Four stars (out of five). Rating: R, for profanity, sexual candor and brief nudity
By Derrick Bang
At first blush, Barney’s Version walks and talks like a picaresque comedy about a rash, self-centered, hedonistic schlub played to humorous perfection by Paul Giamatti: a 21st century Tom Jones
with a somewhat more irascible protagonist.Great chunks of the first and second act are hilarious, fueled by Giamatti’s priceless slow burns and double-takes. (Honestly, film classes could be constructed around Giamatti’s depth of expression, starting with his narrow-eyed squints of suspicion. One gets the impression he could read the phone book and make it mesmerizing.)
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| Although the freshly minted groom at his own wedding, Barney (Paul Giamatti) can't take his eyes off Miriam (Rosamund Pike), one of the guests, after spotting her across the room. Newly married or not, Barney is about to embark on a relentless crusade to woo this other woman, who can't quite figure out what to make of him. |
It’s also rather difficult, early on, to like Giamatti’s Barney Panofsky. He’s not exactly cruel, but he’s certainly thoughtless and prone to frequent sins of omission: the sort of guy who’d hover near a concealed TV set on his wedding day, in order to follow a hockey game. We grow ever more exasperated by Barney’s behavior, even as we laugh at his sometimes outrageous shortcomings.
Then ... an odd thing happens.
Suddenly, we’re not laughing any more. Just as suddenly, we feel sorry – profoundly sorry – for this fellow we’ve gotten to understand so well. And that’s a further surprise; director Richard J. Lewis and scripters Michael Konyves and Mordecai Richler – the latter adapting his novel of the same title
– sneakily fashion a narrative which, despite its episodic nature, ultimately paints a portrait of a complete person. By the end of this film, we feel like we’ve known Barney for years.Additionally, due both to final-act revelations and a better appreciation for little things along the way, we realize that Barney – for all his weaknesses and failings – always has been capable of acts of surprising generosity, and kindness of spirit.
Such a tightrope act – in terms of winning and keeping our empathy to such a character – requires extraordinarily precise acting; one false step, and we’d never surmount the resulting disgust and loathing. But Giamatti pulls it off, unerringly, much the way Michael Douglas held our grudging, head-shaking admiration as the misanthropic Grady Tripp in Wonder Boys
.On a superficial level, Barney’s Version is a riff on The Heartbreak Kid
, in that poor Barney meets the love of his life on his wedding day ... and it ain’t his wife. But this actually comes a bit later in the narrative, after we’ve gotten to know Barney a bit.We meet our protagonist in the present day, in the act of hassling his ex-wife’s new husband over the phone: not a terribly sympathetic start. Barney’s professional life, while successful, is somewhat soulless; as the head of a television company he has self-deprecatingly dubbed Totally Unnecessary Productions, he has overseen a wildly successful three-decade soap opera that has generated pots of money. But there’s no such thing as enough prestige in Barney’s world; as a product of Montreal’s predominantly Jewish, working-class Mile End region, he’s stuck with the nagging belief that he needs to “trade up” in every aspect of his life.
