Ill-Informed Gadfly

“The Nanny Diaries” ought to be a tart-tongued satire of Manhattan bluebloods and their contradictory approach to child-rearing: laissez-faire but absurdly demanding. Instead, it takes its cues from the opening verse of the Whitney Houston chestnut “Greatest Love of All.” It believes the children are our future, and so forth. Even if their parents treat them like foundlings swaddled in Burberry. “The Nanny Diaries” has a reasonably promising central idea: The title character fancies herself an anthropologist, teasing out the mysterious rituals of Upper East Side domestic life. But the movie gives in to ho-hum sentiment, insisting that the kid, tantrums aside, remain adorable and unsullied by his upbringing. Like many a movie child, he’s capable of heart-tugging accidental profundity. As the boy’s parents, directors Shari Springer Berman and Robert Pulcini cast serious actors who can’t do shallow. Laura Linney projects the crumbling vulnerability of a woman abandoned by the husband she built her life around, and Paul Giamatti is schlubby and sour – a Wall Street tycoon beaten down by his profession. These people aren’t funny – they’re depressing. Scarlett Johansson does earthy work as the nanny, but the screenplay does her no favors, embracing hoary clichés about finding yourself and your Prince Charming. Chris Evans plays the flawless love interest with grace, but this is fantasy, not anthropology. A movie diarist can be a nanny or a princess, but the uninspired formula remains the same.

LISTEN: The Nanny Diaries

I was relieved to find out that this 1945 movie — justly regarded as a masterpiece of romantic longing — has a sense of humor. Moments of levity deepen your understanding of and respect for the lead characters, a man and woman who carry out a chaste affair over the course of several Thursday afternoons. Brilliantly structured, “Brief Encounter” begins with Laura Jesson (Celia Johnson) and Dr. Alec Harvey (Trevor Howard) saying goodbye, and it’s not the perfect bittersweet parting they deserve. They are interrupted in their final moments by Dolly Messiter (Everley Gregg), an oblivious, gossipy acquaintance of Laura’s. After Alec departs — placing his hand on Laura’s shoulder for just the briefest of seconds — director David Lean frames the ensuing conversation in medium shot, with Dolly’s back to us as she jibber-jabbers irrelevantly to the stricken Laura. The overwhelming sadness on Laura’s face becomes more potent because Dolly doesn’t even notice it — and even as we empathize with her, we laugh at the absurdity of the situation. As the two women ride the train back home (the opening scene, like much of the movie, takes place in a refreshment stand at a train station), Laura memorably communicates her hatred of Dolly in voice-over.

There are other moments that draw laughs. Laura’s husband, Fred (Cyril Raymond) is kind and well-meaning — but he’s also an obtuse clod. He’s obsessed with crossword puzzles but isn’t very good at them. And he seems to fancy himself stylish — with double-breasted suits, a trim mustache and slicked-back hair — but he’s tragically inelegant. Raymond’s savvy performance communicates both why Laura would have no reason to complain about her marriage and why she would yearn for more. Most of the movie plays in flashback, guided by Laura’s voice-over narration as she imagines herself confessing the affair to Fred. The first 15 minutes are a beautiful tease; we yearn to know exactly what was going on between Alec and Laura before they were interrupted by Dolly. Howard and Johnson communicate an unspoken anguish that haunts you as we follow Laura back home.

Her reminiscence begins with their cute meeting; she gets a piece of grit in her eye as she watches an express train go by, and, in the refreshment stand, Alec gallantly removes it (he’s a doctor). It turns out that train schedules bring them together every Thursday afternoon, when Alec works a hospital shift and Laura does her shopping and catches a movie. They end up having lunch together because Alec can’t find an open table, and they bond over their enthusiasm for the absurd — an old woman abuses a cello in a string quartet at the restaurant, then pops up again as the overzealous organist at the movie theater. (We already know Laura appreciates music — a Rachmaninoff piano concerto emerges as the love theme for the movie.)

