Looking for light in Ingmar Bergman's shadow

      In Bergman Island, director Mia Hansen-Love travels to the Swedish island of Faro, the place where fabled director Ingmar Bergman lived and shot many of his films. Faro might be the last place filmmakers would want to work on scripts but Tony (Tim Roth) and Chris (Vicky Krieps) are both trying to finish screenplays.

     Bergman casts a big shadow which can't be avoided on Faro, where guides conduct Bergman safaris. On top of that, Tony and Chris are being hosted in the house where Bergman filmed Scenes from a Marriage. That film, a guide wryly tells them, was responsible for millions of divorces.

    Tony seems able to work and Chris stumbles, trying to write with a fountain pen that keeps running out of ink.

    In a way, Bergman Island serves as a portrait of a relationship, a creative one that has hit some shoals. Tony and Chris don't even agree on Bergman's work. He hates The Seventh Seal, for example.

    Hansen-Love also includes a film-within-the-film as Chris describes the movie she's working on to Tony. In that film, Amy (Mia Wasikowska) and Joseph (Anders Danielsen Lie) try to rekindle or shed what’s left of their former love. She seems more interested in a reunion than he. The movie further complicates matters because both characters have arrived on Faro for a wedding.

   The story shortchanges Roth, focusing mainly on Chris and her screenplay. In a way, Chris’s creative life dominates.

    I've read that Hansen-Love based the film on her 15-year relationship with director Olivier Assayas. It’s impossible to know what sort of relationship to reality Hansen-Love intended but, in part, the movie explores the tensions between an apparently successful male filmmaker and a female counterpart who seems to be trying to establish her profile.

    The movie? Ambiguities and lack of sharp resolution work against satisfaction and neither character seems capable of making anything at Bergman's level -- not that it matters.

    These characters aren't Bergman -- and that's probably the point. 

    They may be on the director's island, but this casually expressed movie left me wondering whether they weren’t marooned elsewhere.

Bob's Cinema Diary: 9/17/20 -- 'Blackbird' and 'The Nest'

The Nest

Director Sean Durkin returns to the screen after a long hiatus. His last movie was  2011's Martha Marcy May Marlene. With The Nest, Durkin travels back to the 1980s for a look at a marriage struggling to survive the upheaval of a transatlantic move. Jude Law  (as Rory) and Carrie Coon (as Allison) star as a husband and wife who have fallen off the same page even before they move to London. She loves their suburban life in the US. He’s too ambitious to be content. She runs a riding school: He's a commodities trader. Rory and Allison have two kids: a daughter (Oona Roche) from Allison's previous marriage and a son (Charlie Shotwell) from the couple's current marriage. Not only does Rory drag his family across the ocean, he soon runs out of funds. He vastly overestimates his ability to persuade his London boss (Michael Culkin) to merge his company with an American firm, a development that ensures that Rory won't be able to  afford the Surrey estate he impulsively rented for the family. Late in the movie, a taxi driver asks Rory what he does for a living. "I pretend to be rich,'' says Rory, who by this time has entered a state of dejected realization: The rungs on the social ladder he's climbing have begun to collapse. As the horse-loving Allison, Coon embodies the emotional volatility of an '80s woman who doesn't always listen to her better judgment. Initially charming, Rory refuses to acknowledge his limitations and, in Law's hands, reaches a state of hollowed-out desperation. Durkin, who has no interest in feel-good sentiment, courageously brings his movie to a conclusion marked as much by exhaustion and defeat as by anything that might be called reconciliation. 

Blackbird

There are few more familiar dramatic conceits than this:  A family gathers for a special occasion only to have soul-wrenching secrets revealed. Blackbird follows such a traditional map but adds a disturbing twist. Mom (Susan Sarandon) is dying of ALS. In response, Sarandon's Lily has decided to end her life. She wants to see her family one more time before drinking the lethal concoction that will enable her to avoid a nightmarish end to an otherwise fulfilling life. As the story unfolds, director Roger Michell introduces us to Lily's family: daughters played by Kate Winslet and Mia Wasikowska and a husband portrayed by an underutilized Sam Neill. Winslet's Jennifer arrives at Lily’s seaside home with her husband (Rainn Wilson) and teenage son (Anson Boon). Lindsay Duncan turns up as Lily's best friend.  Christian Torpe's screenplay boasts finely wrought moments that are well-executed by a fine cast, tense encounters between the sisters, for example. But the screenplay adds a few reveals too many and even a cast this strong can't always compensate for a lack of dramatic crackle. At the same time, Michell eventually finds the emotional power and the deep sadness that accompanies Lily's decision; just because it's the right choice for her doesn't make its irrevocability any less harrowing.

