FilmSnobby

Hm. THIS is what we've been missing, right? Another cinematic adaptation of a Jane Austen novel! And, by all means, let's adapt Austen's most obscure, least-read work: "Pride and Prejudice"!

Let's face it, Joe Wright's film has a lot going against it from the outset. I couldn't rouse myself to go see it when it was in theaters last year: the prospect of being utterly bored (ANOTHER Austen adaptation?) certainly encouraged the notion that I could wait to see it on a rainy afternoon at home. And the actual execution of the film hasn't entirely dispelled the boredom, as this material is so well-worn that you could almost recite it in your sleep. The cinephile can only think back with gratitude to the example set by Stanley Kubrick, who, after realizing that he couldn't get enough financing to make the film about Napoleon that he had wanted to make, turned to an almost-forgotten novel, "Barry Lyndon", by Thackeray. There are scores of 18th- and 19th century novelists whose works we've never read. Filmmakers: surprise us, for God's sake!

The good news is, Wright & Co. DO surprise us by making an adequately entertaining movie, despite the long odds. Much of the film's success has to do with Austen herself: stick with her (meaning, her themes, her interpretations of her characters, her narrative) and you'll be all right. Screenwriter Deborah Moggach pulls off a marvel of ruthless synthesis with her script. You feel that nothing is really left out; the highest points in the story are raised and illustrated with care, even if the richness of the details must perforce be excised. We're also grateful that Wright, Moggach, and their editors stick to their guns in terms of brevity. The fact is, a 3-hour movie would still be too short, and those rich details would still need to be cut -- therefore, it's eminently sensible that the filmmakers keep the length to just over 2 hours. The only plot element that seems to suffer from this otherwise praiseworthy effort of getting to the point is Elizabeth's flirtation with Wickham. Even if Wickham was always just a tool to get Lizzy's mind off of Darcy, he needs to be a bigger tool than what's evident in the five minutes of screen time the character is afforded here. In other words, he needs to be a real romantic possibility for Lizzy, and his lies about Darcy need to be deeply believed by not just her, but by us, as well. (Austen was a wicked plotter!) The romantic suspense gets lost, to say nothing of Austen's commentary on the predatory social climbers of her time.

All that remains are the performances. Matthew Macfadyen doesn't convince as a proud young grandee. He's morose enough, I suppose, but is also too clearly love-struck to fool Lizzy (and us) about his character and motives. Donald Sutherland as Mr. Bennet seems too sloppy and too amiable: we never get the sense of deeply-felt irritation which is at the root of Mr. Bennet's sardonic witticisms. Tom Hollander as Mr. Collins affords a pleasant surprise, investing this character -- too often hammed-up as a slimy buffoon -- with a fussy little dignity and even a certain amount of decency. (Austen had always implied that if he was good enough for Ms. Lucas, then surely WE can tolerate him.) And two of Great Britain's grandest actresses, Brenda Blethyn and Judi Dench as Mrs. Bennet and The Lady Catherine De Bourg respectively, are so well-suited for their roles as to render pointless any discussion of their portrayals: they're both perfect, obviously.

The revelation here, what makes this movie ultimately worth watching, is Keira Knightley in the lead role. Let it be said at once that a Star is born. Ms. Knightley displays a screen magnetism that heretofore had only been hinted at, for one thing; for another, she provides her interpretation with just the right admixture of tenderness, intelligence, and steel. Is she too young for the part? Actually, no: Elizabeth is 22 in the novel, as I recall; Knightley was about 20 during filming. (Her tender age makes her performance all the impressive!) Critics have complained about her girlishness, the giggling, and so on, but I for one thought that Jennifer Ehle from what women the world over call the "Colin Firth Mini-Series" produced by A&E came across too often as an experienced wife of a dozen years with children playing in the backyard. Knightley is far more plausible as an inexperienced young woman just past 20 who is nonetheless smart enough and tough enough to withstand the interrogations of the fearsome Lady Catherine. It IS possible for one of literature's greatest feminist characters to be YOUNG, just as Austen wrote her.