Alec insists that Laura meet him the following Thursday, and their bond quickly deepens, but Lean makes it clear that their carefree first date, which happens entirely by chance, will be the best time they have together. Once they agree to meet again, they cross a threshold into infidelity. Laura wonders what Alec will tell his wife about their time together — and realizes he won’t tell her anything. She does tell Fred, but of course he doesn’t at all grasp what his wife is saying. Relief overwhelms her, and she laughs uncontrollably at her husband’s lack of curiosity about her spending time with a strange man.

What a marvelous performance by Celia Johnson. Laura is unremarkable, unbeautiful — and unforgettable. Johnson teases out the contradictions that give Laura her roundedness — she’s delicate and timid but earthy and avid. And she shows how Alec’s sensitivity and spontaneity bring out Laura’s radiance. Howard brings grace and intelligence to Alec — unlike Fred, he carries himself with ease. “Brief Encounter” is, crucially, a romance between smart people. That’s why it’s a love affair even though Alec and Laura do no more than kiss.

Director Lean, of course, would go on to craft sprawling widescreen tales, peaking with “Lawrence of Arabia.” But he began his career as a collaborator of playwright Noel Coward, on whose one-act play (set entirely in the refreshment stand) “Brief Encounter” was based. It’s a testament to Lean that the movie never once feels like an opened-up play, even though the low-comic romantic byplay between two railway station employees (Joyce Carey and Stanley Holloway) is clearly a theatrical device. “Brief Encounter” is a movie through and through, one that uses cinematic language to enrich the story. Lean grounds the action in the real world with location shooting — beginning with a train chugging through the station. And his flashback structure allows us to understand that memory will not diminish the intensity of Laura’s feeling for Alec. “Brief Encounter” stands as proof that a great director is a great director — no matter how big or small the canvas.

“Superbad” understands that for many of us, high school was not cornucopia of social and sexual opportunity. It’s a welcome corrective to the last major loss-of-virginity comedy, “American Pie,” which took place in a fantasyland. “Superbad” traffics in awkwardness, frustration and tedium, in misunderstandings and blown opportunities for connection with the opposite sex. It nails the draining sensation of getting what you think you want and still ending up unsatisfied. The story is threadbare, but it provides a framework for these messy emotions. Socially maladroit best buds Evan, played by Michael Cera, and Seth, played by Jonah Hill, are charged with getting booze for a party. Complications ensue. The motormouth Hill and the quietly incisive Cera have amazing chemistry. They freight the deep bond between Evan and Seth with unspoken baggage. The not-so-dynamic duo has a sidekick, Fogell, a puny dweeb who butchers hip-hop slang. Fogell spends the evening with a pair of irresponsible cops who get a kick out of the name on his fake ID: McLovin’. Unlike many, I thought the Fogell sequences were the movie’s weakest – the cops never resemble real people, and Christopher Mintz-Plasse doesn’t have the supple comic skills of Cera and Hill. I apologize if you’ve been told it’s the best comedy ever, but “Superbad” is uneven. It has riotously funny moments but too many draggy scenes that sap the momentum, and it leans too heavily on profane dialogue to get laughs. But it finds an accurate tone for a high school movie: wistful regret.

LISTEN: Superbad

What an incoherent mess. There’s an occasional scene that strikes the right note of humorous unease, but mostly “The Invasion” is a collection of uninspired chase sequences, punctuated by occasional pseudo-scientific gobbledygook. (There’s an awful scene that I know was part of the reshoots — because only the Wachowski brothers and their errand boy, James McTeigue, could write and shoot something so boring — in which Nicole Kidman, Daniel Craig and Jeffrey Wright stand around in a lab and “explain” the exact method of the alien organism that’s taking over people’s bodies.)

