The Talkies

...Esther and Julie are eaten up with guilt about Paul...

...As if all this weren't enough, Jim Train doesn't make partner at the law office in spite of working so hard that he has neglected his family, and he fears that Susan may be having an affair...

...A bit later, we see Helen locked in a room with her computer and Wayne, with unaccustomed tenderness knocking at the door and asking to talk with her...

...and now you're shootin' each other in the land of the free...

...It's not exactly what you'd call a parallel situation to the one in the Bible is it...

...Josiah Lawrence Chamberlain (Jeff Daniels...

...What to them are just "markings on a map" are to Marse Robert "birthplaces and burial grounds, they're battlefields where our ancestors fought...

...You never do that...

...The whole movie takes place on an emotional fortissimo that becomes merely wearisome where it is not laughable...

...The most signal bit of non-communication takes place at the neighboring household of the Golds, where the oldest son, Paul (Joshua Jackson), lies in a coma after a traffic accident...

...This, you might think, would be plenty to be getting on with for a two-hour movie, but there is much more going on in the neighborhood...

...T here is much to like about Rose Troche's film, adapted from A. M. Homes's book of stories, The Safety of Objects—individual moments of wit or poignancy illustrating, one is inclined to suppose, the deeper truths of human relationships...

...The love, for instance, of General Robert E. Lee (Robert Duvall) for his homeland—meaning Virginia—is "something these Yankees do not understand...

...David Johnson) Christianson, are in bed in the aftermath of some sexual act and Wayne says to Helen with real dismay in his voice: "Why did you do that...

...You will get the point that this is a film about communication and, much more often, non-communication, especially between husbands and wives and parents and children, in an upscale suburban community...

...It's easy to train a killer, L. T. explains, "the difficult part is learning how to turn it off...

...True, the speechifying and the poetry are livened up with an occasional clumsy and obvious irony, such as having two Irish brigades, one Union and one Confederate, blazing away at each other as someone shouts: "You left Ireland to escape tyranny...

...When he walks out of the office to spend some time at home, he seems to destroy everything he touches around the house and discovers that his twelve-year-old son, Jake (Alex House), is pursuing a passionate relationship with his sister's Barbie doll...

...In one of my favorite such moments, a married couple out of whose marriage the spirit seems to have departed, Helen (Mary Kay Place) and Wayne (C...

...under the misapprehension that the soldiers of the Civil War were a species of preachers, their minds ever fixed on higher things and inclined to drone on about the higher things...

...Army's top special forces killers in the arts of survival...

...For where Burnsian schmalz is endurable for an hour, with a week to recover before the next dose, it is quite intolerable spun out to this length and administered in one sitting...

...Helen is lecturing Sally about body image...

...One wants to be as generous as possible to this film because in some ways it is very daring...

...For one thing, we know from the beginning that this Abraham, unlike his biblical prototype, is not going to be let off the hook...

...Clearly some kind of balance ought to be struck...

...But here we go to the opposite extreme, where all the characters speak and act like monumental statuary...

...Is it really...

...Annette is also suffering from guilt, among other bad feelings, about Paul, as before his accident the two of them had been having an affair...

...Even a dog can be trained to attack only whom you tell him to attack but not, it seems, the American G.I...

...it's not yet our time...

...The personnel for the battle scenes come from societies of Civil War re-enactors and it is very much a re-enactors' movie—which is to say that it has an antiseptic, educational quality in which the soldiers look like waxworks...

...The most annoying thing about the movie is that Friedkin apparently takes it for granted that, as most of Hollywood these days probably believes, there is no essential difference between a good soldier and a psycho killer-cannibal...

...I won't spoil it even further by revealing what happens, but I found that The Safety of Objects finally becomes not just safe but a little bit smug...

...And even the authenticity is dubious at times...

...One is driven back on the conclusion that all this biblical bracketing is just portentous nonsense...

...We who are about to die salute you...

...In addition to the Christiansons and their children, Bobby (Aaron Ashmore) and Sally (Charlotte Arnold), and the Golds, Esther (Glenn Close) and Howard (Robert Klein), who have a daughter, Julie (Jessica Campbell), as well as the comatose Paul...

...At a simplistic level, the analogies are easy...

...Psycho killers like Hannibal Lecter are, I know, thought to be their own justification these days, so many viewers will find that the more offensive absurdities are physical ones...

...Randy, we gradually learn, is similarly eaten up with guilt and about to go off the deep end in some seriously scary way...

