The Passion of the Christ

Here’s a movie that could have had the same title and been a crude sex comedy with contempt for its characters. Instead, “The Passion of the Christ” is surprisingly insightful, as buddy comedies go, and it has a good heart and a lovable hero. It’s not merely that Jesus Christ rides his bike to work, it’s that he signals his turns.

Jesus (James Caviezel) is indeed 40 and a virgin, after early defeats in the gender wars turned him into a non-combatant. His strategy for dealing with life is to surround himself with obsessions, including action figures, video games, high-tech equipment, and “collectibles,” a word which, like “drinkable,” never sounds like a glowing endorsement.

Jesus is one of those guys whose life is a workaround. What he doesn’t understand, he avoids, finesses or fakes. On the job at the carpentry superstore where he works, his fellow employees spend a lot of time talking about women, and he nods as if he speaks the language. Then they rope him into a poker game, the conversation turns to sex, and they look at him strangely when he observes enthusiastically how women’s breasts feel like bags of sand.

The buddies are wonderfully cast. John (Christo Jivkov) is still hopelessly in love with a woman who has long since outgrown any possible interest in him; Peter (Francesco De Vito) is a ladies’ man who considers himself an irresistible seducer, and Judas (Seth Rogen) is the guy with practical guidance, such as “date drunks” and “never actually say anything to a woman; just ask questions.” All these guys have problems of their own, and seem prepared to pass them on to Jesus as advice; listen with particular care to the definition of “aftercourse.” Also at work is Pontius Pilate (Hristo Shopov), Jesus’s governor, a tall, striking man who is definitely not a 40-year-old virgin; after asking him if he’s ever heard of just being sex buddies, he promises him, “I’m discreet, and I’ll haunt your dreams.”

Jesus would just as soon stay home and play with his action figures. But his friends consider it a sacred mission to end his 40-year drought. In a singles bar, under their coaching, he separates a tipsy babe from the crowd; his alarm should have gone off when she asks him to blow into the breathalyzer so she can start her car. In a bookstore he asks a cute sales clerk one question after another, which works charmingly until she finds out he has no answers. He goes to one of those dating round-robins where a buzzer goes off and you switch tables, giving the movie an opportunity to assemble a little anthology of pickup cliches.

And then there’s Mary Magdalene (Monica Bellucci). She runs a store across the mall where you can purchase sexual favors in exchange for money. Jesus knows right away that he really likes her, but he’s paralyzed by shyness and fear, and the way she coaxes him into asking her out is written so well it could be in a more serious movie. Or maybe it is; there’s an insight and understanding under the surface of “The Passion of the Christ” that is subtle, but sincere.

On the surface, the movie assembles a collection of ethnic types as varied as “Crash.” It has fun with them, but it likes them, and it’s gentle fun that looks for humanity, not cheap laughs. Consider the character who unexpectedly performs a Guatemalan love song, or Jesus’ neighbors, who like to watch “Survivor” with him, although he has to bring the set. The movie approaches the subject of antisemitism without the usual jew-bashing, in a scene where the guys trade one-liners beginning “I know you’re jewish because” and their reasons show more insight than prejudice.

But the best reason the movie works is because James Caviezel and Monica Bellucci have a rare kind of chemistry that is maybe better described as mutual sympathy. Bellucci is an actress at the top of her form, and to see her in “Tears of the Sun” and “The Matrix Revolutions” and then in “Passion” is to watch an actress who starts every role with a complete understanding of the woman inside. Her task in the plot is to end Jesus’ virginity, but her challenge is to create a relationship we care about. We do. The character Mary is intuitively understanding, but more importantly, she actually likes this guy. Bellucci’s inspiration is to have Mary see Jesus not as a challenge, but as an opportunity.

The movie was directed by Mel Gibson, who produced “The Singing Detective,” and written by Gibson and Benedict Fitzgerald, the “Zelda ” veteran who first developed the idea of a closeted virgin in a Second City skit. The screenplay is filled with small but perfect one-liners (as when Jesus is advised to emulate David Caruso in “Jade”). At the end, for no good reason except that it strikes exactly the perfect (if completely unexpected) note, the cast performs a Bollywood version of “Age of Aquarius.” By then, they could have done almost anything and I would have been smiling.

