by MATTHEW HAYS and JOANNE LATIMER

The Pianist

Legendary filmmaker Roman Polanski walked away with the Palme D’Or at Cannes last spring, and it’s not entirely hard to tell why. This, his effort at recounting one man’s horrific tale of surviving the Holocaust during the Nazi occupation of Poland, is pretty earth shattering stuff. Adrien Brody stars in the lead, as a Jewish pianist who, like many in Poland’s Jewish community, hoped the Nazis were just a passing fad. Clearly, they weren’t, and this film illustrates in some detail the ways in which the Nazis began to strip Jews of their rights while preparing to mass murder the lot of them.

I’ve often admired Brody as an actor, but here he proves himself beyond any reasonable doubt. You can taste his anxiety as he witnesses the brutal murders of people around him, as he, his family and all Jews are forcibly moved into a ghetto, ready to be shuffled onto trains headed for the camps. The film also shows Brody hiding out, then made incredibly vulnerable to the people who could well take advantage of his situation. I’m not sure who had the bright idea of releasing this film on Christmas day - it’s a movie that’s emotionally exhausting. (MH)

Evelyn

Lo and behold, Pierce Brosnan, a highly commercially successful James Bond but an awfully plastic one, can actually act. Well, sort of. Here, he plays maudlin as a sweet Irish daddy (based on a true character and story) whose wife leaves him. After Irish social services catch wind that he’s bringing up the three wee ones on his own, they do what social services types always do in movies like this, they move in and forcibly institutionalize the kiddies.

Much thickly-accented hysteria follows, and Brosnan must learn to stay away from the booze, groom himself properly (which includes getting new shoes), and beg some high-minded lawyers (Stephen Rea and Aidan Quinn) for help in the courtroom. The lawyers think they don’t have a case, but try anyway. They lose the case, but we’re only 36 minutes into the film at this point, so that means there must be another way to get the kids back. Sure enough, there is: challenge the law itself, using the Irish constitution to back your case up! I felt almost like I was in an episode of Schoolhouse Rock, expanded to feature length.

Evelyn is a great story, though obviously resting on its You-Are-Watching-Reality laurels a wee bit too heavily. If only someone could make a film along these lines without the lapses into appallingly cutesy moments, the inevitable descent into the severely sentimental (written when the screenwriters themselves had either pounded back too many or were intensely hung over), and the beyond-obvious climactic victory. Really, you can’t actually believe I was giving anything away by saying that, can you? One glance at the soft-focus poster image says it all.

A final note: At the Toronto Film Fest in September, I sat in a round table with Mr. Brosnan himself and several other journalists. Brosnan tried to steer clear of James Bond questions while pumping up Evelyn; he actually seemed like a fairly decent sort. I certainly felt for him when he was asked a series of questions about his own childhood by one of the journalists in the room, from a gentleman from a midwestern newspaper that shall remain nameless. Brosnan recounted the cruelty of his religious teachers during a sometimes-brutal upbringing in his native Ireland. “Would you put your own children in similar schools?” said journalist asked. Brosnan paused, incredulous, and clearly fed up with the festival circus/meat market atmosphere. “That’s not a question,” he responded, refusing to dignify the boneheaded inquiry. It’s moments like that one that make you realize why stars get so sick of the press. (MH)

Talk to Her

Fresh from his ’99 Oscar winner, All About My Mother, queer Spanish drama queen Pedro Almodovar returns with another triumphant bit of cinema.

Artfully shaping the melodrama in his own entirely unique form, Almodovar spins a stranger-than-life yarn about two women in comas (one a dancer, the other a bullfighter) and the men who take care of them. This is one of those films where you really don’t want to give too much of the plot away, but suffice it to say that nothing is really as it seems in the beginning, and the way that Almodovar manages to turn and twist our expectations of our characters is downright magical.

Again on screen we witness Almodovar’s distinctive, kinky way of manipulating his characters and plot, interweaving the melodrama with a mystery, a romance (or several of them, rather), bitter melancholy and a Tennessee Williamsesque potboiler. This is top-notch Almodovar bravado, not to be missed; my favourite sequence involves a scene in a film-within-a-film, in which a man shrinks to the size of a small rodent but still attempts to pleasure his wife. What other director could have dreamed up this vision? (MH)

Rabbit-Proof Fence

Another tearjerker, though this one mercifully manages to avoid many of the pratfalls that Evelyn suffers from. Based on one of those almost-too-difficult-to-believe-it’s-true true stories about three aboriginal girls who escape from their detention home and return, by foot, to their actual home in the outback. The shocker is, these girls walked hundreds of miles and managed to evade the authorities while doing so.