5 stars out of 10.

(Firstly, I'd like to thank those who've asked to me to continue reviewing. Busy life and all, what can I say. Anyway, here you go.)

Alex Gibney's documentary *Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room* was probably made too soon, considering what I've been reading in the "New York Times" . . . which is that Kenneth Lay and Jeffrey Skilling have excellent prospects of dodging major jail time (I'm writing this 4/29/06). Also, the documentary was completed before Enron's accomplice (well, one of them), accounting firm Arthur Andersen, managed to get the Supreme Court to reverse on a technicality a lower court's successful prosecution of them. Meaning, it's a little too soon for mouthing I-told-you-so's from a scenic plateau while peering down on all the hubris-racked executives. Tsk-tsk all you like -- I prophesy minimal accountability from the jackals who operated Enron. Do you think that one of the pipe-line workers featured in the film is really going to get his $300,000 401(k) back? Dream on, idealists!

In any case, *Enron* makes a convincing, if not exactly fresh, case against the deregulation of essential societal needs such as gas, electricity, and broadband, among other things. The documentary asks Americans a fundamental question: Is it okay with you if companies make mind-boggling profits from services you need to get you through your daily life? As a corollary, I'd ask a few more questions: why is it okay that other utilities AREN'T routinely privatized, such as water? Sewers? Road construction? Police and fire? Many "public services" and utilities USED to be privatized many years ago, of course -- what makes gas and electricity different?

An infinite amount of money is the answer. Gibney tells an age-old tale here about the inevitable tendency of wealth to pathologically concentrate itself in the hands of compulsive sociopaths. Blah blah blah -- not a lot new here, folks. I'm not sure we really NEEDED a documentary telling us that Lay, Skilling, and Fastow harbored a King Midas complex -- methinks this was already self-evident from the news of the past 5 or 6 years. The psychoanalysis offered by many of the talking heads (two of whom wrote the book on which this film is based) is in the worst sort of Leon Edel manner: as trite as it is unrevealing. We learn that Skilling took a coterie of his top executives and other pals on "extreme adventures" such as dirt-biking trips in order to overcome, collectively, what the writers suppose is a nerd-complex.

Who cares? The meat of the film -- not touched on NEARLY enough, by my lights -- is how the very nexus of power in this nation, from the banking firms on Wall Street to their servants in state and federal governments, enables and even depends on the pathological greed of bad boys such as Lay & Co. If it makes you feel patriotic, you can call this, as the filmmakers do, the "dark side" of the American Dream, but I aver that such behavior IS the American Dream. Our country depends on organizations like Enron to do its dirty work (i.e., enrich the clever at the expense of the not-so-clever, fund the campaigns of politicians, et al.). When we see more than 90 investment firms sign on to the clearly unethical scams of Andy Fastow, we're reminded that our nation was founded by a bunch of rebels, criminals, and other glamorous types. Spare me the encomiums about the Good People in the Heartland of Kansas -- they never ran things in this country. Andy Fastow is the culmination of America itself. Deal with it.

The movie's hottest stretch is in dealing with how Enron's traders made calls to power-plant operators in California: "Hey, can you provide us with an incident? We need you to shut down." "Okay," is the response. And thus energy prices skyrocketed, making millions for Enron and nearly bankrupting California. But this is really bigger than Enron, isn't it? The larger point for the power-brokers in Washington and their energy company masters was that an elected governor who was unsympathetic to deregulation became the fall-guy for one company's skulduggery. An ex-movie actor, as compliant a puppet as you could please, replaced the governor . . . BY POPULAR DEMAND, via a voter recall! All of which puts the lie to Lincoln's hopeful observation that you can't fool ALL of the people, ALL of the time. Oh, yes you can.

This documentary is not really illuminating for the perceptive folks out there, but it is compelling in a mean sort of way, rather like the figures it centers around. 4 stars out of 10.

