State of Play

“The Truth? You can’t handle the truth.” That’s what Marine Colonel Nathan Jessep (Jack Nicholson) snarls at Lieutenant Danny Kaffey (Tom Cruise) in “A Few Good Men.” Jessep’s viperous arrogance makes him hateful but, in the end, he is right. The truth is that that he ordered a Code Red, the murder of a sub-par soldier to safeguard his unit’s espirit de corps. It is definitely not something we can handle.

“State of Play” is a perfect storm of similar truths in politics. I went seeking a film with the heft and passion of “All the President’s Men,” the 1976 Hoffman-Redford film chronicling Bernstein and Woodward’s exposure of the Watergate break-ins which eventually led to Richard Nixon’s resignation as president. But what I got was something closer to a top 40 version of same: investigative journalism all dressed up as a mildly quirky, entertaining detective story that just happens to be about political corruption.

The film starts with a pretty young woman throwing herself in front of an on-coming DC Metro train during rush hour. The media pile on to an official police statement that it’s a suicide. But an aging, curmudgeonly ace reporter at the Washington Post, Cal McAffrey (Russell Crowe), sniffs foul play. He spends the rest of the film sifting through clues that eventually lead him, quite accidentally, to expose a quasi-military take over of the United States. I’m not sure, given the current state of our nation, why anyone would want to stage a coup and take on all that debt. Especially since they could get all the money, power and influence they could ever want just by gaming the banking system or the electric grid. Who knows, maybe they intended it as a mercy killing.

McAffrey is a Columbo-type character, all rumpled and seemingly out to lunch, who has the occasional Zen moment that pierces the opaque heart of plot darkness. Crowe lumbers through this movie like an amiable circus bear, impervious to the barriers of protocol and intimidation, surprisingly gentle despite his bulk.

He’s an old-fashioned man’s man in the John Wayne tradition, Crowe is. Like the heavyweight champion Jim Braddock he portrayed in Ron Howard’s sappy but affecting “Cinderella Man,” he’s a guy who likes to fight; taking a punch only makes it more interesting. In this film he plays against his type and never actually hits anyone, which is refreshing even as I involuntarily flinch every time he lifts his hand. He’s basically a gladiator without a sword in this film, an honest guy in a dishonest world who has to do dishonest things from time to time to keep the idea of honesty alive for himself and. who knows, Western civilization. This is Bogie’s old haunt, the cleft in the rock where Norman Rockwellesque ideas about community take shelter from Kafkaesque ideas about an arch, godless universe. Crowe pulls this trick off fairly well, notching up the non-violent cop character he played in “American Gangster.” Gotta love his new found plowshares.

Ben Affleck plays a popular US congressman, Stephen Collins, who was having an affair with the woman who was killed by the metro at the beginning of the film. Cal and Stephen are former college roommates and still best buddies. Much of the truth we can’t handle either starts or ends here. The story works despite another embarrassing performance by Ben in his quest to become a serious actor. The guy looks like he just rolled off the assembly line at U.S. Robotics, every facial gesture and movement technically accurate but somehow creepy. It was the same in “Hollywoodland,” where he portrayed George Reeves, early TV’s Superman. Maybe he’s taking his cues from “Barry Lyndon,” Stanley Kubric’s lavish, perverse exercise in taking the motion out of motion pictures.

Of all the Ben Affleck films I’ve seen, I liked him best in ”Good Will Hunting” with alternating doses of wise guy swagger and frightened kid vulnerability. There were odd, welcome little flashes of this guy from Southie in “State,” but I didn’t think they worked for US Congressman. It seemed to me that Ben was over his head, trying too hard to touch bottom.

Helen Mirren plays Cameron Lynne, Cal’s boss at the Washington Post, with the gravitas of the captain of the Titanic. She knows that the Internet and Google will soon sink the Post and most newspapers, and doesn’t quite know how to fight back without lowering the paper’s standards. This was also a truth I did not want to handle.

The Post, after all, was the paper that courageously pursued Richard Nixon and his henchmen through the snares and thickets of Watergate, backing brash, inexperienced young reporters against high-level government officials. Watergate would still just be a swanky address on the Potomac without the Post.

While this film certainly nods in the direction of these Fifth Estate giants, it’s about newshounds, not crusaders for justice. I suppose it’s a sign of the times that our heroes are not outraged, personally or morally, by the high-level crimes they expose. In the end, they are just doing their job: digging up what’s hidden and pantingly plopping it down at our feet. Alas, this strikes me as the most damaging coup of all.

