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The languishing Italian cinema, which has had no notable new director since Bernardo Bertolucci, has found one in Marco Tullio Giordana, the director of the six-and-a-half hour THE BEST OF YOUTH (Italy/Miramax Films). A Miramax representative claims that the film will, finally, debut in the U.S. “in the first quarter of 2005” — that is, a year-and-a-half after its N.Y. Film Festival appearance. Although BEST OF YOUTH was a made-for-television mini-series, underwritten by Italy’s ubiquitous production arm, RAI, it has never been shown on Italian TV.
Angelo Barbello, the film’s producer who grew impatient with RAI’s delay in airing the film, sent a copy to the Cannes Festival’s showcase for first films, where it caused a sensation, and then ran for many months at a Roman cinema and throughout Europe.
This move let the politically-sensitive RAI off the hook, as the picture is crammed with embarrassing social scandals like the inhumane treatment of the mentally afflicted and the violent retaliation of the Sicilian Mafia for being continually taken to court. (The mobsters just keep on knocking off their persecuting prosecutors.)
Remarkably, the film is both a family saga and a pocket history of 40 years of post-war Italy’s significant historical events.
Its acting is so exceptional that we care about even the leading crazo, a dark beauty, Mirella (Maya Sansa). The film’s central roles are two brothers, as different as night and day. The dark, gentle Nicola (Luigi Lo Cascio) is a humane psychiatrist whose revolutionary wife leaves him to become a hit woman for the vicious Red Brigade. Nicola treats kindly those in his sanatorium, including Mirella, while his brother, the tormented Matteo (Alessio Boni), though he loves literature, deliberately flunks his exams and strikes out at everyone near him. The cultured Matteo is afflicted by wild outbursts of violence which do not serve him well, as either a soldier or a policeman — since each of these professions is deliberately chosen as alien to his cultivated nature. In Boni and LoCascio, Giordana has found two male actors almost certain to become international stars.
Signor Boni is a stunning-looking man with a powerful body. He appeared at the Festival in a full beard–though he’s clean-shaven in the film. Although he claimed to be severely jet-lagged, (his promotional companion, Maya Sansa, didn’t utter a word) he projected the exceptional looks and stage energy of a young Gerard Phillipe. (Casting directors should take note that Boni’s English is not only fluent, but is easily comprehensible, despite his accent.)

For a change, the Festival’s opening night film was, arguably, its best. Clint Eastwood’s haunting policier, MYSTIC RIVER (USA/ Warner Bros. Pictures), from a best seller by Dennis Lehane, is, amazingly, Eastwood’s 24th directorial endeavor. It is also one of the very few in which the still great-looking oldster does not appear.
It’s highly unusual for a 73-year-old director to make a film as taut and vigorous as this one. It is also exceptional for him to supply a moody jazz-influenced score, as Eastwood has done here. (The music is enhanced by the superb Boston Symphony Orchestra.) A measure of Eastwood’s belief in the material can be gleaned by his only taking Directors’ Guild minimum in order to bring in the film for $25 million. Of course, Eastwood is bound to have a very rich back-end deal on this sure-to-be-a-hit film. What is most surprising to me, is that a tired genre like a police procedural should become as affecting under Eastwood’s low-key, few-takes direction.

Lacking the star power of Eastwood, the film’s leads are played by Sean Penn, Kevin Bacon and Tim Robbins. The snide buzz, before the film premiered, was that these three names were only the equivalent of one major player–namely, Eastwood. In fact, each actor is doing his best work; although, rather than suggesting boyhood friends from the same shanty Irish neighborhood in Boston, they come across as players who have gone to three very different drama schools. (At the festival press conference, Bacon kidded that the one similarity the three leads shared was that they were the only name actors in their early forties, who still have full heads of hair.)
“Mystic River” is such a powerful picture that it has seemingly eradicated other critics’ memory of its similarity to another best seller turned into a Warner Bros. film, the unsuccessful SLEEPERS (1996), which also starred Kevin Bacon. Both pictures concern the ultimate consequence of child abuse prompting vengeful retaliation in later life. (MYSTIC RIVER has a screenplay by the skillful Brian Helgeland, who co-wrote the memorable L.A. CONFIDENTIAL, which distinguishes it from the humdrum screenplay of SLEEPERS.)
As an ex-con who dotes on his 19-year-old daughter — whose murder is the crux of the film — Sean Penn gives a performance of violent magnitude, for which, months later, he won both the NBR Award and an Oscar. Laura Linney, who plays his wife, said that she and Penn had been directed by Eastwood to play their murderous euphoria as if they were Mr. and Mrs. Macbeth. (Who would have thought that Eastwood even knew “the Scottish Play”?)
Due to his film’s being the Festival’s prestigious opening night selection, Eastwood was joined, at the press conference, by all of his principals, as well as by the authors of the novel and screenplay.
Because each of the picture’s leads (Penn, Robbins, Bacon) is a film director in his own right, Penn was asked whether any of them had contributed directorial suggestions. All three concurred that, as actors, they were the obedient servants of Mr. Eastwood — even if Penn confided at some gatherings, such as the National Board’s, that he coached his co-stars. (It may be significant that Mr. Eastwood had yet to arrive when Penn made this claim.)
As shot by cameraman Tom Stern, one of the film’s distinctive stylistic touches is its high-angle, gliding views of Boston. These focus on the back porches of the distinctive dwellings of South Boston (where the central trio of boys grew up), as well as on the eponymous bridge and river, giving the film a bird’s eye perspective similar to the views of Boston in GOOD WILL HINTING.
Portraying the crumbling wife of the misfit-creep played by Tim Robbins, Marcia Gay Harden proves, as she had in POLLACK, that she is an actress of monumental range and credibility. In the role of the sexually abused boy who has matured into a shiftless and fearful man, Robbins gives an amazing performance, for which he was ultimately awarded the year’s Best Supporting Oscar. According to Eastwood, the role would customarily have been cast with a small man, but one can see the six-foot-five-inch Robbins visibly shrivel, as he grows demented.
Rather than merely being clever, the switcheroo ending is deeply troubling. There is a scene between Penn and his fellow hoodlums conspiring to murder Robbins that feels theatrically contrived, a la “Macbeth.” Set at a pier at night, this plotting scene proves one of the few false notes in a film which is otherwise as memorable as Eastwood’s UNFORGIVEN the winner of the 1992 Oscars for both Picture and Director.

