'Brigsby Bear' and 'Dave Made A Maze'

It's unusual that two movies, both of which risk silliness and both of which achieve some success, open during the same week. But that's the case with Brigsby Bear and Dave Made A Maze, both of which arrive in Denver and presumably around the country this week.

Brigsby Bear, the more engaging of the two movies, tells the story of a young man who was kidnapped as an infant. Kyle Mooney plays James, a man who's freed from captivity after 25 years.

James wasn't physically abused by his kidnappers; instead, he was isolated from everyone else by two people (Mark Hammil and Jane Adams) who claimed to be his parents and who evidently told him that the world was too contaminated for him to venture beyond their well-sealed home.

During his years of captivity, James became totally absorbed in the world of Brigsby Bear, a TV show that he watches on videotapes which his faux father, who dons a gas mask when he leaves the family compound, brings home.

Clunky looking and amusingly amateurish, Brigsby Bear introduces James to a complex fantasy universe that encompasses a variety of different worlds and villains.

There's no reason why the now-grown James should continue his interest in something as child-centered as Brigsby Bear, a series that wouldn't cut it even during the less sophisticated 1970s.

But the totally isolated James no longer makes any distinction between Brigsby's world and his own.

The movie shifts gears when the local police -- led by an amiable detective (Greg Kinnear) -- liberate James. He's returned to his biological parents (Matt Walsh and Michaela Watkins. They try to bring James up to speed about a world that has passed him by.

When James's interest in Brigsby doesn't subside, his parents decide that he ought to see a therapist (Claire Danes). She tries -- without much success -- to convince James to abandon Brigsby and drop in on the "real" world once in a while.

But James persists, so much so that he and a new pal (Jorge Lendeborg Jr.) decide to continue making Brigsby Bear videos. James wants to fulfill the only destiny he can imagine, bringing the series to its conclusion.

James becomes author, filmmaker, and star (in a bear suit) of the Brigsby Bear show.

Look, all of this sounds a bit ridiculous, but director Dave McCary, working from a screenplay by Mooney and Kevin Costello, displays a light, sensitive touch that eschews ridicule, even as it examines the role fantasy plays in keeping James going.

McCary could have put a sneer on the movie's face, turning it into a kind of hip satire about the danger of losing oneself in pop-cultural fantasies. Instead, he has made a captivating charmer of a movie about a young man trying to negotiate a world he may never fully understand.

Dave Made A Maze takes a different tack with its silliness, introducing mild elements of horror and danger along with a healthy dose of 20something dislocation.

Annie (Meera Rohit Kumbhani) arrives home from a weekend trip to discover that her boyfriend Dave (Nick Thune) has erected a cardboard maze in their small living room.

The structure looks entirely wobbly and unsophisticated, a warren of boxes and smoking chimneys that might not withstand a strong wind.

From inside the maze, we hear Dave telling Annie that he's lost. He also makes the preposterous claim that the maze is much bigger on the inside than it appears when viewed from the outside.

Not knowing what to do, Annie asks for help from Dave's pal Gordon (Adam Busch). Others turn up, including a guy (James Urbaniak) who wants to make a documentary about the maze.

Eventually, Annie and company enter the maze, where they discover that Dave was right about the scale of the structure -- and also about its dangers. Booby traps lurk everywhere and a lethal Minotaur roams the premises.

Like Dave's maze, the movie adds creative, low-rent effects, some quite clever and most making inspired use of cardboard.

Dave Made A Maze ultimately wears out a thin premise. But at a swift 80-minutes, it proves more engaging than you'd think for a movie with a substantial number of cardboard sets.

Observing life on a small scale

Ira Sachs's winning Little Men chronicles a boyhood friendship in Brooklyn.

Director Ira Sachs (Love is Strange) brings a gentle but knowing touch to Little Men, a story about two boys who become friends in Brooklyn.

That may sound like the basis for an achingly ordinary feel-good story, but Sachs's movie is fueled by issues as diverse as a father's failure to become the actor he hoped to be and a family's struggle with money issues -- not to mention the disruptive consequences of urban gentrification.

At the start of the movie, 13-year-old Jake (Theo Taplitz) moves from Manhattan to Brooklyn with his parents (Greg Kennear and Jennifer Ehle).

Dad's getting a bit long in the tooth for a performer who still works in the kind of small New York productions for which the actors aren't paid. Mom, a psychotherapist, supports the family.

