A MOST WANTED MAN (Three and a Half Stars)

U.S.-United Kingdom-Germany, 2014

It’s nice to see a big-budget A movie that exercises your intellect as well as your tolerance for violence. In A Most Wanted Man—a smart, sophisticated new spy thriller based on the 2008 novel by John le Carre (“The Spy Who Came in from the Cold,“ “Tinker, Tailor. Soldier, Spy“)—the late, uncommonly brilliant actor Phillip Seymour Hoffman plays an uncommonly well-observed character: a German anti-terrorist agent named Gunther Bachmann. Bachmann is a cynic, a spoiled idealist, an addict who chain smokes cigarettes, downs whiskey after whiskey and speaks in a rumbling monotone glib growl laced with world-weary innuendo. For his sins, he’s been assigned to the anti-terrorist office in Hamburg, a snake pit of  spying and double-dealing in which murder runs rampant and catastrophes like the 9/11 World Trade Center attack are planned.

You could not possibly see this part performed better than Hoffman does here. With that uncanny expertise he had for believing his roles, and thoroughly conveying that belief, this genius of a stage and film player convinces us that he’s German, that he’s a anti-terrorist agent, and that he’s a good man trapped in a bad job. It’s a role (and an accent) that suggests a mix of great popular literary and cinematic traditions: with hints of Peter Lorre, Sydney Greenstreet and James Mason (at his seediest) and shots of other le Carre movie anti-anti-heroes, played by actors like Richard Burton, Mason and Alec Guinness.

Thanks to Hoffman — and to le Carre, director Anton Corbijn, scenarist Andrew Bovell, and a really fine crew and supporting cast — the movie sweeps us almost effortlessly into that gray sinister British,/European/Russian world of international espionage in which le Carre (the nom de plume of ex British intelligence operative David Cornwell) has specialized since the ‘60s. This is the dark fictive domain not only of le Carre but of  earlier master book or movie spy-tale-spinners like Eric Ambler and Graham Greene. And, as you watch the lead actor peel aside all the layers of this sad but relentless man he‘s playing –an often disgusted  professional who has seen the worst and expects no better than some kind of merciless compromise — he manages to tilt the entire world of le Carre’s Hamburg in his darkish direction, to immerse us in its deadly, ruthless  complexities. He makes the man Bachmann and the fictional world around him, come burningly, woundingly, terrifyingly  alive

Thanks to le Carre a.k.a. Cornwell (who is also this movie’s executive producer and whose sons Simon and Stephen Cornwell are two of its producers), Hoffman brings to life this unfazed anti-terrorist agent, bedeviled by more brutal and less humane colleagues. He‘s a wily operative who’ trying to set a trap for a well-respected Muslim philanthropist (Homayoun Ershati as Dr. Abdullah) whom Bachmann suspects is  secretly funneling cash, hidden among his charitable gifts, to terrorist groups, and who is about to get a huge donation from a half-Russian, half Chechin refugee in Hamburg (Grigoriy Dobrygyn as Issa Karpov). Karpov is a wounded innocent on the run — a devout Muslim escapee from Russian prison and torture, who wants to  make up for the evil his military father committed by giving all his inheritance to good people and organizations for good works.

Trying to help Issa — who is the Most Wanted Man of the title — is a dedicated  knockout leftist Hamburg lawyer named Annabel Richter (Rachel McAdams). Holding the estate, warily, is  sage, tightly buttoned Hamburg banker Tommy Brue (Willem Dafoe). And working with, or against, or at cross-purposes with  Bachmann — helping or hindering him, or maybe both (or maybe neither) — are a friendly, almost maternal looking CIA agent named Martha Sullivan (Robin Wright) and a vicious little spy twerp named Dieter Mohr, whom Rainer  Beck turns into the very personification of the kind of self-righteous, nasty, officious little prick who blights most governments, most corporations and not a few smart movies..  Bachmann’s allies and co-workers are his plucky associates Maximilian (Daniel Bruhl) and Irna Frey (Nina Foss), who may also be his lover, or his squeeze, or whatever they  call it in Hamburg.

Now, Hamburg ….As much a character here as any of the actors, as much (almost) as Hoffman’ Bachmann, it’s a city that sets up echoes and shadows and reverberations in our gut and  heads, like the twisted, shadow-drenched  Vienna of Greene‘s  and Carol Reed’s The Third Man, the rotting, furtive  Berlin of Fritz Lang’s M, and the drizzly Paris of Jules Dassin’s Rififi — a labyrinth of  betrayals, with skies that seem always overcast and people who seem always glum or tense or, deadly serious — just like the skies, the office buildings, the streets ready to close in on you, the footsteps echoing behind you, the watchful eyes picking you out of a crowed, the operatives pulling a black hood over your head.  It’s al beautifully realized and visualized and dramatized, not just by the Cornwells, but by director Anton Corbijn (a real visual stylist who made Control, and The American with George Clooney), and by cinematographer Benoit Delhomme, and production designer Sebastian Krawinkel.

Like Humphrey Bogart, Jason Robards, Gene Hackman or Morgan Freeman (or, in a way, Meryl Streep), Hoffman is a character actor who became a star lead, yet remained equally adept at either level. His German inflections roll with an acid melancholy around his throat, often seeming more real than the genuine article, and his eyes keep shifting over that cute, crooked half-smile of his, as if to follow a vanishing prey that he won’t let elude him.

He’s great, of course.  Hoffman was always great, and here he’s once again so good that all the rest of the cast —  including Dafoe, McAdams, Wright, Ershati, Foss and Dobrygyn — seems to be riding along with him, scaling the heights that he’s opened up.

Sad to say, it’s one of his last performances. Hoffman died of a heroin overdose at 46 last February 2, and though he was an extremely prolific actor, there are only a few projects left in the can, only a few more chances to see and celebrate the sad, happy, glorious genius of an actor we’ve grown use to, depended on  — one of the best of his profession, one of the best there ever was, then, always.

This may be the best of those performances — I doubt that the rest of his Plutarch in Hunger Games, will match it — but then everything he did was worth watching. There should be more movies like A Most Wanted Man. There should be more actors like Philip Seymour Hoffman. But let’s thank Heaven  or whoever or whatever parcels out the dramatis personae on destiny’s playlist, that we got  the several dozen or so he gave us. It’s all still there, on celluloid, shining: that crooked little half-smile that suggested a guy about to snatch some candy, or take advantage on  an opponent, that mellifluous voice that could be Irish music or East Coast hip or Boston jive or whatever he wanted it to be — and here so completely convinces us, that we’ll probably always feel that the residents of Hamburg speak like this, or should speak like this, if they don‘t.

It was a sad day for the movies — and for theatre — when Phillip Seymour Hoffman died.

But it’s a happy day or shining hour that  he left something behind. A Most Wanted Man is the sort of highly,  realistic, thickly populated, well-thought-out film drama that we look for in the movies and mostly don’t get. Maybe it would have been better as a TV miniseries, with more time to flesh it out. But its easy to see that this is a film made by people who respect the material, respect the audience, and want to do well by both.

Now, I could fudge the matter, and say that here is a movie that “ordinary” audiences may not get, that maybe it’s too complex and twisty for them to handle. (I liked it better when I saw it a second time myself.) But what’ wrong with making movies for extraordinary audiences? For smart audiences? For audiences that know history and literature and the world, and can’t be easily fooled or quickly satisfied? Movies that can’t be outguessed and predicted, and that can offer up new surprises and revelations the more we see them — extraordinary movies, geared for adults and intended and built to yield up all their treasures, slowly, not all a once. A movie made for adults, with adults, by adults. What’s wrong with that?

That’s why Hoffman was such a reliable guy. He picked good projects and helped realize them as well as they could be. He could take a little, tiny scene  — for example, the way, as the beaming rich kid snob Freddie, that he grins and grins and torments Matt Damon’s Tom Ripley  (“Tommy! Tommy! Tommy!”) trying to get him to unmask himself  in The Talented Mr. Ripley — and make it so memorable yet so endlessly renewable that you never tired of it, never get tired of him. Now there’s Bachmann, this plump, dour, chain-smoking man who tries to live and thrive in a world of Byzantine betrayal, and finds that…that…Well, you’ll see. And if you’re an adult, you won’t demand more car chases, riots, gun battles, more on-screen torture. The movie, and Hoffman, and artists like Hoffman,  have something more to give: a voice, a face, a  grin. The little things, the words, the phrases,  that make up all our lives. Tommy. Tommy. Tommy.