The Great Buck Howard

There’s a scene in “Being John Malkovich” where every character in a crowded restaurant has John Malkovich’s face: the maitre’d, all the diners, male and female, the wait staff. Even the lounge lizard draped seductively across the piano wears the Malkovichian puss. I took it as a surreal montage of one man’s ability to shape-shift right in plain sight.

“The Great Buck Howard” is also a spoof built around John Malkovich but this one shrinks the vast array of characters in Malkovich’s range and pours them into one rather shallow vessel, the aging mentalist Buck Howard.

Buck is an entertainment dinosaur relentlessly stalking his audience in the faded former vaudeville theaters of small market cities. He is driven by the need to drink a daily dose of love from his remaining fans although he seems dismissive of those few individuals who shower him with their admiration. Without apparent friends or family, this hallow-eyed man crafts his decades old illusions with the unvarying solemnity of Levitical rites. He might be offering up sacrifices to the unseen forces which give him his ESP-like powers, the source of his belief that he is, in fact, great. He assiduously filters out anything, like half-empty theaters in seldom remembered towns, which might cast doubt over this self-talk, his greatest illusion.

The honorific ‘great’ was bestowed on Buck by Johnny Carson during the late host’s reign as the Pope of early late night television. Buck, a 61 time guest on the show, never caught a whiff of the ironic patina Carson lacquered onto the title. Was he so dazzled by the glow of the Hollywood Grail plopped onto his lap that he really believed he possessed powers and abilities far beyond those of mortal men? Or did Johnny just affirm what he alone had always known?

Decades after his 15 minutes of fame, Buck still believes what everyone else takes as a goof. He never stops talking about the new killer illusion he’s working on, his ticket back to the mountain top. It certainly appears like he’s whistling a happy tune while Godot dallies. But, in the end, Buck actually delivers his grand illusion with surprising results.

I liked this modestly entertaining film best when it broke through its downbeat, deadpan, put-on style and revealed the man behind the wizard behind the curtain. There are several scenes where the serio-comic Buck completes one of his stage illusions and then seamlessly steps out of the carapace of his act like a cicada molting its shell. He stands before us all gooey and unformed, a crooked boyish smile snaking across his face as he says “Isn’t that wild?” as if he can’t believe the amazing thing that has just happened. It is his personal fountain of youth, a magical place covered up and forgotten, like the Mayan temples swallowed whole by the tropical jungle. This was a great piece of acting because it revealed a touching and forgotten part of Buck without ever breaking the film’s scuffling, kitschy tone.

Watching this great actor strut and fret on the constrained stage of the illusionist's personality was a special treat. He played the role like a jazz trumpeter, muting down his sensitivity, intelligence and explosiveness to play a simpler song. He still hits all his notes -- Buck is fragile and tough, polite and nasty, cunning and slightly retarded – but it’s all done in miniature, pianissimo. There are no Sunday school polite, extremely smart serial killers lurking here, no dangerous liaisons, no lines of fire. Buck Howard may be testy, pompous and self-absorbed but he is not Ted Bundy. He's just there to entertain us and himself, and happy are we for the comic relief.

Duplicity

This is an M.C. Escher kind of flick: your mind fits the pieces together a certain way and then there’s an ah-ha moment where another set of pieces appears unbidden out of nowhere. “Duplicity” uses a similar strategy to spin, tangle and resolve a middling, mish-mosh of a tale about two CIA agents who quit the service to make some real money by stealing the formula for curing baldness. No question the film delivers on its title. This viewer felt strapped into a kayak slicing deftly through the rapids of what’s what? and who’s who? until my internal compass got washed overboard, true north and all.

Our protagonists, played by Clive Owen and Julia Roberts, are street smart, terminally suspicious former agents. After the requisite turf pissing contests, they notice that they are perfect fencing partners in the art of barbed repartee, the prelude to a kiss in the action/adventure genre. There are some intelligent, sharp-edged exchanges between them that evoked Tracey and Hepburn. This was arguably the high point of the film for me, although Julia was leaden in her role, not sleek, and the chemistry with Clive seemed scripted, not stirred.

Eventually, the agents fall in love as madly as two people can who suspect that the other one is just gaming them for some unknown objective. Mistrust and/or ambition tear them apart, and then longing and/or exhaustion bring them back together. The thought crossed my mind that maybe they are both being conned as part of a larger game that neither of them knows about. Or maybe that’s just what director Tony Gilroy (“Michael Clayton”) wants us to think. And so it goes.

