Lies, deceits and a final reckoning

   With the movie Oh, Canada, director Paul Schrader adapts Foregone, a novel by Russell Banks, who also wrote Affliction, which Schrader turned into another of his movies in 1997. Schrader's latest movies (First Reformed, The Card Counter, and Master Gardener)  have had a strange stillness, as if the director has moved beyond storytelling into a near meditative state. 

  Full of fraught memories and soul-wrenching torments, this meditative state isn't marked by calm or clarity. It's full of reckonings.

   Richard Gere, who starred in Schrader's American Gigolo (1980), reunites with the director to play Leo Fife, an American-born documentary filmmaker who fled to Canada during the Vietnam War. 

  Riddled with cancer, the aging Fife has agreed to allow two of his former students (Michael Imperiole and Victoria Hill) to make a documentary about his life and work. Fife insists that the interview -- really an extended deathbed confession -- be conducted in the presence of his wife Emma (Uma Thurman).

   Gere has been made to look gaunt and wasted. Cancer devours Leo's body, but lies and deceits eat away at his soul. He hopes to set the record straight. But Schrader has too much integrity to turn the story into a tale of last-minute redemption.

  Schrader fragments the story so that we see Gere playing Fife at various stages of his life. For the most part, though, a younger Fife is played by Jacob Elordi. Gere and Elordi create an account of Fife's life that may be distorted by memory but nonetheless makes a mockery of the director's reputation as a filmmaker of courage and conviction.

   An early episode illustrates the point. Fife, then married to his pregnant wife (Kristine Froseth), agrees to run the family business of his wealthy father-in-law, abandoning dreams of teaching and writing. He soon employs his modus operandi concerning women, he flees.

   Because Fife makes films, it's tempting to look for spiritual kinship between Fife and Schrader, but such speculations can be dicey. Leo Fife built a reputation by being a good filmmaker, but he has no laurels on which to rest. The scaffolding that upholds his vaunted stature has been subject to rot. Exposing it doesn't make it a less bitter pill to swallow.

Bob's Cinema Diary: 1/10/20 -- Three Christs and Song of Names

Three Christs

Three Christs focuses on a psychiatrist who in the 1950s studied three paranoid schizophrenics, each of whom believed that he was Jesus. Although Three Christs derives from a true story, the movie winds up feeling contrived and unconvincing. A miscast Richard Gere portrays Dr. Alan Stone, a psychiatrist who in the picture's early going arrives at a Michigan state hospital to conduct his study. Peter Dinklage, Walton Goggins and Bradley Whitford portray Dr. Stone’s patients, men who have convinced themselves that they are the true Christ. Stone isolates the trio of faux Christs from other patients to determine if they can get along with one another. Stone wonders: If one Jesus is confronted with another, would one of them have to admit that he's deluded. Everyone, of course, knows that the New Testament tells the story of a single Jesus. Director Jon Avnet needed a villain. The closest he comes is Dr. Orbis (Kevin Pollack), the psychiatrist who heads the hospital and who seems to value procedural correctness over sensitive treatment. Charlotte Hope plays Becky, the young woman who becomes Dr. Stone’s research assistant. Julianna Margulies appears as Stone’s wife, a character who adds little to the story. Of the three Christs, Dinklage gives the most interesting performance. Eloquent and nearly regal in bearing, his Canadian-born Joseph Cassel thinks that he should be sent to England. Tragedy looms as Avnet presents Stone as a man who sides with his patients in a way that the hospital establishment mostly mistrusts. He's adamant in his opposition to electroshock therapy, for example. Beneath all the drama, we find a romanticized notion about how the patients help to cure the doctor of his heretofore unacknowledged delusions. The point seems forced, a notion more accepted than discovered by a movie that flirts with intriguing issues but feels like it might have benefited from the intensifying claustrophobia of the stage.

