Dead-end Fantasies

...The Pekar of today remains comically miserable,butintheveinof many current independent films, American Splendor is too commercial to linger with any seriousness on the suffering of its subject...

...Scott refuses to trust his actors...

...Unlike the other films discussed, American Splendor delves into an imaginative world without proffering a false vision of redemption...

...Shari Springer Berman and Robert Pulcini, who wrote and directed the film, tell Pekar's story using a range of narrative devices...

...In Dentists, illness becomes a cipher for the family's successes and failures...

...Ten years later, such juxtapositions of reality and fantasy have become a prime qualification for what passes as artistic...

...The movie's splendid parts take place in the real world—especially during an extended sequence where everyone in the Hurst family contracts a stomach virus...

...American Splendor takes advantage of the brilliance of its performers...

...The result is a film cluttered with David's fantasies, his "secret life...

...the fictional passages are staunchly realistic...

...in the real world of the film, Sarah has remained as priggish and solitary as ever...

...So they are opting for an ironic stance that allows them to avoid an uplifting alternative and still finish on a note of triumph, albeit a diminished one...

...Trying with the now tired formula to appeal first to sentimentalists, then derailing to cater to thriller fans, Scott unleashes the crudities relished by the latter to ravage the pleasures of the former...

...American Splendor suggests that Pekar is little more than a depressive and that the world is a sunnier place than he is capable of conceiving...

...As long as Scott concentrates on the love burgeoning between father and daughter, though, his distractions are not too jarring...

...Except for Once Upon a Time in Mexico, I think the other films I have discussed are worth seeing—although their reliance on fantasy prevents them from doing full justice to the real stories they set out to tell...

...From the start he comes across as a master of the sting operation who channels the obsessive-compulsive disorder that has made him a recluse into a meticulous awareness of a seam's every angle...

...it transforms them into an assault upon an unsuspecting victim...

...Despite a lush soundtrack of upbeat 1950s lounge hits, the picture clamors for a place in the academy of the austere, its every shot suffused in antiseptic blue and silver light...

...the camera gazes with amused detachment as a frustrated Pekar waits in a grocery checkout line or becomes exasperated listening to the ramblings of his coworkers...

...Far less clear is why El Mariachi, a bounty hunter, loyally defends his president...

...Frank's betrayal renders the savant a loser...

...There she meets his beautiful and troubled daughter Julie (Ludivine Sagnier...

...A year later, Roy has inexplicably recovered from his mental ailments and made his peace with the girl who impersonated his daughter...

...The recent movies Matchstick Men, The Secret Lives of Dentists, Once Upon a Time in Mexico, Swimming Pool, and American Splendor attempt, more elaborately than The Piano, to construct multiple destinies for their characters, alternating the melancholic with the euphoric...

...David's adventures in wish fulfillment obstruct the flow of the plot, repeatedly postponing his inevitable confrontation with the neglected Dana, whose fantasy life never makes the screen...

...It comes as a relief that Nicholas and Ted Griffin's script has no important roles for adult women, and only a few scenes where the men pack heat...

...Pekar's yearlong battle with testicular cancer—a struggle that cannot be laughed off—receives a quick gloss...

...I suspect filmmakers are trying to find canny ways of plugging into the despair they feel about romantic and familial love, even friendship...

...Hold your applause...

...Like Matchstick Men, Swimming Pool does not simply dismiss meaningful relationships from its reality...

...Critics and audiences have praised these works for their bittersweet complexities...

...In his writing, Pekar, who never left his day job as a file clerk, focuses on the drudgery of his occupation and the cramped aspirations of his fellow employees...

...Campion thus imagined two fates for her heroine, one of self-actualization, the other of self-sacrifice, and viewers could take their choice...

...Scott's immersing us into the "real" world of Frank's con shatters our sympathy not only for the deceitful Angela, but also for Roy...

...As David and Dana feverishly contend with the virus, they grudgingly unearth the intensity of their connection with comic flair...

...Husband David (Campbell Scott) and wife Dana (Hope Davis), whose marriage is strained, are forced to care for each other and their three daughters during a spell of misery...

...A complicated variation on this theme, American Splendor is a part fictionalized, part documentary account of the life of Harvey Pekar, legendary writer of underground comic books...