On the one hand, it’s comforting to know that secret agents are as vulnerable and bumbling as the rest of us in the clandestine affairs of the heart. On the other hand, it’s a little scary to know that those who once defended our nation from the bad guys are pretty easily tripped up by their own emotions. Where’s James Bond when we really need him? Nothing fazed Bond, not men with gold fingers or women with pussy galore. He lived in an aura of chic, technological invincibility, never shaken or stirred by fear or love. “Duplicity” is a kind of white flag waved at the Bond era and its triumphalist mythology. Alas, them days is gone.

The premise that secret agents jump from a team fighting for the survival of Western civilization to one seeking to make obscene profits by growing hair on busy streets is, I hope, absurd and sad enough to qualify as satire. Paul Giamatti, who plays the CEO of the company with the new product, does a fine caricature of an exuberantly amoral CEO, a glib, well-dressed huckster like Adam Eckhardt in “Thank You for Not Smoking.” Giamatti’s character is almost sexually aroused about the idea of making a killing on a product that (like all previous baldness cures) won’t actually work. But he’s most passionate about sticking it to his arch corporate rival (played with understated intensity by the always excellent Tom Wilkinson) whom he fears will get to market with the same product before he does. And so it goes.

I think part of the problem with “Duplicity” was that it wasn’t sure whether it was a social satire or a spy story or a love story, so it tried to be all three at once and didn’t have the narrative chops to keep it all in focus. It wasn’t the games within games that got me, or the duplicity either. It just wasn’t done very well. I wanted something I could sink my teeth into and this was soup. I am left somehow knowing that the world will not end in a bang or a whimper but in duplicity. Of course, if it’s done well, we won’t even know it happened.

The Miracle of Grain

Columbia Pictures founder Harry Cohn did not manage his studio by the seat of his pants. No one ever saw him fly by them either. But legend has it that his tushee was the decider on whether to release a movie. Too cheeky a response meant no go.

The Secret of Grain, a 2007 film written and directed by Abdel Kechiche, got a five cheek rating from me, which means I bailed at the 60 minute mark with 90 still on the clock. Many critics, including the usually reliable Roger Ebert, have hailed this film as a gem, however flawed. For me, the story telling was fatally flawed and, sorry, but I don’t see a gem.

That said, I very much liked the idea of seeing a heartfelt story about the trials of being a Muslim of North African origin in contemporary France (Kechiche’s family is from Tunisia). We Americans don’t get much about the humanity of Islamic people these days, let alone sympathetic portrayals of their struggle to live. It was a welcome respite from the ubiquitous post-9/11 jihadist cartoon characters who bedevil our society since the Russians got capitalism.

The hero of the story is Slimane Beiji (Habib Boufares), a North African immigrant to France. Early on, he is laid off from his construction job of 35 years because he is not productive enough for his profit-driven bosses.

We sense Beiji is crushed by his loss but there’s no place on his beautifully sad, deeply lined face for any more suffering to register. We get that he will continue to stoically endure but the game’s over for him even though the final out has not been recorded. I felt sympathy for Beiji and all immigrants swimming upstream in an alien culture.

At this point, the plot stopped moving forward and slipped into a long series of slow, low-impact, overly long takes. The director made a choice to let the story unfold randomly and organically as life does and I get that. It’s one of the things that I love about deeply personal, hand-made films. But sometimes, as with Grain, I get lost with this technique and lose the emotional pulse of the story, never a good thing. And, suddenly, there I was at 2.5 cheeks and numbing out.

I hoped for renewed engagement when the focus finally shifted to Slimane’s extended family. Surprisingly, the patriarch of the clan isn’t at the center of their world. Mostly, he’s not there, almost as if he was already dead, a respected memory. He does not join dozens of family members gathering at his ex-wife’s house for the matriarch’s legendary couscous, perhaps the only Tunisian custom which has survived the family’s assimilation. This dish is kvelled over by all the adults at the table in the same way that Jews wax poetic about mom’s brisket or chicken soup, love you can eat, the last refuge of those caught in the ebb tide between cultures.

Food has given us a lot of great films like The Big Night, Mostly Marta and Babette’s Feast. Even not so great food-based films like Tortilla Soup work because they dish up the comforts of hearth and home, and how can you miss with that?