A dense, unsatisfying 'Alice'

Another wild, crazy and scattered trip to an alternate reality.

Alice Through the Looking Glass arrives in theaters as an effects-laden, visually dense extravaganza that feels more like a wild-and-crazy theme park ride than a trip to Wonderland.

Director James Bobin (Muppets Most Wanted) takes over from Tim Burton, who made his version of Alice in Wonderland six years ago. Simply put: Burton's movie -- though no masterpiece -- was better.

Familiar characters emerge from Bobin's galaxy of imaginative sets, bizarre costumes and dizzying action. But this time, the appearance of old favorites generates little by way of fond recall.

When we first meet her, Alice (Mia Wasikowska) is a skilled sea captain who loses her father's ship to a greedy fleet owner. An unhappy Alice then walks through the famous Looking Glass.

Once she enters this alternate reality, Alice learns that she must travel through time in order to help save The Mad Hatter (Johnny Depp). The Hatter, poor fellow, has fallen into a near-terminal funk as the result of having lost his family.

Alice also meets Time (Sacha Baron Cohen), a character who controls something called a Chronosphere, a spinning globe into which Alice climbs so that she's able to go back in time, perhaps to repair past wrongs. Mostly, it's an excuse for a screenful of summer-time action.

The movie holds two queens in its hand -- the White Queen (a pasty-looking Anne Hathaway) and the Red Queen (an arch Helena Bonham Carter). Enmity between the queens traces back to their childhoods, in case you've been longing to know why they never seem to be able to get along.

If someone told you that Bonham Carter, under the customary ton of makeup, was really a very large toy, you might believe it. More than others who suffer the same fate, Bonham Carter has an air of China-doll unreality about her.

As for Depp, his silly ramblings as the Hatter made me again wish that he'd once and for all leave childhood films behind.

I could say more, but all I'll tell you is that the amusements are skimpy, the sights overwhelming and the whole business seems to have lost the heady, mind-warping spin of Lewis G. Carroll.

In short: Big production, small yield. In 3D, of course.

A house in need of repairs

Director Guillermo del Toro's Crimson Peak borders on the ludicrous.

I was hoping that Guillermo del Toro's Crimson Peak would rival the alluring weirdness of the director's 2006 Pan's Labyrinth, but this lavish Gothic romance/ghost story wastes a ton of production design and a capable cast on a story that (at its most dramatic points) had members of a preview audience chuckling.

As best as I can tell, chuckles aren't what del Toro had in mind for a movie that's striving to be eerie and chilling.

To make matters worse, Crimson Peak brims with the kinds of behavior found only in second-rate horror movies.

Consider: A young bride (Mia Wasikowska) arrives with her dashing husband (Tom Hiddleston) at his family estate in England. A staggeringly gloomy home looks as if it was lifted from an over-priced theme park.

Leaves and later snow drift through a large hole in the roof, but Wasikowska's Edith doesn't bother to ask whether Hiddleston's Sir Thomas Sharp has any repair plans in mind.

Did I mention that Edith, who aspires to be a novelist, is warned never to go below the house's first floor? Well, of course, she is.

To add color and perhaps symbolism, the Sharp home is built atop blood-red clay that seeps through some of the walls of Sharp's Allerdale estate.

Edith's arrival at the Sharp manse isn't exactly joyous. Jessica Chastain plays Lucille, Sharpe's sourpuss sister, a woman with an unnaturally possessive attitude toward her sibling. Lucille doesn't take kindly to her brother's new wife.

All of this takes place after Edith loses her father, who's ruthlessly murdered in the bathroom of his Buffalo, N.Y, club. The movie opens in the U.S. before moving to Sharp's isolated British wreck of a mansion.

Del Toro's depiction of Buffalo society in 1901 seems to have some potential. At minimum, it demonstrates what a movie looks like when some considerable part of the costumer's budget appears to have been spent on women's hats.

