Fistful of Winners

Frances McDormand—middle-aged and unbeautiful—is such a terrific actress that we had no trouble believing her as a rock’n’roll mama in “Laurel Canyon.” As Jane, a record producer and the lover of Ian, a dishy Brit rocker in his early twenties (Alessandro Nivola), she exudes so much sensual warmth you can practically smell the patchouli. Into the frowsty glamor of her house in Laurel Canyon come her son Sam (Christian Bale) and his girlfriend Alex (Kate Beckinsale), East Coast over-achievers. Sam is a first-year resident in psychiatry and Alex a Ph.D. candidate in biometrics who maps reproductive behavior in fruit flies, something likely to be recalled by everyone who’s ever taken a college biology course.

Sam is embarrassed by Jane, who is trying to finish cutting a disc with the Brits, but Alex is drawn to her uncritical acceptance and to the friendly mood-altering substances she and her pals ingest constantly, and when she finishes crunching fruit fly data on her laptop she wanders into the recording studio or onto the pool patio and cavorts with the rockers. Her relationship with Sam founders, and the film leaves us knowing what’s likely to happen.

“Laurel Canyon” was written and directed by Lisa Cholodenko, who has a good eye for parent-child stuff but not such a great ear for believable shop talk among psych residents or musicians. The movie stalls whenever McDormand isn’t on screen, partly because of the extreme coldness of Bale’s performance (he does have one very sexy scene, fully clothed and not touching, with the gorgeous Natascha McElhone). Beckinsale, a lovely comic actor, is given little to do, as though Cholodenko too was hypnotized by Jane; McDormand is such a generous performer that she makes even the hapless Nivola look good. We enjoyed the film but wish it had a stronger spine. Marty felt it was definitely a women’s movie.

On the other hand Martha thought “Anger Management” was a guy movie. Directed by Peter Segal from a script by David Dorfman, the film is misshapen although it tries to behave like an old-fashioned madcap comedy. Adam Sandler, a meek executive assistant in a firm that makes sportswear for pets, finds himself hauled into court on a charge of assault. A severe-looking judge (the late Lynne Thigpen) sentences him to a course of Anger Management therapy with a demonic shrink (Jack Nicholson), and his bizarre fellow patients include Luis Guzman in a stunning series of T-shirts and neck chains, John Turturro, and a pair of porn actresses, one of them actually played by Krista Allen, known to millions as “Emanuelle.”

As it has been since “Billy Madison,” Sandler’s trademark geekiness is unmasked—more crudely here than in “Punch Drunk Love”—as repressed rage, and the therapy involves goading him until he finally expresses it. This doesn’t happen until he and everyone else in his life is at Yankee Stadium along with Rudolph Giuliani, former mayor of New York City. When we saw Giuliani’s unloving face and heard his hectoring voice, we suddenly understood the film’s reason for being: it’s about Sept. 11, 2001, and about how we’re mad as hell and we’re not going to take it any more.

That said, the film has a certain shambling style, especially in a sequence where John C. Reilly and a garden full of saffron-clad Buddhist monks mix it up with Sandler and Nicholson. There are failed moments, especially an extended sequence that ends with Heather Graham in an uncredited cameo pelting Sandler with gooey brownies, but on the whole it made us laugh (although we would have enjoyed a few more shots of pets in fancy sweaters).

Palestinian director Elia Suleiman’s “Divine Intervention” could almost be called “Anger Management II” because of its many images of wish-fulfilling violent fantasies—a scrap of paper tossed from a car window turns into an incendiary bomb and immolates a house; other scraps turn into rocks; rocks become grenades. In a late sequence the central female character becomes a Ninja, leaping, spinning, whirling and laying waste an entire Israeli Defense Force platoon.