Well, for starters, by using a hand-held camera for 15-20 minutes without a break. This odd, extended ultra-close up technique at the couscous lovefest gave the director a way to make us feel physically present at the meal, no question about that. But he left me embedded there without making me feel like a guest. I felt lost again, unable to understand who was who and how things fit together, and why I should care.

The Secret of Grain had jumped with both feet from its stark, singular focus on Slimane to a boisterous multi-generational family dinner scene. It felt like a tropical rain storm dropping suddenly from a leaden sky with astonishing force, a refreshing change at first which quickly flooded the streets. And this is when I gave up and left the theater.

Sounds cranky, I know, but that was my experience. By contrast, take Jonathan Demme’s Rachel Getting Married, for example. This was also a meandering tale with a cast of dozens of extended family members and friends. Demme, also like Kechiche, puts viewers in the extremely up-close and personal mode too many times, often around food. But it wasn’t long before I found his technique engaging and never quite got there with Kechiche.

There are a couple of reasons for this. Demme quickly got his viewers involved with the main characters and their dramatic conflicts. When he used ultra close-ups, they were part of a creative mixture of shots and set-ups, and the editing had a crisp rhythm which gave shape to the blur of so many quick impressions.

Kechiche has said that he admires Yasujiro Ozu, the great Japanese director who made a series of elegant black and white films in the 40’s and 50’s (Early Summer, Late Autumn, et.al) about the impact of modernity on a traditional family. I can see where Kechiche works similarly sympathetic emotional territory in his film, and his deliberately spare, low-drama style of story telling also echoes Ozu.

But I don‘t think this guy is as skilled an artist, and he doesn’t use his cinematic tools as effectively. Ozu’s films are a series full of beautiful, strategically composed shots, each designed to awaken or refresh the viewer’s perceptual palette and to guide him or her into the emotional content of the next scene. The Secret of Grain just isn’t built this way, not for me, anyway.

While stuff certainly happens in Grain, and some of it’s great, for me there never was a substantive dramatic there there. In some ways this film felt like the work of a gifted grad student at NYU film school, perhaps a little too in love with what he’s shot to make cuts that would make the film more accessible. Look, he’s an artist, and he needs to do what he is compelled to do. That’s what enriches cinema and the world. I just don’t think Grain was very good film making.

Knowing

The film Knowing is about precognition of terrible events, but not, alas, its own production. Hollywood has packaged director Alex Proyas’ new offering as a sci-fi film because stuff happens that cannot be explained by science. But the only real sci-fi bona fides this film can claim are the coat tails of the director’s 2004 box office bonanza, I, Robot (2004). Knowing is more of a thriller/mystery/drama/action picture with some sci-fi window dressing, a showcase for yet another of Nicholas Cage’s earnest, iconic performances. I find it creepy to witness another episode in Nicky’s serial murder of the talent, agile freshness and promise he showed in films like When Peggy Sue Got Married, Moonstruck and Raising Arizona. What a loss; he was a great actor.

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A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away … science fiction films relied on the viewer’s imagination more than traditional story telling elements like character development and plausible plots. That’s one of the things that made them uniquely compelling to the initiated and pathetic escapism to those who didn’t have the chops to get off-world on their own. Contemporary sci-fi takes the sigh out of science fiction by doing all the imagining for the viewer. Chalk it up to the wow factor of computer generated special effects. Yes, some of this stuff is truly awesome (and the plane crash in Knowing is truly spectacular) but I find it upsetting that hundreds of millions of dollars are spent every year on making hi-def spectacles out of horrible explosions and crashes. What is this hunger for catastrophic destruction that brings hordes of people to mediocre films like Knowing? Actors have become props, mere set-ups, for the special effects that are the true stars in these films. That’s the most sci-fi thing about them, and the scariest.

Back in the day, the best pre-special effects sci-fi films, like The Day the Earth Stood Still (1952), used the arrival of superior alien intelligence on earth as a foil to prod our species along the evolutionary gyre. Kubric’s 2001 (1968) flipped the idea by taking human beings off-world in search of alien intelligence. The story in these superb films and their progeny [Alien (1979), Blade Runner (1982) and Terminator (1984) to name a few] is built by laying high entertainment value over a fully realized alternative world which quietly meditates on the quirks and perks of our species. How and whether we’ll survive evolution’s crap shoot is the unspoken subtext.