JERSEY BOYS (Three and a Half Stars)

U.S.: Clint Eastwood, 2014

I. The High Notes

Frankie Valli of Belleville, New Jersey had a voice that could melt a klieg light,  hypnotize a hummingbird in full flight or just send shivers down your spine. You heard it — that inimitable nasal fire-alarm falsetto with its Jersey tinges and its wailing shrieks of passion and pseudo-teen horniness — and  your own throat almost started aching in sympathy. “Big!” “Girls!” “Don’t!” “Cry!” Frankie screamed — as he and the other three Seasons (who made up the four Jersey Boys of the hit Broadway show now turned Hollywood musical) waved and doo-wopped and whirligigged and  sang and danced like mad on stage and the audiences screamed back at them, and it all fused into  a kind of mass pop hysteria built around stage performances of their early ‘60s mega-hits “Sherry,” “Rag Doll,” “Walk Like a Man” and “Dawn.”

Who were the The Four Seasons, anyway?  If you’re a baby boomer, you probably remember. If you’re not, you’ve got the Broadway show and this new movie to tell you all about them — four Italian-American guys who could blast the hell out of a chorus, and go “Ooo-ooo-ooo” ‘til the speakers tipped over. They were pop music ‘s biggest group hit makers in the early ‘60s, until The Beatles came along with their “Yeah! Yeah! Yeah” and blew everyone else off the stage for the rest of the decade. They’re also the subjects of the smash  stage hit “Jersey Boys,” which opened on Broadway in 2005 – and has never closed (so far) –and of the new movie version of that show, directed by Clint Eastwood with a simpatico that may surprise you.

Eastwood and The Four Seasons? Mr. Cool Jazz Solo Piano and the doo-wop boys? Well, stranger things have happened. (How about John Huston and “Annie?”)  The movie of “Jersey Boys” takes the guys though four decades (the ‘50 s though the ‘90s), and, if it starts out like Mean Streets, it winds up almost like Dreamgirls or The Jolson Story. This big rock star bio-expose — part of a musical sub-genre that includes  Ray (Ray Charles) or Walk the Line (Johnny Cash) —  showcases sublime front man Frankie and his high-stepping backups (guitarist Tommy DeVito, bass player Nick Massi and keyboardist/songwriter Bob Gaudio) as they sing on stage or in the studio or just hang out in the street.

Deftly mixing the songs with the back-story, Jersey Boys gives us the rock saga of the Seasons and their mob-tainted youth and their Top 40 rise and spectacular fall,  split-up and reconnection — all in typical Hollywood rise-and-crash show biz terms, but with the blend of sentiment and savvy you’d expect from Eastwood. We see and hear the songs, either in the original versions or expertly copied by a cast that includes John Lloyd Young, Michael Lomenda and Erich Bergen (all of whom have played in the show on stage) and Vincent Piazza (who hasn‘t).  And we also see and hear the backstage fireworks and the hedonistic high jinks,  plunging toward an inevitable breakup and an equally inevitable teary reunion. It’s what you expect, but it’s also somewhat what happened, and it‘s definitely what most of us want to see.

The story is told in four parts, each by a different Season — and all four of the Jersey Boys look at the camera and talk to us, like Leonardo DiCaprio did as Jordan Belfort in The Wolf of Wall Street. Tommy DeVito, the rascal  of the group (rousingly  and acidly played by Piazza) tells us how he and Frankie (sweetly and sympathetically played by original Broadway Frankie and Tony-winner Young) and Nick (lovably, goofballishly played by Lomenda) all got together, and how Tommy he and Nick did a stretch in stir, and how they formed a gang not quite as inept as the Roman nincompoops of Monicelli’s Big Deal on Madonna Street. Tommy, a full-of-himself braggart and low-level Outfit hanger-on, also tells us how they started singing in bars for top Mafiosi like the elegant, weirdly sentimental Gyp DeCarlo (beautifully, eerily  played by Christopher Walken), and how one day (Eureka!), they got tossed out of  a bowling alley where they were supposed to gig, and the name of the bowling alley was The Four Seasons, and yeah, that’s where they got the name.  (And I bet you thought one of these guys was  a Vivaldi nut.)

Bob Gaudio by now takes the story, then Frankie, then Nick. (Somebody in the original play was probably thinking of Rashomon‘s four-part flashback structure, even though that Japanese classic has four totally different versions of the same story — but then again we all know how much Clint loves Akira Kurosawa.). Anyway, thanks to Tommy’s pal Joey Pesci (Yeah, that Joe Pesci) (See below), Frankie, Tommy and Nick hook up with Gaudio, the teen genius who gave the world (at age 15) the Royal Teens’ maddeningly  banal  and catchy juke box hit “Short Shorts” (one of those songs that sticks in your head even though you damn well don’t want it to) and he heard Frankie‘s high notes, and decided that was the voice he wanted to sing his songs. So, now they’re a band, and we rise with them, fall with them, endure conflict and bad marriages (Frankie’s wife Mary is superbly, if too briefly, played by Renee Marino) and tragedy, and we get redeemed with them, and if you can’t figure out what’s going to happen when they’re all inducted into the Rock n’ Roll Hall of Fame together, you‘re losing it, my friend. All this may make the movie sound a little silly and corny, but sometimes life is silly and corny. At any rate, the movie works, even if the stage show may have worked better.

II. The Bridge

Now, let me confess something. I never liked the Four Seasons much back in their day, and I didn’t expect to like this movie. I don’t like most falsetto (or castrati) singing, even with a phenomenal set of pipes like Valli’s, and that means I didn’t, at the time, much like “Sherry“ and all the others. There was an East Coast Italian-American early ‘60s doowop group that I did enjoy a lot, and that was Dion and the Belmonts, later just Dion (Di Mucci), the high tenor virtuoso of the mournful “Teenager in Love” and “Born to Cry” and “Lovers Who Wander”  and “The Wanderer” and Dion’s masterpiece, the  savage, heart-sick, scream-the-house-down lament “Run-Around Sue” (“Hurt! Hurt! Bom-de-hurty-hurty…Hurt! Hurt!“).  But I liked Eastwood’s movie, and I also liked the show itself — the book by Marshall Brickman and Rick Elice (who both also wrote the screenplay) and the songs mostly by Gaudio and Bob Crewe (their swishily energetic producer, played here con brio by Mike Doyle). And that must mean that, on some unpredictable (for me at least ) level, I finally like The Four Seasons. Believe me, I never thought I’d see the day.

Let me confess something else. I’ve never seen one of the Des McAnuff stage versions of “Jersey Boys” that packed them in all over the world, but I’m perfectly willing to believe that it was better in many ways than the movie. And yet I still like the picture, even though some (not all) of my colleagues apparently think Eastwood’s direction here is more like an empty chair on a Republican stage than anything you‘d get from Bob Fosse or Richard Lester in their prime. McAnuff is said to have  given the play a pace and a drive like Hell in third gear, and I’m sure that his attack was more exciting than the calm, deliberate, measured  way Eastwood (as usual) chooses to tell the story (or stories) here. But there’s a justification for Clint’s approach, and for the way he tries to keep everything rolling along in life’s rhythms.  We watch the picture and we don’t feel we’re being oversold. We’re eased into this world of pop, and even though it’s familiar, it means something to us.

We mentioned Eastwood‘s fealty to his scripts — he’s known as a director who shoots what the writer wrote and doesn’t try to goose things up — and  “Jersey Boys” has a good one. The movie is well-written, well-acted, well-directed, a solid job all around.  In this case, Eastwood went back to Brickman and Elice’s first script (choosing it over some rewrites written since), and shot it straight up. Brickman, of course, was Woody Allen’s writing partner on Sleeper, Annie Hall and Manhattan — and this rock n’ roll epic is probably his best work since then. So Clint preserved that first script’s special qualities, its canny blend of show biz cynicism and deeper humanity, and he filmed it simply and with admirable clarity — using his usual production team (cinematographer Tom Stern, production designer James J. Murakami and editors Joel Cox and Gary Roach) and getting that moody, half-sad, jazzy, sinewy  look and feel he likes so much. Like a lot of other critics, I wondered what attracted him to this material, but his attraction to it makes more sense after you see the film. This story may mean a lot more to him than we realize.

III. The Horns Come in

The real-life Four Seasons, like the young Eastwood as Rowdy Yates on “Rawhide” (a character whom he puckishly shows on a TV)  — were young men  in a highly competitive, sometimes damaging industry who suddenly got very popular and very rich after years of  not-quite success, and had to cope with all the hassles of world fame. (I know, I know: if they gave you the fame, you‘ll be happy to cope. Yeah. All of us.) But show biz has eaten alive a lot of players and singers and dancers and cowboys, and it still does and still will, and Jersey Boys — which starts in the key of Scorsese, shows us a little Billy Wilder (another TV with Kirk Douglas dissing Jan Sterling in Ace in the Hole, which supposedly inspired “Big Girls Don‘t Cry“),  and then slides into Michael Curtiz for the finish — gives us the lowdown: the stage magic that goes sour, the women and friends that are abused, the money that vanishes. Anyway, just because some of it seems like a cliché, doesn’t mean a lot of it doesn’t ring true.