The daily lives of Palestinians, the film tells us, are taken up with checkpoints, searches and futile rage. Neighbors throw bags of garbage back and forth, or spoil children’s games, or display obsessive-compulsive symptoms. Meanwhile a man and a woman have fallen in love but can hardly ever meet because one lives in Jerusalem and one in Ramallah, and the checkpoint on the bad road between them is bottlenecked by trucks carrying necessities like water and gasoline as well as workers going to and from jobs, and every once in a while by someone driven to make a suicidal gesture. Suleiman’s filmmaking is too loose for comfort; our attention flags after an hour of minimal narrative. But he has an excellent eye for the telling incident, the allegorical image for the current state of mind of Palestinians, and his stationary camera both increases credibility and distances us from the action.

John Malkovich has directed his first feature, a thoughtful, intelligent police drama called “The Dancer Upstairs.” The charming Spanish actor Javier Bardem plays a police inspector in an unnamed South American dictatorship where random acts of violence are committed by guerrillas in the name of “President Ezequiel.” The inspector’s careful procedures are constrained by his autocratic government, but he finds clues in his own past that lead him to the center of a conspiracy. Of course the beautiful country, with its gleaming capital and cramped shantytowns, is Peru, and the guerrillas are the Shining Path. Malkovich has cast entirely Spanish-speaking actors yet the dialogue is in English, except for some scenes in Quechua. It’s a bold move but not a wise one, especially since the dialogue is sometimes cheeky and shallow, much like Malkovich’s own screen talk. But the strong, knotty plot and Bardem’s terrific performance make “Dancer” an unusually satisfying film experience.

Scottish artist Andy Goldsworthy makes his pieces in natural settings—beaches, riverbanks, stream beds—out of materials that he finds there: ice, sand, water, rocks, leaves, twigs and thorns. The ordinary course of time alters, dissolves or destroys the work, which then exists only in the filmed record of its creation and release. Goldsworthy’s work is known to many from photographic books, but now an extraordinary film, “Rivers and Tides: Andy Goldsworthy Working with Time,” shows him making it. The soundtrack lets us hear him thinking aloud as he pulverizes ironstone to dye a waterfall red, or tacks a sinuous chain of leaves together with thorns, to the accompaniment of lovely, plangent music composed by Fred Frith. This is a film that almost totally bypasses the brain, going straight from the senses to the feeling self.

In “L’Auberge Espagnole” French director Cédric Klapisch gives the brain too much to do: He has taken an idiom (in French, “l’auberge espagnol,” “Spanish hotel,” evidently means a multinational free-for-all) and literalized it with this story of Xavier, a middle-class French schoolboy who goes to Barcelona for a year. Our hero shares an apartment with English, Danish, German, Italian, Spanish and Belgian roommates. Klapisch’s style is rangy and full of non sequiturs. We found it mildly pleasant to spend a couple of hours in this auberge, but none of the occupants interested us very much. Generation, we suppose. The views of Barcelona are spectacular.

Now for the theater, beginning with Eye of the Storm’s much-praised production of “Dinner with Friends,” by Donald Margulies: An excellent cast, an intelligent set, and a stupid play. Terry Hempleman, Kirsten Frantzich, Charity Jones and J.C.Cutler worked together beautifully, bouncing the cleverish repartee like buoyant soccer balls off one another’s noggins. Trouble is, nothing really happens. Four old friends get together for dinner, only one can’t make it. After several courses and tedious dialogue from the hosts about their recent trip to Italy, the lone guest confesses that her partner isn’t on a business trip but has left her. The intact couple has trouble with this, but ends up reconciled to their friends’ separation. If that’s your idea of a play, well, sorry you missed it. But we wished these excellent actors and their accomplished director, Casey Stangl, had had a better vehicle with which to delight us.

Director Stangl does get her hands on a meatier piece in “Top Girls,” a wonderful, complicated play by Caryl Churchill at the Guthrie Lab until June 15. In the first scene Marlene, who has been promoted to managing director of the hot employment agency Top Girls, hosts a dinner party for five prominent women from different areas of history and legend. She has invited them because each challenged sexual stereotypes of her day, but once they begin to tell their stories, in a mesmerizing series of overlapping monologues, unbearable narratives of pain and grief pour forth and Marlene hurriedly pays the check.

