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By Cole Smithey

‘Resurrecting the Champ’

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Rod Lurie (“The Contender”) puts another feather in his directing hat with an absorbing character study about a newspaper writer who takes a shortcut to success only to discover that, like the subject of his career-saving article, he is not the man he thought himself to be. Erik Kernan (Josh Hartnett) is a recently estranged sports reporter for the Denver Times whose prose lacks personality. But rather than take advantage of his demanding editor’s (Alan Alda) best efforts to develop his writing style, Erik furtively leverages his way into a Sunday magazine features position with an article about former boxing-great-turned-homeless-bum (Samuel L. Jackson). Hartnett and Jackson deliver career height performances that bristle with the sting of life lessons learned the hard way.

On his way home from covering a boxing event, Erik witnesses a group of college kids thrashing a homeless man, and intervenes to discover that the elderly vagrant is former boxing champ “Battling” Bob Satterfield. These days, the Champ’s prizefighting reputation periodically inspires young toughs to seek him out to boost their infantile egos by taunting him to fight. Convinced that he has stumbled into the story of a lifetime, Erik befriends the Champ, whom he visits for daily interviews when he isn’t spending time with his young son Teddy (Dakota Goyo) and trying to win back the affection of his co-worker/soon-to-be-ex-wife Joyce (Kathryn Morris).

The specter of Erik’s famous sports broadcaster father haunts him by the sound of his very name. No amount of ambition can remove the paternal blinders that hinder his progress in life. Erik is still searching for an individuality that he can own without having to fully commit. For Erik, the Champ represents a father figure, alter ego and meal ticket rolled into one. When Erik’s loving essay, about the rise and unremarkable fall of Bob Satterfield, launches him overnight into the moneyed realm of television sports broadcasting, he waffles at a contract offer from the network’s man-eating producer (Teri Hatcher) that comes with an unsubtle sexual overture.  

Screenwriters Michael Bortman and Allison Burnett adapted their idea from a magazine article by newspaper reporter J.R. Moehringer, and took liberties in crafting a story that addresses the phenomenon of disconnect between father figures and their sons, along with America’s atmosphere of media deception and hunger for fame. Unlike J.R. Moehringer’s real life article, that won him a Pulitzer Prize, Erik Kernan’s career insurance magnum opus turns out to be based on one very faulty premise. The public discovery sends Erik on a mission of eating humble pie and begging forgiveness from those closest to him. It also brings him closer to the Champ, upon whose identity he had hung his hopes. Erik’s lesson in humility and ethics causes him to come clean to his son about certain lies he has told in order to win the boy’s lasting respect. It’s in these scenes that Hartnett gives himself over completely to the role, and the effect is unmistakable.

“Resurrecting the Champ” is an understated movie about the insidious nature of public and private lies. At a time in American culture when nearly every “truth” presented in a public forum contains a heavy dose of fiction, it is restorative to see a character take accountability for his actions with the understanding that the situation demands. The cost of Erik’s mistake comes through in the eyes of his editor (beautifully played by Alda) and gives the audience a sense of propriety that we should all expect from the once-lofty newspapers that we read. There’s more to life than the pursuit of fortune and fame, or the pretense of either. Rod Lurie tries to revive common sense as a means to an end. He may not succeed completely, but he does make a convincing go at it. CV

‘Mr. Bean’s Holiday’

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In what Rowan Atkinson has called his last feature outing as the childish accidental prankster “Mr. Bean,” this bookend sequel to “Bean” (1997) is a highly enjoyable family comedy for every unadorned moment of Mr. Atkinson’s comic genius. The British, deep-but-squawky-voiced, Mr. Bean wins a church raffle for a vacation to the South of France that includes all of 200 euros and a digital mini-cam to record his holiday. Accompanied by an arsenal of goofy faces, high-water pants and a brown winter blazer, Mr. Bean leaves a trail of disaster everywhere he goes. Bean’s impromptu photo session with a fellow traveler, Russian film director Emil (Karel Roden), strands the man on a train platform away from his son Stepan (Max Baldry), who Mr. Bean must chaperone on the train to Cannes.

It’s impossible to overestimate Rowan Atkinson’s skills as a comic. The nerdy Oxford graduate draws effortlessly on the performance vocabularies of comedians like Buster Keaton and Jacques Tati (“M. Hulot’s Holiday”), while adding his own akimbo physicality to create a curious man hampered with the brain of a nine-year-old boy. Atkinson pays homage to Buster Keaton, as when Bean circumnavigates Paris in a straight line using a compass that leads him over park benches and traffic-filled streets.

There’s a signature “Bean” sequence in a fancy Parisian restaurant where the maitre d’ (Jean Rochefort) mistakenly seats Mr. Bean, and takes the liberty of bringing out a seafood platter consisting of giant shrimp and oysters. Bean proceeds to consume one of the large crustaceans — shell, claws, head and all-from the back end as a naturally grotesque act of buffoonery. He goes on to make a show for the dining room manager by pretending to enjoy the oysters that he secretly spills into a napkin before pouring its slimy contents into the open purse of a nearby patron, whose sticky cell phone soon rings.

The universally accessible camp amusement builds to a breaking point when Bean tries to cheer up the lonely little Stepan by making a host of rubbery faces that cost him a slap in the face from the cheeky lad. Atkinson’s painstaking choreography and unflappable timing draws laughs when Bean busks for money at an outdoor provincial market by dancing and mouthing lyrics to songs ranging from pop to opera. It’s one of the funniest sequences and taps into the depth of Atkinson’s physical burlesque.

“Mr. Bean’s Holiday” gains texture from the inclusion of simultaneous footage filmed on Mr. Bean’s video camera during the vacation. The recurring film-inside-a-film device shifts the road movie episodes to a subjective viewpoint that lets the audience in on Bean’s boyish mindset. Good use is made of Cannes as a properly pronounced destination where insufferable American arthouse director Carson Clay (Willem Dafoe) is premiering his self-produced, directed, written and acted, navel-gazing vehicle “Playback Time.” The humor wanes here primarily because Willem Dafoe is not a comic actor, but also because his character barely reacts to Mr. Bean’s outré shenanigans.

Rowan Atkinson’s humor, as a British-inflected vindictive mime, walks a fine line between irreverence, anarchy and innocence. As with the skits of Monty Python, there’s nothing highbrow about it, and yet there is such art and irony at play that the sophistication is unmistakable. “Mr. Bean’s Holiday” is an immediate classic because its comic traditions are so faithfully employed at every level of execution. There’s something Shakespearean in the way director Steve Bendelack and his ensemble join in celebrating a fresh approach to a comic heritage that Rowan Atkinson perfected while working with the BBC-produced television show “Not the Nine O’ Clock News.” What could be next, a Jackie Chan and Rowan Atkinson buddy picture where Atkinson is the martial artist? CV

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