Edith's father (Jim Beaver) immediately mistrusts the aristocratic Sharp, who's trying to persuade him to invest in a machine that mines clay. A self-made industrialist, Beaver's Carter Cushing prides himself on being a good judge of character.

These early scenes -- sort of an extended prologue -- also introduce us to a doctor (Charlie Hunnam), an earnest fellow who cares about Edith, and who quite predictably will figure into the movie's over-the-top finale.

Del Toro lays on the funhouse effects (skeletal-looking creatures emerge from floors or soak in bathtubs), but the story evolves in ways that seldom surprise.

Perhaps del Toro was betting that audiences would delight in seeing these musty horror tropes exhumed and presented with unashamed blatancy, but -- in the clinches -- the resultant movie proves as silly as it is somber.

If Crimson Peak had been intended as a comedy, it might have worked, but del Toro seems to take the movie's swooning melodrama seriously.

Beyond all that, Crimson Peak's ghosts seem less like expressions of supernatural unrest than effects that seep into a movie like wandering strangers with no place else to go.

Emma Bovary arrives on screen -- again

Though not without its virtues, this Madame Bovary falls short.

The story of a blossoming woman stuck in a lifeless marriage in a provincial French backwater certainly has the potential to speak to modern audiences as both an early feminist drama and a biting social critique of bourgeois narrowness.

Begin there in thinking about the latest adaptation of Gustave Flaubert's Madame Bovary, a semi-successful attempt to transfer Flaubert to the screen.

Bored and filled with inchoate romantic longing, newly married Emma Bovary tries to divert herself with wanton material acquisitions (fine dresses and fancy furnishings) that mire her in debt. She also engages in affairs that she hopes will provide an escape route from her country-doctor husband, a decent fellow of simple tastes and limited ambition.

There's no faulting the production values that director Sophie Barthes brings to the task of adapting Flaubert for the screen. Working with cinematographer Andrij Parekh, Barthes creates the feeling of isolation and monotony that awaits Emma on the dawn of each day, the numbing emptiness of life at the bottom rungs of the middle class.

Given the standard of her time, Emma is supposed to be happy to have a husband and provider, but she's reluctant to resign herself to a compromised existence far from the civilities of Rouen, the city that beckons and taunts her with its opera and high culture.

The screenplay by Barthes and co-writer Felipe Marino must make omissions and condensations, and although I haven't read Madame Bovary since college, it struck me that Barthes and Marino have done a defensible job of focusing Flaubert's story for the screen. Flaubert devotees may disagree, particularly when it comes to the omission of Emma's child.

In this edition, Emma Bovary is played by Mia Wasikowska, who -- I think -- only intermittently fixes our attention. Some reviewers have pointed out that Wasikowska is perfect for the role because she makes no effort to elicit our sympathies. Still, Wasikowska's performance can be seen in as a study in only sporadic connection.

Employing a variety of accents and styles, the supporting cast acquits itself well enough.

In a generally subdued atmosphere, Rhys Ifans stands out as Monsieur Lheureux, a merchant who senses Emma's vulnerability, sells her as much luxury merchandise as possible (on credit) and then pushes her into a ruinous, debt-riddled corner.

As Charles Bovary, Henry Lloyd-Hughes plays a character who, by definition, is a bit of a cipher. Ezra Miller portrays Leon, a youthful law student who falls for Emma. Under different circumstances, he would have made a good match for her.

Emma initially rebuffs Leon. She does, however, have an affair with the disreputable Marquis d'Anderveilliers (Logan Marshall-Green). Of course, Emma expects too much of the relationship.

Paul Giamatti brings his usual avidity and a bit of grubbiness to the role of Monsieur Homais, an ambitious pharmacist who pushes Dr. Bovary into performing a supposedly ground-breaking operation on poor, club-footed villager. The operation, of course, does not go well.

Not without its virtues, Madame Bovary dwells on Emma's suffocating provincial surroundings, perhaps to emphasize that the constraints of her rote existence have alienated her from her natural self.

If Barthes succeeds in creating a plausible 19th century environment, she also manages to dull the movie's edge. The damp streets and uninviting interiors aren't enough to carry the day.

By the end, I felt as if I were re-familiarizing myself with elements of Flaubert's plot without penetrating the agonizing and acutely observant heart of a great story.