The Song of Names

Based on a novel by classical music critic Norman Lebrecht, The Song of Names aims for high seriousness but fades from the screen without making the expected impact. The story centers on a gifted Jewish violinist who's played at various ages by Luke Doyle, Jonah Hauer-King and Clive Owen. Sent to England from Poland to escape the Nazis, young Dovidl is raised by an English family that goes to great lengths to respect his Jewish heritage. After a rocky start, the supremely confident Dovidl makes friends with Martin, the son of the man who agrees to shelter Dovidl while nurturing the youngster's musical talents. As the two age, Martin develops a belief in Dovidl and promotes his career. On the eve an important concert, the now-grown Dovidl vanishes. After 35 years, Martin (played as an adult by Tim Roth) tries to find his former friend. Director Francois Girard uses Dovidl's disappearance as a source of mystery while the movie shifts between the war and post-war years and the 1980s. Little catches fire with Dovidl's story becoming secondary to Martin's search. The result: A movie that tries to deal with the Holocaust, musical genius and personal transformation fails to plumb any of those areas with sufficient depth. The historical backdrop and the music provide a bit of elevation, but the movie strikes only a minor chord.

Another stay at the Marigold Hotel

Judi Dench and Maggie Smith highlight a less-than-wonderful return trip to India.

When it movies do reasonably well at the box office, one go-round no longer seems sufficient.

So it's hardly surprising that director John Madden and the ensemble cast of The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel have reunited for a sequel, this one appropriately titled The Second Best Exotic Marigold Hotel. And second best, it most certainly is.

Three years after the original, Sonny (Dev Patel) has joined with the reliably acerbic Muriel (Maggie Smith) to try to interest an international franchiser in their small Indian operation, selling it as a charming spot where the elderly can enjoy their golden years at a low cost.

The movie never seems to question whether expansion and franchising are consistent with maintaining the hotel's rumpled charm, but a movie such as The Second Best Exotic Marigold Hotel never strays too far out of an audience's comfort zone.

Among the new but hardly pressing questions: Will Douglas (Bill Nighy) overcome his shyness and finally confess his growing love for Evelyn (Judi Dench)?

Called upon to be diffident, Nighy loses access to the wit that has marked his best work. For her part, Dench continues to bring warmth and dignity to a role that otherwise might be at home in a sitcom -- sitcom sensibilities being the operative force here.

Meanwhile, Sonny and his fiancee (Tena Desai) are planning their engagement party and wedding -- albeit not without obstacles stemming mostly from Sonny's insecurity. He frets about a potential rival.

Norman (Ronald Pickup) continues to work out the details of his relationship with Carol (Diana Hardcastle), and Madge (Celia Imrie) flirts with two Indian suitors.

Also added to the mix is a miscast Richard Gere, who plays a man who says he's writing a novel after the collapse of his marriage.

Lest he be left out of the romantic stew, Gere's character is smitten by Sonny's mother (Lillete Dubey) in what amounts to a pro forma and sparkless attempt at romance.

What was the point of adding Gere anyway? The reason people might want to see this movie rests almost entirely on their affection for characters they already know -- not on the expectation that newbies will arrive.

Less distracting is David Strathairn: He's briefly seen as the owner of a chain of hotels that may want to add The Marigold to its burgeoning empire.

The script even finds a way to return Douglas's miserable but estranged wife (Penelope Wilton) to the proceedings before all the loose ends are neatly tied.

You know from the start that any movie set in India must include energetic Bollywood-style dancing, which this one does, although it tries to leave us with a slightly reflective aftertaste.

For my money, Dench and Smith provide the major reasons to make a second trip to Jaipur, India, that and any incidental travelogue pleasures the journey may offer. Put it this way: Aging seldom has been made to seem more colorful.

A tense, well-acted 'Arbitrage'

Robert Miller has a lovely wife and two grown children who work for him at his wildly successful hedge fund. As befits a man of great wealth, Miller and his wife give major money to charity, and he's regarded as a Wall Street wizard, a guy who hits way more than he misses.

But Robert -- Richard Gere in a performance that's smart and icy -- may not be anyone's idea of a role model. He has a mistress (Laetitia Casta), and he's in the midst of carrying out a fraud, a $412-million scheme designed to fool auditors who are evaluating his company for a possible merger.

Robert desperately wants the merger to succeed, which means he's walking a financial tightrope. He hopes he can close the deal before he faces exposure and ruin.