Many movie musicals, including some of the great ones, make the songs and the big numbers the raison d’etre of the whole show. There are some cinematic coups here — most obviously, the quick moving shot up the outside wall of the legendary Brill Building, with song-peddlers peddling behind the windows on every floor. But Eastwood seems to be just as much or more interested in the dramatic scenes, and he doesn’t try to jazz up the songs the way a Fosse or a Rob Marshall might. He just plays the Four Seasons numbers (and some others)  as another part of life, of the story, of how it happened — until the movie climaxes and the credits roll, and Eastwood and his very gifted company finally give us a big super-choreographed number, staged to the later Four Seasons hit, “December, 1963 (Oh, What a Night)” — and this one is a killer. Under the end-titles, the picture brings back the whole ensemble and turns them loose and lets it rip. It’s a terrific sequence, even if they don’t give the great Chris Walken enough (or really any) dancing room. (Walken, a fantastic hoofer, still scores with a few seconds of preoccupied-looking, desultory  dips.)

IV. The Chorus

One of the best things about Eastwood’s Jersey Boys is the showcase it gives the four young actors who play the Four Seasons: Lloyd, Piazza, Bergen and Lomenda. Each of them nails his part, totally, from the songs to the back-story and back again. But they also complement each other beautifully — Piazza with his dark, funny portrait of the brash but beguilingly edgy Tommy DeVito; Young as Frankie, with his likable naiveté and that sweet, pure voice; Bergen with his silky arrogance, his taste for T.S. Eliot,  and his (somewhat justifiable) conceit; and Lomenda, another scene-stealer with great whirling-doofus stage moves —  a magnetic performer even if,  as Nick says, it’s a four man group, and he’s Ringo.   (Tommy DeVito, by the way, which is the name of the  sociopathic killer Joe Pesci played in Goodfellas, is also the name of the  guitarist for the Seasons — and, ironically, the real-life Joey Pesci, played by the uncanny Pesci look-and-act-alike Joseph Russo, is also part of  Jersey Boys. He introduces them to Gaudio, manages a little, and is eventually Tommy’s post-Seasons employer. And oh yeah, later on he met Scorsese and won an Oscar, right around the year the Four Seasons were named to the Rock ’n Roll Hall of Fame. So I‘ve got just one thing to say about life and art and movies and all that jazz: “You think I‘m funny?”)

The picture’s four leads, or at least three of them, probably know the show better than their director by now, and Eastwood gives them plenty of room to shine. He obviously likes the story, likes its slant on the bumps and jags of the entertainment industry (rock n’ roll as well as movies), and he helps tell that story with a depth and an empathy that belie his 84 years and his sometimes conservative politics, and the automatic stature that his Oscars have rightly conferred on him. This is a movie that, like Eastwood’s Bronco Billy and Honkytonk Man and Bird, shows the darker or crazier side of show biz and music, makes us feel the way it feels for the performers and musicians, puts us on stage and upfront. If nothing else, it’s fun to see a Clint Eastwood movie where somebody uses the term “objective-correlative.” And where somebody else sings falsetto without a gun pointed at them.

So I was wrong. The Four Seasons really could sing up a storm. Capeesh? I still prefer “Run Around Sue,” or even “Donna the Prima Donna.“ Jersey Boys could have been better, but you can say that about almost any movie — except Citizen Kane, Seven Samurai, The Rules of the Game, Persona,  Lawrence of Arabia, Stagecoach, Vertigo, Goodfellas,  Singin’ in the Rain, and oh, maybe two dozen or so others. Meanwhile, if Jersey Boys is not a great movie — and it’s not — it’s sure as hell a good one.

Anyway, there’s a good reason why there are so many movies about top-notch, well loved show biz icons who lead messed up or nearly ruined lives  and then, by God, come back. Except in certain extreme cases, most of us will always want to see that last big redemptive number. Most of us will want to hear one more chorus, applaud one more time, get one more glimpse of that stairway to so-called heaven. Most of us will always be rooting for them. And let me confess something: I am too.

A MILLION WAYS TO DIE IN THE WEST (Two and a Half Stars) U. S.: Seth MacFarlane, 2014

NEIGHBORS (Two and a Half Stars)
U. S.: Nicholas Stoller, 2014

As they used to say in revolutionary France, or even in National Lampoon’s revolting Delta House, “Liberte, egalite, fraternite!“

In the new frat comedy Neighbors, the sometimes criminally good-looking teen-idol actor Zac Efron plays Teddy Sanders, a frat boy president who moves his band of bros (Delta Psi, to be specific) next door to an affable but uptight yuppie couple (Seth Rogen and Rose Byrne as Mac and Kelly Radner). The thirtysomething Radners, who were young once themselves , just want him to co-exist and keep the noise down. But things take a nasty turn and Teddy winds up triggering seemingly endless hostilities between his Greeks and the next door  Geeks.

Teddy, played by the teen stud star of High School Musical, is described, by Mac, as resembling something created by a gay laboratory scientist. (Like Andy Warhol’s Frankenstein, maybe?) In a way, that’s the way Efron plays the role — the way all the actors play their roles:  like tongue-in-cheek laboratory creations, manufactured from punch lines and cribs from one or two hit frat boy bromances. There isn’t a scene or a speech in the movie that isn’t top-heavy with artifice and formula, or that wasn’t designed, deliberately and almost laboriously, to crack us up, barreling at the audience like a comic Mack Truck. It’s the exact opposite of the way a Judd Apatow-style comedy usually works — less organic, less natural, less human. Here, it’s: Are we having a good time yet? No? Wait: there’s a scene with dueling dildos and flying auto air bags and a Robert De Niro look-alike contest with Teddy as a Mohawked Travis Bickle. Hey, it’ll kill you.

Neighbors is a comedy in the Animal House vein and the Old School tradition about what becomes an all-out war between the well-intentioned Radners, who just want to be nice but hip we-were-kids-once-too neighbors, and the party-crazed Delta Psi fraternity guys who move in to the Radners’  sort-of-affluent chunk of suburbia, and  proceed to party all day, party all night, party-party-party till you just can’t party no more.

So, why didn’t I laugh harder at Neighbors, as everybody else seems to be doing? It wasn’t because I didn’t want to. And it wasn’t because the movie didn’t have  a funny cast and a funny director: Neighbors actually seems to have everything going for it (except a part for Jonah Hill), beginning with its cast, which also includes Christopher Mintz-Plasse and Jerrod Carmichael (put those two on a marquee) as supporting fratboys, plus Ike Barinholtz and Carla Gallo (as pot-smoking thirty-whatever cronies of Mac and Kelly), and ( a really inspired touch) the delectably doofus Lisa Kudrow (of TV’s “Friends“) as the mean Dean Wormer equivalent, who almost has Delta Psi on probation.

And there’s also the director, Nicholas Stoller, whose expertise at staging or writing comedy — and putting on parties — has ranged across buddy-buddy bromantic comedies like Get Him to the Greek, to nice young couple rom-coms like The Five Year Engagement to sophisticated kiddie extravaganzas like the last two Muppets movies,

I certainly thought I was going to laugh — as I usually do at Judd Apatow or Seth Rogen movies. Scenes that I now vaguely remember — like the De Niro look-alike bash  or  the air-bag flying whoopee cushion slapstick, or the dueling plaster casters — should have probably raised a chuckle or two. And Rose Byrne, one of the wonderfully bad-mouth Bridesmaids ensemble, is very, very amusing for a good part of the movie, in what might have been a thankless wifey role. All that seems like such surefire yock material that I’m beginning to believe I actually did laugh at the movie, and somehow forgot the whole thing, after going blotto until the morning after. Maybe…

You get the feeling throughout Neighbors that you should have been hoisting a brew to the memory of the gone but not forgotten Bluto played by Animal House’s zit-popping pirate king John Belushi, and laughing your generational ass off. Instead –and this bewildered me — I mostly felt a step or two ahead of a snore,

Maybe that’s because the movie doesn’t really have a Belushi equivalent but instead gives us ab-flexing lookers and teen icons like Zac Efron (and Dave Franco, of the Brothers Franco, as his wingman), rather than slob hedonists like Delta House’s Belushi (or Bruce McGill or Tom Hulce) and hard-partying clowns like Will Ferrell and Vince Vaughn and Luke Wilson of Old School. These frat hedonists or reliving-it-up guys are the hairy heroes of Animal House and Old School (or at least the hairy anti-heroes). Here, they seem to be wet dreams for the Radners, or for those homoerotic scientists that supposedly threw Efron together.