Kenneth Branagh plays the misguided Aussie who thinks all aboriginals should simply be placed in camps at a young age and “reprogrammed” for existence within the general populace. It’s pretty heartwrenching stuff, especially when you consider that this policy wasn’t entirely done away with until about 1970.

The three young girls march along, using the rabbit-proof fence as a guideline for getting home. They find help along the way from various strangers, some aboriginal, some white, their lengthy journey making them into causes célèbres while en route. The film is punctuated by an epilogue that features one of the actual women who made the trek, giving the story a Schindler’s List-like kick that underlines everything we’ve just witnessed. It’s a fitting touch from Phillip Noyce, the director who’s staged a pretty remarkable comeback after some lacklustre studio projects in the past few years. (MH)

Antwone Fisher

As predictable as gravity, Antwone Fisher is the first film directed by two-time Oscar-winning actor Denzel Washington. It’s a slow plod through the (real) life of one Antwone Fisher, a hotheaded young seaman in the U.S. navy with a chip on his shoulder. Fisher (Derek Luke) is sent to see the naval shrink (Washington) for a psychiatric evaluation. They square off, with no memorable one-liners, and we learn that Antwone survived the creepy horrors of foster care. The problem with Antwone Fisher is that Fisher isn’t nearly hotheaded enough. The chip on this shoulder really isn’t that big. His posture, vocabulary and good manners may be standard-issue U.S. navy camouflage, but they also mark him as an unlikely flunkey from the good shrink’s couch. Fisher is an exemplary protégé. How boring is that? Flashbacks to Fisher’s foster home carry the weight of importance here, but even they have the toothlessness of high-minded intentions. Yes, Antwone Fisher had a rough life. Let’s see it. (JL) •

Catch Me If You Can

If you have a fetish for film credits, you’ll drink in the first few minutes of the latest chase movie from Steven Spielberg, Catch Me If You Can. The retro, Pink Panther-like credits are animated, with someone - someone, you imagine, as cool as Frank Sinatra - snapping their fingers in the background. It’s stylized in an unpretentious way that sets expectations soaring for the rest of the film.

There’s no time to think about being disappointed once the film starts: Spielberg cranks up the forward momentum and never lays off. Catch Me isn’t overly arty or deep, but it has the entertaining spin of a seasoned showman. There are an allowable number of smart-ass cinema references and Spielberg doesn’t abuse the voice-over to tell his tale. It’s high-concept, to use a loathsome industry term, and it’s highly satisfying.

“Everybody runs,” was the catchy sound bite from Minority Report, Spielberg’s last film. It also applies to Catch Me, a set piece from the 1960s about a real-life con artist named Frank Abagnale (Leonardo DiCaprio) who cashed fraudulent cheques worth over $4-billion (U.S.) before he turned 19 years of age.

Devastated over the bankruptcy of his father’s store, Frank tried to rebuild the family fortune as a “paperhanger,” which is FBI code for cheque fraud, we learn. His motive is to amass a fortune to save his parents’ destroyed marriage. His mother, a war bride from France who seems doubly damned as a European smoker and adulteress, leaves home to land another rich husband. Frank flees and falls into crime, quite naturally.

This is a great role for DiCaprio. He glides through each scene with the right amount of confidence and dumb luck. Playing a con artist comes easily to an actor. I suspect it hits close to home - who wouldn’t want to celebrate and confess their professional lives as impersonators?

Frank passes himself off as a commercial pilot, after learning how to forge an airline pay cheque. Then the FBI puts Agent Hanratty (Tom Hanks) on his trail. This is when the chase movie becomes a buddy movie. They forge a crook-lawman bond over three years of cat and mouse, while the slippery paperhanger humiliates Hanratty on the job. Frank becomes a doctor, a lawyer and even moves to France before the law closes in.

Hanks is a tad boring in this uptight role, but it’s expected. It’s a Tom Hanks role, probably written for him. What isn’t expected is the touching performance of Christopher Walken as Frank’s lovable, big-hearted dad. He’s a Rotarian in this film, not a whack-job subbing for Dennis Hopper.

As DiCaprio delights in the self-referential payoff of playing a con artist, Spielberg knows the film director has to stay legit. We will turn on him if we feel cheated by anyone but Frank. The story’s solid. That’s why Catch Me is so good. Everybody runs, except Spielberg. (JL)

All of the above films open on Christmas Day, except
Antwone Fisher, which opens on New Year’s Day

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