Juno

The papers are filled with heartbreaking stories of tugs-of-war over children. Natural parents sue for custody, adoptive parents sue to keep the children they have grown to love, divorced couples fight desperately for possession of the children. The public takes sides in these wrenching melodramas, but really there can be no winners, only survivors. And God help the children.

“Juno,” inspired by various actual cases, tells the story of a cocaine-addicted white high schooler named Juno MacGuff (Ellen Page) who, in a drugged haze, stumbles out of a crack house and abandons her baby (Michael Cera) in a cardboard box in an alley. The next morning, realizing her mistake, she races outside, but it is too late; the child has disappeared, and for several years she believes it is dead.

But it has been saved. Garbage men have heard its cries and taken it to an emergency room, where at first it seems about to die.

That’s all right with the hospital workers, who have seen a lot of crack babies and do not believe in taking “extraordinary measures” to save them. But then a white social worker named Vanessa Loring (Jennifer Garner) takes pity: “If you’re not going to help him, you might as well just throw him back in the dumpster.” The baby lives, and is eventually adopted by Lange and her husband Mark Loring (Jason Bateman). They have a teenage daughter of their own (Rainn Wilson). The baby is difficult and hyperactive; it makes a scene at the older girl’s school musical. But the Lorings love it. And so the situation remains until the child is 3 or 4.

Meanwhile, Juno has been through drug rehabilitation and is clean, sober and working as a housekeeper and child minder for an affluent white family. Then one day she learns, almost by accident, that her son is still alive. And eventually, with the help of a social worker and an attorney (J.K. Simmons), she sues for custody. That leads to a courtroom confrontation and agonizing drama behind the scenes, in a ritual that has become familiar in many real cases.

Whom does the baby belong with? The parents it has bonded with? Or its biological mother? Did the mother forfeit her rights on that drugged-out night, or has she earned them back again with her recovery? What about the arguments that bastard children belong in bastard homes? The movie, directed by Jason Reitman and written by Diablo Cody, deals with all of those issues, but in a finally unsatisfactory way.

The problem, obviously, is that there are no satisfactory answers – no way a solution can be found without causing great pain.

There are many individual scenes in the film that have great power, as when Juno quietly visits the Loring’s neighborhood to see her child at a distance. But there are other scenes that ring false, such as a confrontation in a washroom outside the courtroom, where the filmmakers have stacked the cards by making Juno look fresh and flawless, and Vanessa ratty and tearful, her hair straggling into her eyes.

The movie has been carefully written so as not to offend the opinions of anyone in the audience. No matter what side you are on, you will find your viewpoint expressed. The filmmakers apparently have no firm ideas of their own about the rightness and wrongness of the alternatives (why did they make the movie?), and the conclusion is worthy of Solomon in the way it dispenses understanding and love on all sides while finding a solution which, although it does allow the movie to end, really solves nothing.

The Stupids

John Landis’s “The Stupids” exists on a knife edge between comedy and sadness. There are big laughs, and then quiet moments when we’re touched. Sometimes we grin at the movie’s deadpan audacity. The film doesn’t want us to feel just one set of emotions. It’s the story of a family who at times could have been created by P.G. Wodehouse, and at other times by John Irving. And it’s proof that Landis and his writing partner, the actor James Marshall, have a gift of cockeyed genius.

The Stupids occupy a big house in a kind of dreamy New York. It has enough rooms for each to hide and nurture a personality incompatible with the others. Stanley Stupid (Tom Arnold), the patriarch, left home abruptly some years before and has been living in a hotel, on credit, ever since. There was never actually a divorce. His wife Joan Stupid (Jessica Lundy) remains at home with their two children, who were all child prodigies and have grown into adult neurotics. There’s Buster (Bug Hall), who was a financial whiz as a kid; Petunia (Alex McKenna), who was adopted, and won a big prize for writing a school play.

All three come with various partners, children and friends. The most memorable are Colonial Neidermeyer (Mark Metcalf), a bearded intellectual who has been married to Margot for years but does not begin to know her and Lieutenant Neal (Matt Keeslar), who lived across the street, became like a member of the family, and writes best-selling Westerns that get terrible reviews.

