“Illuminata”

In John Turturro's ambitious and arresting American tragicomedy, the actor-director invents himself an artistic tradition.

By Andrew O and #039;Hehir

In a world of canny operators who make movies with one eye on a demographic calculus and the other on Tina Brown and her empire of murmur, John Turturro’s integrity and attention to craft seem almost monastic. He’s the freak in the hair shirt, hand-inking illuminated manuscripts in the Mall of America. “Illuminata,” Turturro’s second film as a director (after 1992′s “Mac”), suggests that he wants to enlist himself in an artistic tradition — or invent one — that’s virtually untouched by Hollywood. Although it’s an often hilarious sexual roundelay, “Illuminata” far transcends the genre of farce. At its core, it’s a heartbreakingly beautiful tragicomedy about art, love and artifice, with a script of rare humor and complexity and some of the most enjoyably freewheeling performances in years. But there’s something quixotic, even lonely, about it too. “Illuminata” fearlessly attaches itself to the neglected legacy of classical Western theater, and the theater-derived films of Jean Renoir and Ingmar Bergman, and acts as if the Hitchcock/noir/men-with-guns cinema that so preoccupies younger filmmakers these days never existed.

Turturro stars as Tuccio, a frustrated young playwright married to Rachel (Katherine Borowitz, Turturro’s real-life spouse), the manager and star of a large and rather sloppy troupe of actors. Rachel and company are engaged at a struggling theater owned by a comically warring couple, Pallenchio (the marvelous Irish actor Donal McCann) and Astergourd (the larger-than-life Beverly D’Angelo). We are supposed to be in Manhattan, circa 1905, and there are a few historical markers scattered about — automobiles are not yet common and Ibsen is known but not universally accepted. But the script by Turturro and his friend and collaborator Brandon Cole (adapted from Cole’s stage play) is really set in an almost abstract backstage reality; it’s somewhere between Shakespeare’s time and our own, and that’s what matters. Cole’s one-name characters — Tuccio, Pallenchio, Marco, Flavio, Beppo, et al. — clearly echo the pseudo-Italian names in the Bard’s comedies, and the hilariously vainglorious actress played by Susan Sarandon is named Celimene, the beloved of Molihre’s “The Misanthrope.”

But “Illuminata” is not some dry postmodern exercise, nor is it anything like Woody Allen’s often labored Bergman imitations. If Cole and Turturro have clearly studied Bergman’s “Smiles of a Summer Night,” arguably the greatest of all film comedies, they have learned the right lessons from it. “Illuminata” teems with its own sense of life, crackles with daring, walks the tightrope between satire and pathos with a rare assuredness. When we see Rachel’s company launch into a production of “Cavalleria Rusticana” (the melodramatic play, not the melodramatic opera), it’s clearly atrocious. But we’ve already invested enough emotion in these characters, especially the graceful and dignified Rachel, that we want to like this desperate play despite ourselves. Similarly, when Old Flavio (Ben Gazzara), an aging actor who’s constantly coughing up bits of disconnected Shakespearean dialogue, begins declaiming Prospero’s closing monologue from “The Tempest,” Turturro’s camera wanders to the ludicrous Pallenchio, sitting in the orchestra. He begins to speak the lines along with Flavio, and at a single stroke we see the cuckolded theater proprietor as a tragic, not a comic figure — a failed actor with the words of a dying sorcerer locked in his heart.

When a young actor collapses and nearly dies onstage during “Cavalleria,” Tuccio seizes the opportunity to stage a production of his own play, “Illuminata.” A realistic drama about a man who cheats on his wife with a beautiful young woman, but whose wife cannot tear herself away, “Illuminata” seems to reflect uncomfortably on Tuccio’s marriage to Rachel, who plays the wife opposite Tuccio’s loyal if airheaded friend Dominique (Rufus Sewell). Clearly lacking a convincing ending, “Illuminata” opens abysmally and is savaged by the vicious critic Bevalaqua (Christopher Walken), an outrageous blend of Oscar Wilde and Mario Lanza. The domineering Astergourd announces that “Illuminata” will be closed in favor of “A Doll’s House” — significantly, a play in which a wife leaves her husband — and the film’s complex sexual machinery is set in motion. Intoxicated with his own wounded self-importance, and insulted by Rachel’s insistence that they need to eat, Tuccio dismisses her, suggesting she tell Astergourd: “I, the great Rachel, lover to the mediocrity Tuccio, am here to eat. Give me Ibsen and some sausage.”

If the uncomfortable liaisons that flow from this are too numerous to mention, what’s most important is the marvelous fluency with which Turturro handles very difficult, finely nuanced tones. If Tuccio’s rendezvous with Celimene — who is, if possible, even more self-involved than he — is played for laughs, it nonetheless generates considerable erotic heat. Bevalaqua pursues the troupe’s clown, Marco (Bill Irwin), but even this overheated “macaroni queen” is redeemed from caricature in the end, for all Walken’s scenery chewing. When Rachel, Dominique and young Simone (Georgina Cates), Dominique’s lover, rehearse Tuccio’s play, the scene begins as a sparkling satire of actorly pretension: “You can’t cross left to right?” asks Rachel incredulously. “Not emotionally, no,” answers Simone. But within a few minutes, Rachel has wrenched the truth out of the younger woman — Simone really does love Tuccio, and dreams that he will leave Rachel for her — and we have left ersatz emotion behind for the real thing.