Money being an obvious problem, the family is relieved to move into a Brooklyn apartment that Kenner's character inherits from his recently deceased father.

The apartment sits atop a store that comes with the building. The store is occupied by Leonor (Paulina Garcia of Chile's Gloria), a seamstress who never paid market value for her shop. Jake's aging father evidently welcomed Leonor's company, and adopted a casual attitude toward collecting the rent.

Pressed for money, Jake and his sister (Talia Balsam) believe they're justified in asking for a reasonable rent increase. Leonor thinks otherwise.

Leonor's tough-cookie recalcitrance is further complicated by the fact that Jake and Leonor's son (Michael Barbieri) become fast friends.

An infectiously likable kid who wants to be an actor, Barbieri's Antonio perfectly complements Jake's shyness. The friendship between Jake and Tony gives Sachs an opportunity to celebrate the freedom of city life for a couple of 13-year-olds.

Sachs and co-writer Mauricio Zacharias develop a carefully balanced drama that revels in the delights of boyhood, understands the psychological complexities of the adult relationships and isn't out to slam anyone ever the head.

Credit Sachs with taking us deep into the lives of people whose struggles may not be epic, but never feel anything less than real. In a time of unashamed movie preposterousness and bloat, Sachs's movie reminds us that observing life on a small scale beats not observing it at all.

'Heaven' is best when earthbound

A best-selling book finds its way to the screen.

If a four-year-old boy awoke from a coma and told you that he had just visited heaven, seen Jesus, met his long-departed great grandfather and had experiences that banished all his fears, would you have the heart to suggest that the boy wait until he's old enough to investigate what neurobiologists might have to say about his story?

Neither would I. I'd smile, and wish the boy well.

Of course, there was just a such a boy, and his Nebraska-based family made his experiences the subject of Heaven Is for Real, a blockbuster best-seller that helped establish a publishing mini-trend: cheerleading for the afterlife.

Those seeking adult affirmation about heaven may wish to try Proof of Heaven: A Doctor's Experience With the Afterlife by Eben Alexander. A movie based on Alexander's book reportedly is being developed.

As Variety reported on April 14, Hollywood is displaying a growing faith in Christian movies. Put another way, Hollyood's always eager to find another lucrative niche market.

Stripped of some of the boy's more apocalyptic declarations -- the coming war between Satan and Jesus that will destroy the world, but vanquish evil forever -- the movie version of Heaven Is for Real has been carefully crafted to keep its tone down-to-earth.

Greg Kinnear's Todd Burpo -- a pastor in a small rural church -- provides the movie's entry point. Todd struggles to come to grips with what his son Colton (a cute Connor Corum) tells him, information about heaven disclosed casually and sporadically by Colton -- almost in time-release fashion.

Colton's visit to heaven takes place while he's in a coma after emergency surgery for a ruptured appendix.

When Todd thinks that his son may be dying, he fumes at God. Later, he's taken aback by the boy's account of things he only could have seen if he had an out-of-body experience.

The movie includes some transparently obvious skepticism -- not so much to question the authenticity of young Colton's story but to give the proceedings an aura of objectivity.

And an end-of-picture speech by Kinnear - the movie's Frank Capra moment -- suggests that the boy's vision of heaven may have been tailored by God to match the expectations of a four-year-old; i.e., Colton sits on Jesus's lap, sees other kids and meets a second sister he would have had had his mother (Kelly Reilly) not miscarried.

Colton has one older sister (Lane Styles), but the story doesn't pay much attention to her.

Director Randall Wallace probably knew that he couldn't make the movie without showing Colton's heaven.

We see Colton's grassy version of heaven, his vision of angels and even a full-faced picture of the Jesus Colton encounters, which arrives like an exclamation point at the end of the movie.

For the most part, though, Wallace's approach is less ethereal than earthly, which I suppose is in keeping with the matter-of-fact attitude Colton displays toward heaven.

Such a tone suggests -- at least to me -- that significant commercial calculation went into how this material would be presented by Wallace, who had a hand in writing the screenplay and who is best known for having written the screenplay for Braveheart. Wallace tries not to overplay the movie's heavenly hand.

At times, Heaven Is for Real plays like an after-school special. At other times, it grapples (albeit gently) with the community's attempts to decide what to make of Colton's story.

Not all of Todd's congregants are willing to accept the boy's story, and one woman (Margo Martindale) sees it as a potentially destructive to the church over which Todd presides.