...As Oscar Wilde said of the death of Dickens's Little Nell, it would take a heart of stone not to laugh at it...

...More than once, someone says: "Hail, Caesar...

...Annette is not getting child support from her bum of an ex-husband, who is about to re-marry, and is trying to keep the girls as well as herself from hating him while pursuing Randy (or anything else in trousers...

...They just provide a superficially plausible motivation for this latest, military-survivalist version of that great figure of romance for our times, the psycho serial killer...

...Well fancy that...

...But then if he'd wanted to make it look real, I don't suppose he would have started with Abraham and Isaac or ended with the Apocalypse...

...There are also the Trains, Jim (Dermot Mulroney) and Susan (Moira Kelly) and their two children, divorced mother Annette Jennings (Patricia Clarkson) and her two daughters, and various other friends and neighbors, including Randy (Timothy Olyphant), the lawn and pool guy...

...The most amusing moment comes when Bonham predictably abandons the spirit of cooperation with the police and the FBI and takes to the wilds on his own after Hallam...

...That portentous repetition of the final phrase becomes something of a tic...

...Abraham is ace tracker and woodsman L. T. Bonham (Tommy Lee Jones) who, without being a soldier himself, has trained all the U.S...

...The generals on both sides, for example, always seem to know who is opposite them and the disposition of his troops...

...One can only imagine what Old Blue Light would have made of the plural...

...It doesn't help, either, that the movie ends with Cash's take on the Apocalypse of the New Testament, "The Man Comes Around...

...They'rethe incarnation of all our memories and all that we are...

...It's not yet our time, gentlemen...

...Not that there is any actual Caesar present, apart from Julius, crossing the Rubicon in one of the more tedious voiceover ruminations by Col...

...If you figure out what it is, let me know...

...The film is rather spoiled for me by the final scene between comatose Paul and his desperately grieving mother...

...But of course Fried-kin doesn't care about the chickens...

...This is something he doesn't really want to know about, so he leaves both home and office to find the missing purpose in his life...

...illiam Friedkin's preposterous W The Hunted begins with Johnny Cash's version of Bob Dylan's version of Abraham and Isaac, in "Highway 61 Revisited," in order to make—well, some different point...

...Too much...

...They're places where we learned to walk, to talk, to pray...

...She calls through the door for him to write whatever it is he has to say in a note and put it on the refrigerator...

...Naturally only L. T., now "working for the wildlife fund" in British Columbia, can track him down and bring him in...

...for another it offers a welcome contrast to the war movies of the past two or three decades, which generally start from the premise that all the shooting makes no sense at all and is undertaken either by drug-crazed psychopaths (most Vietnam movies) or by decent men with obscure private motivations ( The Patriot, Saving Private Ryan...

...Now his Isaac, a star pupil called Aaron Hallam (Benicio Del Toro), has flipped out and is murdering deer hunters and disemboweling them "in a ritualisticfashon" in the woods outside Portland, Oregon...

...As for the eponymous "Gods;' we have only the firm Christian faith of several of the soldiers—most notably General Thomas "Stonewall" Jackson (Stephen Lang), the film's real hero—to go on...

...Just keeping the characters straight takes an effort, but they are all living very full ifnot very happy lives...

...They're places where we made friendships and fell in love...

...In fact, it must be many more millions than that, but the figure is, shall we say, resonant...

...There is no hint of whence comes this excellent intelligence, which makes for economy of narrative but not nearly enough of the fog of war that ultimately costs General Jackson his life...

...Even more disastrously, Maxwell and Jeff Shaara, author of the novel he adapted, seem to labor (and boy do they labor...

...In Hallam's case it is that by killing the hunters he is somehow sticking up for the six million chickens that he says will perish in slaughterhouses this year...

...From the start, it offers the full Ken Burns treatment of the Civil War, with weepy violins and catch-in-the-throat personal commentary, and it never lets up...

...The comedy in many of these vignettes is no less enjoyable for taking place balanced on the knife-edge—at several points—of tragedy...

...As they are both dropped, by convoluted means too tedious to go into, weaponless in a trackless forest, Friedkin cross-cuts between the two men making their impromptu knives—Bonham's out of flint, Hallam's from a steel spring at a makeshift forge—all as if it were being done in real time, that is, about five minutes' worth, before the chase resumes...

...For one thing, it has the boldness to represent Confederate soldiers as human and sympathetic...

...All that we are...