The radicalizing of a Pakistani

It's probably impossible to discuss The Reluctant Fundamentalist -- director Mira Nair's big-screen adaptation of Mohsin Hamid's 2007 novel -- without at least mentioning the recent bombings at the Boston Marathon. I mention this because Nair's movie poses a topical and eerily relevant question: What might make a highly educated and apparently assimilated Pakistani immigrant wind up opposing everything about the U.S.?

Nair tells the story through a framing device. Changez (Riz Ahmed), a Pakistani professor, meets with a self-described American journalist (Liev Schreiber) in a Lahore cafe. Schreiber's character believes Changez may be able to help locate a kidnapped American.

We soon discover that the story is less interested in the captured American than in allowing Changez to explain how he made the journey from a hot-shot investment banker with a premier Wall Street firm to a radicalized college professor in Pakistan. Changez, we learn, not only lived in the U.S., but availed himself of its greatest opportunities. He graduated from Princeton, and quickly landed on the fast-track to wealth.

Changez tells Schreiber's Bobby the story of events that transformed him from a ruthless takeover artist to an academic who sees a link between the brutalities of capitalism and the world of religious fundamentalism.

If such a connection makes sense, The Reluctant Fundamentalist doesn't succeed in convincing us: The screenplay seems to find some sort of moral equivalence between capitalist ravishments and terrorist slaughter. The idea seems more like a fatuous reach than a devastating insight.

Having said that, it also should be noted that Ahmed gives a terrific performance as a young man learning the American ropes, which at first pull him upward and then threaten to strangle him. Ahmed's avid, intelligent performance holds the movie together, even as the story takes some less-than-credible turns.

The most notable of these unfortunate detours involves the relationship Changez establishes with a photographer named Erica, a mousey looking Kate Hudson. Erica eventually mounts an exhibit of photographs that she believes to be personal and revealing, but which mostly put her post 9/11 bigotry on display.

September 11 and the subsequent change of American attitudes give rise to prejudices that can't help but impact Changez. He's strip-searched at an airport. He's wrongly questioned by the New York City police. He begins to understand that no matter how assimilated he believes himself to be, he can't overcome the bigoted assumptions of those who identify him with terrorism.

Ahmed's fine performance is supplemented by equally strong work from Kiefer Sutherland, as Changez's boss and mentor at the investment banking firm. And it's always nice to see the fine Indian actor Om Puri, even when he's underutilized. He plays Changez's father.

Nair (Monsoon Wedding and The Namesake) keeps the story flowing. She's good at mixing milieu and character and giving material the involving sweep of a novel.

The Reluctant Fundamentalist offers some -- if not all -- of the richness of a novelistic story. But in the end, political reductionism undermines the story's human richness, and Nair manages to give us only flashes of the major work The Reluctant Fundamentalist might have been.

Von Trier hears the sweet call of doom

The provocative Danish director outdoes himself with a gloom-shrouded epic of annihilation.

Anyone familiar with the work of Danish director Lars von Trier knows he specializes in movies so bleak they hardly allow for even the slightest expression of faith in humanity.

After 1996's Breaking the Waves , von Trier became a regular on the festival circuit, sometimes connecting (Dogville) and sometimes missing the mark (Antichrist). Those, of course, are my assessments. Von Trier enthusiasts will have their own favorites, and nothing he does ever will please his many detractors.

Last May, von Trier may have bitten the festival hand that feeds him. He was barred from the Cannes Film Festival after making ridiculous comments about Hitler, Naziism and Albert Speer. He was attempting, I think, to position himself in the land of outrageous opinion. He also seemed to be making a joke, the humor of which eluded just about everyone who heard him. Von Trier clearly would be better off letting his movies speak for him.

And in his latest movie -- Melancholia -- the director speaks loudly and with no small amount of pomp, delivering a message steeped in romanticized doom. No slouch when it comes to pessimism, von Trier imagines not only the destruction of individual characters, but of the entire planet. He seems to think that this might not be such a bad thing. After all, life -- with its pointless rituals and stupid striving -- doesn't amount to much anyway.