“Illuminata” is such a masterful accomplishment, from its astonishing ensemble cast to the lovely, unshowy cinematography of Harris Savides and the painstaking production design by Robin Standefer — that I hesitate to make the most obvious criticism. But Tuccio, as a protagonist, remains something of a cipher, a weak link in the lavish tapestry of “Illuminata.” He may redeem himself in Rachel’s eyes (it’s criminal, by the way, that an actress with Borowitz’s talent and willowy, grown-up beauty isn’t a star), but I was left feeling that he’s still an arrogant jerk, and an indifferent playwright, who doesn’t deserve her. We’re meant to understand that Tuccio saves himself and then Rachel saves his play, but for the first time in Cole and Turturro’s marvelous screenplay, the writing in the concluding scenes feels merely elegant, rather than convincing. This undercooked, passive role is a central, if not quite fatal, flaw in one of the most ambitious and arresting American films of recent years. Turturro is already one of our finest actors and, on this evidence, looks like a director of impressive range, prodigious human sympathy and unlimited potential. Perhaps doing both at once remains just beyond his grasp.

: More Andrew O
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Michael Douglas: The last great antihero

In "Solitary Man," the actor plays another in a long line of cads who are more interesting than they are likable

By Matt Zoller Seitz

Michael Douglas in "Solitary Man."

Topics:Solitary Man, Our Picks, Movies, Susan Sarandon

“There is nothing noble in failure,” says Ben Kalmen, the protagonist of the dark comedy “Solitary Man.” And he knows whereof he speaks. Ben is a disgraced former used car dealer and insatiable womanizer who once had all the outward trappings of success (stable marriage, lots of money, a degree of celebrity), and mysteriously and systematically began to destroy all of it. By the time the film’s main action begins, he’s a magnificent wreck of a man who’s slowly learning that the world isn’t responsible for his misery – he is.

Happily, Ben’s dictum about failure doesn’t apply to movies. Failure itself isn’t noble or heroic or innately interesting; it’s just a human condition like any other. But because mainstream American cinema tends to cower in fear of any behavior it considers unsympathetic and any circumstance it considers unhappy, a film about failure possesses a small degree of nobility right out of the gate. You just don’t see that kind of film every day. What such a movie does after that is, of course, up to the filmmakers and the actors. Luckily, “Solitary Man” is funny and absorbing, and it features a lead performance by Michael Douglas that’s both hugely entertaining in itself, and fascinating for the way it illuminates the actor’s long, colorful career. Ben Kalmen isn’t just a worthy addition to Douglas’ personal rogues gallery; he seems to contain bits and pieces of all of them.

Six-and-a-half years prior to the film’s main action, for reasons even he doesn’t understand, Ben started systematically and intentionally ruining his life. His prolonged orgy of self-destruction was triggered by possibly catastrophic medical news. I say “possibly” because Ben never even learned what, if anything, was wrong with his health. In the film’s prologue, a doctor tells him, “I don’t love your EKG” – a wonderfully smarmy preface to everyone’s worst nightmare – and he flees the office rather than hear the details.

The movie picks up with Ben, now divorced from his wife, Nancy (Susan Sarandon), living a pathetic shadow of his former life. He still carries himself like a Master of the Universe (and think of how much more watchable “The Bonfire of the Vanities” would have been had Douglas played Sherman McCoy), but the more time we spend with him, the more we realize that Ben’s aura of imperviousness is just a performance. Ben’s chronic infidelity destroyed his marriage, and at age 60, his capacity for talking much younger women into bed seems less a gift than a manifestation of his deep immaturity, depression and fear of death. (It’s not the women he’s after, it’s his own rosy memories of youthful potency, and he doesn’t seduce these women with sheer charm, but by choosing targets that have daddy issues and exploiting them.)

Ben lost his string of car dealerships in a stupid criminal scam. He’s living beyond his means and has to keep borrowing money from the handful of people he hasn’t completely alienated. One of them is his 30-something daughter, Susan (Jenna Fischer), who wants the old man to be a decent grandfather to her son, Scotty (Jake Siciliano), and knows he has it in him. But Ben takes advantage of her good nature, and his grandson’s, too. The sequence in which Ben shows up late for Scotty’s birthday party — loping toward the family car as it’s being loaded up, and grinning as if his belated presence is the greatest gift of all — is every parent or grandparent’s nightmare of fraudulence and inadequacy packed into one agonizing moment. (The only similar scene that’s half as devastating is the bit in Clint Eastwood’s “True Crime” in which the workaholic hero packs his preschool-age daughter into a stroller and pushes her through a zoo at breakneck pace so that he can get back to the office faster, and convinces the poor girl it’s a marvelous experience by calling it “speed zoo.”)

If Ben’s magnificent ruin of a life weren’t so astutely observed — and if Douglas didn’t let you see every flicker of vanity, delusion, arrogance, introspection and shame that passes through the character’s mind — Ben’s plight and the movie would be unbearable. But writer-director Brian Koppleman and his co-director, David Levien (they co-wrote the scripts for “Rounders” and “Oceans 13″), hit the right tone early — empathetic yet brutally honest — and Douglas’ absorbing, minutely detailed performance sustains it. (He’s given Ben some distinctive verbal and physical tics — such as the aggressive, borderline-violent way he jabs people when he’s trying to sell them something, and getting excited by the act of selling — but he never highlights them, much less demands that we appreciate their cleverness. They’re subtle, and feel tossed-off.) “Solitary Man” is as warm as a comedy about a screw-up can be without resorting to special pleading. The film never asks us to rationalize Ben’s awesome selfishness; remember, he didn’t receive a frightening diagnosis, he deliberately avoided receiving it, as if he wanted an excuse to act out anyway and didn’t want to complicate the process by dealing in facts.

