Mobster’s Rating:
Let’s hear it for Paul Giamatti. Is there anyone else who can take self-loathing schlubs and make them as dimensional, as sympathetic or as likable?
Certainly the actor has got his work cut out for him here with Barney Panofsky, the protagonist (hero just simply won’t work) of Mordechai Richler’s acclaimed novel Barney’s Version. Barney, like Harvey Pekar before him, is a right mess; a man whose life has unspooled in an erratic snarl, smacking him to and fro as he mostly sits there and tries not to capsize.
The film, like the novel, tracks him through three failed marriages, a lifetime’s worth of regrets and disappointments, and the uncertainty he feels over the possible murder of his friend, Boogie Moskovitch (Scott Speedman). Through it all, Giamatti externalizes Barney’s flustered, brooding melancholy, mostly viewed in the book as a deep well of internal ambivalence and conflict. Odd that the Academy has taken the time to honor the make-up artists who visually depict Barney’s journey through 50 years of time but have not recognized the actor himself, whose mannerisms and shuffling of character traits do more to hammer home the burden of those wasted, faded years.
Of course, were they really wasted? Has the sum of Barney Panofsky really accumulated in the handful of gathered vignettes and hard-won pains that the man now recalls—if not completely clearly—several decades later? The book explored those questions, but mostly was concerned with absorbing and observing the character of Barney himself, especially when it comes to the way he interacts with his three wives, particularly lovely Miriam.
Miriam(Rosamund Pike) is the woman who loves Barney with the most patience and sincerity, and the only one he seems to have truly adored. The film casts her and the rest of the people in Barney’s life as nearly phantom figures, all of them sometimes feeling more or less real depending on their proximity to Barney. It’s not always as effective as the book’s configuring of events but it does allow most of the novel to rise to the surface, if only in a superficial way. The one exception, character wise, is Barney’s father, played with ornery, comedic warmth by none other than Dustin Hoffman. Hoffman hasn’t been this good, or this aware of his own gifts in years. His scenes with Giamatti, especially towards film’s end are both poignant and revelatory.
When Barney’s Version gets mired in awkward sentimentalism regarding the perils of age and memory, Hoffman rescues it from the clutches of the maudlin. Minnie Driver as Barney’s second wife is an acerbic, seemingly spirited witch right from the get-go. However, she’s dynamic and in charge of her character and she actually makes the role work in her favor and both she and Hoffman illustrate the problem with the rest. Everything on the periphery of Barney is too vague and colorless. This, unfortunately, is very true of Pike, who has all the gentleness and resolve of a good woman but she never pops on screen and she’s simply too restrained to rise up and out of the brewing mundane chaos of Barney’s headspace. Scott Speedman barely registers at all as Boogie, even though his character and the mystery of his death are a lynchpin in the film’s focus.
It took me awhile to warm to Richler’s book. In truth, I can’t say that I love it. It’s exceedingly well written and hits some grand and eloquent notes, particularly in regards to the way we use the impressions people surrounding us to define and make value of our own internal perceptions. Unfortunately, there is still a point where it’s more concerned with ‘literary’ aspiration than it is with telling a story. On the printed page, Richer uses the Alzheimers to work around this fact but the film has to deal with it all bluntly and head-on.
The result is an interesting film that has plenty to recommend but little to celebrate. Barney is a nebbish who did so much wrong and was often too baffled or moody to see the right until it was waving at him over the chasms of time. The story should be a tragedy, it tries at times to be a comedy, but instead comes out more like an cinematic shrug at a man who wasn’t such a bad guy but didn’t have the ambition to change anyone’s mind about that. Giamatti, though, is excellent. Really.