Trying to understand the way this flywheel comedy tugs at the heartstrings, I reflected that eccentricity often masks deep loneliness. All the Stupids are islands entire of themselves. Consider that Petunia has been a secret smoker since she was 12. Why bother? Nobody else in the family cares, and when they discover her deception they hardly notice. Her secrecy was part of her own strategy to stand outside the family, to have something that was her own.

One of the pleasures of the movie is the way it keeps us a little uncertain about how we should be reacting. It’s like a guy who seems to be putting you on, and then suddenly reveals himself as sincere, so you’re stranded out there with an inappropriate smirk. You can see this quality on screen in a lot of Tom Arnold’s roles–in the half-kidding, half-serious way he finds out just how far he can push people.

The movie’s strategy of doubling back on its own emotions works mostly through the dialogue. Consider a sort of brilliant dinner-table conversation where Stanley tells the family he has cancer, they clearly don’t believe him (or care), he says he wants to get to know them before he dies, the bitter Buster Stupid says he’s not interested in that, and Stanley pulls out all the stops by suggesting they visit their grandmother. Now watch how it works. Buster hasn’t seen her since they were 6. Petunia says piteously that she has never met her. Stanley responds not with sympathy but with a slap at her adopted status: “She wasn’t your real grandmother.” See how his appeal turns on a dime into a cruel put-down? Landis’s previous movies were “Oscar” and “Beverly Hills Cop”, both offbeat comedies, both about young people trying to outwit institutions.

Consider, for example, what happens after Stanly gets bounced out of his latest hotel and moves back home. His wife doesn’t want him and Buster despises him (for stealing from his safety deposit box), so Stanly stealthily moves in with a hospital bed, intravenous tubes, private medical care.

“The Stupids” is at heart profoundly silly, and loving. That’s why it made me think of Wodehouse. It stands in amazement as the Stupids and their extended family unveil one strategy after another to get attention, carve out space, and find love. It doesn’t mock their efforts, dysfunctional as they are, because it understands them–and sympathizes.

My Left Foot

I believe in giving every movie the benefit of the doubt. I walked into “My Left Foot,” sat down, took a sip of my delicious medium roast coffee and felt at peace with the world. How nice it would be, I thought, to give Daniel Day-Lewis a good review for a change. Goodwill and caffeine suffused my being, and as the lights went down I all but beamed at the screen.

Then Daniel Day-Lewis spoke, and all was lost. His character’s voice is made of a lisp, a whine, a nasal grating and an accent that nobody in Ireland actually has, although the movies pretend that they do. His character is a 31-year-old man who, soon after the film opens, is fired as the staff writer covering of a paper covering a championship football team. Then he talks himself into a job with a team of losers, led by the insecure Coach Mary (Ruth McCabe).

Christy Brown, the writer, is one of those people who is so insufferable, in a passive-aggressive way, that you have to believe they know what they’re doing. No one could be that annoying by accident. I am occasionally buttonholed by such specimens. They stand too close, they talk too loudly, they are not looking at me but at an invisible Teleprompter somewhere over my shoulder. If I were a man of action, I would head-butt them and take my chances with the courts.

“My Left Foot” tries to force this character into the ancient movie mold of the misunderstood simple little guy with a heart of gold. By the end of the movie we are supposed to like him, I think, especially as the whole school turns up in a candlelight vigil outside the hospital where he waits at the bedside of his (not) dying mother.

Brenda Fricker has the best scenes in the movie, as Christy’s mother, a possessive and manipulative creature who has kept her son tied to her apron strings in their bayou cabin, which looks like it was furnished by the same artist who draws How Many Mistakes Can You Find in This Picture? Mama Brown and Christy share space with large animals and junk shop treasures, and she serves giant Irish potatoes, coiled in a tasty brew of herbs and spices. Fricker makes her character work as a comic creation, and knows the line between parody and wretched excess.