The script is careful to distinguish between Ben’s view of himself and the movie’s view of Ben — an important difference that too many films about charismatic, badly behaved characters either fail to delineate or purposefully fudge. The most revelatory scenes in the movie are the ones in which Ben’s friends and relatives puncture his delusion that his self-absorbed way of life is a highly evolved, uncommonly brave kind of individualism, and that anyone who doesn’t live that way is a philistine or a coward. Following an ill-advised one-night stand with one of his daughter’s friends, Ben practically drives the poor woman from his bed with his needling, insensitive observations, then defends his behavior by saying that he just decided one day to say whatever popped into his head and anyone that couldn’t handle it could hit the bricks. (The world contains many varieties of asshole, but the very worst is the kind that’s rebranded himself a righteous truth-teller.)

The supporting characters aren’t just there to absorb his punishment. They’re representatives of value systems – some close to Ben’s, others thankfully far removed. As played by Sarandon, Ben’s ex-wife isn’t a doormat; she’s a loving woman who barely recognizes the man she married and wishes that man would return but knows it’ll happen slowly, if at all. Jenna Fischer’s Susan is still in thrall to her father; from the way that he regales her with inappropriate details of his love life, one surmises Ben once presented himself as less of a father to her than a best friend who happened to share half her DNA. Now Susan is more mature than he is — more evolved. It pains him to be reminded of this, just as it hurts when younger women who initially seem intrigued by his randy energy hear him addressed as “Grandpa” and flash that condescending, “Aren’t you cute?” smile.

On the other end of the spectrum we have Ben’s sexy, slightly brittle girlfriend Jordon (the always remarkable Mary-Louise Parker, letting you know who her character is just by the way she holds a glass or folds her legs under herself on a couch). She’s the lover Ben deserves, a cool materialist, bruised by life and cynical about everything. Her teenage daughter, Allyson (Imogene Poots), is a younger, female version of Ben — not soulless yet, but getting there. Their inevitable, “Are they going to go there? Dear God, they went there” tryst during a college campus visit would be revolting if both characters hadn’t been established as cheerful heels, and if Allyson’s rope-a-dope approach to seduction wasn’t so clearly in the tradition of Michael Douglas movies about men who think with the wrong head. And when Allyson shares the same frame with her and Ben’s campus guide, a likable, kindhearted boy named Daniel Cheston (Jesse Eisenberg, who has the second most expressive stammer in movies, after Jeff Goldblum), the visual and moral contrast is so stark that it almost amounts to a sight gag.

Towering above (or is that sinking beneath?) the rest is Douglas, maybe the last remaining link to an era when actors could play characters that were interesting rather than likable and still appear in big movies. He’s at his best playing human steamrollers undone by hubris or unexamined illusions (sometimes both). The power-mad corporate raider Gordon Gekko in “Wall Street”; the impulsively cheating husband in “Fatal Attraction”; the newly divorced man in “War of the Roses” who holds onto his dreams of a perfect marriage by refusing to give up his stake in the family house; the super-macho police detective undone by his animal cravings in “Basic Instinct”; the laid-off angry white man rampaging through a multicultural Los Angeles in “Falling Down”; the aging, one-hit wonder novelist in “Wonder Boys,” self-medicating his depression with pot and nostalgia: To one degree or another these characters are all opportunists, screw-ups or some combination. And there’s not a saint among them.

Douglas is a ’70s-style antihero whose star rose a decade late. In a decade-plus of American film defined by Rocky, Rambo, “Top Gun” and umpteen films staring Arnold Schwarzenegger and his guns, Douglas insisted on playing recognizable men who lived in something vaguely resembling the real world. Even during the peak of Douglas’ fame (roughly 1985 to ’95) you never caught him being photographed with Vaseline on the lens, like Warren Beatty in that godforsaken remake of “An Affair to Remember” or Robert Redford in, well, everything post-”Brubaker.” (He’s more a Jack Nicholson type of performer, but without Jack’s tendency to go cartoonishly over-the-top.) He didn’t act opposite robots or space creatures or spend a lot of screen time leaping into the air unloading handguns. (One notable exception is Ridley Scott’s glossy-trashy, America-vs.-Japan thriller “Black Rain.” But even there Douglas managed to make a standard-issued, ass-kicking Yankee cop seem human-scaled — socially inept and insecure, a prisoner of machismo.) Even when his characters are misunderstood or persecuted, the actor never models a halo. In the ludicrous conversation piece “Disclosure,” in which Douglas’ character is sexually harassed by Demi Moore’s ruthless Amazon boss, the actor makes sure we know his character is still a sinner, even if he’s being sinned against, and he’s not smart enough to see the larger puzzle of which his torment is one small piece.

Douglas’ characters are always guilty of something. When D-Fens, the hero of “Falling Down,” finally has his epiphany on a dock, it’s phrased as a question: “I’m the bad guy?” Douglas’ most memorable characters could all pose that question to the audience, and by all rights the response should be the same: Yes, absolutely – and don’t go changing.