Subsequent scenes show us Marlene and her colleagues, all top girls, at work and then take us to her village-dwelling sister and niece. In the final scene, set a whole year earlier than the others, Marlene pays a rare visit to the village and her sister forces her to see that her success has been bought at the family’s expense. Individualism isn’t the answer to any social problems, because it leaves the competitive capitalist system unchanged, and “We can’t all be winners.”

Twenty years ago we thought this play was about Margaret Thatcher, a deconstruction of power feminism. Today “Girls” is more clearly about class, about how post-Marxist feminists blur the quite real distinctions between women and then pretend that they have made bridges. Stangl manages the changing dynamics of the play expertly. The six women of the cast are all excellent, but Suzanne Warmanen, Sally Wingert, and Bianca Amato as Marlene stand out. The imaginative set design and lighting are by Troy Hourie and Marcus Dilliard, respectively.

The Ten Thousand Things company usually charms us, but their magic didn’t work on the creaky Rodgers & Hammerstein musical “Carousel.” We could see why director Michelle Hensley chose the show—it’s a working-class drama, set in a small town on the coast of Maine where the only industries are fishing and a textile mill. Into this late-nineteenth-century industrial grimness comes a traveling carousel owned by tarty Mrs. Mullin and run by the rakish Billy Bigelow. Billy gets in with one of the factory girls, they both lose their jobs, and a predictable sort of hell breaks loose, larded with some great songs: “If I Loved You,” “June Is Bustin’ Out All Over,” “When You Walk Through a Storm.”

The chamber form imposed on 10K Things by its choice of venues—adult day centers, prisons, training schools—has worked brilliantly for them before, but “Carousel” resisted their best efforts, despite a load of charm and talent in the cast (but, alas, little voices and little voice). Sarah Agnew, as Carrie, and Carolyn Goelzer, as Julie, gave an illusion of life to the sodden dialogue and lyrics, but Hammerstein defeated most of the other performers. That said, it is almost always a treat to see how the company works within its severe constraints; Joel Sass and Stephen Mohring’s “sets” and Amelia Cheever and Susan Fick’s costumes were imaginative and flexible. We usually love the way music enhances these productions, but this show has such a weak book that it really needs big orchestration.

In an empty warehouse in Northeast Minneapolis, the adventurous troupe Skewed Visions presented a short, pungent performance piece called “The Orange Grove,” created by director Gülgün Kayim based on her own experience as a Turkish Cypriot immigrant in London. The skillful performers have been working on the piece for two years, and they brought off its difficult transitions—from pastoral life on the island of Cyprus to a crowded urban flat; from a language comfortable as old shoes to the strange cadences of English—with verve and flair. Myth, memory and family tradition combined in a thick braid of images, shot through with music, fire and food. We were delighted finally to see the Skewed folk, who are working in a rich modern tradition of site-specific theater pieces; we missed “The Car,” hit of the 2001 Fringe Festival, because it took place in the back seats of three cars for an audience of nine. We’re glad “The Orange Grove” included more of us, and we look forward eagerly to their next production.

As they did with “Don Juan Giovanni” and “The Magic Flute,” the Theatre de la Jeune Lune has tackled Beaumarchais’ Figaro plays and Mozart’s opera, “The Marriage of Figaro” simultaneously. Challenging themselves to come up with a synthetic work that would be both a play and a pocket opera, they double-cast most of the roles with actors and singers. Reaching into obscurity for the third play in Beaumarchais’ series, “The Guilty Mother,” they have produced a sort of “Figaro for dummies,” a puzzling meld of lovely music and moments from all three plays, wrenched out of sequence. As usual, the company’s work is interesting, sometimes thrilling, always impressive, and, this time, not quite successful. “Figaro” plays through June.