Barney's Version

To start on a tangent, it should be noted that Paul Giamatti won a Golden Globe for Best Actor in a Musical/Comedy this year for Barney's Version. It is fascinating to ponder how the Hollywood Foreign Press considered this film a comedy (it certainly isn't a musical). It's a dour, unpleasant, dispiriting film, with a few chuckles here and there, but to call it a comedy is to misunderstand the meaning of the word.

Perhaps they thought that Giamatti, as Barney, was some sort of charming figure. I think that was the intent of screenwriter Michael Konyves and director Richard J. Lewis, but it is not the result. As played by Giamatti, Barney is pretty much consistently an asshole and not worth the two hours of screen time that is devoted to telling his story.

The film is told in flashback from when Barney Panofsky, in his sixties and the producer of a Canadian soap opera, is the subject of a book by a police detective who thinks he got away with murder. He looks back at his life, mostly framed by this three marriages: a mentally ill artist he marries in Rome (Rachelle Lefevre), an obnoxious woman of means (Minnie Driver), and the love of his life (Rosamund Pike), whom he meets at wedding number two. Pike ultimately divorces him, leaving him a shell of a man, but it's hard to gather much sympathy, as he's a boozing curmudgeon through the whole film.

This film misfires on so many levels its hard to count. Lewis, a veteran of series television, seems to not know what kind of film he wants to make. Adapted from a novel by Mordecai Richler, it has a kind of novelistic structure that makes us think a lot is being left out. In particular, Dustin Hoffman appears intermittently as Giamatti's father, and given Hoffman's talents his appearances are welcome as a twinkly scene-stealer, but one can't help but wonder how his character may have been more fully developed in the book.

But more troubling is the constant shifts in tone. At certain points Barney's Version is a family drama like Terms of Endearment, and then it's a mystery story, featuring the unknown whereabouts of Giamatti's louche friend (Scott Speedman). Did he kill him, or not? (We get the classic Chekhovian rule of a gun appearing in the first act going off in the second). Finally, the film slides groaningly into a disease-of-the-week movie. The tip off is when Barney can't remember where he parked his car. Cue ominous music.

This film is also unfair to its female characters. Lefevre, as wife one, is a one-note character of suicidal mental illness. Driver plays an especially thankless part, recalling the original version of The Heartbreak Kid, in which Charles Grodin realizes his new bride (Jeannie Berlin in that film) is a horror show and chases after a shiksa on his honeymoon (Cybill Shepherd). Here Giamatti realizes his mistake at the wedding reception, and fixates, for no particular reason, on Pike. One is left to wonder why he wanted to marry Driver in the first place.

Giamatti's pursuit of Pike is set up to be charming, but it's not. Pike does fine with her role, but in contrast to Lefevre and Driver, her character is something of a saint. We wonder why she would give Giamatti the time of day and not report him to the police.

Lewis also has no sense of pacing, as this film drags to its conclusion (the closing shot is unbearably treacly).

Giamatti is an actor who is only as good as his director. I've liked him in several things, such as Sideways and Cinderella Man, and found him unbearable in others, like The Last Station. Here he has some fine moments--we can appreciate how he loves Pike, and when he errs into adultery his pain is finely etched--but he can't rise above the mediocre script and direction.

My grade for Barney's Version: D+