: More Matt Zoller Seitz

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“Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps”: Gekko’s back!

Cannes gets a peek at the "Wall Street" sequel, and a seminar on capitalism with Oliver Stone

By Andrew O'Hehir

Michael Douglas and Shia LaBeouf in "Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps"

Topics:Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps, Cannes Film Festival, Charlie Sheen, Susan Sarandon, Wall Street, Film Salon, Movies

CANNES, France — Oliver Stone has returned to the characters and themes of his greatest success — and arguably his greatest failure — after 23 years in order to preach a sermon on the topic of “moral hazard.” As Gordon Gekko, the legendary financial shark played by Michael Douglas, explains to a civilian in “Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps,” that’s a term used to describe the risks involved with entrusting your money to someone like a stockbroker or an investment banker — someone who takes no responsibility for what happens to it later.

As millions of ordinary homeowners and investors all over the developed world have discovered over the last two years or so, the moral hazard associated with capitalism’s boom-and-bust cycles can produce extraordinarily painful results. Stone’s long-delayed “Wall Street” sequel will surely make news as the first major motion picture to dramatize the worldwide financial crisis, and to point the finger squarely at those who induced it, exacerbated it and lied about it.

But I also think Stone’s new film expresses a more personal, intimate sense of moral hazard, which more broadly indicates the possibility that one or more parties to a contract may lie, cheat, steal or otherwise behave badly. Stone may now feel that his 1987 “Wall Street” made its piles of money under false pretenses, or at least that it failed to deliver the lesson he thought it would. Instead of a parable about the evils of greed and speculation, “Wall Street” was seen by many as an antiheroic saga with a charismatic dark angel at its center. (John Milton had much the same problem with “Paradise Lost,” not that I’m equating the two.) For the would-be financial whizzes of the “American Psycho” generation, Gordon Gekko was a role model and a father figure, not a cautionary example.

“Oliver and I were both pretty stunned by the way people perceived Gekko,” Michael Douglas told a packed press conference after the film’s Friday morning preview screening. “He was a very well-written villain, and people are always attracted to villains. But we never imagined that all these MBAs, all these kids coming out of business school, would say he was the person they wanted to be.

“This time around, we saw an opportunity to start him over again from the bottom. And it’s really ambivalent. The biggest question I get about Gordon in this movie is: Has he changed? Is he a changed man? Well, you don’t find out until the end.”

In that spirit, I’ll discuss “Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps” only in general terms. Most of you won’t get to see it until its worldwide release in September, and a full review should wait until then. It’s an ambitious, uneven, surprisingly talky melodrama, which mixes a quasi-documentary approach to the crash of 2008 with the story, as Michael Douglas puts it, “about how money shapes families and how money can destroy families.”

Along with Douglas, Shia LaBeouf and Carey Mulligan in leading roles, Stone’s terrific supporting cast includes Josh Brolin, Frank Langella, Susan Sarandon, Vanessa Ferlito and 94-year-old Eli Wallach, sensational as a sinister Wall Street patriarch. Although the title has a nicely evocative ring, it’s actually bowdlerized: “Money,” Gekko tells would-be son-in-law Jacob Moore (LaBeouf) on a New York subway car, “is the bitch who never sleeps.” In other words, one night she’ll get away from you.

While the movie has moments of beauty (thanks to cinematographer Rodrigo Prieto) and considerable thoughtfulness, I only wish it had more of the mordant masculine menace suggested by that scene. Stone and his writers, Allan Loeb and Stephen Schiff, do indeed seek to tear Gekko down and then rebuild him, perhaps hoping to lay bare the essential nature of the man, and of the culture of endless accumulation and manipulation that he represents.

In the film’s opening sequence, Gekko is released from federal prison in 2001, after eight years behind bars. He reclaims his personal belongings, which include a gold Rolex and a mobile phone that weighs more than the Manhattan phone book. No one shows up to meet him outside the gates. As we learn in short order, his daughter Winnie (Mulligan) won’t speak to him, although she’s his only living blood relative and also holds the keys to his financial future.

Flash forward to 2008, when Gekko has reinvented himself as a best-selling author and professional Cassandra, telling adoring throngs how much worse today’s masters of the universe have fucked them than he ever did. That’s when he meets Jacob, who is both engaged to his estranged daughter and is also an ambitious young energy trader at an investment bank that’s about to drown under a tide of worthless paper. (The collapse of Jacob’s firm is clearly modeled on the historic implosion of Lehman Brothers.)

Stone clearly longs to invest these characters with emotional and moral ambiguity, and to craft a tale whose heroes and villains are never entirely clear. (As Stone put it, “Each of the characters plays each other’s roles at different times in the movie.”) I’m just not sure that’s where his strengths lie. It may not be accidental that Josh Brolin gives the movie’s best performance as the thoroughly abominable Bretton James, an ultra-slick investment titan who helps bring Gekko and Jacob together (because they both hate his guts).

Brolin’s character, however, is ancillary to the movie’s central triangle, in which each member ostensibly wants the same thing — to heal the rift between Winnie and her father — but none of them is being entirely straightforward. Jake is a classic capitalist idealist, who believes he can make a killing on Wall Street while funding a major societal breakthrough (a voodoo-flavored fusion-energy scheme). Winnie wants to put her left-wing investigative website on the map with a major scoop. (No, as far as I can tell it’s not supposed to be Salon.) And Gordon wants … well, what the hell do you suppose Gordon wants?

