At the Arthouse

Don't read this if you're easily offended: Inside Paul Giamatti's Barney life ofdebauchery

Barney found out that Rosamund Pike was the love of his life. But the fool stilldrove her away.
The movie poster that made me stop.

Editor's note: This review contains plot spoilers. Only read if you dare.

It’s not often I get snookered by a movie poster, but the image on the Barney’s Version ad got the best of me. It shows a bearded Paul Giamatti being lectured by a finger-pointing — and very happy looking — Dustin Hoffman. Above the two stars you see the faces of three smiling, beautiful women.

Looks like a romantic comedy. Certainly a comedy of some kind, as it’s based on a novel by Mordecai Richler, the bard of the Montreal Jews, who loved to show his characters in all their gross and embarrassing and hungry humanity.

So I was surprised when the film turns out to be a sad study in a man’s decline, and his final descent into what appears to be Alzheimer’s. I’m glad the poster offered a sunnier image, otherwise I might have missed a very touching movie, of the “kind that they don’t make anymore” variety. And I would’ve missed Giamatti’s gripping performance, and Hoffman’s lustily comic turn, his best role in ages.

This is a hard film to summarize, as it sprawls far and wide. It recounts Barney’s life in the arts, as it were, as he evolves from a quasi-bohemian, would-be artiste in Rome, to an unapologetic producer of trash television in Montreal.

Along the way, he gets married three times, once to a tragic artist, once to a Jewish princess (Minnie Driver), and once to Miriam, the woman of his dreams (Rosamund Pike). He also manages to become a suspect in the murder of an old writer friend from back Rome (Scott Speedman), all the while drinking a lot of Scotch, chain-smoking Cuban cigars and following the Montreal Canadiens hockey team, often all at the same time.

The movie doesn’t hang together all that well, and I suspect that if I’d read the book I’d find it pretty dissatisfying. For example, the thread that deals with Barney being a suspect in the murder of a good friend ought to shadow the entire film, but here it seems like an afterthought, and could have been omitted without any real loss.

That’s because the film is really just a character study. Giamatti’s Barney is a deeply flawed man who somehow manages to win a woman, Miriam, who gives him much more than he really deserves. His tragedy, if that’s not too grand a word, is that his characters flaws (the aforementioned whiskey, hockey and cigars) keep him from expressing what seems to be his real love for her. Fool that he is, he runs the good woman off.

Here, Alzheimer’s offers a partial compensation. At some point he can’t remember that she’s left him and married a man he despises. So he buys a burial plot for two and engraves her name on the tombstone.

The film offers Giamatti perhaps the juiciest role of his career, and he gnaws it all the way down to the bone. This is an easy film to find fault with — it is quite sentimental — but because of its performances it’s also easy to connect to.

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Movie Review

Daniel Craig shines in Queer, an unapologetic tale of love and loss

Photo courtesy of A24

Drew Starkey and Daniel Craig in Queer.

As recently as the late 2010s, if a movie was made about an LGBTQ+ character, it was more than likely about their coming out experience. Romance, if it existed, was typically chaste, and actual sex was almost completely out of the question. Things have changed dramatically in the 2020s, to the point that a major movie star has no issue starring in a film called Queer.

Based on the 1985 novella by William S. Burroughs, the film features William Lee (Daniel Craig), whom everyone calls just Lee, a writer living in 1950s-era Mexico City who spends most of his time haunting local bars with friends like fellow writer Joe Guidry (Jason Schwartzman) and hitting on younger men. His early interactions in the film seem to indicate that Lee has a bad reputation within the local gay community, as multiple people avoid him or give him odd looks.

Lee senses an opportunity when he encounters a newcomer, Eugene Allerton (Drew Starkey). Despite some awkward interactions, the two of them start spending time together, although Lee has much more invested in the relationship than Eugene does. Their hit-and-miss bond continues until Lee, who’s starting to get into drugs in addition to the booze, convinces Eugene to accompany him on a trip to South America.

Directed by Luca Guadagnino and written by Justin Kuritzkes (making their second straight film together after Challengers), early on the film seems to be mostly about the divide between an older person who’s grown comfortable in his ways and a younger person who’s living a relatively carefree life. The introduction of drugs into the plot changes things, though, with Lee searching out more ways to open his eyes to what the world has to offer.

Guadagnino and his team use some interesting visual storytelling techniques to introduce ideas that may not be present in the actual script. The most successful, demonstrated in multiple scenes, is the superimposition of movements by Lee over what’s actually taking place in the scene. The subtle overlay gives the audience insight into Lee’s true feelings, showing what he can’t or won’t say out loud.

Music also plays a big part in how the plot is perceived, with the use of anachronistic songs from Nirvana and Prince serving to heighten certain moments. The score by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross is not as in-your-face as the one they did for Challengers, but it complements the film well, especially when the plot starts to get trippy in its final half hour.

Craig, who appears sweaty and disheveled for much of the film, is about as far from the suaveness of James Bond as you can get in this role. He takes multiple risks with his performance and almost all of them pay off. Starkey’s character is subdued by comparison, but still comes off well. Schwartzman and Lesley Manville are given showy roles, with both using altered appearances that make them nearly unrecognizable to deliver memorable performances.

Queer is not as accessible as Challengers was storytelling-wise, but the fact that it tells a story about gay men living their lives as they see fit with no interference or questions shows how far the film world has come in a short period of time. It also continues Guadagnino’s streak of making audacious films in a way that few other filmmakers are willing or able to approach.

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Queer is now playing in theaters.

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