...In the dramatic sections of the film, Paul Giamatti (as Pekar), Hope Davis (wife Joyce Brabner) and Judah Friedlander (coworker Tobey Radloff) seem to be aiming at caricature rather than straight mimicry...

...Like Ridley Scott, he refuses to rely on his actors to convey inner conflict, even though they are up to the task...

...A year of illness is immediately palliated by a segue into the more rewarding life that followed his cure...

...Rudolph, a disciple of Robert Altaian, tends to pace his films with a maddening lugubriousness, but his ability to pluck dry farce out of grave situations has always been a saving grace...

...Sarah Morton (Charlotte Rampling) accepts the offer of her publisher and lover John Bosland (Charles Dance) to stay in his vacation house in the south of France, where she plans start work on a new novel...

...After Roy has a breakdown, Frank finds him a psychiatrist, Dr...

...Scott is leeringly fascinated by the sadism of rape...

...But when their real life counterparts step on the screen, we learn that they have not exaggerated anyhing...

...That Once Upon a Time in Mexico dispenses with any pretense of presenting three-dimensional characters is not astounding, since it is an action film...

...Nearly all the other work done by this prolific director—think of Alien, Thelma and Louise, G.I...

...Rudolph tosses out any notions of closure and gives up on his alienated characters, but begs us to love them anyway...

...We next learn that the mark, Angela, Dr...

...Its focus is tellingly trivial...

...But business requires that they avoid the "downer" ending that these days is box office poison...

...As soon as Angela (Alison Lohman) comes on screen the film soars...

...Pekar's world is a menagerie of bizarre "types...

...Both Roy and Angela are high-strung, needy and alienated...

...Negative, selfdefeating paths turn out to be the only "real" ones...

...So an alter ego (the insufferable Denis Leary) takes him on a guided tour of his repressed id...

...But the ambiguity seemed a calculated effort to heighten the commercial appeal of a disturbing work...

...By contrast, a genuine depiction of the chaotic mix of resentment and love that defines so many families fuels The Secret Lives of Dentists, adapted by Craig Lucas from Jane Smiley's novella The Age of Grief and directed by Alan Rudolph...

...Carolina's conspicuous absence from the main action demonstrates what little stock Rodriguez places in loving human contact...

...Before a sneeringly malicious twist, the first two thirds of the movie is actually enjoyable, although there are some irritations...

...David's fantasies do add color to his ordinary life, allowing us to imagine his character is capable of action, but as mMatchstickMen, the fantasy simply makes all the more obvious the hero's inability to negotiate the real world...

...Our hard-earned faith in the tender relationship that anchored the film vanishes as it turns out to be a fantasy Frank contrived to trick Roy into letting his guard down...

...He pushes his readers toward a reality most of us run to the movies to escape...

...Roy divulges his dangerous vocation and, unable to resist Angela's pleas, involves her in an ambitious, risky scheme conceived by Frank...

...The con itself is dubious...

...Given the profound hardheartedness in movies lately, even a heavy-handed remake of Paper Moon comes as a welcome surprise...

...Berman and Pulcini err by stopping short of completely saturating their film in Pekar's brutally sarcastic sensibility...

...Little in cinema is more frustrating than a shootout that consists mostly of shock cuts...

...While we knew little about Frank, we trusted him because he had gained Roy's respect...

...Transformation and empowerment are merely the stuff of dreams...

...But not three minutes in Once Upon a Time passes without several gruesome acts of violence...

...All but one of these films, I agree, have fine moments, but their never subtle double-dealing masks a cynicism that reverses the The Piano's optimistic notions of reality and fantasy...

...Julie is a fantasy creation of Sarah's...

...An equally surly view of human relationships can be found in François Ozon's Swimming Pool, which is about a detective novelist with writer's block...

...After a number of quarrels, the two women form a friendship and get caught in a sticky situation that leads them to trust and make sacrifices for one another...

...Early on, David glimpses Dana in the embrace of another man, but cannot bring himself to confront her...

...The sexual tension of Sarah and Julie's friendship and their adventures in seducing men turn out to be a vengeful stab at John, who never made a promised visit to Sarah...

...In the same manner as the other recent works mentioned at the outset, it does this by setting a nihilistic vision of the real world against a much sunnier dreamlife...

...But the merely quotidian, no matter how wittily played, will not do for Rudolph...

...Klein—practically the entire cast—are in fact cons enlisted by Frank to cheat Roy out of his money...

