relationship with Mike lCarer; G‘flfftaltfl; as storybook f'iappiness. Cutting against any kind of capitalist subtext equating money with happiness. the odd one out of the rrioneyed pals is Olivia (Jennifer Artistoni. She has guit her Job teaching to become a housemaid and mistakenly feels she has Joined the working class.
There is not much plot in this narrative and the little that there is revolves around Olivia's search for happiness and love. Her chOice of lovers leave a lot to be desired and her friends are unsure how to help their peer pal. This rich-helpingpoor storyline is used by Holofcener as the starting point for a funny. barbed and surreptitious attack on the attitude of moneyed America to the poor and peaks at a charity event hosted by Franny The downside is that the whiiiiSical tone and cliched characters do occasionally grate. (Kaleem Aftab) I General release from Fri 26 May. See Profile, page 42.
DRAMA THE KING (15) 105min 0000
Anyone familiar with the brooding. gothic. guietly malevolent screenwriting style of Milo Addica would know that somewhere down the line, The King Will be heading into very bleak territory indeed. We saw it in Monster Ball, we saw it again in Birth. and here it happens once more. with an almost glorious brutality. Gael Garcia Bernal. taking on his first English-speaking part. plays Elvis. just out of the navy and on the hunt for his dad. Pops (William Hurt) is the upstanding pastor of a Texan community. In denial of his bastard offspring, he tries to push Elvis away from his family before his true identity can be revealed to them. EIVis has other plans. and when he begins to date his sister (the impresswe Pell James) it all goes horribly, Violently wrong.
While the themes resonant in Addica's aforementioned work rise up again (a mysterious stranger upsets the natural order; family oddities; how life can change in a split second). the film also delights for some wonderfully understated performances and a simmering directorial style from James Wisconsin Death Trip Marsh. The finale may raise as many questions as it answers — is true evrl at play here? Can Elws ever unite with his father? - but this only serves to make this a genuinely haunting experience.
(Brian Donaldson)
I Cinewor/d Renfrew Street. Glasgow and Cinewor/d, Edinburgh from Fri 26 May. See intervrew, right.
ADAR'TATth\l '7 HRiLL 9:: THE DA VINCI CODE (12A) 148mm 0.
Dan Brown's cash bubble ma, finall, burst With Ron Howard's liifl‘i ‘.‘:li5|()"i a two and a half hour ,a‘.‘.'nt<;st .‘.lll(;."i displays the worst hallmarks of a Hollywood rush-(ob, remorselessz, cashing in on a popular fad. Awkwardly miscast as Haixard symbologist Robert Langdon. an off- form Tom Hanks grimaces and shakes his considerable (owls as he investigates the titular code. aided by a sparrow—legged and egually miscast Audrey Tautou as French chyptologist Sophie Neveu. Also in the mix are Paul Bettany and Ian McKellen hamiiiing it up as albino monk Silas and Prior, of Sion expert Sir Leigh Teabing respectively There are a few low-rent pleasures along the way. but the hokey plot mechanics of Brown's bestseller are cruelly exposed by Akiva Cinderella Man Goldsman's clod- hopping script. which mistakes rambling theological corwer'sations for action. And the codes secret is poorly dramatised by over-literal CGI- flashbacks which render the controversial theories (far better explored in the now infamous book The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail) overtly ludicrous. Crucially, Howard displays practically no grasp of pacing or momentum. particularly in a last half-hour dev0id of tension or incident. Despite some nice locations. including Scotland's very own Rosslyn Chapel. what was a decent page—turner emerges as a bum-numbing melodrama of little interest in terms of either cinema or tabloid theology. (Eddie Harrison)
I Out now on general release.
DOCUMENTARY
ENRON: THE SMARTEST GUYS IN THE ROOM
(15) 109min COO.