If you think it’s a bit rich to sit around at a resort town in the south of France with a bunch of people from Hollywood talking about the evils of capitalism, well, you’d be right. Nonetheless, that’s exactly what we did at the press conference, which offered one of the most felicitous and absurd combinations I’ve experienced in several years of coming here.

Things happen at Cannes that don’t happen anywhere else. One question came from an Iranian journalist, who inquired about Stone’s dormant plan to make a documentary about Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Iran’s controversial president. (It remains dormant.) The next reporter who took the mike was from Israel, and we all held our breath. But no, he didn’t challenge his colleague from Tehran to talk about nuclear reactors or the Holocaust. He asked Michael Douglas about being an older actor in Hollywood. (There are fewer studio roles, but you can still find parts in interesting independent films.)

Beefy, mustachioed and sunburned, Oliver Stone looked ready to step outside, don a tan blazer and work alongside the alternately menacing and cheerful security guards who man the doors of the Palais des Festivals. When Douglas and producer Edward Pressman approached him about reviving Gekko and “Wall Street,” he said, it was 2006 and the boom was near its apex. “I didn’t want to celebrate that culture of wealth. It just seemed wrong, it had no appeal for me. But after the crash — I mean, that was a major heart attack. Then I knew it was time for Gordon Gekko to come back.”

Asked by an Arab journalist whether the film was “anti-capitalist,” Stone paused for a long moment and chose his words carefully. Stone is not entirely unlike Gekko, in that he plays a double game and is always in danger of succumbing to moral hazard. He hangs out with Hugo Chávez and Fidel Castro (with whom he recently filmed a third and presumably final interview), but also wants to keep on making Hollywood movies and flying first-class to Cannes on somebody else’s nickel.

“I’m confused, as are many people right now, about whether capitalism in its present form will work,” he finally said. “It seems not. It goes beyond America, of course, to England and Greece and many other places. It looks like we need serious reform and regulation.

“You know, when I look back at the ’80s, it’s like we all got drunk. In 1987, I thought was going to correct itself. But it didn’t. It got worse. The real income of the American worker flattened out in 1973, but American productivity went way up. So there’s a real imbalance between what ordinary people make and what the bosses and managers, the people at the top, make. It’s an enormous problem.”

The next question came from an Egyptian fellow who asked Michael Douglas, “What is it like to be Michael Douglas?” The answer was about children and nuclear weapons.

: More Andrew O'Hehir

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Al Pacino brings Jack Kevorkian to life

In HBO's understated biopic, the notoriously hammy actor does something truly riveting: He disappears

By Heather Havrilesky

Al Pacino in "You Don't Know Jack."

Topics:Jack Kevorkian, Disability, HBO, Our Picks, TV, Susan Sarandon, Television

Most Americans are willfully ignorant about death. We cling so desperately to our distractions, our novelties, our money, our diversions, all with the illusion that we can put off death indefinitely, that any direct talk of death makes us uncomfortable.

“We’re all going to die someday,” the realist tells us. “We get older and older, and eventually, we die.”

“Jesus, could you stop being so negative?” we respond.

“It’s really best to plan for it before it happens, so we have some control over how it goes,” the realist counters.

“Plan for it? God, you’re morbid,” we say, turning back to our iPhones to tweet about the fantastic pastrami we had for lunch.

We actively divert our attention from death each day, and then one day, there it is, rudely interrupting our normal routines, and we’re bewildered by how cruel and callous the world suddenly seems. Doctors who refuse to weep with us! Coroners who go about their business as if they do this several times a day! Funeral home directors who gesture gracefully to a plentiful box of tissue, pursing their lips in a grotesque affectation of heartfelt sympathy! It’s all so macabre, yet so mundane! It’s just so wrong.

This is the framework in which we encounter Jack Kevorkian, aka Doctor Death, the advocate for physician-assisted suicide. “Death? Suicide? Physician?!” we shriek. “Who is this creepy guy?”

But HBO’s Kevorkian biopic, “You Don’t Know Jack” (premieres 9 p.m. Saturday, April 24), offers a more mundane picture of Kevorkian, and of death itself: Patients neither weep inconsolably nor smile sweetly like those brave souls on “Grey’s Anatomy,” nor do they close their eyes in an instant as their friends and family hold hands in a circle, singing softly. Death may bring relief to Kevorkian’s patients, but in the end, the dying patient and his or her loved ones hardly know what to say. They look at each other questioningly. They hold hands and try to smile. “You’re so brave,” one woman tells her husband. Another dying woman simply thanks Kevorkian for helping her, the two squeezed together in his VW van because there’s nowhere else to do this.

The mundane reality of death is something we don’t anticipate, something we can’t bear, at some level, thanks to a lifetime of being spoon-fed valiant stories of the soldier who speaks a few brave words then dies on cue or the old man who lies in his bed at home, receiving loving visitors with warmth and clarity. By presenting death — and Kevorkian himself — unadorned by the usual comforting clichés, director Barry Levinson and screenwriter Adam Mazer not only do justice to Kevorkian’s story, but they also do justice to his very humble cause.