...She pictured herself fastened to it by a rope, plunging underwater and drowning...

...Matchstick Men, one of the more interesting examples of this trend, has been marketed as buoyant froth about neurotic con men, but director Ridley Scott is incapable of lightheartedness...

...Their unnarrated love story—which also might have made a better film than Matchstick Men—is the filmmakers' last-minute ploy to appease sentimentalists by dressing up Roy with family, but these final hurried images are empty and unconvincing...

...At one point, a major character has his eyes gouged out...

...They peek into his autobiographical tales, let Pekar, his wife and several friends speak to the camera, and intercut dramatic takes where these same figures are impersonated by actors...

...We discover him living with the sexy cashier he used to eye at the local convenience store, who is pregnant with his child...

...The most one could say is that Rodriguez prefers Gothic cruelty—someone always seems to be bleeding from the gut—to affection and realism...

...Muck like Blade Runner, Gladiator and Black Hawk Down has been lavished with laurels by viewers who mistake estheticized violence, postcard-ready tableaux and banal symbolism for serious filmmaking...

...Lohman, who was terrific in last year's White Oleander, conveys the emotional life of a 14year-old vividly, chomping on gum, constantly testing Roy's tolerance, teetering between jubilation and flooding tears...

...His girlfriend Carolina (Salma Hayek) is dead when the action begins...

...There is no time for friendship or love in the world of El Mariachi (Antonio Banderas), who staves off several attempts to assassinate Mexico's president...

...Why this cluster of similarly hostile visions...

...Rather than quitting while they're ahead, however, the director and his screenwriters introduce a new intrigue that tears the heart out of the film...

...Indeed, Scott might have made a more emotionally complex film if he had allowed Roy to do just that—and to launch a clever counterattack that would keep us on his side...

...How are we supposed to follow who's killing whom...

...In yet another "twist" ending, it turns out that for the bulk of the picture we have been privy not to Sarah's real life experiences, but to the plot of the novel she wrote while secluded in John's house...

...Invisible to all but David, he snaps at family members and coworkers, suggests that David sleep with an attractive hygienist who assists at the dental practice he shares with his wife, and goads him to muse over the honest conversations and passionate sex that long ago disappeared from their relationship...

...The initial shock of this sort of reversal has been treated more effectively in The Usual Suspects, Fight Club and Memento...

...She exists only as a part of El Mariachi's dreams, an alternative to the bloody world he dodges and blasts his way through...

...Instead, Scott and company provide Roy redemption through a second, even more enervating denouement...

...It is tough to forgive Roy for dragging Angela into the criminal life, and the swindle gets too much attention...

...What Dentists seems to convey, therefore, are doubts that reality can accommodate meaningful change...

...Frank's mark, furious at being cheated, tracks down the con men...

...Jane, and Hannibal—contains a sequence where a scantily clad woman is terrorized by a lascivious monster...

...The story glides to a resting point after 90 minutes, as hope that Roy will win joint custody of Angela rises...

...Instead of letting Roy Waller (Nicolas Cage) convey his jittery worldview through performance, he forces it on us with distracting jump cuts...

...Nor does it help matters that Robert Rodriguez, the alleged auteur who credits himself here as director, writer, photographer, camera operator, editor, coproducer, and head of production design, is one of the most incompetent men in Hollywood...

...Hayek gets second billing, but she is not on the screen for more than 10 minutes...

...Klein (Bruce Altman), who learns about Roy's former lover and puts him in touch with the daughter he did not know he had...

...Why does Roy keep all his money in cash in a safe deposit box...

...For one thing, the credits roll before the unborn child can, like Angela, test Roy's mettle with cries, demands and assertions of will...

...Its hero straightforwardly delivers his own compelling social message...

...Watching them reach out to one another is Matchstick Men's true pleasure...

...But when allowed to follow the plot, we relish Roy's brilliance at the confidence game he practices with apprentice crook Frank Mercer (Sam Rockwell...

...How can Frank be sure that Roy won't uncover the hoax by renewing contact with the woman he believes to be Angela's mother...

...I am no fan of Scott's...

...Roy, fearing for his life, hands Angela the numerical codes she will need to access his life savings...

...Here, for once, alternate visions of character and situation enhance our appreciation of them...

...As the protagonist was freed from a torturous marriage and embraced her lover, she recalled her beloved piano falling into the sea...