Another look at a morally bankrupt LA

Director David Cronenberg visits the land of palm trees, money and greedy ambition.

It's impossible for a director as talented as David Cronenberg to make a movie that doesn't boast a few interesting wrinkles.

The opening of Cronenberg's Maps to the Stars -- a movie written by novelist Bruce Wagner -- has an eerie, otherworldly dimension that lets us know that the guy behind the camera has an edgy gift.

We feel a bit dislocated by the sight of passengers riding a bus at night. Who are they? Where are they headed? We feel as if the movie is about to awaken from a dream.

It does -- and that's the trouble.

The promise of Cronenberg's opening quickly evaporates as a muddled series of LA-based story lines emerges.

We begin to realize that Maps is taking aim at Hollywood with all the trappings such a project suggests: amorality, rampant egotism, wanton sex, obscene amounts of money, half-baked guru figures and, yes, even incest.

Meeting the movie's characters can feel like paging through a yearbook of sickos, the presumed intention here.

Benjie Weiss (Evan Bird) is a child actor who starred in a monstrously successful hit TV show. At 13, Benjie's already a veteran of rehab. He's also an obnoxious little tyrant and one of the least likable characters I've seen in a film in some time.

Benjie's parents (John Cusack and Olivia Williams) aren't much better. Mom manages Benjie's career, and endures the humiliations her son heaps on her. Dad writes self-help books and also does the kind of body work that's supposed to release buried pain with a push here or a contortion there.

Actress Havana Segrand (Julianne Moore) is trying to restart her career by vying for a part in a remake of a movie originally made by her late mother, now something of a Hollywood cult figure. In what amounts to one more perverse twist, we learn that mom sexually abused Havana as a kid.

Perhaps Cronenberg wanted to find the truth in these characters by pushing them to extremes. They are capable of showing traces of humanity, but they seldom stray too far from their inner monsters.

The ingredients in Cronenberg's pot eventually are brought together by the arrival in Los Angeles of Agatha (Mia Wasikowska), a character whose role in the drama gradually reveals itself.

Craziness seldom needs embellishment, but that doesn't stop this story from showing us that at least two of its characters (Benjie and Havana) are haunted by ghosts. They are unsettled by dead people.

Cronenberg's collage of tawdry ingredients has some sharp and telling moments -- the faux chumminess between Havana and a rival actress, for example -- but the movie never really rises to the level of strong satire or true trash.

Maps to the Stars wanders instead through a haze of developments that feel as if they're being dragged across the screen in hopes of leaving an indicting stain.

Two additional comments:
-- Robert Pattinson, who appeared in Cronenberg's Cosmopolis -- another movie that didn't really work -- plays a chauffeur who aspires to be a screenwriter and actor.

-- Moore holds nothing back in her portrayal of an actress whose life is marred by desperation, psychological torment and character flaws. Did anyone think the recent Oscar winner couldn't give this kind of performance?

Maps to the Stars seems to want to tell us that Hollywood is less a place than a contagious disease. But spending time with the folks who've caught this disease isn't as revealing as you might imagine.

Look, I'm a Cronenberg fan. I consider him to be one of the smartest directors I've ever met, and I've admired much of his work. I look forward to seeing his next movie, and plan to regard this unrewarding Day of the Locust descendant as a detour.

Jarmusch joins the vampire jamboree

Jim Jarmusch -- a director who has marched to his own tune since his 1984 breakthrough with Stranger Than Paradise -- is a late attendee at the vampire party that's been sinking its teeth into popular culture for the past several years.

Perhaps that's why Jarmusch's Only Lovers Left Alive feels burdened by fatigue, as well as by a pervasive sense of futility. Make that futility with a capital "F."

That may be part of the point. Jarmusch seems to be commenting on the generally woeful state of human affairs.

Within the movie's confined and airless world, only vampires truly appreciate the best of human achievement in the arts and sciences. Vampires dismiss the rest of humanity, which they seem to regard as a biological lost cause.

It's a risky approach because Jarmusch's movie sometimes becomes an example of the statement it's making, an entertainment that can feel more like it has been embalmed than edited.

And yet ....

There's something to be discovered amid the resignation and ruin, a feeling that the movie's vampires -- played by Tilda Swinton and Tom Hiddleston -- are remnants of a dying breed, symbolic holdovers from the last days of a reeling counterculture.