“Is this the face of a killer?” That’s what the promotional posters for “You Don’t Know Jack” say, under a close-up of Al Pacino’s face. Is Scarface a killer? Is that a trick question?

Miraculously, though, in “You Don’t Know Jack,” Al Pacino makes us forget every other role he’s ever played. Instead of bringing more Pacino to the table than anything else — the macho growling, the eye rolling, the almost poetic line readings, the exaggerated rage — the actor brings low-key eccentric Jack Kevorkian to life. Direct but unassuming, confident but ambivalent about the spotlight, Kevorkian allows Pacino the chance to do something he’s only been able to do a few times in his long acting career: disappear.

Along with the pleasure of watching Pacino flesh out this strange, stubborn man, bickering amiably with his friends in a scratchy Midwestern accent at poker night or matter-of-factly interviewing patients about why they want to end their lives, HBO’s biopic demonstrates beautifully how the profile of a strange controversial figure like Kevorkian can be transformed into a moving, eye-opening story. Like Kevorkian himself, this film isn’t a splashy attention seeker, but its charms are apparent within the first few minutes, from Jack’s rambling, off-topic conversations with his friend Neal Nicol (John Goodman) to his humble little apartment, with its odd ambient light and framed photographs. Instead of glamorizing Kevorkian or making him appear more heroic or more suave than he is, the filmmakers embrace the down-to-earth nature of his life and his choices. Each scene, each shot reflects this perspective: the wide angle of Kevorkian crouched under his VW van, working on it, as activist Janet Good (Susan Sarandon) approaches to tell him she’s sorry she couldn’t help him with his first patient; the off-kilter banter with his sister Margo (Brenda Vaccaro) that always skitters around the darkness of what Kevorkian is taking on.

Most important, “You Don’t Know Jack” presents what many of us missed back when Kevorkian’s face was on all the magazine covers, navigating the kind of media storm that can make even the most unassuming idealist look like a grandstanding opportunist. Despite the grim nickname “Doctor Death,” despite the disturbing nature of what he did, rigging up tubes or gas masks to help terminally ill patients die, Kevorkian’s aims were anything but morbid. After watching helplessly as his mother died slowly in the hospital, lingering on, in pain, unable to speak, he decided to challenge the accepted approach to death in this country, an approach that he saw as inhumane at best, downright savage at worst.

Death doesn’t have to unfold the way we assume it does, Kevorkian argued. No one should necessarily have to accept years of suffering through whatever extended nightmare awaits them, in the hospital, in hospice, in the nursing home. Death isn’t some frightening, terrible thing. Just because we spend most of our lives trying to avoid its very existence, just because it’s depicted in books and movies and works of art as some shadowy, mysterious, dramatic presence, that doesn’t mean we’re utterly powerless in the face of it. As taboo as it is to look at it directly or to dictate its terms, death can simply be a choice to stop living.

Kevorkian himself didn’t always make the most rational choices. After helping 130 terminal patients end their own lives, Kevorkian had the audacity to show footage of himself administering a lethal injection to an ALS patient on “60 Minutes,” after which he openly dared authorities to do something about it. He then represented himself in his murder trial — stubborn idealists as passionate as Kevorkian aren’t always so open to advice in these matters — and subsequently spent eight years of his life in jail. Even as we witness Kevorkian skidding off the tracks, as his friends and former lawyer look on, cringing, it’s hard not to admire his tenacious adherence to his own principles. He didn’t want to help people behind closed doors, he wanted to change the laws of the land. He accepted his fate with an understated shrug. In his mind, he really had no choice. “When a law is deemed immoral by you,” he tells anyone who’ll listen, “you must disobey it.”

The film conjures a complicated picture of Kevorkian. But even with such witty, touching dialogue and such a moving performance by Pacino, what we remember most clearly at the end of this film are Kevorkian’s patients. These people didn’t see Kevorkian as “Doctor Death,” they saw him as an angel, one who might finally deliver them from their suffering.

: Heather Havrilesky is Salon's TV critic and author of the rabbit blog. Her memoir, "Disaster Preparedness," published in 2010. More Heather Havrilesky

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Straight to DVD: “Tenderness” and “Peacock”

Russell Crowe! Susan Sarandon! Crazy teens and cross-dressers! We go semi-upscale with two new releases

By Bob Calhoun

Cillian Murphy and Susan Sarandon in "Peacock" and Russell Crowe in "Tenderness."

Topics:Straight to DVD, Film Salon, Dvd reviews, Susan Sarandon, Movies

This corner of Film Salon is usually the dumping ground for cage fighting movies with “Stone Cold” Steve Austin and slasher flicks hosted by Flavor Flav, but this week I’ve got a pair of films that boast a combined three Oscar winners, a best-actress nominee and a two-time Golden Globe winner. Consider this sudden deluge of talent to be a kind of upscale outlier. Rest assured, I’ll be back to pondering the greater meaning of lesbian vampire epics and rock ‘n’ roll werewolf programmers soon enough.

“Tenderness,” based on the 1997 novel by Robert Cormier, did make it into limited release mostly based on the star power of Russell Crowe in a top-billed supporting role. Since most of us are seeing it on the small screen for the first time, here it is. Lori (Sophie Traub) is a confused 16-year-old who re-enacts previous sexual abuse by making out with an older man she picks up at a gas station or pulling up her shirt while her boss at the supermarket strokes himself. She’s obsessed with Eric Komenko (Jon Foster), a kid who murdered his parents with his archery set but got off with a light sentence by claiming that anti-depressants drove him into a parricidal rage.