So if you’re wondering why “The Invasion” doesn’t make any sense — why, visually, it’s literally all over the map — here’s the backstory. Principal photography took place in downtown Baltimore in fall 2005. I know this because I walked past the production’s “base camp” every day on my way to work. It’s typical for movies set in Washington D.C. to do much of their shooting in my town, in part because it’s difficult to obtain the necessary permits in our nation’s capital. So the intersection of Charles and Baltimore streets gets quite a workout in “The Invasion,” as the location of Kidman’s alleged downtown-D.C. psychiatrist’s office. It’s a perfectly reasonable cheat — nobody cares, really. And I believe that if director Oliver Hirschbiegel hadn’t been fired, the movie might have retained some semblance of geographic coherence. But Warner Bros. reportedly didn’t like his cut — too moody, not enough action — and brought in the Wachowskis and McTeigue, who directed the awful “V for Vendetta,” to fix it. They did extensive reshoots in Los Angeles in early 2007. The climax — a dumbfounding car chase — is actually supposed to take place in Baltimore, and if you’re wondering when Charm City turned into a sprawling megalopolis, it didn’t.

Whether Hirschbiegel was entirely on his game is an open question. I seriously doubt his version was a masterpiece. Even early on, the details never feel right. Kidman attempts a Southern accent — once every dozen lines or so. Regional American dialects are far beyond her capabilities; she can barely do a passable American accent at all, and one wonders if Hirschbiegel, who’s German, could tell the difference.

But Hirschbiegel can’t be blamed for the way the movie lurches forward. “The Invasion” begins with a glib fictionalization of the space shuttle Columbia disaster, positing that debris from the shuttle is contaminated by an extraterrestrial virus. One of the first to be infected is Tucker Kaufman (Jeremy Northam), a doctor with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the ex-husband of Carol Bennell (Kidman). The alien flu spreads quickly, turning people into soulless, if peaceful, automatons with thousand-yard stares. There’s potential for satire here that I can only assume was better explored in two previous versions of “Invasion of the Body Snatchers” — one from Don Siegel in 1956, one from Philip Kaufman in 1978. (I have seen neither but look forward to catching up with them.) In “The Invasion,” though, the central idea — that when people’s bodies are taken over by aliens, they shed their murderous and warmongering impulses — is entirely contradicted by the action. The pod people become increasingly aggressive, like the souped-up zombies of “28 Days Later.”

That’s pretty much what “The Invasion” boils down to — a bad zombie movie with a big budget and A-list stars. It literally cuts to the chase, over and over, and the chases just get less engaging. It can’t catch its breath long enough to create the appropriate paranoid mood, and it does nothing to communicate the extent of the alien epidemic. Then, suddenly, it’s all over, and everyone’s fine. Whew! Oh, wait, I was never worried, because I was too busy rolling my eyes.

A two-and-a-half-hour movie about Hitler and his diehard flunkies left me cold. What are the odds?

“Downfall,” released in the United States in 2005, is impressive, proficient moviemaking, and it certainly establishes director Oliver Hirschbiegel as a talent to watch. I rented it because I wanted to make sure I’d be justified in bashing Warner Bros. for taking “The Invasion” away from him, and I am. His style is quiet, observant, uninflected, and I’m certain his cut of “The Invasion” would have done a better job establishing mood and building atmosphere. What remains of that silly movie is little more than a series of chase sequences.

“Downfall” is remarkable largely for its seemingly realistic recreation of Hitler’s final days. We feel we are in the bunker, with its drab institutional lighting, its oddly homey touches and the raving lunatic with the square-shaped mustache barking ridiculous orders. But it offers little insight into the psychology of fantaticism, and the story isn’t organized around anything other than the war’s inevitable end. It’s told partially from the point of view of Hitler’s naive secretary, and while she’s a sympathetic figure, she’s mousy and passive. Juliane Kohler does strong work as Eva Braun, playing her as a desperate party girl; she’s like the inappropriate drunk who insists everybody’s having a great time when really they’re just uncomfortable.