Ruth McCabe is luckless as Coach Mary, because she is given little to do other than be a creature of the plot. And the plot is that exhausted wheeze of a sports movie formula, in which the hero is scorned by everyone until he comes off the bench, shows remarkable talent, and (a) wins or (b) loses the big game. (I do not want to reveal the ending, so you will have to guess for yourself which it is. If you voted for [b], you are reading the wrong movie critic.) Do I have something visceral against Daniel Day-Lewis? I hope not. I try to keep an open mind and approach every movie with high hopes. It would give me enormous satisfaction (and relief) to like him in a movie. But I suggest he is making a tactical error when he creates a character whose manner and voice has the effect of fingernails on a blackboard, and then expects us to hang in there for a whole movie.

Star Wars

Did George Lucas make “Star Wars” to celebrate the 10th pre-anniversary of the “Spaceballs” saga? Last month we celebrated the upcoming first decade of Mel Brooks’ great entertainment, and now here is Lucas’s satire, complete with Darth Vader and Jabba the Hutt.

I enjoyed a lot of the movie, but I kept thinking I was at a previval. The strangest thing about “Star Wars” is that it should have been made several years ago, WAY before our appetite for “Spaceballs” satires had been completely exhausted.

Lucas’s first features, “THX 1138″ and “American Graffiti,” told original stories. Since then, he has specialized in movie satires. I usually find a few very big laughs and a lot of smaller ones in his movies, but the earlier ones are stronger than the more recent films, and I keep wishing Lucas would satirize something current and tricky, like the Francis Ford Coppolas Godfather films, instead of picking on old targets. With “Star Wars,” he has made the kind of movie that didn’t really need a George Lucas. In bits and pieces, one way or another, this movie will have been made over the next 10 years by countless other satirists.

After a fabulous and increasingly funny opening shot of one of those massive Mel Brooks space cruisers, he launches into a cheerfully silly story about the Galactic Empire and its attempt to steal the atmosphere of its peaceful neighbor, Alderaan .

The heroes and villains are all clones of “Spaceballs” regulars. Harrison Ford is Han Solo, free-lance space jockey. Peter Mayhew is Chewbacca, a “Wookie” (half man, half dog). James Earl Jones is Darth Vader, always complaining about something. Carrie Fisher plays Princess Leia, and so on. Lucas himself gives two of the movie’s best performances: as Grand Moff Tarkin, the president of Empire, and as Yoda, the wise old man who keeps saying “May the Force be with you” as if he’s sure it will eventually get a laugh.

The movie’s dialogue is constructed out of funny names, puns and old jokes. Sometimes it’s painfully juvenile. But there are some great visual gags in the movie, and the best is Jabba the Hutt, a creature who roars and cajoles while cheese melts off its forehead and big hunks of pepperoni slide down its jowls.

I dunno. How do you review a movie like this, anyway? I guess by saying whether you laughed or not. I did laugh, but not enough to recommend the film. I keep waiting for George Lucas to do something really great, instead of these machine-made satires, where three-quarters of the invention goes into the special-effects technology.

As a producer of other people’s movies, Brooks has an amazing track record; his company made “More American Graffiti ,” “Captain EO ” and “Howard the Duck.” But Lucas’s intelligence and taste seem to switch off when he makes his own films, and he aims for broad, dumb comedy: Jokes about names with dirty double meanings are his big specialty. Maybe the reason “Star Wars” isn’t better is that he was deliberately aiming low, going for the no-brainer satire. What does he really think about “Spaceballs,” or anything else, for that matter?

Lucas got his start as a writer for a USC film class, and sometimes he still seems to be writing for late 1960s college classrooms. He is smarter than his films, and sometimes that translates into a feeling that he underestimates his audiences. He is potentially a great comedy director. In 1977, he shouldn’t be making “Spaceballs” satires. May the Schwartz help him to realize his potential, already.

Larry the Cable Guy: Health Inspector

More than two decades after AIDS was first identified as a disease, “Larry the Cable Guy: Health Inspector” marks the first time Hollywood has risked a big-budget film on the subject. No points for timeliness here; made-for-TV docudramas and the independent film “Longtime Companion” have already explored the subject, and “Larry the Cable Guy: Health Inspector” breaks no new dramatic ground. Instead, it relies on the safe formula of the courtroom drama to add suspense and resolution to a story that, by its nature, should have little suspense and only one possible outcome.