The not-so-hot script for Neighbors, by Apatow producers Andrew Jay Cohen and Brendan O’Brien, is more a collection of frat jokes than a well-constructed comedy machine (which Animal House was) — and even though it feels like this story should be springing from character (or from characters), much of it just seems to swoop in from Gagland.

It didn’t make sense to me that almost none of the Radners’ neighbors got pulled into the big fray, that the entire rest of the neighborhood seemingly took a pass on the Delta Psi feud, even when Teddy and his boys started going wild, trying to establish new wastrel records and surpass the all time toga-party beer-pong mess-around records of their horny, smashed, stoned predecessors, with the same ill-tempered cop (Hannibal Buress as Officer Watkins) getting called to shut the party down over and over by the Radners.

Why didn’t the Radners solicit more help from the other “grownups” in the neighborhood? Why is the initial détente between them and the Delta Psi guys transgressed so relatively easily? The Radners try to make peace with Delta Psi and promise to contact Teddy before calling the police on them ( a crucial agreement since both the college kid and oldster groups  smoke cannabis) — and then (at least in the eyes of Delta Psi) Mac and Kelly break their word and call too soon. (The movie tries to explain this by having the Delta Psi Guys seemingly ignore the Radners’ complaints at a wild party. But why is that happening?)

Of course, you can plausibly answer that the movie isn’t supposed to make sense, or that it does make sense of a sort, and who are you to complain about senselessness anyway?  (Especially if you laughed at Animal House.) Neighbors is less about the frat partiers than about how the Radners, the somewhat older generation  try to reawaken or hold onto their own vanishing youthful propensity for high jinks —  and how they react to the sex-crazed, self-indulgent kids next door. (The movie begins with a scene where the Radners’  mid-day love-making is interrupted by their infant son in a cute bassinet — though why they’re in a room with him in the first place, isn’t explained.)

Mac and Kelly ultimately have their revenge on the frat boy  sex, drugs and rock ’n roll revelers, but it isn’t a very satisfying turnabout, and I thought the last sidewalk encounter between Teddy and Mac — where Efron does a Taylor Lautner chest-pop and Rogen gives us a peek at his hyper-active tummy — didn’t work at all, unless you’re an abs or tummy aficionado.

Seth Roger is  a funny comedian — a “shaggy man type” Pauline Kael would have called him — and his characters have more humanity than some of the other big movie comedian-stars of today, like Adam Sandler or Kevin James. (James gets a comic nudge here from both Rogen and Byrne). But Neighbors, popular as it may be, isn’t one of his best shows, and Mac is one of the least recognizably real of his movie characters.

SPOILER ALERT (roll over to view)

Perhaps that’s because on some level, Rogen seems a bit envious here of good-looking, charismatic babe-magnets like Efron — though great looks aren’t always what appeals most to the opposite sex — and he may want to show that he can party hard too, when he wants to. (I thought he already showed that in This is the End.) In either Animal House or Old School — or in most of the movies that copy them — Mac would have been a secondary villain, a quick joke, someone to get upchucked on, or doused with a brewski or two. The fact that here, Mac and Kelly win their battle with the Greeks, may be seen as a sign of maturity, evidence that the Apatow bunch is growing up. But is it? Is it just a one-up on the Zac Efrons of the world? Who knows?

END OF SPOILER

I was young once myself. And anyway, I just figured out why I didn’t like this movie much.

In the 1960s, while I was a student at the University of Wisconsin, I lived for several years in private housing on Langdon Street, which was the UW’s Fraternity Row. I had some friends in the frats. But I also had some bad neighbors — including one inebriated gentleman in snazzy shorts who ran his convertible into me one sunny football afternoon, while I was crossing the street near Langdon (with the right of way), and started yelling angrily at me for God knows what (maybe for scuffing the fender on his car when he hit me), and trying to start some kind of half-assed brawl — backed up by the three other drunks riding with him.  They calmed him down, probably by opening another brew. Now, I can’t swear that this bozo and his chums were frat boys, and that his lamentable driving etiquette might have prejudiced me all these years later, against seeing Zac’s Teddy  as some kind of a cutie-pie. But who else would be driving a convertible, drunk, on a Saturday afternoon, on Fraternity Row? One thing’s for sure: He wasn’t an anti-war protestor or a Bob Dylan fan. Or a John Belushi.

In 1981, Belushi (with his comedy-bro Dan Aykroyd) made a  movie of his own called Neighbors, based on a Thomas Berger (“Little Big Man”) novel about dueling next door guys (Belushi had the Rogen role), and that one didn’t make me laugh much either (or much of anybody else). Lots of people are chuckling at Neighbors though. So, what can I say? Party hearty, dudes. And when your neighbors call the cops, make sure you flush all that weed down the toilet. As we used to say back on Langdon Street, maturity is overrated.

MUPPETS MOST WANTED (Three Stars)

U.S.: James Bobin, 2014 (Walt Disney Pictures)

There was never a TV puppet show quite like “The Muppet Show” — or a romantic couple of any kind quite like Kermit the Frog and Miss Piggy the hamme fatale — or a supporting troupe like Fozzie the Bear, Gonzo, Animal, the Two Old Curmudgeons, and all their funny, fuzzy friends.  And I’m happy to say that the new Walt Disney movie Muppets Most Wanted continues that splendid renaissance of Muppetry we saw in the 2011 Disney picture The Muppets. It’s not necessarily as good, because it doesn’t have the built-in emotional charge of being a Muppet revival movie about the revival of the Muppets — a storyline which, for those of us who’ve been familiar for years with the handmade troupe of the great late muppeteer Jim Henson (and Frank Oz and the rest)  quickly became hilarious and touching and something to cheer for.

Muppets Most Wanted, the follow-up, is darker and more cynical, and far less sentimental. But it’s just as entertaining. It has the same director-writer, James Bobin, the same co-writer, Nicholas Stoller, the same composer (Christophe Beck) and songwriter (Bret McKenzie),  and some of the same technical people — and of course it has the same button-eyed, enthusiastic wild and woolly-faced  bunch of  Muppets.

Even if it doesn’t carry the same emotional charge, this movie still has similar amounts of sly wit. show biz pizzazz, lovable high jinks, colorful set design (by Eve Stewart of The King’s Speech and Les Miserables) and lots of all-star cameo guest appearances. (Tony Bennett and Lady Gaga pop up together in one of the first songs, “Were Doing a Sequel,” and Celine Dion  sings with Miss Piggy (voiced by Eric Jacobson) and Kermit (Steve Whitmire) on the big ballad “Something So Right.“ If you don’t blink too much, you’ll catch Tom Hidddleston, Christophe Waltz (waltzing), Usher (ushering),  Zach Galifianakis (galifianakissing), James McAvoy and Chloe Grace Moretz..

If Muppets Most Wanted is a step  down from The 2011 Muppets (and I don’t think it is), it’s  certainly not a very far step down, if it’s a step down at all. After all, The Muppets, thanks to Jason Segel, Amy Adams and the whole gang, was the best Muppet Show of any kind in decades.

There are problems with sequels however, and no one knows that better than the show biz-savvy Muppets,  who are by now almost as imperishable a part of the movie biz as the Oscar Show. This movie‘s two first musical numbers, in the zippy new score by McKenzie. are “They’ve Ordered a Sequel” (sung by superfan Walter, Statler and Waldorf, and the aforementioned “We’re Doing a Sequel,” sung by The Muppet Ensemble, plus Bennett and Gaga — an ideal Muppet all-star pairing and a snappy, slap-happy number that sets the tone for the wised-up story that follows.

This movie begins right after the last movie ended, with the triumphant comeback of the Muppet company. Then  it brings  on its ‘60s caper movie super thriller travelogue plot, introducing two super villains, the acerbic Golden Globes dismantler and Office guy Rickey Gervais as the  sneaky and nefarious Dominic Badguy, who wants to be their manager and take them on a world tour (of Berlin, Madrid, Dublin and London), and Badguy’s bad green boss, the slimy Russian amphibian Constantine (Matt Vogel), who looks just like Kermit with the addition of a black beauty  mark on his right cheek (which he covers up with green goo) and who talks like a bad dream of Akim Tamiroff doing a bad Vladimir Putin imitation.