Few characters make such strong impressions. One Nazi general is largely indistinguishable from the next. They all know Hitler’s bonkers, but they can’t bring themselves to challenge him. What’s strange is how little second-guessing the movie dramatizes. As Berlin falls, the diehard Nazis are consumed by fatalism, but few seem to question the devotion to the Third Reich that brought them to this point. Maybe this is accurate, but I’d have preferred some explanation of what kind of fascist dream they were holding onto. Because most of the military brass appear otherwise sane — they know the war is lost. Toward the end, they’re drunk all the time, because drinking is all they have left.

Of course, there are a couple of genuine psychopaths — Joseph Goebbels and his wife, Magda, who bring their six perfect Aryan children to the bunker and have them sing patriotic songs for Uncle Adolf. Then, in the movie’s most memorably horrifying scene, Mrs. G administers sedatives and cyanide capsules to her brood because she won’t allow them to live in a world without National Socialism.

Bruno Ganz gives Hitler his all, with the fits of spittle-flying rage and the tyrant’s delusional defiance (Saddam Hussein, through his spokesman, sounded a similar tone as Baghdad fell). He also shows an incongruous, quiet charm with the ladies. Yet he remains remote, unknowable. “Downfall” effectively recreates his suitably pathetic death: After he shot himself, Hitler’s body was quickly wrapped in a blanket, hauled outside the bunker, doused in gasoline and burned. Given that bringing him to justice would have been impossible, that seems about right.

“Stardust” disarms you with its cheeky energy. It’s a nearly unprecedented pleasure: a sword-and-sorcery tale that acknowledges that sometimes sex occurs between unmarried partners. The hero is born nine months after a dalliance between a dashing adventurer and a mysterious, captive woman. In other words, “Stardust” has archetypes who act like real people. Adapted from the graphic novel by Neil Gaiman, the movie imagines a parallel universe called Stormhold that’s separated from England by a simple stone wall. The hero, Tristan, conceived on one side of the wall and raised on the other, must cross the barrier to fulfill his destiny. Once in Stormhold, he discovers that when falling stars crash into the earth, they take the form of fetching young women. Soon he’s protecting one such star from evil witches and conniving princes. In one of many droll touches, the king of Stormhold encourages his seven sons to murder one another, and the ghosts of slain heirs to the throne provide a sardonic running commentary. “Stardust” is crammed with competing agendas, and thanks to director Matthew Vaughn’s bombastic style, it often feels overstuffed. The actors clash jarringly: Robert De Niro stops the movie in its tracks with an amateurish performance as a gay pirate, and Claire Danes is cloying and mannered as the fallen star. But Michelle Pfeiffer plays an imperious witch queen with delicious diva attitude. “Stardust” is no J.R.R. Tolkien saga, after all – and Pfeiffer understands its witty, ragged rhythm.

LISTEN: Stardust

When Patrice Leconte directs a mainstream crowd-pleaser like this, it’s like Monet executing a paint-by-numbers. I exaggerate, but only slightly. Leconte is a shining light of contemporary French cinema, capable of ravishing visual beauty and piercing psychological complexity. “The Widow of Saint-Pierre,” his eccentric and tragicomic period piece starring Juliette Binoche and Daniel Auteuil as the resident celebrities of an island off the coast of Newfoundland, is one of the moviegoing highlights of the past decade. “Girl on the Bridge” and “Man on the Train” are brilliant as well.

“My Best Friend,” meanwhile, is predictable and borderline cloying — I say borderline because it thankfully maintains a Gallic edge. It’s willing to make its hero completely unlikable, and it celebrates a culture devoted to the important things in life — good food, good wine and good company. It’s also interesting as a genre exercise. “My Best Friend” explores male friendship within the structure of the classic romantic comedy — boy meets boy, boy loses boy, boy wins boy back. Unlike most American comedies, it understands that men can bond without behaving like troglodytes. The great Auteuil, Leconte’s frequent collaborator, stars as Francois Coste, a wealthy antiques dealer who has no friends. His business partner (Julie Gayet) bets him that he can’t produce a best friend within 10 days. Determined to prove her wrong, Francois enlists Bruno (Dany Boon), an ingratiating cab driver, to teach him how to get close to people.