Hiddleston's Adam lives in a deserted part of Detroit in a house full of electronic equipment that supports his musical habits. Adam spends most of his time recording all the parts of various tunes in his junk yard of a home.

Adam also nourishes himself with blood he buys from Dr. Watson (Jeffrey Wright), a doctor who runs a blood bank in a nearby hospital. Adam always arrives unannounced, sporting a flimsy doctor's disguise.

When he drinks blood out of a wine glass, Adam -- like movie's other vampires -- swoons like a heroin addict experiencing the relief of a first rush.

Swinton's Eve lives in Tangier: She reads compulsively, and obtains her blood supply from Elizabethan playwright Christopher Marlowe (John Hurt), a vampire who's clearly devoted to Eve.

Adam. Eve. Marlowe.

Restrained as the tone can be, Jarmusch's movie virtually screams out for metaphoric or ironic interpretation: Adam and Eve, for example, seem more like the last couple than the first.

And immortality -- or as close as former humans can get to it -- has its burdens. Suffering from spiritual exhaustion, Adam contemplates suicide, a wooden bullet to the heart.

Concerned about him, Eve -- his long-time lover -- decides it's time for a visit. She flies to Detroit to elevate Adam's spirits. When Eve travels, she carries a couple of suitcases containing nothing but books.

Adam's also concerned about what humans -- he regards most of humanity as the walking dead and calls them "zombies'' -- have done to the planet, contaminating the blood supply and despoiling the very Earth upon which they walk.

That's the rub, though. No matter how contemptuous vampires are of humans, they can't live without them. The lumpen masses feed the vampiric elite.

Not a lot happens. An eager-to-please human named Ian (Adam Yelchin) drops in on Adam from time to time, bringing a sampling of guitars and other paraphernalia to satisfy Adam's musical cravings.

Late in the movie, Eve's sister Ava (Mia Wasikowska) arrives for a visit: Ava's boisterous, undisciplined and liable to sink her fangs into a human, an activity that Adam and Eve disdain as barbaric.

Is it disparaging to say that Swinton was born to play a vampire? Could there be an actress more suited to pallor?

Hiddleston -- known for his work in The Avengers and Thor movies -- shows a different side of himself, and it's always a pleasure to see Hurt, who seems to be decaying before our eyes.

Jarmusch is now 61, and it's tempting to view Only Lovers Left Alive as a kind of dirge for a lost cultural moment that he cherished. Is Jarmusch wondering whether even vampires have the energy for one more bite?

I don't know, but Only Lovers Left Alive feels less like an artistic summation than a last gasp.

Lots of menace with no place to go

A talented Korean director shows off his skills but Stoker still falters.
Generally, I have mixed feelings when directors from other countries -- particularly those with distinctive styles and edgy concerns -- travel to the U.S. for English-language productions. I root for the their success, but can't help wondering whether something vital will be lost in translation.

In his first U.S. movie, the often brilliant and always provocative South Korean director Park Chan-Wook (director of movies such as Oldboy and a trilogy of Vengeance films) completes about three-quarters of the journey to a new culture. Park's Stoker can't quite provide the rich payoff his movie promises -- but that's not to dismiss the film's early going, a virtuoso display of style in which Park creates an atmosphere chilled by impending, perhaps inevitable doom.

Working from a screenplay by Wentworth Miller, Park seems to be riffing on Alfred Hitchcock's Shadow of a Doubt. Both movies make room for an ambiguous character named Uncle Charlie, Joseph Cotton in Hitchcock's movie and Matthew Goode in Park's version of a story about an uncle who shows up after his brother dies in a car accident.

Uncle Charlie works to establish a bond with his niece (Mia Wasikowska), a young woman he's never met before. In fact, she never knew her father (Dermott Mulroney) even had a brother until Charles turns after Dad's death.

As the story progresses, it becomes clear that both mother (a convincing Nicole Kidman) and daughter (perhaps to a lesser degree) are falling under the sway of the preternaturally helpful Uncle Charlie, played with cagy confidence by Goode.

To further complicate matters, Wasikowska's India Stoker is going through the weirdness of her own sexual awakening; the gifted Wasikowska is up to conveying every bit of that weirdness. India displays the normal recalcitrance of an 18-year-old but augmented by something that seems significantly creepier.