Knowing is a different breed entirely, part of a recent run of guilt-free apocalyptic movies where the earth dies but it’s not our fault. Yes, our cavalier abuse of mother earth has mucked up the ecosystem pretty good but ultimately it won’t be the smoking gun of global immolation and human extinction.Old Sol’s erratic behavior is the bad guy in Knowing, not greenhouse gases. Could happen, of course. That's the bad news. The good news is that we can go back to polluting as much as we want because, hey, the really big decisions are made in another galaxy, far, far away.

Two Lovers

30 something Leonard Kraditor (Joaquin Phoenix) is trudging along the crowded sidewalks of Brighton Beach, delivering dry cleaning from his family’s store. Then, astride a pier by the bay, he suddenly climbs over the railing and drops into the sea, plummeting downward with express elevator speed. Hitting bottom, he bounces back up toward the glint of surface light. He scurries away from the people who pull him out of the water, shoulders hunched like gargoyle wings. He reminded me of furtive, haunted Peter Lorre but also John Belusi, the samurai stunt pilot. I wasn’t sure what to think.

As the film unfolds, we learn that the force which drove Leonard off the pier, ironically and tragically, is rooted in the good life his Holocaust-surviving parents have worked so hard to tee up for him. He lives with them now in film time because he’s recovering after “hurting himself” (there are puncture wound scars on his forearms) after his fiancee ended their relationship.

Ruth, Leonard’s mother (the ever classy Isabella Rossellini), is the archetypal Jewish mom: a hygiene queen, totally devoted to her son but also compulsively nosey. She’s the kind of gal who gets down on her knees to look under Leonard’s door to see what he’s up to at night, just for his own good. Reuben, his father (Moni Moshonov), is a gentle, sweet natured man who gently and sweetly wheedles Leonard every day to come into the family business and finally make something of himself.

Leonard loves his parents and is nice enough to gently deflect their ceaseless meddling in his affairs rather than tell them to take a hike. But, to be fair, he doesn’t take it upon himself to take a hike either. His truth is that he doesn’t want to be where he is but doesn’t know where else to go. He is an eternal stranger in lands that are all too familiar.

And so the stage is set for this suicidal but reasonably nice Jewish boy from Brighton to meet Sandra (Vinessa Shaw), a nice Jewish girl from the ‘hood. She’s pleasing enough to the eye but doesn’t turn him on. Still, here’s a woman of child-bearing age from a well-off family who is attracted to him and, perhaps more importantly, is not his mother. Unfortunately, she is also officially pre-approved by his parents and this automatically fogs the window of any real feelings Leonard might have for her.

Enter salvation: a silky blond shiksa named Michelle (Gwyneth Paltrow), who just happens to live almost next door. Unfussy, easy going, non-judgmental, Michelle is the perfect antidote for the over-determined, hot house world of Jewish material world ambition. She’s the moral equivalent of olam ha ba, the promised messianic world where Jews finally get to kick back and enjoy themselves like everyone else.

Poor love starved Leonard dives into the promise of happily ever after with Michelle in the same way he jumped over the side of the pier, a lost soul seeking wholeness through losing the pieces of himself that don‘t play nicely together. But Michelle thinks of him as a brother, not a lover, and she clings to her love for Ron (Elias Koteas), a married man who doesn’t seem to be in a hurry to leave his wife for Michelle.

Suffice it to say that the plot works itself out with some bright spots along the way. Paltrow plays Michelle with remarkable sensual ease, beautiful inside and out, as they say.She’s fun to watch, and I think that will hold up even for non-Jewish men and women.

Phoenix’s best scene is with Michelle at a crowded dance club. While she gyrates obliviously, arms raised above her head, he buries his face in her hair, inhaling her with an animal intensity right up there with Brando’s “Stella” from A Streetcar named Desire.Truly great acting.

Films like Marty, Rebel Without a Cause and Lost in Yonkers, among many others, reenact the struggles of sons or daughters to get free of the rules and regs of well-meaning but over-protective parents. Some, like The Graduate, do it with wit, others, like The Chosen, do it with soul. This film, written and directed by James Gray (We Own the Night, Little Odessa), does it with leftovers, making little new of old hash.

Happy Go Lucky

Happy Go Lucky bursts onto the screen, elbowing the credits to the side. It opens with tracking shots of a long-skirted young woman riding a bicycle through labyrinthine contemporary London, her eyes bouncing off the built environment like a sliver of sunlight in a dark forest. She’s an adult experiencing the child's pure delight of balancing on rolling wheels, the terrestrial creature’s close encounter with flight.