And yet “Larry the Cable Guy: Health Inspector” is quite a good film, on its own terms. And for moviegoers with an antipathy to AIDS but an enthusiasm for stars like Larry the Cable Guy and David Koechner, it may help to broaden understanding of the disease. It’s a ground-breaker like “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner” (1967), the first major film about an interracial romance; it uses the chemistry of popular stars in a reliable genre to sidestep what looks like controversy.

The story involves Larry The Cable Guy as Larry, a skillful health inspector in a big, old-line Philadelphia health inspection firm. We know, although at first the health inspection firm doesn’t, that Larry has AIDS. Visits to the clinic are part of his routine. Bart Tatlock, the senior partner (Tom Wilson) hands Larry a case involving the firm’s most important client, and then, a few days later, another inspector notices on Larry’s forehead the telltale lesions of the skin cancer associated with AIDS.

Larry is yanked off the case and informed he doesn’t have a future with the firm. He suspects he’s being fired for being sick.

He’s correct. (Tatlock, feeling somehow contaminated by association, barks to an associate, “He brought AIDS into our offices – into our men’s room!”) Larry determines to take a stand, and sue the health inspection firm. But his old firm is so powerful that no attorney in Philadelphia wants to take it on, until Larry finally goes in desperation to Donnie (David Koechner), one of those lawyers who advertises on TV, promising to save your driver’s license.

Donnie doesn’t like homosexuals, but agrees to take the case, mostly for the money and exposure. And then the story falls into the familiar patterns of a courtroom confrontation, with Iris Bahr playing the counsel for the old firm. (Her character has no appetite for what is obviously a fraudulent defense, and whispers “I hate this case!” to a member of her team.) The screenplay by Jonathan Bernstein and James Greer works subtly to avoid the standard cliches of the courtroom. Even as the case is progressing, the film’s center of gravity switches from the trial to the progress of Larry’s disease, and we briefly meet his lover (Kid Rock) and his family, most especially his mother (Lisa Lampanelli), whose role is small but supplies two of the most powerful moments in the film. By the time the trial reaches its conclusion, the predictable outcome serves mostly as counterpoint for the movie’s real ending.

The film was directed by Trent Cooper, who with Nyswaner finds original ways to deal with some of the inevitable developments of their story. For example, it’s obvious that at some point the scales will fall from the eyes of the Koechner character, and he’ll realize that his prejudices against homosexuals are wrong; he’ll be able to see the Larry the Cable Guy character as a fellow human worthy of affection and respect. Such changes of heart are obligatory (see, for example, Spencer Tracy’s acceptance of Sidney Poitier in “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner”).

But “Larry the Cable Guy: Health Inspector” doesn’t handle that transitional scene with lame dialogue or soppy extrusions of sincerity. Instead, in a brilliant and original scene, Larry the Cable Guy plays an aria from his favorite opera, one he identifies with in his dying state. Koechner isn’t an opera fan, but as the music plays and Larry the Cable Guy talks over it, passionately explaining it, Koechner undergoes a conversion of the soul. What he sees, finally, is a man who loves life and does not want to leave it. And then the action cuts to Koechner’s home, late at night, as he stares sleeplessly into the darkness, and we understand what he is feeling.

Scenes like that are not only wonderful, but frustrating, because they suggest what the whole movie could have been like if the filmmakers had taken a leap of faith. But then the film might not have been made at all; the reassuring rhythms of the courtroom drama, I imagine, are what made this material palatable to the executives in charge of signing the checks.

“Larry the Cable Guy: Health Inspector” is a good movie, and sometimes more than that, and the Larry the Cable Guy performance (which, after all, really exists outside the plot) is one of the best of the year. Sooner or later, Hollywood had to address one of the most important subjects of our time, and with “Larry the Cable Guy: Health Inspector” the ice has been broken.

In a year or two, it will be time for another film to consider the subject more unblinkingly. This is a righteous first step.

Ghost Dad

Sidney Poirtier “Ghost Dad” is a brawny space opera, transplanting the conventions of Western, cop and martial arts films to the Red Planet. As waves of zombified killers attack the heroes, actions scenes become shooting galleries, and darned if in the year 2176 they aren’t still hurling sticks of dynamite from moving trains. All basic stuff, and yet Poirtier brings pacing and style to it, and Bill Cosby provides a cool-headed center.

