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‘Man of the Year’

By Cole Smithey

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Writer/director Barry Levinson (“Rain Man”) squanders an attempt to stir debate over Republican voter fraud that marred the 2000 and 2004 presidential elections, and that threatens to cloud the upcoming 2008 balloting, with an imploding satire about a television comedian who runs for President of the United States.

Tom Dobbs (Robin Williams) is a freethinking political talk show comic, a la Jon Stewart, who takes up a challenge from his fan base to run for President as an independent. Dobbs relies on a grassroots movement and refuses to run an expensive television ad campaign that would obligate him to special interest groups. What starts out as a promising political satire quickly sinks in a quagmire of over-leveraged dramatic subplots and an ending that neutralizes the film’s apparent thematic intentions.

Levinson applies light brush strokes to the unholy unification of Republican and Democratic parties during the film’s thematic centerpiece sequence when Dobbs co-opts a presidential debate as a bully pulpit for disseminating his dissenting ideas. Dobbs walks out from behind the lectern to give a communal smackdown to the entire debate process by enthusiastically upbraiding his rivals for disguising their equally divided relationships with the oil companies that support them.

Eleanor Green (Laura Linney) works as a programmer for Delacroy, a computer company responsible for making the new electronic voter machines used in the election. Eleanor sets herself up as a target when she discovers a glitch in the voting program that favors double letter patterns, and sends an e-mail to the CEO of the suddenly prosperous company advising him of the problem. Her letter is dutifully ignored, and Tom Dobbs erroneously “wins” the election to the chagrin of his cocky opponents and to Eleanor’s dismay.

In her apolitical heart, Eleanor feels responsible enough for the voting catastrophe to personally divulge the circumstance to president-elect Dobbs. The higher-ups at Delacroy are one step ahead and send a thug over to furtively drug Eleanor at home. She’s fired the next day after suffering a drug-induced freak-out in the employee cafeteria. Even after successfully introducing herself to Dobbs, and opening up romantic possibilities with the political prankster-turned-politician, Eleanor inexplicably loiters for an eternity before revealing the fallacy of his electoral win. The movie stalls out as Linney’s miscast role, and the film’s shift away from comedy toward a political thriller takes its toll.

Publicly smeared as a drug addict by Delacroy’s public relations flack Alan Stewart (underplayed by Jeff Goldblum), Eleanor takes refuge in a motel while Dobbs contemplates a crisis decision that will verify the film’s premise that “change isn’t always a good thing.”

Like Levinson’s previous swipe at politics (“Wag The Dog”), “Man of the Year” is a hollow concept movie that never dives to its ostensible depths for fear of drowning in the murky narrative ocean of its complex circumstances. It’s a misleading movie on several levels because it reneges on its promise as a comedy and as a political satire. There are some great laughs in the first third before the movie dodges the inevitable implications of its troubling subject. Delacroy is obviously a stand-in for Diebold, whose trail-exempt voting machines have wrought untold disaster on America’s democratic process. If Levinson wanted to crack into the mood behind such corruption, he needed to revisit the gallows humor of political satires like “M*A*S*H” or “Slaughterhouse Five” that witnessed the desolation of liberty with a keen eye on the absurdity behind such cruelty. CV

'The Science of Sleep'

By Jonathan Kiefer

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Finally the French have repaid us for Jerry Lewis. They're tag-teaming now, with Jean-Pierre Jeunet and Michel Gondry periodically floating bittersweet, heart-shaped confections across the Atlantic, knowing full well that American movie audiences will gobble them up upon arrival. We believe our gluttony has to do with emotional vulnerability, but beyond that we can't explain it; we're just transfixed. Apparently, something has been found in translation.

That's sort of how it is with the young lovers in Gondry's latest, "The Science of Sleep," for whom courtship equals the quest for a common idiom. Stéphane (Gael García Bernal), an aspiring artist and inventor, finds himself crushing on his neighbor (Charlotte Gainsbourg), in spite and because of how tricky it is for him to talk to her. To begin with, his French is lousy. More importantly, though, he lives in his own little dream world. The movie wonders whether she'll move in with him there.

Fresh from Mexico and his father's funeral, Stéphane hasn't been in Paris for years, but his mother (Miou-Miou) has lured him back with the well-preserved sanctuary of his boyhood bedroom (complete with spaceship-embroidered blankie) and the promise to hook him up with a creatively satisfying job. As it turns out, the job's a bore, but he suspects there's some creative satisfaction to be had from hooking up with the girl across the hall.

She's an artist, too, and her name is Stéphanie. Soon enough she's also an enthusiastic partner for haphazard DIY art projects and a featured guest on "Stéphane TV," the one-man variety show playing nightly in her admirer's dreams. It's all fine, fun stuff; the problem, predictably, has to do with reality. Though he swims and flies freely among the cotton clouds and cellophane streams of his unconscious, Stéphane hobbles in his actual world, bogged down by literalism and semantics. His idea of nightlife is an animated wonderland of miniature cardboard cities and hand-sewn stuffed animals - beyond whose borders he suffers a drastic, uproarious ineloquence of self-expression. So, jauntily, the namesakes trade confessions, affections, hostilities and other emotional upheavals. Stéphanie's patience thins.

