jetwimp

Those who doubt the ability of cinema to delineate the inhuman will have their minds changed by this catastrophe of a film. Kenneth Branagh, doing a dogged but effective imitation of the film's director, Woody Allen, plays a self-obsessed would-be novelist circulating in the demimonde of Manhattan artistic chic. He is plagued with a pointless case of satyriasis; his incessantly propelling lust seems to have neither a emotional nor, weirdly enough, even a physical dimension. I thought of the shades circulating and moaning in the eight circle of Dante's hell. Humorless, solipsistic (a literary critic in the film uses that wonderful word to describe the character's writing), fretful, unfetching, he brings to mind the classic lament of the unrealized dweeb: `I'm not much, but I'm all I ever think about.' I found the film both sad and frightening, although it was intended to be neither. I also was reminded of the famous play of Sartre, although here the Huis Clos is all of Manhattan, rather than one room. I will mention only a single humiliating scene, that in which a hooker, teaching Judy Davis to administer oral sex, chokes on the banana serving as the instructional tool and has to be administered the Heimlich maneuver.

I'm sorry that it took 9/11 to overshadow this artistic train wreck, and to convince us that that city has both love and soul, and is populated not with Dantean shades sniggering as they lavish their emptiness on each other, but rather with real people and their attendant hopes and agonies. By contrast, all the characters in this film were nothing more than colliding oil slicks. Woody has enlisted the talents of some of the world's great actors, but to what end? Branagh is a consummate technician, and there is not a single false note in his American accent nor, indeed, in the speech of any other non-American native in the film, including Judy Davis. One should carefully compare Branagh's performance in this film, though, with that in the masterful 2001 tv film `The Conspiracy.' The subject there is the Wansee conference wherein the details of the final solution were hammered out. Branagh plays Oberstgruppenfuhrer Reinhard Heydrich, Head of the Security Police and Security Service, the architect of the master plan to rid Europe of its Jews. Powerful, charismatic, twinkling with irony, deeply frightening, Branagh's portrait of this ubermonster is flawless, and the contrast with the present performance suggests, disturbingly enough, that evil, at least artistically, may sometimes be more moral than vapidity.