. . . but then, didn't Peckinpah more or less "re-direct" *The Searchers*, over and over and over again? Most of the elements of the "revisionist Western" are already here, in 1956: a true anti-hero as portrayed by John Wayne; the taste for mindless violence exhibited by most of the characters; the bald-faced presentation of racism in the Old West, and how the historical representation of this fact serves as an indictment on American society as a whole. This movie influenced nearly everyone in its wake: Peckinpah, obviously, but also Coppola (cf. *Patton*), Scorsese (cf. almost his entire oeuvre), Paul Schrader, Sergio Leone (no duh), Tarantino, etc. etc. *The Searchers* still holds up today, but it has a few faults -- not niggling ones, either -- that prevent it, in my view, from being a thoroughly satisfying masterpiece.

Ford's style is bolder here than usual. The film announces itself as a determinedly make-believe affair right after the opening credits, when a huge title-card informs us that the setting is "TEXAS, 1868", and the first shot we see is of Monument Valley, Arizona, through an opened door of a homesteader's cabin. Ford plays around with locales, weather, and even day and night: one moment Wayne and sidekick Jeffrey Hunter trod listlessly through the Arizona desert, and in the next cut they're bundled up in winter furs amidst the snow of Montana or who-knows-where. Sunlight and moonlight seem to be interchangeable, even within the context of one sequence. Ford had apparently grown weary of natural realism, perhaps even of the business of making movies (or simple ones, at least). The film is self-consciously epic, almost to a self-parodying degree. The usual elements of a Ford film -- the tough guy, the tenderfoot who worships the tough guy, the heehawing comic relief, white actors pretending to be Indians, the wearying vistas of Monument Valley itself, are all bombastically exaggerated in *The Searchers*. Even the plot, which is nothing more or less than a man's years-long search, up and down the entire North American continent, for his niece after she has been kidnapped by the Comanches, is indicative of overstatement.

What prevents the film from becoming a baroque failure or an accidental art-house oddity is the presence of John Wayne as the racist ex-Confederate soldier Ethan Edwards. This is Wayne's best role, and he gives it the best performance of his career. In fact, I used to like this film somewhat less than I do now, but several viewings of Wayne's work here have won me over to the film as a whole. Perhaps my own increasing age has helped me to empathize with the crusty old reactionary "Uncle Ethan", a man who has lived long enough to allow life's bitter disappointments to calcify his soul. In any event, it's a magnetic, compelling performance. Wayne is never scarier here than when he laughs at something: even his mirth is aggressive and hateful. Frankly, there is nothing -- not even in *Straw Dogs* -- that compares to the joyous and evil glint in Wayne's eyes when, after a member of the rescue party desecrates the grave of a dead brave, Wayne says, "Why stop there?" and commences to fire bullets into the dead Indian's eyes. Or when Wayne says he'll keep going after the Comanches "just as sure as the turning of the Earth." Or when Wayne commences slaughtering buffalo so that the Comanches will have little to eat in winter. I'm rather shocked that Ford convinced Wayne to take this role on: it's a near-repudiation of everything Wayne believed in. By which I mean, Wayne was always the GOOD guy. In a typical Wayne movie, his character would say to a guy planning to shatter a dead Indian's skull, "Hey, never mind that -- we got work to do." Not Ethan. He LIKES that sort of thing.

Thank God for Wayne, because the rest of the cast -- with the exception of a spirited Vera Miles as Hunter's long-suffering fiancée -- is well-nigh atrocious. Jeffrey Hunter does not cut the mustard as Martin. (Too bad James Dean was already dead.) In fact, he's so bad here that he drags my rating down 2 stars by himself. Natalie Wood as the kidnapped niece, dressed in face-paint and fringed Comanche gear, is no paean to credibility, either. But the guy playing "Mose" is so annoying as to encourage one to hit the fast-forward button. I'm glad Ford found this sort of retarded, heehawing hayseed bit funny, but that's no solace for the rest of us. I put up with Andy Devine in *Stagecoach* mostly because the rest of the cast wouldn't let him finish a sentence, thereby minimizing the damage. No such luck with "Mose".

7 stars out of 10.