Sleuth
dir. Kenneth Branagh
As though being the twin brother of vastly successful playwright
Peter Shaffer weren’t indignity enough, minor playwright Anthony
Shaffer (who died in 2001) suffered another blow last year when his
film The Wicker Man was remade into a misogynist pile of shit.
Now Kenneth Branagh has wrapped his fingers around Shaffer’s last
remaining shred of dignity: the 1970 Tony Award–winning play
Sleuth, which was first made into a movie in 1972.
The new Sleuth, set in the country mansion of hack crime
writer Andrew Wyke (Michael Caine), is cluttered with remote controls
and digital gadgets instead of dartboards and analog playthings. But
the mechanics of the plot are the same: Wyke’s wife’s lover, Milo
Tindle (Jude Law), comes to the estate to ask Wyke to give her a
divorce. Wyke evades the question—with entertaining verbal
panache—and then persuades the gullible Tindle to help defraud
Wyke’s insurance. Diamonds are flashed, wit is dangled, and the act
climaxes in Tindle’s total humiliation. Next comes act two, wherein we
learn Tindle is capable of staging elaborate deceptions of his own.
The film feels even stagier against the modernist angularity of
Wyke’s new house, which screams more “repertory theater budget” than
“millionaire’s interior decor.” Add Harold Pinter’s elegant compression
of Shaffer’s script and the film’s potential audience begins to
resemble the Seattle Rep subscriber base. There’s really no reason
Sleuth had to be made into a movie again, but as long as
you’re okay with teleplays, it’s fun to see verbal wit married to blind
personal hatred. Too bad about Jude Law (and his receding hairline),
who manages to suggest his character is mentally unstable even though
the script doesn’t require it. A character study this ain’t. ANNIE
WAGNER
Dan in Real Life
dir. Peter Hedges
A mopey retread of all the old family-comedy
clichés—kids are wise; love is tough; sometimes the guy
with all the answers forgets to take his own advice (can you
imagine?)—Dan in Real Life isn’t a disaster. But it
definitely isn’t good.
Steve Carell, lovable but unremarkable, stars as the titular Dan, a
bundle of all the golden-hearted single-father clichés. Beloved
advice columnist by trade, and father to three precocious girls, Dan
spends his days (in real life, not fake life, in case you were
confused) dispensing drippy platitudes in the newspaper, dispensing
drippy platitudes in books, and dispensing drippy platitudes from his
melancholy mouth. He also enjoys packing school lunches, harassing
14-year-old suitors, and forbidding his eldest from driving an
automobile. “You’re a good father,” says the tiniest (and, therefore,
the wisest) of the daughters, “but sometimes a bad dad.” God, I am so
bored just typing this.
The story is that Dan and kids head to granny and gramps’s summer
house for their boisterous annual family retreat. It’s in one of those
windy, whitewashed New England coastal towns where everything’s lonely
and boarded up and draped in buoys. Just like Dan. In a
lonely, Atlantic, buoy-draped bookstore, Dan meets a pretty lady
(Juliette Binoche), and they fall in love. For the purposes of
awkwardness, this pretty lady is already taken—by Dan’s crappy
brother, Dane Cook! Now and then, amid overwhelming ordinariness,
Carell will say something unbearably funny, like, “This corn is like an
angel to me.” Then, everything that you expect to happen happens, in a
mild, inoffensive, and okay way.
Dan in Real Life would be perfect if you were home sick
with the flu. It would be a good one to watch with your mom. And it’s
an effective reminder of how fun it is to play touch football in the
summertime with your weird cousins. Because it’s just normal, and
boring, and a little bit funny. Kind of like real life. LINDY WEST
Desert Bayou
dir. Alex LeMay
An awkward hybrid of Spike Lee’s Hurricane Katrina doc When the
Levees Broke and resettlement culture shock movies like Lost
Boys of Sudan, Desert Bayou barely skims the surface of
its toxic waters. I’m convinced there’s a fascinating film to be made
about the 600 mostly black New Orleans residents who were
shipped—without their consent—to mostly white Utah in the
days following Hurricane Katrina, but director Alex LeMay lacks the
light touch and serious analysis needed to do it.
Desert Bayou starts with a summary of the destruction
brought by the storm (narrated by Art Hoyle in tones that vary from
didactic to patronizing) that makes you pine for the terrible sweep of
Spike Lee’s extended introduction. But the real focus of this film is
what happened to America’s “internally displaced persons” after they
touched down 1,800 miles from home. Immediately upon stepping off the
plane in Utah, the New Orleans residents were searched, ostensibly
because they hadn’t been screened before takeoff. Hustled away to
isolated military barracks well outside of Salt Lake City (which is
majority non-Mormon and home to most of the people constituting Utah’s
less than 1 percent black population), the evacuees were subject to
criminal background checks and a strict nightly curfew.
These facts are disquieting, but they’re revealed disjointedly, with
no sense of the escalation or de-escalation of hysteria.
(Person-on-the-street interviews reveal, less than shockingly, that
some Utahans are prejudiced blockheads and others are blustering
freethinkers.) As for the evacuees, we learn that ex-con Curtis is
having trouble finding a construction job, but we never see him
interact with his neighbors or prospective employers. We learn that
Clifford is good with kids and has gone back to smoking crack, but we
never find out how he feels about living in a sea of Mormons.
Desert Bayou wastes plenty of time following New
York–based radio host Rabbi Shmuley as he insists, without
evidence, that the kind people of Utah will welcome the evacuees, but
we learn precious little about the experience of the people themselves.
ANNIE WAGNER