Melancholia uses a kind of sci-fi backdrop to enlarge the scale of its inquiries. A planet 12 times the size of Earth is heading directly for our tiny planet. If this approaching planet -- bearing the metaphoric name Melancholia -- doesn't change course, it's a total wipeout for Earth and its creatures.

The opening of Melancholia boasts some of the most astonishing images of the year, sights on a par with the great work that Terrence Malick did in the cosmic segments of Tree of Life. Most of the von Trier's best imagery occurs in this prologue, a series of images that summarize the entire movie in graceful slow-motion, all to the strains of Wagner's prelude to Tristan and Isolde.

In the first half of Melancholia, von Trier takes us to the wedding of Justine (Kristen Dunst) and Michael (Alexander Skarsgard). The couple becomes late for their very elegant reception when their limo gets stuck in the forest. Watching a massive white limo trying to negotiate a tiny wooded road clues us to von Trier's comic sense of absurdity. What could be sillier than celebrating a new beginning as the cosmic wrecking ball approaches? Like the limo on that impossible road, it's a bad fit.

As is often the case, the director offers some stiff competition for the all-too-familiar irritations of his hand-held camera. The bride's mother (Charlotte Rampling) makes sneering comments about the futility of marriage. She's divorced from Justine's father (John Hurt), who drinks too much and seems to wallow in warm sentimentality. The bride's boss (Stellan Skarsgard) proves to be an obnoxious ad man who insists that Justine invent an advertising slogan before the reception concludes.

Justine's sister Claire (Charlotte Gainsbourg) bravely tries to keep things going while her husband (Kiefer Sutherland), the sap who's paying for the nuptials, complains about the bride's irresponsibility. In conventional terms, he's absolutely right: At one point, the bride abandons the groom to make love to a stranger on the golf course surrounding the lavish estate where the wedding reception is being held.

That’s pretty much the pattern. The reception – punctuated by all manner of small social hostilities – takes place under the shadow of the irresistible doom to which Justine finds herself drawn. Justine has fallen under the spell of melancholia (with a small "m"). Try as she may, she can't make herself conform to what she probably sees as the frivolous demands of the wedding. (I guess she didn't trust her doomy instincts enough to forgo the whole thing in the first place.)

Dunst keeps the audience off guard as a deeply disturbed woman who's obviously suffering from powerful inner turmoil. Dunst gives one of those courageous, all-out performances that looks as if it probably left her spent.

Part II -- named for Claire -- involves the opposing ways in which the two sisters -- Justine and Claire -- cope with what they think will be the end of the world. Having had her erotic flirtation with death, Justine seems increasingly ready to consummate the affair. Beset by fear, anxiety and concern for her young son, Claire resists.

For his part, Sutherland's John attempts to reassure his wife and young son (Cameron Spurr) that the approach of the planet should be regarded as a scientific adventure, not a portend of doom. In a von Trier movie, he's a walking demonstration of the failure of rationality.

Unfortunately, the movie's second half slows down considerably. By the time von Trier's apocalyptic denouement arrives -- and I found myself rooting for it -- you'll either have yielded to Melancholia or you'll have headed for the exits. I was alternately entranced, bored and dubious.

It falls to Justine to sound what could be von Trier's motto: "All I know is life on earth is evil." I don't think even the obnoxious behavior of the wedding guests justifies such a sweeping conclusion, but von Trier never has been one for cinematic restraint, and his final images are as compelling as those that opened the movie.

I can't give this one a clear yes or no. If nothing about Melancholia sounds alluring, stay home. I wouldn't think of arguing you out of your easy chair. Otherwise, cue the Wagner, try to keep from smirking at the movie's more ridiculous parts, and, by all means, let the apocalypse rip.