These two Foulfellas have cooked up an evil, exploitative scheme in which Constantine — who has escaped from Siberia, and replaced himself with Kermit — will masquerade as Kermit and the two crooks (who bring down the house with their rousing razz-ma-tazzy number “I’m Number One (He’s Number Two.)”)  will book the Muppets into a series of theatrical show venues which not coincidentally are just next door to a variety of  well-heeled places to be looted and Rifified — culminating in a final daring heist of the Crown Jewels in the Tower of London itself , while Constantine marries the bedazzled Miss Piggy. (What we see is the actual Tower of  London, made available to the production, because “the woman who runs it” likes The Muppets.)

Meanwhile Kermit languishes in the Siberian gulag vacated by the perfidious Constantine, with Kermit reliving his own version of “One Day (or several) in the Life of Kermit Kermitovich,” His gulag mates include Ray Liotta, Jeamine Clement and Danny Trejo, and his seemingly ferocious, hard-ass guard, Nadya, is played, and how, by  Tina Fey. Luckily for him, Nadya  happens to be a Broadway musical comedy fanatic and she signs on whole-heartedly to Kermit’s offer (which is part of his escape plan) to put on the most show-stopping, hubba-hubba, all-singing, all-dancing, imitation Broadway musical comedy prison show since Mel Brooks’ “Prisoners of Love” closed out The Producers.

The movie’s main joke involves the bad/good doubling of Kermit — as the gentle, whimsical, crinkle-faced frog-chappie we all know and love and the fiendish and almost incomprehensible master criminal Constantine — who teams up with Dominic Badguy to turn the entire troupe into stooges and unknowing accomplices to a crime wave..

But The Muppets, as much as Sid Caesar or Carol Burnett in their prime, thrive on movie parodies, and Muppets Most  Wanted is packed with them. The movie  manages to smoosh together the genres of musical comedy (always a natural for the stage-struck Muppets), detective and heist thriller (with Ty Burrell  of  “Modern Family” as Interpol agent Jean-Pierre Napoleon, the most inept French sleuth since Inspector Clouseau, assisted by the true-red-white-and-blue C. I. A muppet bird, Sam Eagle), a prison picture (with Fey at her faintly smiling, deadpan best), and a con-artists love story which actually seems (for as second or two) as if it may produce the long-deferred nuptials of the little green guy (or his double) and his big pink ladylove.

All these plot elements keep colliding merrily, until the usual big bang-up climax brings them all together for a grand finale or two. The movie, whose exteriors were mostly shot in England (by Robert Zemeckis’ cinematographer Don Burgess), looks as shiny and feel-good flashy as something snazzy from the ’60s, and the musical numbers have the right touch of  catchy lunacy. Gervais, Fey and Burrell are admirably Muppet-friendly (or, in Gervasi’s case, Muppet-conning) human costars, and the entire show has the zip and irreverence and playful satire (and at least some of the heart) that a Muppet-admiring audience would expect.

Muppets Most Wanted is, like its predecessor, better-written and better-directed and smarter than most of the current movies made for alleged adults. Of course, it could be argued that Jim Henson’s Muppets themselves, after they branched out from Sesame Street to their own TV show and movies, were an act as much or more for adults as for children, two groups who respond to different aspects of the Muppet Mythos.

A fine custodian for the mythos so far, is writer-director James Bobin who became a hot TV scripter-helmer thanks to sharp comedies like Flight of the Conchords and Da Ali G Show.  Right now, he seems a nearly ideal auteur for the Muppets of today, and co-writer Nicholas Stoller (The Five-Year Engagement and Get Him to the Greek) fits in smartly with him. Both of them have credits that are more adult, and off-color than you’d expect to find in the makers of puppet movies for families. But that‘s part of the secret of the troupe: kiddie toys  who, however childishly they act, have the minds of adults. Or part of the minds of adults.

A word or two about Kermit and Miss Piggy, a couple who dance like Fred and Ginger, sing like Frank and Ella, and play romantic comedy like Spence and Kate — or at least think they do (or at least Miss Piggy thinks they do). The words: Hurrah. Good show. May Muppet Time last forever  — or at least ‘til the next sequel rolls around.

.

CATHERINE DENEUVE

She was the most beautiful woman I‘d ever seen. For three and a half of my college years at the University of Wisconsin in Madison, her picture was on my wall,  a space she shared with Humphrey Bogart, Ray Charles, James Dean, Pieter Bruegel‘s painting “The Harvesters” and El Greco‘s “View of  Toledo.” She was Catherine Deneuve, the quintessential French movie  star/actress of the last half of the twentieth century, and in the picture (the one just above), she was peeking back over one nude shoulder, pale gold blonde hair a-tumble and softly framing that almost intimidatingly gorgeous face — a face lovely and  girlish and a little expectant and, in this black-and-white poster picture, notably unsmiling.

It was an image from Luis Bunuel’s 1967 movie classic Belle de Jour, in which Deneuve played a  bourgeois wife, in a happy but dull marriage, who decides to spend her days incognito, as a whore in an elegant Parisian bordello. The movie was a Bunuelian masterpiece about the dark side of romance, full of  menace, mystery, perversity and dark secrets — and Deneuve, in the middle of it all, seemed a creature of light floating through darkness, especially at the end, when she finally, enigmatically, smiled.

Deneuve then was quite frequently called the screen’s most beautiful actress, especially  after Belle de Jour became an international hit — a success that followed on the heels of her unforgettable appearances in Roman Polanski’s moody British shocker Repulsion and Jacques Demy’s romantic musical The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (one of the two Deneuve films being released or re-released now). Still in her early 20s — after having commenced her film career as a teenager, discovered by director Roger Vadim (the ex-husband of Brigitte Bardot, and  Deneuve’s lover as well) — Deneuve had one of the most strikingly sexy faces of a sexually unbuttoned era.

But she proved a striking actress as well, and her longevity is extraordinary. (Lillian Gish, the champion, acted  in movies in eight different decades; Deneuve has worked in seven.) Today,  at 70, she is still a star actress, still beautiful. I saw her at a press conference in the journalist’s room at the Cannes Film Festival, when she was 60, and I remember how she entered the room  and suddenly seemed to tilt the entire space toward her, pulling in everyone’s rapt attention — the most beautiful woman, I thought then, that I had ever seen, or ever will see.

Why was she on my wall so long? Why is her presence so remarkably enduring? Like other great screen beauties of that era whom I had special crushes on — Liv Ullmann, Leslie Caron, Bibi Andersson, Shirley MacLaine, and Catherine’s elder sister Francoise Dorleac — she had not just stunning looks, but a vibrant personality that was deeply appealing as well. Deneuve has said she knows she owes her  career to that youthful slightly icy beauty that Roger Vadim saw and recognized. But she is also one of the great people of the screen because of the deep humanity we now sense beneath the image, because we loved to look at her then, when she was 20, but still love to look at her now, when she is 70 — and because she still creates or reproduces characters on screen that we feel compelled to watch and to think about. I met her finally at that same Cannes fest, as part of a roundtable discussion interview, and I sat next to her, and, for an hour, she beggared the college fantasies instilled by that face in my poster. At the end, I talked to her for a few more moments, and she smiled her  smile, the one I never saw on my wall, and I left, happy for that brief moment. God, what a lovely woman!

THE UMBRELLAS OF CHERBOURG (Four Stars)

France: Jacques Demy, 1964

Deneuve was 20 when she played Genevieve Emery in Jacques Demy’s The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (1964), which won the Palme d’Or at Cannes and became a golden classic of the French New Wave, and one of the great romantic musicals of, it seems, all time. The movie was written (both libretto and song lyrics) by director Demy,  and it has one of the great,  marvelous original music and song scores — sometimes ‘50s-’60s jazzy and sometimes showstopper big-balladish —  by the French New Wave’s ‘60s composer of choice, the fantastic Michel Legrand. Legrand, with formidable skill, composed a wall-to-wall score in a movie where there is not one line of spoken dialogue, in which every speech, like every aria, is sung, and in which one song in particular, the haunting, yearning, heart-breaking ballad “Je ne pourrai jamais vivre sans toi“ or “I Will Wait for You” became a touchstone of the era, covered by Sinatra, Tony Bennett, Louie Armstrong and many others — and probably broke as many  hearts as anything by the Beatles, including “Yesterday.”

Demy’s story is in three acts, with a coda. Act One: Deneuve’s Genevieve is a young girl who works in 1957 in Cherbourg in her mother’s (Anne Vernon’s) umbrella shop. Genevieve has just met a young auto garage mechanic  named Guy Fouche (Nino Castelnuovo), with whom she has fallen in love — and whom she wishes to marry, right away. She is sure, and so is Guy. But Mme. Emery, whose umbrellas boutique is in trouble,  is almost automatically opposed.  A practical businesswoman, she is much happier when Genevieve meets a rich young Parisian jeweler  named Roland Cassard (Marc Michel), who can solve their financial difficulties, and who falls as instantaneously in love with Genevieve, as Genevieve did with Guy.

