‘Paper Man’
The quirk-laden indie “Paper Man” brings together a novelist who won’t grow up with a sullen teenage girl for mutual wallowing, eccentric high jinks and life lessons but, unfortunately, little reason to care.
Richard Dunn (Jeff Daniels) gets dropped off at a Montauk, Long Island, rental house for the winter by his high-strung surgeon wife, Claire (Lisa Kudrow), so he can finish a second book, except he’s distracted by an ugly couch, debilitating writer’s block and an imaginary superhero friend (Ryan Reynolds) he’s held onto since childhood. Enter Abby (Emma Stone), a high school loner with a bad boyfriend, a hangdog companion (Kieran Culkin) and a dark secret. Richard and Abby click — over soup, confessions and origami — but without sex, which in the hands of husband-and-wife writer-directors Kieran and Michele Mulroney is meant to be refreshing but mostly feels like a nascent creepiness glossed over.
A grown man with a hallucinatory holdover from boyhood has thematic potential, considering our culture’s pervasive idolization of childish things over the hard business of life. But the movie’s tone disintegrates whenever the filmmakers shoehorn in the blond, spandex-and-cape-clad Reynolds for unfunny slapstick and heartfelt discourse. Meant to amuse, Reynolds’ why-am-I-here look feels all too understood.
MPAA rating: R (for language and a scene of sexuality). Opens Friday at Landmark’s Century Centre Cinema. Running time: 1:50
— Robert Abele, special to Tribune Newspapers
‘The Father of My Children’
“The Father of My Children” showcases a vividly authentic look at the way movies are made, but you would never call it a film about filmmaking. And while its plot pivots around a melodramatic event, it is anything but a melodrama.
Instead, what French writer-director Mia Hansen-Love has created is an extraordinarily empathetic humanistic drama, a film of love, joy, sadness and hope that understands how complex our emotions are, and does beautiful justice to them.
The father of the title is producer Gregoire Canvel (Louis-Do de Lencquesaing), the head of Moon Films, a prominent Paris production company that’s been in business for years.
Though he often arrives late, Gregoire never misses a weekend in the country with his Italian wife, Sylvia (Chiara Caselli) and their daughters, teenager Clemence (Alice de Lencquesaing, the real-life daughter of Louis-Do) and her younger siblings, Valentine (Alice Gautier) and Billie (Manelle Driss).
This happy family life may sound pro forma, it is a tribute to Hansen-Love’s gifts as a filmmaker and her special facility with children (“I couldn’t imagine not working with children,” she says in the press notes) that it is anything but.
Though a company like Moon Pictures invariably operates on the far side of financial stability, “The Father of My Children” gradually lets us know that Gregoire and his company are in far worse shape than most people realize, and in fact might be in danger of going under.
The type of person who continues to pick up checks though his company owes a million euros to a lab, Gregoire is used to riding out these storms, but in this case the crisis starts to genuinely get to him and he begins to truly feel that the walls are closing in.
It’s at this point that something happens, something that is as upsetting as it is meant to be. It’s something that could have started a film or ended one, but its placement right in the center of things underlines the intentions of its writer-director.
For what Hansen-Love is interested in most of all is how people respond to a given situation, how, each in their own way, characters cope with the circumstances life has placed them in, how each one decides for themselves what is to be done and how to proceed.
No MPAA rating. Opens Friday at Landmark’s Century Centre Cinema. Running time: 2:00
— Kenneth Turan,
Tribune Newspapers critic
‘The City of Your Final Destination’
It’s easy to see why the Merchant Ivory team was attracted to “The City of Your Final Destination,” a languid literary contemplation on the vagaries of life, love, bee stings and the artistic soul. Just as easy to sense is the missing touch of Ismail Merchant, who died in 2005, almost a year before the film went into production.
Filled with unrealized possibilities and fraught with flaws, “Final Destination” seems destined to be little more than a footnote in the anthology of extraordinary films to come out of the long creative collaboration between producer Merchant, director James Ivory and screenwriter Ruth Prawer Jhabvala.
Like many of the classic Merchant Ivory productions such as “The Remains of the Day” and “A Room With a View,” the film exists within a tiny ecosystem of relationships that will change, and be changed by, the entry of a foreign object. In “Final Destination,” that outside influence is a University of Kansas English graduate student, Omar Razaghi (Omar Metwally).
Based on the Peter Cameron novel, the movie mostly unfolds in Uruguay in 1995 and is concerned with the legacy of the late Jules Gund, a writer of some acclaim and much mystery. Gund has left behind one published novel, an unexplained suicide and a decaying family estate where his brother Adam (Anthony Hopkins), widow Caroline (Laura Linney), mistress Arden (Charlotte Gainsbourg), her daughter Portia (Ambar Mallman) and Adam’s lover Pete (Hiroyuki Sanada) continue to live in a necessary detente.
Omar arrives unexpectedly after they refuse permission for the Gund biography he has in mind, triggering a ripple effect that will change everyone in turn, including Deirdre (Alexandra Maria Lara), his girlfriend back home in Kansas.
With Omar the primary agent of change, the film is largely dependent on Metwally’s performance, and it, unfortunately, wilts in the heat of that Uruguayan summer and the formidable cast around him. The actor, who made his screen debut in Steven Spielberg’s “Munich” (2005), never gains his footing; worse still, it feels as if Ivory just left him to flounder.
The old hands, meanwhile, rest easy in their roles, with Hopkins’ Adam delightfully draped in wrinkled linen suits and wry observations. Linney is the cucumber cool, unmovable obstacle in Omar’s path, wearing the pain of Gund’s betrayal like a shawl against the chill. Gainsbourg is as light a butterfly as Arden, more an innocent lost, and without the darkness that has become the actress’ signature. The surprise is Lara as the irritatingly efficient Deirdre, who blows in like an ill wind — a welcome relief that someone has finally stirred things up.
MPAA rating: PG-13 (for a brief sexual situation with partial nudity). Opens Friday at Landmark’s Century Centre Cinema and Renaissance Place, Highland Park. Running time: 1:58
— Betsy Sharkey, Tribune Newspapers critic