Still in the credits, the woman parks her bike, runs an errand and returns to find her bike boosted. After peering quizzically up street and down, as most of us would, her lower lip cantilevers out to the right and the first of a series of self-amused wisecracks bubble out of her mouth. If she feels sad or angry at having her bike ripped off, we never know it. It’s not clear whether she does either. Some Alice in Wonderland process kicks in for her, draining gravity from trouble so it seems absurd or inconsequential. She literally skips away from the scene of the crime as if she is still astride the now phantom two wheeler.

Her name is Pauline but everyone calls her Poppy. She inhabits the psychological realm somewhere north of Eliza Doolittle’s winning cheek and south of Mary Poppins’ logical positivism, wardrobe courtesy of Annie Hall. In the ‘60’s she would have been Georgy Girl or a flower child dancing in the moon shadows. Here she’s a 30 year old primary school teacher, played by the excellent Sally Hawkins, who comes across as a more tomboyish Ann Hathaway with her appealing, wide-eyed effervescence.

Outside school, Poppy has a very cheeky but affectionate relationship with almost everyone, but her connection with Zoe (Alexis Zegerman), her roommate, is built on firmer foundations of understanding and trust. (Initially, I thought Zoe, who is about Poppy’s age but looks older, was Poppy’s mother) Poppy’s defiantly acerbic sister and another female friend studying to be a lawyer round out Poppy’s inner circle. The gals are all single and in varying stages of coping with that. Except for Poppy, none are fulfilled in their work. As a group, they’re tight in the way the boys were in Diner, townies who have lost the will to move on but not yet the dream.

The camera right floats in the middle of the action during the several Ya-Ya Sisterhood scenes early in the film. It feels almost like a documentary about female bonding. I felt a bit voyeuristic, like I wasn’t supposed to be there, but thought that women would probably love these scenes. My wife Myrna told me that she thought it looked like a man trying to show what womens' intimacy was like. You’d think Mars would already know that about Venus. My favorite segment was where the ladies dissolve repeatedly in hysterical laughter while comparing the size, shape and appeal of each other’s breasts. To be honest, it had never occurred to me before that tits were funny. It’s a life changing experience to be sure, but here, at last, I think modernity has gone too far.

In the classroom Poppy has a real enthusiasm for educating her students and a talent for getting down with them. This is where she lives most fully, the boundaries between adult and child vanishing into freedom. One scene has her strutting around her class room in a home-made chicken mask, flapping her wings and crowing, reveling in the activity well beyond the statute of limitations for even playful adults. For Poppy the lessons about how the world works are really lessons in how to be happy in the world. She transforms the most mundane instruction, such as the commuting distances for migratory birds, into odes to wonder and joy. And what an ode her performance is to teachers, those dedicated, creative, loving folks who teach our young people to be human beings!

Ultimately, alas, Poppy encounters people who aren’t so happy go lucky. The film pivots on a scene when she sees one of her students angrily wrestling another boy to the ground. Here, for the first time in the film, Poppy is not able to bubble, charm or fix this bump in the grind of human existence, the indelible rites of competition, jealousy and anger.

Mike Leigh’s narrative arc for the subsequent education of Ms. Poppy was a tush-squirmer for me. There’s something about his diffusive, almost watery style that kept me from engaging enough to suspend disbelief. That said, the scenes with her driving instructor (Eddie Marson), alternately a raging lunatic and a buttoned-down Brit, were quite vivid, both Monty Python funny and Taxi Driver scary. I was truly on edge, dreading that this lovely, totally harmless woman-child would be savagely attacked and/or brutalized by this man.

Ditto Poppy’s attempts, in a back alley way after midnight, to reach out to a very large, verbally dexterous and vaguely dangerous homeless man (Trevor Cooper, who looked to me like Stanley Kubric doing a spoof on Invasion of the Body Snatchers).

In the end, Mike Leigh takes pains to make the medicine go gently down poor Poppy’s throat. She learns that she can’t make everyone happy and doesn’t have to. And, lo, a very nice guy shows up who adores her just the way she is. The film ends with a beautiful aerial zoom out of Poppy and Zoe in a row boat on a summer lake. Poppy is talking to her new beau on her cell phone, giggly and squealing as ever, a silly Zen master of the eternal moment no matter what form it takes.