Despite the movie's initial appearance, writer/director Nicholas Jarecki isn't necessarily out to make a major statement about financial corruption, something, say, on the order of last year's Margin Call.

First and foremost, Jarekci cranks up a thriller that has Robert trying to cover up another crime, a task that involves him with a young black man (Nate Parker) who owes him a favor and helps carry out the deception.

This part of the movie introduces a determined cop (Tim Roth) who spends most of the movie trying to prove Robert's guilt. If things threaten to get dull, an amusing Roth's around to pose questions that seem to annoy everyone with whom he talks.

Adding a second criminal element to the financial deception has a dual effect: It keeps the movie from bogging down in complex wheeling and dealing (good), but it also prevents Jarecki from making a strong enough statement about a financial system in which unethical and illegal behavior seems to be tolerated -- so long as no one gets caught.

Jarecki has a lot on his plate, but he mostly weaves the movie's many threads into a brisk and coherent thriller that features a variety of strong performances. Among them: Susan Sarandon portrays Robert's wife, a woman who may know more than she lets on. Brit Marling plays the daughter who works for and idolizes her father, and who provides the movie with a character who experiences morally based doubt.

About three-quarters of the way through, I began to wonder how Jarecki would join the movie's many plot lines, and I can't say I found his resolution entirely satisfying, but there's enough crackle, intrigue and pleasure (smart guys trying to outsmart one another) in Arbitrage to keep it percolating nicely.

Plenty of grit, but to what end?

Wesley Snipes/Don Cheadle, strong work in a flawed effort.

One cop (Ethan Hawke) needs money to buy a house. Another (Don Cheadle) wants a promotion that he believes will liberate him from the morally murky world of undercover work. A third cop (Richard Gere) maintains a safe distance from conflict because he has only seven days remaining until retirement.

Such is the setup for director Antoine Fuqua's Brooklyn's Finest, a cop drama that commits a variety of big-screen felonies. Among them: The motivations given each character in a script by Michael C. Martin and Brad Caleb Kane tend to be over simplified, and a farfetched ending – bathed in the expected bloodshed – makes the entire movie feel contrived.

Fuqua, who directed Training Day, would seem the ideal candidate for getting the most out of Brooklyn's Finest, but the movie doesn't feel as if it has an overriding sense of purpose. Brooklyn's Finest doesn't fulfill the demands of either art or entertainment; it explores the down-and-dirty world of cops who've been tempted by corruption and, in some cases, have indulged their least honorable impulses, but it seems more interested in finding pumped-up drama than in unearthing any kind of truth.

A strong cast is supplemented by an appearance by Wesley Snipes, in what's being touted as a comeback performance. Snipes acquits himself well as a gangster who has won his release from prison thanks to an assist from Cheadle's character. Cheadle's Tango owed Snipes' Cas a favor, so he helped his buddy find a slick attorney who knew how to open slammer doors.

Cheadle gives his usually strong performance as a detective who's living with too much moral ambiguity. Hawke pushes himself to jittery extremes as Sal, a detective who's driven to do better by his family. But Gere seems wooden in this context; he's playing a cop with nothing in his life but vague retirement plans, an undistinguished record and a relationship with a hooker (Shannon Kane). (If you want to see Gere really handle the role of “dirty” cop go back to Mike Figgis' Internal Affairs (1990). Maybe Gere's better at police work in Los Angeles than in NYC.)

The supporting cast can't be faulted, although Lili Taylor is largely wasted as Sal's wife, a woman who's pregnant with twins. Will Patton plays the cop who keeps promising Cheadle's character a promotion, but never seems to deliver. And Ellen Barkin shows up in a quasi-comic role as a foul-mouthed federal agent who seems interested only in advancing her own career. Say this: Barkin refuses to get lost in an atmosphere where testosterone is the hormone of choice.

Watching Brooklyn's Finest is like watching lots of urban ingredients boil in a pot without ever figuring out exactly what dish is being cooked. The movie has plenty of hard-core urban dynamism, but – in the end (and especially at the end) – doesn't have much to show for it.