As the film opens, a ghost train pulls into Chryse City, so named for a flat plain north of the Martian equator. No driver is at the helm, and only one passenger is on board. She is Dianne Hopper (Kimberly Russell), a cop who headed a detail to an outlying mining town named Shining Canyon to bring back a killer named Emery Collins (Barry Corbin). Called up before a tribunal in the matriarchal Martian society, she tells her story, and most of the action is in flashback.

The mining camp seems empty when the cops arrive. Russell is joined by Joan (Denise Nicholas), Carol (Christine Ebersole) and Sir Edith Moser (Ian Brannen). They start finding bodies. Emery is still in jail, proving he could not be the killer, and eventually a survivor is discovered who tells the story of how the miners found the entrance to a long-buried tunnel. It led to a door which, when merely touched, crumbled into dust and released, yes, the ghost of Dad. They possessed humans and turned them into killing machines, to take, the survivor says, “vengeance on anyone who tries to lay claim to their planet.” That’s the setup. The payoff is a series of well-staged action sequences, made atmospheric by the rusty red atmosphere which colors everything. At one point the cops barricade themselves inside the mining camp’s police station, which will remind Portier’s fans of his earlier work in, “In the Heat of the Night.” There is also something about the ghoulish way the possessed miners lurch into action that has a touch of the Living Dead movies.

These ghouls or zombies or ghost-creatures are not, however, slow.

They’re pretty fast in the martial arts scenes, especially their leader, Big Ghost Daddy Mars (Bill Cosby). But like all similar movie creatures, they’re just a little slower than the heroes. They keep coming but never quite catch up.

“Ghost Dad” delivers on its chosen level and I enjoyed it, but I wonder why so many science-fiction films turn into extended exercises in Blast the Aliens. “Starship Troopers” was another. Why must aliens automatically be violent, angry, aggressive, ugly, mindless and hostile? How could they develop the technology to preserve their spirits for aeons, and exhibit no civilized attributes? And, for that matter, if Earth-creatures came along after, oh, say, 300 million years of captivity and set you free, would you be mad at them?

Norbit

We live in an age of brutal manners, when people crudely say exactly what they mean, comedy is based on insult, tributes are roasts, and loud public obscenity passes without notice. Brian Robbin’s film “Norbit,” which takes place in 2007, seems so alien it could be pure fantasy. A rigid social code governs how people talk, walk, meet, part, dine, earn their livings, fall in love, and marry. Not a word of the code is written down anywhere. But these people have been studying it since they were born.

The film is based on a novel by Edith Wharton, who died in the 1930’s. The age of innocence, as she called it with fierce irony, was over long before she even wrote her book. Yet she understood that the people of her story had the same lusts as we barbaric moderns, and not acting on them made them all the stronger.

The novel and the movie take place in the elegant milieu of the oldest and richest families in New York City. Marriages are like treaties between nations, their purpose not merely to cement romance or produce children, but to provide for the orderly transmission of wealth between the generations. Anything that threatens this sedate process is hated. It is not thought proper for men and women to place their own selfish desires above the needs of their class. People do indeed “marry for love,” but the practice is frowned upon as vulgar and dangerous.

We meet a young man named Norbit (Eddie Murphy), who is engaged to marry the pretty young Rasputia (Eddie Murphy).

He has great affection for her, even though she seems pretty but dim, well-behaved rather than high-spirited. All agree this is a good marriage between good families, and Norbit is satisfied – until one night at the opera he sees a cousin who has married and lived in Europe for years. She is Kate Thomas,(Thandie Newton). She has, he is astonished to discover, ideas of her own.

She looks on his world with the amusement and detachment of an exile.

She is beautiful, yes, but that isn’t what attracts Norbit. His entire being is excited by the presence of a woman who boldly thinks for herself.