It’s easy to see where this is going. And the screenplay isn’t as well-worked-out as one would expect from Leconte — Francois has a sweet and patient girlfriend whose mere existence seems to contradict his nasty, self-interested demeanor. Her attraction to him goes unexplained. The tedious climax involves the French version of “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire,” and one must accept that (1) the show airs live and (2) the million-euro question is shockingly easy.

Nonetheless, Leconte always knows what to do with the camera, and his stars reward him with precise and nuanced performances. Auteuil manages to be a chameleon while always looking the same — he can switch his vast charisma on or off to suit the role. Here, it’s off, and he’s squickily clueless and desperate. Leconte hints at his recurring thematic concerns in the antagonistic but symbiotic relationship between Francois and Dany. His cinema celebrates unlikely soul mates. He’s an old-fashioned romantic, but at his best he’s also unsentimental, capable of telling stories with sweeping resonance. You won’t find that in “My Best Friend,” but trust me — you’re still in the hands of a master.

Given the critical consensus that Michael Moore has grown as a filmmaker since this, his 1989 debut — I could see improvement even in the arc from “Fahrenheit 9/11″ to “Sicko” — I wasn’t surprised to be unimpressed when I finally sought out “Roger & Me.” At its best, it’s a heartfelt lament for the death of an American city — Moore’s native Flint, Michigan — and at its worst it goes for cheap laughs or pads its meager running time with irrelevant filler. (I realize that the eccentric woman selling rabbits — for pets or meat — was illustrative of Flint’s grim economic state, but why go back and devote a second sequence to her?)

From the start, Moore has great instincts as an entertainer. He skillfully weaves in stock footage, popular music and his own ingratiating, folksy persona. He’s also a good muckraking journalist. He has a way of asking questions so obvious that perhaps no one else would ask them — and for making them piercing. What little sense of justice “Roger & Me” provides comes at the end when we learn that the local General Motors flak, who pathetically tried to justify CEO Roger Smith’s abandonment of Flint, was fired. He worked in Flint, after all.

The gimmick, of course, is that Moore wants to ask Smith face to face why he closed all the factories in Flint. His bumbling attempts rarely entertain — who would be surprised that Smith insulates himself from a no-name, camera-wielding rabble-rouser? Moore goes to the lobby of GM headquarters; he’s turned away. He goes back later; he’s turned away again. He tries to ask Moore a question at a stockholders’ meeting, and makes it look like Smith cuts him off and laughs about it. (I’m dubious that this happened exactly as the editing suggests.) Other low points: Moore’s “gotcha” interviews with Miss Michigan and with women on a golf course. It’s disingenuous for him to imply that these people should show a deeper understanding of Flint’s troubles. (He’s better at catching celebrities off guard — Flint native Bob Eubanks makes an appalling joke about Jews and AIDS that it’s remarkable he ever recovered from.)

Moore should be applauded, though, for his devotion to and respect for working Americans. He makes an obvious but necessary point: The fewer people get paid a living wage for a decent day’s work, the richer the CEOs get. And it’s only gotten worse since 1989. “Roger & Me” is at its post poignant when it chronicles the seemingly endless evictions carried out by a beleaguered sheriff’s deputy. He has a job to do — and he takes pains to ensure that the evictees don’t think he’s to blame — but it clearly wears on him. This is the economic reality of Flint — he has to throw people out of their homes, unpleasant as he may be, because he has no other viable options. Moore also shows former auto workers taking jobs as correctional officers to staff the jails that house Flint’s exploding criminal element. One guard proves the embodiment of irrepressible American optimism when he talks about how much he likes the job — even as a profane argument between inmates breaks out behind him.

Seen today, “Roger & Me” is more relevant as a launching point for Moore than as a contribution to the documentary form. But it certainly has its moments.