There's little question that Park has control over the movie's imagery, its performances and its eerie soundscape, all of which heighten the sense of uneasiness he skillfully creates.
Park tries to maintain ambiguity as he builds toward what should be (but isn't) a whopping and intelligent finale.

Park and cinematographer Chung-hoon Chung find plenty of opportunities to show off their mastery, but the screenplay -- which seems rooted in India's fantasy life and dark capacities -- ultimately doesn't reward our patience.

Park's stylistic flourishes (India likes to arrange shoeboxes in horseshoe shapes) seem designed mostly to keep us off balance. They do, but the danger in this kind of approach (violent but less so than some of Park's Korean movies) is that it sets a high bar for the movie's payoff.

Without going much further, I'll just say that Park doesn't vault over the bar he sets for himself, and many will conclude that, in this case, the result is a little too frustrating, a carefully prepared meal that offers too little by way of real nourishment.

Tale of bootleggers has genre kick

Lawless has the look of a great movie, but its rewards have more to do with its hard-core attitudes..

Set in the early 1930s, Lawless tells the story of a clan of bootlegging brothers who rose to prominence in Franklin County, Va. Working from a novel by Matt Bondurant, director John Hillcoat and screenwriter Nick Cave try for the bracingly bitter tone of a Depression-era story that sometimes feels as if it's out to recycle a variety of familiar western and gangster ploys.

In this case, three moonshining brothers face off against a corrupt lawman. Bondurant's novel, by the way, derives from his family history, and the movie begins with a title card telling us that it's inspired by a true story.

In Lawless, Hillcoat (The Road ) focuses on Jake Bondurant (Shia LaBeouf), the youngest of three Bondurant brothers and the tale's narrator. The Bondurants are hard-core moonshiners led by Forrest Bondurant (Tom Hardy). Brother Howard Bondurant (Jason Clarke) brings muscle to the proceedings. Jack is considered "the runt" of the Bondurant litter, a young man not naturally given to violence.

In this case, the bootleggers aren't the bad guys. That job falls squarely on the shoulders of Guy Pearce, who pushes the limits of stereotype as Charlie Rakes, a citified sadist of a lawman who travels to Virginia from Chicago. Rakes has been hired to enforce a system of payoffs to local officials.

Fiercely committed to controlling his own affairs, Forrest refuses to play ball with the local pols, and the building blocks fall into place for a story that turns white-lightning outlaws into advocates for untrammeled independence.

Lawless boasts an impressive supporting cast. Gary Oldman has a small role as Floyd Banner, a Tommy-gun toting gangster. Jessica Chastain shows up as a red-headed refugee from Chicago, a woman with a checkered past who hopes find a little peace in a small town. Chastain's Maggie has an eye for Forrest, who -- as played by the stoically impressive Hardy -- seems as immovable as a tree stump.

When Forrest thinks or speaks, he tends to start with a murmured growl that sounds as if it's somewhere between a sigh and grunt. He's the brutal brains and backbone of the Bondurant brothers' thriving booze business. Hardy, who gave one of the bravura performances of cinema in the British movie Bronson, remains an impressive actor whose very presence can seem like a threat. When he really wants to make a point, Forrest uses a set of brass knuckles.

Working with cinematographer Benoît Delhomme, Hillcoat gives his images a romanticized burnish, but when the screenplay calls for brutality, the director presents it with full force. The action builds toward a showdown between the Bondurants and Rakes at a covered bridge.

LaBeouf doesn't always seem perfectly cast as a young man who has an eye for a preacher's daughter (Mia Wasikowska), but he has his moments. LaBeouf's Jack lacks the killer instinct of his tougher brothers, a deficiency that sets up one of the movie's big (and all-too-obvious) questions. Will Jake be able to pull the trigger when the chips are down?

In the end, Lawless comes across as an artfully made genre piece that seems to have been aiming for quite a bit more: It's not in a class with Hillcoat and Cave's previous collaboration, The Proposition, an astringent western set in the Australian outback.

You also may find yourself wondering about the moral calculus that turns the brutal Bondurant boys into heroes. Still, there's a wistful air of longing about this violent movie, an attempt to hold onto a robust moment of Bondurant family history, even if that moment doesn't quite rise to the level of legend.