Also working against the lovers are the times. Guy is suddenly drafted by the French Army, then embroiled in Algeria — a conscription that will pull Guy away from Cherbourg and Genevieve and also from his elderly, sick, loving aunt Elise (Mireille Perrey) and Tante Elise‘s other helper, the self-sacrificing Madeleine (Ellen Farmer), who is obviously, but quietly, in love with Guy.

The lovers are dismayed. But determined. The bouncy, jazzy, cool-and-hot rhythms of the opening scenes in Guy‘s garage with his buddies and co-workers (the Legrand music redolent of breezy jazz masters like Stan Getz and Oscar Peterson and Errol Garner and the sublime virtuoso  Art Tatum) give way to soaring, lush melodies by Legrand that suggest Bill Evans or Lester Young or Duke Ellington and Johnny Hodges doing Gershwin or Porter. (“If it takes forever, I will wait for you. For a thousand summers, I will wait for you…”)

The lovers  meet, embrace, weep, sing their hearts out. (So does everyone else.) They will wait forever. But forever is a long time. And things change. (Ah, how they change.) The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, while it was made by artists (Demy and Legrand) who love the classic Hollywood musicals of Minnelli and Donen, which usually ended happily, are also cognizant of the sexual realism, darkness and irreverence that came in with the sixties, especially with West Side Story. (Guy’s war in Algeria was obviously intended to recall the 1964 War in Vietnam.) The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, which begins in the rain (with multiple umbrellas popping up like little colored balls in an  overhead shot), ends in the snow, in another garage (an Esso), where the lovers re-meet, unhappily. It is one of the saddest, most bittersweet endings of any movie musical.  Ever.

Michel Legrand, like Bernard Herrmann or Elmer Bernstein,  is one of the great film composers, so prolific, so technically brilliant and so cinematically attuned that later, in a rare move for a movie composer,  he wrote and directed a semi-autobiographical film of his own, called Five Days in June. (It stars Sabine Azema, it’s quite good and it deserves a reissue.) His partner here. Jacques Demy, was one of the prime  romantics of the French New Wave of the ’60s, as romantic as Truffaut, but, in the end, more fragile. (Demy  died of AIDS at 59.). Demy’s and Legrand’s special touch and special gifts are evident throughout this glowing musical —  sad, heartfelt, in love with youth and passion and beauty, despite knowing they will not last, they cannot last, Oh God, why can’t they last?

Demy is sometimes underrated by more cynical, political-minded film intellectuals who prefer Legrand’s acid scores for Godard (Breathless, Bande a Part) to his dreamy scores for Demy (Lola, The Bay of Angels, The Young Girls of Rochefort). And, despite his frequent brilliance, he was not always as great a filmmaker as, say, his genius director-wife Agnes Varda.  But, with The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, he reached his lyrical peak.

The film has a sometimes over-languorous feel that at times dampens both its joy and its heartache, and it‘s sometimes too obvious that Deneuve, Castelnuovo, Vernon and the others are being dubbed. But it is a gem of its era. It compels and seduces us and leaves us with tears of memory — because of Legrand’s now sprightly, now sad music, because of Demy and cinematographer Jean Rabier’s  sparkling, confectionary images, and because of the face of the young Deneuve: quiet, adoring. vulnerable, shining with hope, numb with heartache. The beautiful Catherine doesn’t sing a single note of Legrand’s beautiful songs. (Danielle Licari does.) But when she’s on screen, in the center of all Demy’s lyricized street and shop scenes, she makes a whole city, a whole world, sing around her.  Would we wait for her? Forever? Well, as it turned out, we almost have. (French, with English subtitles.)

ON MY WAY (Three Stars)

France: Emmanuelle Bercot, 2012

Deneuve is now 70; and she is still a movie star, still confoundingly beautiful. In On My Way — a moving  buoyant, very intelligent road movie by the very talented director-writer-actress Emmanuelle Bercot (Polisse) — Deneuve plays Bettie, a provincial single mother and restaurant owner-manager, who lives with her elderly, bossy  mother, and has just been jilted by her longtime adulterous lover. She is shocked, miserable that this jerk dumped her for a girl in her 20s.  (We hate this guy, immediately. What an ass!) In the midst of the restaurant bustle, Bettie suddenly, beginning in a long tracking camera shot that follows her through her workplace,  takes off and drives away in her car, without telling a soul where she’s going or why — mostly because she doesn’t really know herself .

At first on a search, dying for a cigarette, she ends up on the weathered old farm of a weathered old farmer who rolls one for her, with arthritic fingers, while recounting the sad story of an old lost love. (An incredible scene, though anti-smokers may justly  disapprove of Deneuve, a lifelong heavy smoker, for playing this sequence and Bercot for writing it. )  Then she keeps driving, meets other people —  bar crowd lady regulars at a boisterous saloon, an egotistical young pickup artist named Marco (Paul Hamy). a kind security guard at a furniture store.

Finally, after problems with both her credit card and her Cell phone,, she is reached by her worried employees (who are facing a business crisis), her mother, and  her volatile, resentful daughter Muriel (French pop star Camille). The latter, off on as job interview, recruits Bettie to take care of Bettie‘s young grandson Charly (p1ayed jauntily by Bercot’s son Nemo Schiffmann) and drives off with him to a family gathering. On the way Bettie stops, perhaps a little too coincidentally, at a reunion of old beauty queen winners, to which, as the 1969 Miss Brittany, she was earlier invited.

The film has its flaws and minor lapses — Bercot says there were budgetary problems which prevented her from doing all the location work she wanted — but it’s full of life and heart and personality. The actors, many of whom are non-professionals in their first film appearances, are wonderful — and they’re anchored by the very professional, and very inspired Mlle. Deneuve. It’s a fine film. And though some may dismiss On My Way as a “mere” star vehicle or an imitation ‘70s-style road movie, we should remember that many of the best movies of film history, French or American or otherwise,  have been star vehicles. This is a particularly good one, and a particularly good and very affectionately made road movie, by a writer-director, Bercot, who  loves her largely non-professional cast, and loves the road and loves her star, Catherine. So do we. So do I.

Catherine Deneuve… I’ve known her, we’ve known her (or known what she shows us on screen) most of our lives. She was once a beautiful young girl and teenaged ingénue, and now she’s a beautiful old woman.  Once a universally desirable young actress, she’s now a nearly universally admired star character lady, one of the great ladies of the screen. When she was young, the camera loved her, and it still does. Her early radiance has become the light she shines on the humanity of the very human characters she so movingly plays and so wondrously reveals. It’s as if Brigitte Bardot had grown up to become Meryl Streep. God, how lovely Catherine is. God, how wonderful she is. One smile, one look, and we still will wait for her. Forever.   (French, with English subtitles.)

THE GRAND BUDAPEST HOTEL (Four Stars)

U.S.-British-German: Wes Anderson, 2014  (Fox Searchlight)

I. The Great Zubrowkan Novel

Wes Anderson’s new movie The Grand Budapest Hotel is — What’s the word  I’m looking for? Fantastic?  Piquant? Nabokovian?  Wes-Andersonish? Scrumptious? Playful?

Yes that’s it: Playful. Not the sexiest adjective, I realize. Ah, well… But that’s what the picture is: It’s playful to a fault — and Nabokovian and scrumptious and all the rest too. Done in Anderson’s unmistakable style, full of toy-like miniatures, painted-looking backdrops, sprightly camera moves, quick zooms, and high-style writing and acting, it’s a deliciously wayward  and intricately amusing show — a delightful example of what can happen when a gifted movie artist isn’t afraid to try something eccentric or out of the way. Working  within a rigorously stylized format,  but with plenty of oddball kinks, twists and gags, Anderson and his fellow moviemakers and actors seem to be having a ball. They toss around ideas and visions and crazy little diversions that they‘re drawing from all kinds of  classic books and movies and paintings and musical pieces — and when the film is really working, which is most of the time, their art and artistry seems to fully connect with their imaginations and with us, and with the images and thoughts tumbling around in their heads.

The show, set in a fictitious world drawn from our own, is about theatricality — about play. And it’s full — to the brim — with visions of those odd little wonderlands we can create for ourselves, when life begins to seem too dark and borderline awful to bear without them. So, we can invent a whole fantastical other-world — especially if we’re someone like Wes Anderson, the maker of Bottle Rocket and Rushmore and The Darjeeling Limited and The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou and Moonrise Kingdom, some of which are films people like a lot, and some of which irritate the bejeezus out of them (including, at times, me), but none of which are any less than personal statements by a real filmmaker — dreams in full flight. (Notice I didn‘t call them “quirky.”).