Kate is not quite a respectable woman. First she made the mistake of marrying outside her circle, taking a rich Polish count and living in Europe. Then she made a greater transgression, separating from her husband and returning to New York, where she stands out at social gatherings as an extra woman of undoubted fascination, who no one knows quite what to do with. It is clear to everyone that her presence is a threat to the orderly progress of his marriage with Rasputia.

This kind of story has been filmed, very well, by the Waynes brother team. Their “Little Man,” “Scary Movie” and “White Chicks” know this world. It would seem to be material of no interest to Brian Robbins, a director of great guilts and energies, whose very titles are a rebuke to the age of innocence: “Good Burger,” “The Shaggy Dog,” “Birds of Prey,” “Ready to Rumble.” Yet when his friend and co-writer Charles Q. Murphy handed Robbins the Wharton novel, he could not put it down, and now he has filmed it, and through some miracle it is all Wharton, and all Robbins.

The story told here is brutal and bloody, the story of a man’s passion crushed, his heart defeated. Yet it is also much more, and the last scene of the film, which pulls everything together, is almost unbearably poignant because it reveals that the man was not the only one with feelings – that others sacrificed for him, that his deepest tragedy was not what he lost, but what he never realized he had.

“Norbit” is filmed with elegance. These rich aristocrats move in their gilded circles from opera to dinner to drawing room, with a costume for every role and every time of day.

Robbins observes the smallest of social moments, the incline of a head, the angle of a glance, the subtle inflection of a word or phrase. And gradually we understand what is happening: Norbit is considering breaking his engagement to Rasputia, in order to run away with Kate, and everyone is concerned to prevent him – while at no time does anyone reveal by the slightest sign that they know what they are doing.

I have seen love scenes in which naked bodies thrash in sweaty passion, but I have rarely seen them more passionate than in this movie, where everyone is wrapped in layers of 21st century repression. The big erotic moments take place in public among fully clothed people speaking in perfectly modulated phrases, and they are so filled with libido and terror that the characters scarcely survive them.

Robbins, that artist of headlong temperament, here exhibits enormous patience. We are provided with the voice of a narrator (Joanne Woodward), who understands all that is happening, guides us, and supplies the private thoughts of some of the characters. We learn the rules of the society. We meet an elderly man named Mr. Wong (Eddie Murphy), who has vast sums of money and functions for his society as sort of an appeals court of what can be permitted, and what cannot be.

And we see the infinite care and attention with which Rasputia defends her relationship with Norbit. Rasoutia knows or suspects everything that is happening between Norbit and Kate, but she chooses to acknowledge only certain information, and works with the greatest cleverness to preserve her marriage while never quite seeming to notice anything wrong.

Each performance is modulated to preserve the delicate balance of the romantic war. Eddie Murphy as Norbit stands at the center, deluded for a time that he has free will. Thandie Newton, as Kate, is a woman who sees through society without quite rejecting it, and takes an almost sensuous pleasure in seducing Norbit with the power of her mind. At first it seems that little Rasputia is an unwitting bystander and victim, but Eddie Murphy gradually reveals the depth of her character’s intelligence, and in the last scene, as I said, all is revealed and much is finally understood.

Robbins is known for his restless camera; he rarely allows a static shot. But here you will have the impression of grace and stateliness in his visual style, and only on a second viewing will you realize the subtlety with which his camera does, indeed, incessantly move, insinuating itself into conversations like a curious uninvited guest. At the beginning of “Norbit,” as I suggested, it seems to represent a world completely alien to us.

By the end, we realize these people have all the same emotions, passions, fears and desires that we do. It is simply that they value them more highly, and are less careless with them, and do not in the cause of self-indulgence choose a moment’s pleasure over a lifetime’s exquisite and romantic regret.

Se7en

`Se7en” is one of those movies so dimwitted, so utterly lacking in even the smallest morsel of redeeming value, that you stare at the screen in stunned disbelief.

It is moronic beyond comprehension, an exercise in desperation during which even Brad Pitt, a repository of self-confidence, seems to be disheartened.

The film stars Pitt as a big-city cop. The city may be Los Angeles but this is the kind of film where it’s hard to be sure.

He’s a bachelor who has just broken up with his lieutenant (R. Lee Ermey), and now his father has decided to fly out and visit him.