Sharing her obsession is Detective Christofuoro (Crowe), a Buffalo, N.Y., cop with an ailing wife who believes that Komenko is responsible for the unsolved murder of a teenage girl found in an upstate New York lake. Lori keeps a scrapbook with newspaper clippings of the Komenko killings while Christofuoro pores over crime scene photographs at 24-hour diners. “You’re a psychopath, Eric,” Christofuoro tells Eric during one of the youth’s last days in a juvenile detention facility, “You’re going to kill again. You know it and I know it. And I want to prevent that from happening.”

The detective is right about Eric. He is going to kill again and even has plans to meet his next victim at a dilapidated amusement park near Albany. On his way to his murderous rendezvous, Eric discovers that Lori has stowed away in the back of the Volvo station wagon he inherited from his slain parents. Eric can’t bring himself to get rid of Lori either by ditching her on the side of the road or strangling her with a rolled up length of cloth towel ripped out of a bathroom dispenser. Lori engages in a push-pull with her idol, attempting to entice him with a clumsy sexuality that she doesn’t seem to grasp. Traub’s performance as Lori recalls a young Juliette Lewis in Scorsese’s “Cape Fear” (1991), except that Traub brings far more nuance to her portrayal of a damaged teen. For his part, Foster captures homicidal compulsion mixed with small moments of pause. He hesitates to grab that claw hammer and tries to stop himself from fashioning a makeshift garrote, but in the end, he remains a prisoner of his urges.

“Tenderness” is directed by Jon Polson, who helmed the more cookie-cutter thriller “Swimfan” (2002) and appeared as an actor alongside Crowe in the gay-themed comedy-drama “The Sum of Us” (1994). Crowe, who was in between filming “Cinderella Man” (2005) and “3:10 to Yuma” (2007) during the 2006 shoot of “Tenderness,” had to be lured by an expanded part and badgered by Baz Luhrmann to appear here. Based on the strength of Traub and Foster’s performances as the leads, I can’t help but wonder what the movie would be like without the expansion of Crowe’s role. Christofuoro often comes off as too saintly, but Crowe’s trademark intensity makes the characterization engaging where it could have been dull in less capable hands.

Billed as a thriller on its DVD cover, “Tenderness” is really more of a dark character study. Eric and Lori never attempt to out-crazy each other like Anthony Perkins and Tuesday Weld in the similar but more horror-based “Pretty Poison” (1968), nor do their commingled personality disorders fuel a spate of random killings as in “Badlands” (1973) or “Natural Born Killers”(1994). Crowe’s detective is also held back from Dirty Harry excesses. The turmoil is mostly internal here. There are times in “Tenderness” where I wished that Eric and Lori went on that upstate killing spree and Crowe confronted them with blazing lead, but by the film’s end, I was glad that it stayed away from crime movie clichés. Despite its sparse physical violence, “Tenderness” manages a quiet but effective gut punch. Laura Dern (the two-time Golden Globe winner) appears briefly as Komenko’s aunt.

“Peacock” is another character study steeped in the language of the horror film, but the PR folks at Lionsgate have also opted to classify this release as a thriller. Please don’t judge them too harshly for their categorization hocus-pocus. Label one movie a thriller and the other “a disturbing character study” and see which one makes its way into more Netflix queues.

Cillian Murphy, the Irish actor best known as the airline passenger from hell in “Red Eye” (2005) and the Scarecrow in “Dark Knight” (2008), is John Skillpa, a milquetoast bank clerk who lives in the creepy house he inherited from his abusive mother. Skillpa rides the same rickety 10-speed to work every day that he presumably took to school when he was a kid. He also keeps his bank book and a key to a safe deposit box in a metal case filled with candy wrappers that he stashes beneath the boards of his front steps as if he’s hiding it from somebody. The person he’s hiding it from is Emma, his cross-dressed female alter ego who leaves breakfast for Skillpa every morning with a nice little note.

When a caboose detaches itself from a train and crashes in his backyard while Skillpa is in a housedress pinning laundry to a clothesline, his Middle American, “Mad Men”-era neighbors assume that Emma is his wife. Emma soon becomes the talk of the town. She’s on the front page of the paper, gives the OK for a senator to use the crash site for a campaign rally and makes friends with the mayor’s wife (Susan Sarandon), who runs a local adoption agency and home for women. John, on the other hand, is still bowled over by the mayor (Keith Carradine) and dumped on by the requisite asshole boss (Bill Pullman).

Emma soon hatches a plan to adopt Jake, John’s son that he fathered with a local waitress and sometime prostitute named Maggie (Ellen Page from “Juno”) under nightmarish circumstances. John is against all of Emma’s machinations, but can do little to rein in his conjoined better half. As Emma continues schmoozing with the town’s elite, she gains in confidence and soon starts driving the dead mother’s Impala instead of pedaling that old bicycle. By the time Emma takes up smoking and picking up drifters in dive bars, she’s in the driver’s seat.