We're not exactly entering spoiler territory if I tell you that Todd does not loose his job over any such dissension or that the movie's most touching scene is one in which Kinnear and Martindale share their grief.

Kinnear, of course, operates at his likable best. He and Reilly create a convincing portrait of a couple struggling with financial issues in a rural community that seems to lack for rich benefactors.

Heaven Is for Real isn't likely to gain much audience beyond those looking for family entertainment with a Christian spin, presumably a sizable enough group to keep turnstiles spinning through the Easter holiday. Other religions are left out of this particular heaven.

Colton's story also includes a couple of pivotal trips to Denver, where the family visits the Denver Butterfly Pavilion. Colton eventually overcomes his arachnophobia and holds a tarantula named Rosie in the palm of his tiny hand.

I'm not sure why I feel compelled to share this detail, perhaps only as a way of saying that it's one more localized element in a movie that presents what appears to be a decidedly middle-American vision of life on Earth and of the world to come.

Moves on the art-house circuit

CHICO & RITA TAKES AIM AT ADULTS

Chico & Rita. Directors Fernando Trueba and artist Javier Mariscal take a lingering, discursive look at the bumpy love affair between a jazz pianist and a singer in this Oscar-nominated animated feature. The movie begins with the pianist -- old and wandering through the mists of memory -- thinking about how he met Rita in Havana during the jazzy latter days of Batista's regime. The story takes Chico and Rita from Havana to New York, Paris and Las Vegas as they try to sustain musical careers and fan the flames of an affair that meets with its share of obstacles, some of them caused by Chico's roving eye. The movie's music takes precedence over the animation, which tends to flatten out faces, and an improbable ending puts a smiley face on a sometimes edgy story. Still, the main virtue of Chico & Rita is that it's aimed entirely at adults, which means it makes room for Rita's voluptuous carnality and includes an animated sex scene. I don't take this as a sign that adult-oriented animation has a real future, but one always can hope.

NORWEGIAN WOOD, IT'S NOT ALWAYS SO GOOD

As a lover of director Tran Anh Hung's The Scent of Green Papaya, I found myself hoping I'd be equally transported by Norwegian Wood, Tran's big-screen adaptation of a popular 1987 Japanese novel by Haruki Murakami. Tran serves up some of the year's best and most memorable imagery, but tells a story that's never fully involving. The tale springs from the suicide in the 1960s of an adolescent whose death haunts the lives of two friends. Watanabe (Ken'ichi Matsuyama) leaves his village home to become a college student in Tokyo, but remains detached from the student turmoil that surrounds him. Eventually, Watanabe re-connects with the beautiful Naoko (Rinko Kikuchi), who was the girlfriend of the boy who killed himself. Watanabe and Naoka establish a relationship, but she ultimately winds up languishing in a mental institution, tormented by the unfulfilled sexual relationship she had with the boy who committed suicide. Another student (Kiko Mizuhara) -- the sexually aggressive Midori -- also establishes a relationship with Wantanabe. The elements of a fine movie are in place, but Norwegian Wood misses the mark, something in the manner of an arrow that hits the target and falls gently to the ground. Notable, though, are the brilliant work of cinematographer Mark Lee Ping Bin and the musical score of Jonny Greenwood.

WAIT, HAVEN'T WE BEEB DOWN THIS ROAD BEFORE?

It's not possible for me totally to resist a performance by Alan Arkin, so I was happy enough watching Thin Ice, a bit of neo-noir set during the middle of winter in Wisconsin, where (as one character) puts it, there are two seasons: winter and road work. Director Jill Sprecher tells the story of an unscrupulous insurance agent (Greg Kinnear) who's trying to persuade a aging and somewhat addled client (Arkin) to give him a valuable violin. Of course, Arkin's Gorvy, who lives in a house strewn with bric-a-brac and clutter, doesn't know the instrument has any real value, at least not at first. The plot thickens appropriately as Sprecher makes room for appearances by Bob Balaban (as an appraiser of violins), David Harbour (as an ultra-sincere insurance agent who works for Kinnear's Micky), and Billy Crudup (as a workman who installs security alarms). Crudup gives a strange and lively performance as a man who becomes mired in criminal activity, and Kinnear does his best to hold the story together as an increasingly desperate man. The trouble with Thin Ice: If you've seen enough of these neo-noir, con-game stories, you'll peep the movie's hole card long before you should. This is not a case where familiarity breeds contempt, but it sure as hell takes off some of the edge.