Venice 2010: Barney's Version and Road To Nowhere

If The Town represents all that I like about American filmmaking, Barney’s Version (right) offers quite a lot of what I don’t. It’s pretty much the last big film here in Venice, bar Julie Taymor's The Tempest, and I was hoping that festival director Marco Muller had backloaded his event the way he did two years ago, when The Wrestler, Hurt Locker and Rachel Getting Married finished up an otherwise very dreary line-up. This year has been the other way round, with very good films to start and a few duds in the last stretch (Takashi Shimizu’s Shock Labyrinth, Paul Morrissey’s News From Nowhere and Hong Sang-soo’s Oki’s Movie).

Based on the novel by Mordecai Richler, Richard J Lewis’s film tells the story of Barney (Paul Giamatti), an ageing Canadian TV producer who reflects on his life after being accused of murder by a retired cop in his local bar. This unsolved crime, however, is a mere detail in Barney’s life; his first wife kills herself after being unfaithful, his second wife is Minnie Driver doing comedy (look at the picture; enough said), and his third and last wife (Rosamund Pike) is the love of his life. Well, apparently, since he doesn’t always do all that much to show it.

I’m sure it worked very well on the page but, onscreen, Barney’s story is both sentimental and unengaging, which is quite a lethal combination. Giamatti, as ever, is excellent, and Pike is surprisingly good too, but there’s an awful lot of acting going on and it gets in the way of whatever the hell it is we’re supposed to care about. For one thing, Barney is a raging drunk, which nobody seems to mind much, not least his saintly wife who only draws the line when it leads to him sleeping with a floosie. I’m not saying he needs to be a sympathetic character, but there’s not much to like about Barney, and his final battle with Alzheimer’s really doesn’t summon half the pathos it ought to. This film may get some awards attention, notably for Giamatti and perhaps even Dustin Hoffman, who is great as Barney’s maverick-cop father. But like Get Low, another TV movie-like confection, it’s just a formulaic showcase for a great actor in a custom-written role.

Similarly disappointing was Monte Hellman’s Road To Nowhere (pictured above), which I had very high hopes for. I won’t attempt a synopsis because I really didn’t understand it. What seems to be happening is that a director is showing a reporter a DVD of a film he made, which is a loose biopic of a femme fatale named Velma Duran (Shannyn Sossamon) who became involved with a corrupt businessman and faked her death as part of an apparent joint suicide pact. There are asides within the film within the film, including parts set in Cuba and London that I couldn’t make head or tail of. Ultimately, it plays out like a mix of Mulholland Drive and Inland Empire (the poster even borrows heavily from Lost Highway), but Road To Nowhere never musters David Lynch’s unique atmosphere or tension, and the mystery it affects to conjure never really adds up to the sum of its parts.