“The Grand Budapest Hotel” is the name of the movie, of course. But it’s also the title of a fictitious book we see being opened, in the present,  in this film‘s opening sequence. A classic of the literature of an obscure (and fictitious)  Eastern European country Zubrowka, it was written by a celebrated (but nameless)  fictitious author, played by Tom Wilkinson, who lives there — in a place that seems to be part Czech, part Hungarian, and part Ruritania before the revolution. In 1985, this great author, in his study, tells us the incredible story that became his novel: told to him on a memorable night long ago (when he was  Jude Law) in 1968 at Zubrowka’s storied but now deteriorating and nearly empty Grand Budapest Hotel — where the writer met the hotel’s mysterious owner Mr. Moustafa (F. Murray Abraham).

Mr. Moustafa, a man of elegant demeanor, rare charm  and impeccable manners, introduced himself to the author (as a literary fan) in the hotel baths, invited him to dinner, and then, over fine drinks and pretty little pink-and-green pastries, in the vast, nearly empty Grand Budapest dining room, he tells the writer and us the incredible, unbelievable, but (he insists) true story of M. Gustave (Ralph Fiennes), the concierge of the Grand Budapest in its prime, and his own elegant, impeccable mentor. All this took place  back in 1932, when Moustafa was a teenager named Zero and the world was a much different, though not necessarily better place.

Mr. Moustafa narrates — F.  Murray Abraham, like Morgan Freeman, is a wonderful narrator — the story of how he came to the Grand Budapest in its heyday, and how he was chosen by M. Gustave to be his lobby boy, a position Gustave once held himself with great distinction.  M. Gustave knows everything about the hotel, upstairs and down. He’s a stern, meticulous but tender-hearted taskmaster who lives in a Spartan little servant’s room in the back of the hotel. His instructions and eloquent speeches are spiced with poetry, laced with irony, and spiked with a “fuck” or two, or more. In the course of his seemingly endless duties,  he has seduced and become the lover of a whole company of elderly, blonde, very rich women guests of the hotel, including the fabulously wealthy Madame De (Tilda Swinton, a fine job), who regularly comes to the Grand Budapest to dally with M. Gustave, but now has premonitions of disaster. M. Gustave pooh-poohs her, but she’s right.

Gystave’s new lobby boy, the young “Zero” Moustafa  (Tony Revolori), is a refugee from a fictitious war-ravaged middle eastern country, where his family was slaughtered. He was hired by the hotel on a trial basis, though he has seemingly zero experience and zero qualifications, beyond his appealing looks, his lively intelligence  and his equable disposition — and he soon also becomes M. Gustave‘s right hand boy, his pupil and  his fellow adventurer. And  M. Gustave, who is played with near flawless comic technique and brilliance by the not-usually-funny Fiennes, shows him the ropes, teaches him how to multi-task Grand Budapest-style, how to anticipate a guest’s wishes before he or she wishes them.  (Revolori plays the teen-aged Zero very well, with nice boyish appeal and  presence.)

Their bond is not sexual, or at least not overtly sexual — Zero also has a fine, resourceful pastry-cook girlfriend named Agatha (Saoirse Roman, very good and moving), whom he still remembers and adores years later. But the bond between boss and student sometimes seems  a touch homo-erotic, just as Anderson’s movies often seem to be elegant bromances, this one included.

The rite of passage soon becomes a murder mystery.  Madame De dies, and M. Gustave and Zero travel by train to her mansion — a journey interrupted when  they are nearly arrested by thuggish police, but saved by the gentlemanly Officer Henckels (Edward Norton, a really fine job), whose parents stayed sometimes at the Grand Budapest, and who was befriended by M. Gustave when he was a “lonely little boy.”

We can sense something dark right around the corner, in a story that seemed on its way to being a pure  Lubitschian comedy of sexual manners. Murder is afoot. The seeds of totalitarianism, and World War II, are in the soil. And the old world is falling. At the De mansion, the family’s suave attorney Deputy Kovacs (Jeff Goldblum, fine also), reads the will, which leaves everything to Madame De’s immediate family and a horde of distant relations — but mainly to Madame De’s vicious son, Dmitri Desgoffe und Taxis (Adrien Brody, terrific).

But then Deputy Kovacs  opens a second will, delivered to him only that day, which is to replace the earlier one if Madame De’s  death is ruled a murder (which seems likely, since she died of strychnine poisoning).

That will leaves most of the money to the family, but also leaves one “priceless” painting, called Boy With Apple, to M. Gustave. And that  bequest throws Dmitri — who can, without fear of argument, be called insanely and murderously selfish  — into a towering rage and a tantrum, in which he accuses M. Gustave of seducing his mother and others (which is true) of being bisexual (which may be true), of seducing  multitudes, including perhaps the Boy with Apple, and orders him arrested, thrown from the house, or destroyed, whichever is easiest. That will be the assignment of Dmitri’s  truly scary odd-job man and hired killer, the skull-faced Jopling (Willem Dafoe, a perfect heavy), who begins his workmanlike string of violence and crimes in this movie by socking Zero (who socked Dmitri who socked Gustave) and hurling Deputy Kovacs‘ defenseless cat out the window.

Soon M. Gustave is unjustly in prison, arrested by the gentlemanly Henckels, with Zero and Agatha as part of Gustave’s assembly of outside helpers — which also includes a secret organization of eminent European concierges, called The Society of Crossed Keys. (Bill Murray runs it, ably.) A miniature hacksaw will be smuggled into him in one of those luscious-looking pink and green pastries, part of an escape plan by bare-chested, tattooed jailmate Ludwig (Harvey Keitel, an eerie turn) — while Dmitri gradually graduates from appalling sadism to unspeakable evil, to hot but madly inaccurate triggerman in the God-damnedest gunfight I have ever seen. Meanwhile, Jopling, who has a face like the icy mask of death, and rows of rings on eight fingers that suggest Robert Mitchum’s love-hate display in The Night of the Hunter, lurks around everywhere, mercilessly enforcing Dmitri’s rub-out list.

II. The Hotel

As you can see, The Grand Budapest in its heyday was not only one marvelous hotel,  but the movie about it has one hell of a synopsis, and we’re barely halfway through. It’s a formidably intricate and delightfully gamesome tale, packed with grand allusions and lost illusions and fancy little thingumabobs of plot twists. But it’s also sad, melancholy underneath and more and more sad as the story goes on..

The Grand Budapest Hotel, the movie, has many antecedents. On one level, Anderson’s show  tells the kind of “rising young man” story we see in cynical-romantic European tales of  rites of passage like Stendhal’s “The Red and the Black” or Thomas Mann‘s “The Confessions of Felix Krull,” or that splendid underseen Czech film about a rising young waiter, Jiri Menzel‘s I Served the King of England. On another, it’s a Hitchcockian chase-suspense thriller, with two homages to Vertigo and one to The Secret Agent, and another one, God help us, to Topaz. On yet another, it’s an elegantly witty cynical-romantic boudoir comedy of the Lubitsch and Billy Wilder variety — with Wilder’s noir edge sharpening the jokes. On still another, it’s  a Woody Allen comedy pastiche period bauble and a Kubrickian high-style chiller with spooky corridors and snowy runways that recall The Shining.

Then  there’s the Vladimir Nabokov element: the tricky book-within-a-book structure  that suggests the dazzling complexities of  Nabokov’astonishingly annotated “Pale Fire” — and a map of  Zembla, Nabokov’s annotator‘s “distant northern land.” And there’s Stefan Zweig, the masterly, tragic Viennese Jewish writer whom Anderson says (in the credits), inspired the whole movie. Zweig is best known among cinephiles for writing the novel on which Max Ophuls based that great 1948 tragic Hollywood romance Letter from an Unknown Woman. (Ophuls also directed another classic movie romance, called, suggestively, The Earrings of Madame de…). Zweig, an anti-Fascist literary star of the early twentieth century, with literary friends all over Europe,  fled the old world as  WW2 spread, and  committed suicide in 1942, rather than face a possible post-Hitler hell-world. So Zweig, this movie’s godhead, was no comedian. His stories sometimes suggest almost bottomless sorrow, and his character is replicated here in both the old and young author of  The Grand Budapest Hotel, and in M. Gustave.