A gender-bending story set in the 1890s

How you react to Albert Nobbs, a project that Glenn Close reportedly spent two decades trying to bring to the screen, depends almost entirely on how you react to Close in the title role; she's playing a woman posing as a man in 19th Century Ireland. Close, who played the role on stage in the 1980s, brings the project to the screen under the direction of Rodrigo Garcia (Mother and Child and Nine Lives). As written by Close and John Banville and based on a novella (Celibate Lives) by George Moore, Albert Nobbs feels as meticulously crafted as Close's make-up. But here's the thing: I couldn't buy Close as a woman successfully passing as a man. Maybe it's her delicate facial features. Whatever the case, Nobbs looks like a strange version of Close, pinched into a constricted, almost neutered impression of a man. The screenplay tells us that Nobbs decided -- partly for economic reasons -- to pose as a man, but the movie also serves as commentary on how some people have responded to societies bound by rigid gender-role conventions. While working at a hotel, Nobbs meets Hubert Page, a house painter played by Janet McTeer, who brings robust conviction and humor to her role as another woman posing as a man. McTeer's Hubert essentially steals the picture from the deeply repressed and fussy Nobbs, who dreams of opening a tobacco shop. Hubert lives with a woman who loves and accepts him; he suggests that Nobbs also might be able to find some semblance of normal life. Nobbs then turns his attention to Helen (Mia Wasikowska), a co-worker at the hotel. There's genuine poignancy in watching Nobbs, a man of limited imagination, pursue a dream that we know is beyond his reach. At its best, Albert Nobbs stirs emotion, but I never entirely shook the distracting awareness that I was watching Close create an illusion that didn't quite convince.

*For the record, not everyone shares my view of Close's performance, certainly not the members of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences who nominated her for a best-actress Oscar. The Academy does agree on McTeer, though. She was nominated in the best-supporting actress category.

'Jane Eyre' only fitfully springs to life

Come on baby, light my fire. This Jane Eyre takes too long to spark.

Watching Jane Eyre, the umpteenth adaptation of Charlotte Bronte's, dog-eared 1847 novel, I was besieged by a single nagging thought: "Will high school English never end?"

I had approached the latest big-screen edition of Jane Eyre with more hope than usual, mostly because Cary Joji Fukunaga directed it. Fukunaga's previous work - the viscerally charged immigration drama Sin Nombre - seemed light years away from the world of Bronte, but Fukunaga could have been precisely the right man to breathe new life into a literary classic.

Did he? Not entirely.

Despite the presence of a gifted young actress - Mia Wasikowska - this Jane Eyre comes up short on urgency and passion. Even the presence of the estimable Judi Dench, as the housekeeper at the movie's principal location - Thornfield Hall - doesn't provide a totally compelling reason for us once again to trample across the moors.

Of course, it's all mostly acceptable. And, yes, I'm being something of a spoilsport. Jane Eyre is by no means a bad movie, just one that probably needn't have been made. Besides, if you can't give into your prejudices now and then, what's the point of being a critic?

For those who don't know, the story begins with Jane's mistreatment by an aunt (Sally Hawkins) after her parents die. Jane's shipped off to an orphanage where she's further abused. When she's old enough to leave, Jane lands a position as governess to a child who's being cared for by the gloomy Edward Rochester (Michael Fassbinder).

Rochester's house, we learn, harbors a secret: Jane, we learn, is forbidden from entering an attic room, and often hears strange goings-on about the house with Fukunaga cranking up the ominous atmosphere.

Fassbinder lacks the stature that Orson Welles brought to the role of Rochester, a man whose demeanor can be gruff. Fassbinder broods with the best of them, but he's probably not imposing enough.

Wasikowska - familiar to those who've seen Tim Burton's Alice in Wonderland or those who saw her as the daughter of Julianne Moore and Annette Bening in The Kids Are All Right -- is a gifted young actress - but even her work can't always elevate a Jane Eyre that takes its time finding the kind chemistry between Jane and Rochester that can satisfy committed romantics.

Oh well. Enough. With movies such as Jane Eyre I'm never sure whether to write a review or a book report.

So to borrow a phrase from Bill Maher, maybe we need a new rule: Please, a moratorium on movies made from novels for which there are CliffsNotes.