I found the prospect of yet another Canadian film disenchanting, even though THE BARBARIAN INVASIONS had been puffed in the International Herald Tribune as the outstanding film of the 2003 Toronto Festival, but I knew that both the Festival and the film were Canadian. I am even indifferent to the work of Canada’s best-known filmmaker, Atom Egoyan, as well as anything labeled Canadian culture. I yawn.
Denys Arcand, the writer/director of a previous, successful film, THE DECLINE OF THE AMERICAN EMPIRE (1986), has written INVASIONS as a sequel (Canada/Miramax Films). Unsurprisingly, it brings together, once more, many of the same, lovable, iconoclastic, Canadian intellectuals whose meant-to-be delicious chatter has as much tang, for me, as the lunch-meats in a New York style deli in Montreal, where this film is set.
Like most sequels, it is a synthetic contrivance — a death watch in which an old gang of fellow travelers, who joined every successive “ism” in their day, mocks each other’s past follies and their own, and an estranged son reunites with his dying father.
The film focuses on the protracted death (from metastasizing stomach cancer) of Remy (Remy Girard), the film’s still marvelously vital, self-indulgent, irreverent, retired history professor and absentee father. (Girard tends to fake such big emotional scenes as bitter weeping by over-emoting.)
Remy’s demise sets the stage for his gradual reconciliation with his estranged son, Sebastien (Stephane Russeau). Remy, while relishing the comforts of his son’s wealth, has nothing but pseudo-Socialist contempt for Sebastien’s realm of high finance. He views his son as contemptible for never having read a book. (Sebastien was a math/economics major in college rather than a humanist, like Papa.) Remy also resents that his son is an ultra-handsome and super-rich, London-based, market-manager.
Sebastien deserts his clients to subsidize his father’s last weeks, but he takes with him his stunning, nubile wife, who leaves her post with a top London auction house to accompany her husband to Montreal.
I think it’s truly remarkable how these high-powered types can leave their glamorous jobs in London to be by the Montreal bedside of a dying parent they can’t abide. (Of course, they manage, somehow, to keep up by use of their “mobile” phones.) In fact, as I type up this illogical précis, I feel a retrospective surge of resentment at the Academy Awards for honoring this schmaltzy French-language film as Best Foreign Film, not to mention the National Board of Review’s giving it the same prize.
The true barbarism of the script is that it endlessly trades in smutty humor, either at the expense of the intellectual gang’s past sexuality or that of history’s fools for love. (The recounted tale of the “blow job” which polished off a 19th c. French premiere is less potent when we have no idea of the high-born participants.)
Sebastien is so rich, that he is able to immediately outfit a derelict hospital space with luxury furnishings, while the jammed hospital’s hallways are littered with patients on gurneys. (The point of this study in contrast is to satirize socialized medicine in Canada, which provides equal misery for everyone, unless you can privatize. But Arcand’s humor is as heavy-handed as everything else in this unbelievable script. Remy, as a Socialist, has voted for Medicare with these horrific, crowded results.)
The unused ward in the highly overcrowded, Montreal, municipal hospital enables Remy, a satyr, the privacy for a few, last, professional massages, as well the requisite secrecy for his illegal heroin snorting (to dull his cancer pain.) These are administered by an attractive, young addict (the daughter of one of Remy’s still-fond mistresses) hired by Sebastien, who generously encourages the junkie to use the H she has bought to feed her own habit.
As the term “barbarians” is applied both to the 9/11 attackers, for violating the American Empire for the first time on its native ground, and, on another occasion, to the successive waves of various Arabic drug merchants dealing in Montreal, I can only conclude that Arcand’s barbarians are mostly Moslem. But “barbarian” is even used, at one point, to characterize the illiterate Sebastien. It is fear of the world’s young Turks, who will inherit the globe and supplant Arcand’s generation, whom the writer-director fiercely resents.
The loss of 3,000 in the World Trade Towers, (which are seen in the film, on television, as a second plane hits the second tower with horrendous impact) are minimized by Remy, the old history prof, as trivial in comparison to the slaughter of World War II and the Chinese and Russian death camps combined. Arcand, through his spokesman, Remy, manages to trivialize both the losses of the Holocaust as well as 9/11. History, you see, is monumentally cruel!
I will not be buying the DVD of this bore, issued in mid-July 2004. It’s a truly lethal, I mean Canadian, gift.

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