Intricacies and grand allusions are also embedded in Anderson’s playful visual and dramatic style — which achieves maximum density in dialogue, in characterization (there seem to be hundreds of people in the movie, and many of them seem to have back stories), in music (Alexandre Desplat, abetted by buoyant folk music and a lute with plucked strings piece by violin virtuoso Vivaldi), density in plot and, most of all, in imagery. You can hardly ever absorb everything in an Anderson film frame, even if your eyes are oonstantly wandering — and it you do, Anderson and cimematographer Robert Yeoman are liable to start wandering laterally down some Zubrowkan street or hill themselves, or turning your head with one of there swooping pans, those escalator down-and-up shots or those tight showy zooms

Everyone talks about Anderson’s daffy visuals, of course, mostly because they’re so damned crazy-looking and we’re probably amazed  (and appreciative) that he can keep getting away with this stuff. But it’s the writing and acting that make this Anderson’s best film, and probably his most appealing to audiences — the wonderful sript and the razor-sharp performances by Fiennes and all the others.  This is truly classic American movie writing and acting — in the tradition of To Be or Not To Be and Ninotchka and Unfaithfully Yours and His Girl Friday — and it‘s a kick to see someone even trying to make a movie like this, with this much fizz and sizzle and comic and tragic vocabulary, much less succeeding so well at it.

. In a film by Lubitsch or Wilder or Preston Sturges, it’s the dialogue and how it’s spoken — the zingy rhythms, voluptuous sarcasm, sexy double entendres and deadly irony — that creates most of  what we call their style. Lubitsch’s and Wilder’s films look pretty good, mostly because of people like Wilder’s production designer Alexandre Trauner, but I’ve never detected any unusual or remarkable visual style in Preston Sturges’ work, nor does it really need any.

Anderson, who follows in the footsteps of the three men above — they, as well as Zweig, are his teachers — may purposely use his anachronistic technique because that’s how he can best make movies with these sophisticated, ultra-eccentric, razzle-dazle  scripts,. The people who don’t like his work find his visual style precious and pretentious, and it sometimes  seems precious and pretentious to me too. I could get along without a few of those lateral tracks or sidewise puppet-show compositions. But some of them are beautiful, some are witty, and, at his best — which definitely includes The Grand Budapest Hotel — that seeming artistic eccentricity becomes artistically expressive and entrancingly funny.

III. Comedy and Casablanca

One of the reasons they don’t make romantic comedies, or just plain comedies, like they usd to, is that these days they’re making an entirely different kind of funny movie — one that. many audiences, I suspect, don‘t enjoy as much. . I’m not just talking about the greater sexual frankness today, which actually works very well in the hands of the Judd Apatow group, or Woody Allen, but about the kind of stories mostly being made.  In the old days, say in 1932, when The Grand Budapest Hotel takes place, most  comedies could be about  sex and whoopee sometimes, but they were also often about social collisions, and a lot of them revolved around swindles or con-games or deceptions of some sort.

That’s true of Sturges’ films (especially Hail the Conquering Hero). And Lubitsch’s (especially Trouble in Paradise) and Wilder’s (especially those two late masterpieces, Some Like It Hot and The Apartment). And it’s true of a broad selection of great American movie comedies: from City Lights to Safety Last to The General to Sons of the Desert to A Night at the Opera to Bringing Up Baby to The Bank Dick to The Philadelphia Story to Singin’ in the Rain to Hollywood or Bust to Dr. Strangelove to The Producers to Broadway Danny Rose to even  those paragons of movie virtue  It’s a Wonderful Life and The Bells of St. Mary’s , where Ingrid Bergman‘s nuns and the angel Clarence (Henry Travers) and Heaven itself pull some fast ones, and switcheroos. The Marx Brothers were a bunch of chiselers and double-shufflers, and so were Hope and Crosby — and as for W.C. Fields, he was probably the greatest bunco artist and flim-flam man the screen has ever seen, or ever will see.

The biggest double shuffle of all involved the ways some of these characters and couples disguised the fact that they were were having sex lives, when, to anyone with  brain and a healthy contempt for the Production Code, they so obviously were. There are all kinds of  deceptions in Grand Budapest, and it made me nostalgic to see them. I suspect the movie, which was a roaring success last weekend at the multiplexes of Los Angeles where I saw it (twice),  would be even more popular if it had the sexy-temptress female character Anderson didn’t include, maybe a high-priced Dietrichesque hooker who works the hotel, with a cut for M. Gustave. But, as it is, the main romance is between M. Gustave and Zero

It’s a romance of words, and M. Gustave is a Paganini of wordplay. The best speakers of dialogue in the Grand Budapest Hotel — the two actors who connect most exhilaratingly with Anderson’s beautifully shaped dialogues and monologue — are Fiennes as M. Gustave and Abraham as the older Moustafa. It’s an unalloyed pleasure to listen to them, to hear what these two great actors can do with their lines, the way they savor both the inner meaning and the sly poetry of  the sentences, the way they roll those golden words off their golden theatre-trained tongues — like two great musicians, flawlessly hitting very note and line, yet doing it so casually, so naturally  that they all but envelop you in the verbal beauty and high playfulness of the speeches. The crisp verbosity and velocity of the middle-aged M. Gustave in 1932, and the mellow eloquence of the older Mr.Moustafa in 1968 are perfect correlatives for the way each of them faces the world, conquers high society, makes their fortune and outwits their tormentors.

But the other actors are admirable as well. It may sound excessive , as if I‘d been suckered by the movie‘s con-games myself, but, along with the top two actors,  I liked every single performance in Grand Budapest and I thought three of them — the villains played by Adrien Brody and Willem Dafoe, and the oddly sensitive policeman played by Edward Norton, were almost as good, in their way, as Fiennes and Abraham. It really doesn’t make sense to me to look at this movie, and complain, as several smart critics have,  that Anderson cast too many stars and too many actors he’s used before — as if it were wrong somehow to bring in Bill Murray and Jeff Goldblum and Lea Seydoux and Mathieu Amalric and Tilda Swinton and Jason Schwartzman and Owen Wilson and all the rest, sometimes only for a minute or two — any more than it was wrong for John Ford to assemble that very familiar, very Fordian cast for The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (Wayne, Stewart,Vera Miles, Lee Marvin, Edmond O’Brien (for Tommy Mitchell), Andy Devine, John Qualen, Lee Van Cleef and Strother Martin and all the others), or for Frank Capra to get together that quintessentially Capraesque bunch for It’s a Wonderful Life, or for Warner Brothers to get a similarly spectacular dramatis personae for Casablanca — three movies that, in many ways, owe a big part of their classic status to their great “loaded“ acting ensembles .

Casablanca is a good cross-reference for The Grand Budapest Hotel, which like Michael Curtiz‘s and Howard Koch’s and the Epstein Brothers’ 1942 masterpiece, tells a sometimes deeply sorrowful and painful story of  international conflict and personal turbulence, but puts it under the brisk, crackling  veneer of an international thriller, with comedy and romance and music and lots of jokes. But imagine Casablanca if Rick were killed, and Ilse too, and if Renault and Sam came back to the rubble of Rick’s place…

There’s no doubt at all in my mind that Brody’s Dmitri is a  fascist-to-be, maybe even a fascist already — nor that Norton’s Henckel was dumped. killed or jailed by fascist leaders who finally purged the gentlemanly policeman. Nor that M. Gustave might have been a Jew, as Deputy Kovacs was, and as Stefan Zweig was, and if they hadn’t been killed by Dmitri’s thug and the Nazi-minded police, or escaped to America,  they would have died in the camps, like some of my relatives. That’s the darkness swirling beneath the  bright, crazy, madcap —  playful — surface  of The Grand Budapest Hotel, a movie which is about far more than just zany little characters caught in melodrama and toy-like sets and lateral tracking shots.

IV. The Audience Rises, The Cast Bows

The Grand Budapest Hotel is about trying to be  a human being in a world that turns people into puppets and prisoners and corpses. It’s about trying to survive in a world teetering on oblivion and the brink of apocalypse. It’s about how all we admire most can be destroyed or lost, and how we survive despite it all.  And it’s about little pink and green pastries with saws inside, and how to keep the customers happy and how to remember your friends. It’s about how books and movies can preserve what we love. (And that bastard Jopling will pay, dammit, for killing Kovacs’ cat!) It’s about the barley field where the train stops and the police come aboard. It’s about Stefan Zweig and why he killed himself. It’s about The Earrings of Madame de..and God  bless Max Ophuls , who made us cry,  and Ernst Lubitsch who made us laugh.  It’s about life, turned into a show and it’s about people, turned into players. Wonderful actors with a wonderful narrator, on a wondrous stage in a wondrous hotel.

But it’s over now. Lights up. M. Gustave, take a bow. Mr. Moustafa, embrace your friend.  Dmitri, smile as they boo you. The entire ensemble bow and smile — and wave to the cheap seats. They‘re the ones, remember, who mostly can’t escape their fates.  Applause. Whistles. Bravos. Cue the balalaika. Curtain.