“What haunts me, is that in all the faces of all the bears that Treadwell ever filmed, I discover no kinship, no understanding, no mercy. I see only the overwhelming indifference of nature. To me, there is no such thing as a secret world of the bears.” — Werner Herzog

This is what makes “Grizzly Man” great — not Herzog’s skill in chronicling the life and death of bear-loving nutjob Timothy Treadwell, but his complex relationship with his subject. Treadwell fascinates and maddens Herzog in equal parts. If you tend to believe, as I do, that Treadwell — who lived among grizzly bears in the Alaskan wilderness for about a dozen summers, before one ate him and his girlfriend — was a lunatic who dug his own grave, Herzog won’t change your mind. I doubt he wants to. And yet “Grizzly Man,” released in 2005, is absolutely riveting, thanks to Herzog’s appreciation of Treadwell the filmmaker. The great German director uncovers countless triumphs in Treadwell’s footage — and marvels at the way Treadwell created and manipulated his own screen persona. Was he delusional? Sure. Self-aggrandizing? Absolutely. But with his camera, he captured unrehearsed moments of ecstatic beauty.

Herzog is also superb in his account of Treadwell’s death. Some people — probably those who enjoy “torture porn” horror movies — think the director pulled his punches by refusing to play the audio tape of the lethal mauling. (Treadwell’s camera was rolling at the time, but the lens cap was on.) I think Herzog communicates Treadwell’s gruesome end without exploiting it. We get a detailed description of the tape by a medical examiner. And Herzog himself, in an extraordinary moment, listens to it in the presence of Treadwell’s longtime friend, Jewel Palovak. Playing it for the audience would provide cheap sensation — but instead, Herzog creates a moving and resonant scene that captures the grief of those who loved Treadwell.

“Grizzly Man” is not without its cheap sensations, though — watching Treadwell, you’ll feel like you’re rubbernecking at a grisly crash. I’m no mental health professional, but I don’t think I’m making an irresponsible leap to conclude that the man was seriously ill. Just listen to him rhapsodize over fresh bear poop, among many other examples. Herzog clearly admires Treadwell’s adventurous spirit — the director has proven something of a mad daredevil himself over the years. But he never lets his hero off the hook. It’s a confident filmmaker who’s willing to impose himself on the material the way Herzog does here. He elevates “Grizzly Man” to art through the force of his unsentimental perspective.

Funny and inventive as it is, “The Simpsons Movie” feels like an old shoe. It’s nobody’s fault, really. Given the extraordinarily long lead time, I think the 11 veteran “Simpsons” writers who teamed up on the screenplay came through admirably. The movie is packed with verbal and visual wit, and the story is airtight — although I was personally disappointed that the movie finds so little room for the legendary villain Mr. Burns. The situation — Springfield becomes so polluted that the maniacal head of the Environmental Protection Agency (voiced by Albert Brooks) encases the entire town in a dome — seems ripe for exploitation by the town’s greediest tycoon. I mean, the dude tried to block out the sun once.

But no matter. There’s nothing really wrong with “The Simpsons Movie.” Like the show at its best, it celebrates the resiliency of the American family while slaughtering sacred cows with glee. I laughed hardest during Homer’s whine about having to go to church — “Why can’t I just repent on my deathbed?” It’s so beautifully resonant, and when the Simpsons join the shocked congregation (which has heard every word of his rant about them “worshipping their phony God”), Homer provides one of many nuggets for longtime fans when he intones, “Praise Jeebus.” Another highlight: Bart’s naked skateboarding, which outdoes the “Austin Powers” series for naughty-bits-concealing invention — and then gleefully pushes beyond your expectations by showing Bart’s yellow weiner.

Still, it’s hard to pronounce “The Simpsons” movie a must-see. How could it be? The show’s been on for nearly 20 years. Brilliant as they are, there’s nothing the writers can tell us that they haven’t already. Fans love to whine about the show’s deterioration over the years — a complaint as banal as fear of getting older. How could it possibly be as good as it was in, say, 1995? How could the characters not become caricatures of themselves when they never age? Even now, “Simpsons” episodes are reliably funny — there’s just no sense of urgency anymore. The movie may be bigger and better — and admirably fast-paced — but it can’t achieve relevance.