More enlightened viewers may be uncomfortable with co-writer and director Michael Lander’s likening of cross-dressing to mental illness, and “Peacock” can almost use the distinction of multiple personality disorder from transvestism drawn by the psychiatrist during the conclusion of Alfred Hitchcock’s “Psycho” (1960). With its mother issues, the art director’s use of taxidermy (albeit not in Skillpa’s house) and early 1960s setting, “Peacock” already owes so much to “Psycho” that it might as well have dredged the swamp behind the Bates Motel just a little bit longer. However, “Peacock” isn’t a Hitchcock homage like DePalma’s “Dressed to Kill” (1980) nor a shot-for-shot remake, à la Gus Van Sant. Instead, “Peacock” feels like the same basic story as “Psycho,” but altered greatly as it made its way through the rural grapevine. While Skillpa has plenty of skeletons in the closet, he doesn’t keep a mummified corpse in the fruit cellar.

“Peacock” is short on thrills but will mess with your mind sufficiently. Although it’s the weaker of these spooky character studies, it still packs enough atmosphere for a digital download or old-school movie rental. The DVD features an alternate ending that is both darker and more predictable.

: Bob Calhoun is a California freelance writer who specializes in rock 'n' roll, martial arts and Hollywood stuntmen. More Bob Calhoun

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“Speed Racer”

You know a movie's heading nowhere fast when even its monkey doesn't make you laugh.

By Stephanie Zacharek

Topics:Susan Sarandon, Movies

Every once in a while I’m hit with a movie whose existence I find impossible to comprehend. Who is this movie for? Did anyone involved take the time to have an actual thought — even just one — before investing time, care and money into this thing? Andy and Larry Wachowski’s “Speed Racer” is so bereft of intelligence, style and excitement that I can’t figure out who in the world it’s supposed to appeal to: baby boomers nostalgic for the old Japanamation cartoon on which it’s based? Parents who want to cultivate ADD in their kids? The picture is bankrupt in terms of everything but color, and even then, its palette suggests not careful selection but no selection: There isn’t a single neon-jellybean or retro-flower-power color that isn’t represented in “Speed Racer” — if a color is bright, it’s in there. That’s not visual boldness; it’s cowardice — and that’s only the beginning of the picture’s problems.

The plot of “Speed Racer” — its alleged script was written by the Wachowskis, who also produced the movie — is exceedingly simple, so simple that it apparently has been piled high with extraneous details to make it more, you know, Matrixy. Speed Racer (the expressionless Emile Hirsch, looking even more 2-D than usual) is a fearless driver on the track, partly because there’s racing in his blood: His dad, Pops Racer (John Goodman), builds race cars; his older brother, Rex Racer, a supremely gifted driver, has coached Speed from an early age.

But Rex disappears one day; he later dies in a big race. Speed’s ambitions are fueled by his brother’s legacy, and for a brief time, at least, he seriously considers a lucrative sponsorship offer from greedy captain of industry Royalton (Roger Allam), the head of a big race-car manufacturer. When Speed ultimately rejects the offer, Royalton vows to destroy the Racer family business. The rest of the movie is filled with tedious video-game-style racing and Speed’s ever-so-gradual discovery that there are crooks out there who are fixing races; stopping them requires him to join forces with his former rival, Racer X (Matthew Fox), a slim, masked exclamation mark of a guy in a leather suit.

At one point Racer X (in that aforementioned leather suit) turns to Speed (who’s wearing a pastel polo shirt with a scarf tied jauntily around his neck) and says stiffly, “I thought we made a good team today,” to which Speed replies with boyish eagerness, “It felt like we’d been doing it for a very long time.” That kind of dialogue is representative of the Wachowskis’ smirky knowingness, their “Let’s throw in a few campy, homoerotic jokes for the hip grown-ups!” approach to screenwriting. The filmmaking in “Speed Racer” lives down to the feebleness of the writing: The racing sequences are garish and sloppy, but in a deceptively sleek way — they’re so heavily computer-generated that they bear no resemblance to reality whatsoever. Even the original “Speed Racer” cartoon had some visceral immediacy, as well as a sense of glamour and fun. The Wachowskis do borrow some of the series’ stylistic touches, including a wipe effect in which events unfold behind a character as his or her image glides across the screen. The effect is clever the first time it’s used, tedious the following 999.

The Wachowskis made dazzling sci-fi entertainment with “The Matrix,” even if the subsequent pictures in the trilogy made the first movie’s vibrance seem like a fluke. But especially after suffering through “Speed Racer,” I can no longer wrap my brain around the idea that the Wachowskis are the same guys who made the smart, sexy noir thriller “Bound.” Some of the supporting actors desperately try to add the human touch here, among them Susan Sarandon and Christina Ricci, both of whom appear more alive than anything else in the movie. (For the most part the actors’ skin looks unreal, like latex.) Paulie Litt, as Speed’s pudgy little brother, Sprittle, is so annoying I kept wishing he’d go play in traffic. Not even his mascot, Chim Chim (played by two chimps, Willy and Kenzie), is funny, and you’re in trouble when your movie doesn’t even get laughs with a monkey.

“Speed Racer” is so arrogant about its so-called stylishness and energy that it feels like punishment, the equivalent of being trapped at a dinner party between two guys who feel compelled to inform you, in long-winded detail, how great they are. This isn’t a picture filled with wonder and a sense of fun; it’s so jaded and crass that I almost wonder if it’s a highly unscientific experiment designed to gauge how little audiences will settle for these days. Manic and multicolored, “Speed Racer” is an excess of nothingness.