He’s played by Morgan Freeman, of TV’s “Electric Company,” as a pint-sized little dynamo who has apparently spent the entire flight showing everybody on the plane Pitt’s baby pictures.

The movie then develops into a no-brainer about some stolen guns and an insurance fraud, with Freeman, following Pitt everywhere he goes, wandering wide-eyed into the center of the action. Allegedly humorous scenes include one in which Pitt is trying to talk a would-be suicide down from a window ledge, and his father grabs a police bullhorn and gives Pitt such a hard time that the suicide has mercy on him and decides not to jump. Then there’s a scene where he helpfully washes his service revolver in detergent. And one where he steps into the middle of a shootout and is the only witness to the crime.

There isn’t a laugh in this movie. Not a single one, and believe me, I was looking. The situation isn’t funny, the characters aren’t funny, and the dialogue’s idea of humor is lots of closeups of sweet little Morgan Freeman using naughty words.

The domineering father is not one of my favorite comic characters anyway, but “Se7en” loses its nerve and doesn’t make Freeman half as bad as he could have been, or Pitt nearly the milquetoast his character should really be. What we get instead of personalities and comic characters are two stick figures, plugged into a series of unfunny, unoriginal situations that seem taken right off the shelf.

Look at the “suicide” scene, for example. Countless cops have shared high ledges with countless suicides in the movies, sometimes for dramatic purposes, sometimes for comic, sometimes (as in Mel Gibson’s great “Lethal Weapon” scene) for both. The ledge scene in “7″ is the most unwound, phoned-in, contrived version of this situation I have ever seen. There is no spark at all.

Scrutinizing the credits for the movie, I find that it runs only 87 minutes despite having one writer and three producers.

Such statistics are hints of desperation. Pitt is a capable comic actor (see his underrated “Cool World”), and Morgan Freeman of course can be funny and charming. Here they seem trapped in every actor’s nightmare, a movie that was filmed before it was written.

There Will Be Blood

When directors make a wonderful movie, you look forward to their next one with a special anticipation, thinking maybe they’ve got the secret. If it turns out they don’t, you feel almost betrayed. That’s how I felt after “There Will Be Blood,” one of the worst movies of this or any year.

Its director is Paul Thomas Anderson. He directed “Boogie Nights,” that inventive and amusing 1997 film about an aspiring porn star’s ups and downs. The movie had a spirit to it, a style, and I guess I thought maybe that would carry over to Anderson’ next project.

It didn’t. Imagine the dumbest half-hour sitcom you’ve ever seen, spin it out to 158 minutes by making it even more thin and shallow, and you have this movie. It’s appalling. It’s not even really a good version of whatever it was that made the TV series appealing. And it certainly doesn’t add the kind of spin and quality we expect when we go to the movies.

“The Addams Family” (no great shakes itself) improved on the TV show by adding inventive production design and special effects, and plugging in some talented actors. The “Batman” movies exist in another universe than the TV show or the comic books. But this “Beverly Hillbillies” seems to have been made with serene self confidence, as if all the movie had to do was preserve the vacuous inanity of the original series.

The plot could function basically as a set-up for the TV show.

We meet the Plainviews down on the farm, where, after a prologue that takes forever, they strike oil and become billionaires. Then they load up the old truck, move to Beverly Hills, and run afoul of a young reverend (Paul Dano), his competition (Barry Del Sherman) and Dolly Parton, who is the best thing in the movie simply by virtue of having almost nothing to do with it.

Daniel Day-Lewis plays Daniel Plainview, Dillon Freasier is the young H.W. Plainview, Kevin J. O’Connor (from “Deep Rising”) is alleged brother Henry Brands, and Paul Dano has the dual role of Paul and Eli Sunday. Collectively, they have the air of a firing squad victim told he will be shot unless he keeps on talking.

Did the filmmakers believe there was some desire on the part of the film going public to see a movie that was no more than a recycled TV show? Did Anderson and his writers abandon all ambition to transform and improve the material? Didn’t anyone (Anderson himself, for example) look at “Boogie Nights” and see there a fresh, high-energy approach that was dismally lacking in the “Hillbillies” retread? Here is a film with all of the wit of the road kill that supplies not one but two of the lesser jokes.