Fabrice Luchini. Despite the restricted venue, however, Leconte busies himself with the psychological motivations of his characters, and the result is a story that explores the boundaries of sexual paralysis and romantic trepidation.

William’s peaceful, dull routine is interrupted one day with the arrival of Anna (Sandrine Bonnaire), a troubled woman who begins to share intimate details about her marriage. Too flummoxed to interrupt, William realizes that Anna has made a mistake: she thinks he is the psychoanalyst whose office is down the hall. In a weaker film, this premise would have been enough to sustain a farcical comedy of errors in which the mistaken identity is only discovered in the final act. Leconte, however, is more interested in exploring the sorts of things that happen following the revelation of truth, so we are somewhat surprised when William tells Anna he is not a shrink, and she decides to continue seeing him anyway.

As Anna and William forge their bizarre relationship, Leconte nearly tires himself out trying to evoke the erotic tension found in so many of Hitchcock’s great films. “Intimate Strangers” lacks most of the high-stakes danger that propelled “Vertigo,” “North by Northwest,” and “Rear Window,” which makes William’s obsession with Anna more humdrum than it ought to be. The rather late arrival of Anna’s creepy husband delivers a jolt, but the movie would have been much stronger had Leconte pursued this angle in greater depth.

Leconte chooses coyness over disclosure, and the strategy works for some scenes but hampers others. To what degree is Anna manipulating William? Does William even suspect her of duplicity? The characters are often too opaque to enjoy, and the director seems content to keep his viewers in the dark too much of the time. Little clues suggest that William and Anna are greatly stimulated by their doctor-patient formality (a shot of William dancing to “In the Midnight Hour” is one of the movie’s comic highlights), but Leconte keeps the lust on a mighty short leash.

Most of the film’s supporting players exist to poke holes in William’s fantasy, but as signposts of reality, they also provide the audience with much-needed context. William’s former partner Jeanne (Anne Brochet) pops up often enough to scold him for his mind games with Anna. William’s secretary, Mrs. Mulon (Helene Surgere), is simply delightful as she shoots withering glances and mumbles bitter complaints under her breath. Dr. Monnier (Michel Duchaussoy), the real psychologist Anna intended to see in the first place, is suitably pompous and greedy. His interactions with William are clever and revealing. Despite an awkward ending, Leconte wants his viewers to leave the theatre with ideas to ponder. Whether one spends any time thinking about “Intimate Strangers” depends on how much joy can be found in material designed to conceal a cryptic agenda.