Smoke

If you were ever to imagine Harvey Keitel if he'd never acted, this is what he would be doing. The quintessential "cool", Harvey is at his most human in this role as a cigar shop owner in Brooklyn. Showing his tender side, he has hired a 'slow, mentally impaired' local from the neighborhood to sweep the pavement. His shop is a place where people with a revolving interest of Cigars, go to hang out and talk about life, love, and bullshit. It is the epicentral natural dialogue through which each character speaks that makes this movie so warm, humorous, and incredible. A great movie, 5 stars all around. -Al

The characters are genuine, funny, sensitive, tragic... just human. They are sympathetic with their small weaknesses and their daily problems. The movie gives a realistic description of the daily life of ordinary people in Brooklyn.

Brooklyn has the star role. In fact the movie seems like a declaration of love to this city, although when compared to Woody Allen's "Manhattan", the approach is completely different.

The message is in a way surprising (maybe because of my European bias): Even in this money driven, rough, fast living, time-is-money, urban and individualistic environment there is a lot of love, friendship and humanity. Humanity means also that we do things which eventually do not make very much sense, are not logical and which may be very emotional. Smoking belongs to such activities. It is an activity which needs a work break. It gives us an opportunity for a stop and for starting rethinking issues. Therefore the small cigar shop, which appears like an island within a stormy ocean, like the antipode to the bustle environment.

Sometimes some of the hurry enters the shop, but the clocks seem to tick differently there and at the end everything calms down. I like this movie.

Auggie Wren (Harvey Keitel) owns a Brooklyn smoke shop where regulars hang out. He takes a photograph of his shop from the streets everyday at the same time. Paul Benjamin (William Hurt) is surprised to see his dead wife Ellen in one of the photos. She was pregnant when she was killed. Rashid (Harold Perrineau) saves Paul from on-coming traffic. In return, Paul lets Rashid stay with him and starts mentoring the young man. Rashid reconnects with his father Cyrus Cole (Forest Whitaker), who lost his arm and love in a car accident, without revealing their true relationship. Auggie's one-eyed ex Ruby McNutt (Stockard Channing) asks him for help with their pregnant daughter Felicity (Ashley Judd). Paul is assigned by the NY Times to write a Christmas story and Auggie gives him one.

I love the idea of Auggie's photographs. There is something compelling and poetic about it. These characters are interesting. Some of the stories are more compelling than others. The cast led by Hurt and Keitel are doing solid work. These lives each have their own stories but I'm not sure that every plot finishes. It's like Auggie's photographs. Every one is unique and has a story to tell but it is the congregate where the true beauty is revealed.

"It's such a sad old feeling, the fields are soft and green, it's memories that I'm stealing, but you're innocent when you dream, when you dream, you're innocent when you dream" ---Tom Waits

Smoke is a very difficult film to describe because it does not unfold with a coherent narrative, but rather with slice-of-life vignettes about chance, communication, and inter-connectedness. Author Paul Auster and director Wayne Wang (The Joy Luck Club) worked on the story for years before it reached the screen and the collaboration produces a highly literate, novelistic cinema that is divided into separate chapters, each elaborating a different character. I have seen this small masterpiece many times, but I keep watching it because I love its celebration of the simple pleasures of life: friendships, good conversation, and, of course, smoking a good cigar. Smoke is not a complex or experimental film, just a beautiful and simple delineation of humanity.

Harvey Keitel plays Auggie Wren, the owner of a small cigar store in Brooklyn. An amateur photographer as well as a raconteur of tall tales, Auggie has taken one photograph a day from the street corner outside his store every day for the past 14 years. "People say you have to travel to see the world,'' Auggie says. "Sometimes I think that if you just stay in one place and keep your eyes open, you're going to see just about all that you can handle.'' When a friend comments that all the snapshots look alike, Auggie points out the differences: the light, the season, and the look on people's faces. It's all a matter of slowing down, Auggie says, being in present time, and observing what is in front of you.

One of the store's regular customers is writer Paul Benjamin (William Hurt) who hasn't published a novel since his wife died a few years ago in an incident of street violence. When a young Black man, Rashid Cole, (Harold Perrineau Jr.) saves Paul's life by pulling him away from on an oncoming car, Paul offers him a place to sleep. The lives of the two become intertwined in the young man's encounter with some robbers and in his search for his father, brilliantly played by Forrest Whitaker. When Auggie's former lover, Ruby (Stockard Channing), shows up, she tells Auggie he has a pregnant daughter (Ashley Judd) that now needs his help. These incidents come together in a powerful, fully realized conclusion.

Although Smoke has its moments of high drama, it is mostly a low-key, slice-of-life type of film that depicts events in life as happening for a purpose, not as random or chance occurrences. The characters are not "movie colorful", but ordinary down-to-earth people brought to realization by a flawless ensemble cast. The film reaches a sublime conclusion in a tender Christmas story narrated by Keitel and supported by Tom Waits' haunting song "Innocent When You Dream". Everyone ends up in a better place than when they started, including myself as viewer.

Though the writing is very "stagey", the acting is fantastic all around. The more you allow yourself to get into this movie, the more you will enjoy it. The soundtrack insidiously lulls the viewer into a state where the everyday is made beautiful.

This movie is full of overlooked performances by some of today's best actors, including Forest Whitaker, Harold Perrineau Jr, (who most people know from the OZ HBO series), and Ashley Judd, whose takes one of the smallest roles in the movie but develops an extraordinary character.

Harvey Keitel and William Hurt have a dynamic in each scene that shows the true brilliance of each actor. Stockard Channing plays a character that could easily have been overacted with a style and realism that engage the viewer.

Certainly a movie you have to put yourself into, but you won't be disappointed if you do.