Enron CorpOration was an energy company based in Houston. Texas. PriOr to its bankruptCy in late 2001. the company employed around 21 .000 people and was one of the world's leading electriCity. natural gas. and communications companies. viith Claimed revenues of $101 billion in 2000. Fonune magaZine named Enron
INTERVIEW
NAVY BLUES
Brian Donaldson gets fundamental with the man who would be king —
director James Marsh.
While it would wrong to say that James Marsh regrets leaving behind a deeply impressive canon of documentary work to make his first full- length feature, he has had his eyes well and truly opened by the process. The transition from making docs largely on his own terms, about everything from Elvis’ culinary habits (The Burger and the King) to an American smalltown riven with disproportionate levels of illness, murder and wanton window-smashing (Wisconsin Death Trip) was something of a weird one for the Truro-born, New York-based Marsh. ‘lt’s amazing that even a low-budget American independent film is so driven by the star system; it’s all just bullshit. If you’re making a film on the kind of budget that we had and don’t have more freedom to pick who you want and to have the key collaborators that you need, then it
just becomes one long battle.’
Quite how an executive would have a problem with Gael Garcia Bernal playing a discharged naval officer seeking answers to his heritage, and a wonderfully hirsute William Hurt getting all Biblical on our asses as a preacher with a dirty secret is anybody’s guess. The King has a familiar feel of people falling into existential despair, but so it should, with Milo Addica (Birth, Monster’s Ball) holding the pen, alongside Marsh's clapperboard. The key turning point comes halfway through, when Elvis (Bernal) is confronted by the pastor’s son, who knows nothing of his real connection with this apparently disturbed loner who has strolled into town. But is the key character, as one early review suggested, the personification of ‘true evil’? Marsh blanches at this. ‘lt’s the kind of film that seems to provoke a spectrum of responses and I wouldn’t want to argue with any of them, but I don’t think he is the epitome of some malignant force in the world. He’s just empty inside, certainly not evil.’
While we get no hint of the terrors he witnessed while on military service, which may have influenced Elvis’ later behaviour, we get hints in the opening scenes that something is brewing. ‘The first thing we see is him packing his gun away,’ notes Marsh. ‘One of the first rules of drama, according to Chekhov, is that if you see a gun in the first act, you’re only doing your job properly if it goes off by the end of the story.’ Be warned: the guns (both mental and physical) well and truly go off.
I The King opens at Cinewor/d Renfrew Street, Glasgow and Cineworld, Edinburgh release from Fri 26 May. See review, /ett.
“America‘s Most liinoxatwe Company"
for SIX conseCutive years. In 2001 it was revealed that this behemoth had in fact been sustained for most of its life by institutionalized acCOunting fraud. And that's JLlSl half the stony. Filmmaker Alex Gibney‘s Supremel'y engrossmg dOCumentary about the rise and fall of this most ‘.‘rorrying of c0rp0rate institutions is an absolute (0;. Based in large part on Bethany McLean's book of the same name. Gibney uses a mix of real cOrporate yideo footage ithese boys liked to film
tl‘i‘;fli’)‘;i.(;‘)zli’,i ",‘V‘L'ri’JH‘I'i
tilt‘tlli” ' mi’b (I'Hfi 3v”, (2‘1, H-{I' H1 ’0"
{,Tif‘i" l' f:‘;’,i1if:’,fi'i', .‘.""l‘:
C(flirif “(liq/Jr ()!()iry M1 ‘1'“, 1,1“).
to slow/i. A’iriiiftedi, Gone, 'a'; a 'ttt " ’rie fact that NS 1310 reéi’li'if; i' ’ Je“ Skit WK} arid Ker: Lay Enron", CED"; are about ten times scarier than i’ :cr'ae' Douglas broker I": '.«’/ai/ Street. .‘rhile PGl‘fl (JO/2V5“, ’,UE‘./l"tg i’jl’L‘OKJT 1‘. iust icing on the cake (Ra... Dar,
I GF—f. Glasgow from Fri 2 Jun Fii’mr'iouse. Edinburgh from Fri 23 Jun. See DfC/iefl. page 39‘.
Zr, Hay—"i .3! e THE LIST 41