Filho do Nobel

"Nobel Son" is one of the more entertaining movies of the year. It is an intriguing, quirky mix of quick-cutting, edgy direction; an outstanding cast; and some unusually literate text and sophisticated in-jokes for the who-is-doing-it (rather than who-done-it) genre.

Randall Miller is the MTV director, Miller and Jody Savin - each with a rather meager resume as a writer - are responsible for the winning script.

It's rare and fortuitous these days to walk into a theater to see a movie whose plot you know, and still be engaged and surprised. Such is the case here.

With deliberate exaggeration and advance apologies, I'd compare "Nobel Son" to "Sleuth" both for its tit-for-tat, now-you-see-it/now-you-don't continuous cliff-hanger nature, and the sense of amusement and fun even through some rather harrowing action. "Son" is *like* "Sleuth" in the true sense of that grossly abused word: having some of the same characteristics.

Only a great English stage actor such as Alan Rickman could make the silly cartoon figure of Eli Michaelson believable - and he does, becoming sort of likable in his unfettered loathsomeness. Michaelson is rotten to the core, antisocial beyond the worst case of Asperger's, plus a miserable human being - and the winner of the Nobel Prize in Chemistry.

Mary Steenburgen plays his long-suffering wife, a character with a vaguely delineated past as a storied criminal investigator. Never too far from her is Bill Pullman, a detective, former colleague, current shoulder to lean on. Bryan Greenberg is the son, who - as you must know from all the ads and buzz - is held for ransom, apparently by Shawn Hatosy, a young actor who more than holds his own against the veterans in the cast. Danny Devito and Ted Danson show up, unnecessarily but - in the case of Danson - not irritatingly. Eliza Dushku has a star-turn debut as City Hall (that's the name), a looney poet, painter, and fornicator (their word, not mine).

There is something inexplicable about the cinematography: everybody in the cast looks like hell, sans makeup, sans Vaseline-smeared lens, sans everything. Pullman wins the race to Showing All the Pores, pasty-white, as unattractive as possible, but the others - including the women - are not far behind. A new trend? Makeup crew on strike? Who knows? For sure it's distracting, but "Son" is too good to allow this stupid quirk to interfere.

Nobel Son is a labyrinthine clockwork plot that involves one of the trickiest, slickest heists since The Italian Job or the first and second Ocean's films, a con game with more twists and hairpin turns than a script by David Mamet on coke, and a theme of desire for revenge that seethes even more after dubious narrative about-faces. The heist and con game film and the revenge story are a surefire mix for me. But I felt like I was trying to watch a great heist movie at a rave party. Whether techno music is good or bad, it renders you a slave to its beat. But I wanted to be a slave to the movie's beat. It's difficult to do both. Hence, the film is a more difficult viewing than it needs to be.

As a philandering chemistry professor who as a laboriously detestable character drives the story by winning the Nobel Prize in Chemistry, Alan Rickman is the definite anchor for the ensemble cast of characters, all of whom are pawns in the script's scheme to weave the jazziest web the genre's seen in years. It could have easily achieved that goal were director Randall Miller contemplative enough to understand the effects of the audiovisual medium of film. There are not only sequences which require a much different kind of music, but there are several sequences which would be much more impacting to the tension of the unraveling story's pace without overscoring at all. Nearly every American genre film has sequences handled in the less effective way, but few of them soar into the depths of its extreme.

Rickman is the flagship but Mary Steenburgen is no less charming as his wife. A woman can be married to a man like Nobel Prize-winning chemist Eli Michaelson purely by being masochistic, deranged or in control of a deeply sophisticated feel for bitter sarcasm. But in spite of there being plenty of pleasant surprise in bit roles by Danny DeVito, Ernie Hudson and Bill Pullman as well, there isn't much room to talk about their performances, which are compartmentalized into roles that serve more as functions than characters to create a remorseless plot. Each character's occupation has much more to do with how they could come in handy to tie up loose ends than with who they are.

Nevertheless, this caper takes you for a turbulent excursion, because whether or not Randall Miller or his wife and co-writer Jody Savin have crafted a top-drawer entry into the con game genre, they remember that confidence tricks manipulate human weaknesses like selfishness, corruption and ego, as they are all things a con artist possesses himself, but also exploited are merits like honor, charity or a forthright belief in good faith on the part of the con artist.

The great movie reviewer, Gene Siskel, once said that the only way to evaluate a movie is to start by asking yourself what the creators of the movie intended ... what they intended here, and delivered, is a weird black comedy, filled with fine performances by exceptional actors, that never ever goes where you think it is going. Just when you expected something the movie goes another way. Is it perfect, of course not. Will you have a lot of fun if you just let it take you on its journey ... maybe not, but in that case you have no sense of humor at all, ... these actors clearly enjoyed playing these roles and delivering these lines ... they had fun too.

It's not stupendous, but it's very good, light dramatic load, softened by doses of sarcastic love and ironies, plot twits at every turn, fun, engaging, captivating ... I loved it ...

I was really looking forward to "Nobel Son". I was thinking, finally, an intelligent thriller that is going to focus on the characteristics of those found in the academic sciences. But I'm afraid that all I got was a jumbled mess that never really accomplished anything.

The son of a Nobel Prize-winning chemist is kidnapped for ransom. There are a lot of interesting ways to take this story. The main problem is, they take all of them. We have an opportunity to investigate what's really going on in the mind of the son, how has his father affected his life, why does the father live his life the way he does, who is really responsible for the kidnapping and why... . The ways to explore this story are endless, and instead of delving in whole-heartedly, all that came out was a jumbled mess that left me feeling frustrated with no invested knowledge in any part of the story. Another review said the problem was too many cooks. I second that, and will adapt the phrase from "too many cooks spoil the broth" to "too many writers spoil the story". Only two screenwriters were credited, but I'm willing to bet there were more with their hands in it.

The actors were all quite good, I'm sure. It's the characters that I'm more confused about. Whenever they presented a scene which echoed my experiences in the ivory tower of science, they usually followed that up with a scene that didn't make sense based on what we knew about the characters. Perhaps I was focusing too much on specifics, but I was continuously confused and frustrated by their characterization and story ideas. Too many writers, ideas, and lack of focus spoiled "Nobel Son".