Gondry has a knack for the halting attraction between creative inner lives, those hairpin turns of mood from mopey to magical. What's more, for rendering the heart-on-sleeve pop fantasias of imaginative but stubbornly infantile protagonists, he is without a current rival. Recall, for example, that he has some Björk videos to his credit, not to mention two other fiction features, "Human Nature" and "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind." It does matter, but not much, that those films were written by Charlie Kaufman and that Gondry's on his own as the screenwriter of "The Science of Sleep." Without Kaufman he's still self-involved but less self-serious - and also less plotty, freer for better and worse to drift along his streams of consciousness, spotting sub-surface flashes and panning for whatever precious ores they might signify.

Well, there's no shortage of preciousness here. The astute or cynical viewer likely will stop gobbling at least long enough to notice that most dreams aren't as self-consciously dreamlike - or as whimsically music-video-like - as the average Michel Gondry picture. At least the reveries of Gondry's stop-motion escapism, though inevitably grating, resist the tyranny of lifeless CGI.

More powerful than even the most elegant narrative festoons, though, are "The Science of Sleep"'s many mad-funny little moments of truth - most of which come directly from Bernal. With a performance so charming and at ease and comically sharp, he may be the best lead actor Gondry ever can hope for. His Stéphane, though nearly pathologically callow, is also credibly, sweetly yearning, and that's what it takes to discover a lover's language in the frontier between dreams and delusions. He deserves better than the movie's cravenly ambiguous ending, its way of seeming hyper-articulate without saying much.

Should Gondry wish to consider future collaborators, a shrewd choice would be Miranda July - not just because a female foil could enrich his work, but also because July, who wrote and directed "Me and You and Everyone We Know," already has mastered what he seeks: a filmic vernacular of relationships as collaborative creative acts, equally subject to enchantments and rude awakenings. CV

'The Departed'

By Cole Smithey

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After directing two massive historical epics ("Gangs of New York" and "The Aviator") Martin Scorsese approaches screenwriter William Monahan's highly polished adaptation of the Hong Kong police thriller "Infernal Affairs" with an exhilarating fluency that combines flawless visual compositions and informed musical cues with an unbridled sense of dark humor. Monahan reconfigures the setting of the original story to take place during the '80s-era battle between the "Staties" and Boston's Irish mob.

Leonardo DiCaprio plays Billy Costigan, a rookie undercover cop in South Boston, where he infiltrates the Irish mob run by Frank Costello (played with volcanic energy by Jack Nicholson). Billy's problem with maintaining Frank's unraveling do-or-die trust escalates while he attempts to uncover the identity of Frank's secret mole, Colin Sullivan (Matt Damon), inside the Special Investigations Unit of the police department under the cool-headed Captain Queenan (well-played by Martin Sheen) and his hard-ass assistant Sergeant Dignam (Mark Wahlberg).

Billy and Colin are opposite sides of the same coin. Each man carries intense internal struggles with his peculiar demons. Colin is profoundly loyal to Frank for mentoring him since childhood in the ways of Boston's mean streets. He's on the "fast track" within the Special Investigations Unit, even if the canny Sergeant Dignam doesn't trust him. Inside of the film's unity-of-opposites is a classic race-against-time scenario wherein two similar yet different men must bring down the other one before those close to them discover their particular ploy.

The secretly impotent Colin tells his police psychiatrist girlfriend Madolyn (Vera Farmiga), "Honesty is not synonymous with truth." It's a defiantly hypocritical viewpoint that defines the philosophy of the Bush administration, and de facto the attitude of a country so immured in corruption that it cannot fathom the depth of the crisis. Scorsese smuggles in some other subtle social commentary when Billy says, "It's a nation of rats." The rodent imagery haunts the film's artistic tableau that comes on the heels of an unthinkable spree of intensifying brutality.

"The Departed" involves interconnecting moral, ethical and physical crises that are passed along as if from rats spreading rabies. Nearly every character, with the exception of Captain Queenan and Sergeant Dignam, are infected with betrayal. As the only female character in the movie, Madolyn sets the bar low on her ideals of marriage and career when she furtively dates Billy, her tightly wound psychiatry patient, in order to satisfy physical needs not being met at home with Colin. She soon becomes pregnant, and the filmmakers plant a soft question about the true identity of the child's father.

The subtextual matter of fatherhood is addressed in several different pairings throughout the story. Frank is a central father figure to both Colin and Billy. Jack Nicholson taps into his great big bag of inspiration to create an unforgettable movie gangster that is at once colorful, pragmatic and energetic. At the other end of the spectrum is the tightly knit duty-bound relationship between Captain Queenan and Sergeant Dignam. Martin Sheen (Queenan) sets an unruffled example that Mark Wahlberg's character (Dignam) appropriately ignores. These are men who aspire to greatness within the context of their duty-bound jobs and whose priorities don't overlap.

Scorsese continues to grow as a director. He's insanely interested in making sure that the composition of every frame contains exact pieces of narrative information and a visual balance. Cinematographer Michael Ballhaus ("GoodFellas") does an outstanding job, as does Scorsese's ever-precise editor Thelma Schoonmaker. Martin Scorsese is a master director in every sense of the word, and with the help of his ensemble he has made a masterpiece of modern cinema, complete with a triple climax ending. CV

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