Barney's Version (2010) (Monday, February 21, 2011) (184)

In a thousand years when future people look back at the first century or so of feature films, they will undoubtedly notice a group of movies that start out bad and add to them some of the worst bad hair imaginable. On top of Jesse Eisenberg's unforgivable plastic payas in Holy Rollers and John Travolta's dirty sausage dreadlocks in Battlefield Earth, Paul Giamatti's shower-drain cake hair in Barney's Version will rank as the worst bad hair in film history. More than an animal, this piece looks like roadkill that's been festering and bleeding for a week on the pavement. It's so silly it becomes distracting - but that's probably a good thing because while it's onscreen it's far and away the most likable thing about the movie. This film is worst than the terrible rubber wig its star wears through the first half.

This movie, based on a book by Modechai Richler (which I've never read), is about Barney Panofsky (Paul Giamatti), a piece of shit of a man who lives his whole life as a child. Well, that's being a bit too mean, probably. As the film opens, Barney is a sad divorced man living in Montreal in fabulous wealth. He's the producer of a hit soap opera, has two college-age kids and an ex-wife living in New York. A police officer tracks him down at his local pub and shows him the book he's written, a tell-all about how Barney killed his best friend 30 years earlier. We then see a flashback to when Barney and his friend, Boogie (Scott Speedman), were living in Rome in the 1970s.

Basically they were drunk and avoiding growing up. Boogie was a novelist and Barney was futzing around drinking and waiting to begin his life back in Canada. When he does move back, he continues to be drunk all the time, marries a rich Jewish woman (Minnie Driver, who apparently is incapable of playing an English woman), loves his drunk father (Dustin Hoffman), and hates his life. At his wedding, however, he meets another woman, Miriam (Rosamund Pike) and falls madly in love with her. He then needs to get out of his horrible marriage and convince Miriam to marry him. He does this and then lives happily ever after... except that he still behaves eternally like a putz.

There's a thing with Boogie going missing (this is, anticlimactically, what the police officer was referring to in the first scene), a thing with him being a constant disappointment to Miriam and his kids, a thing with Miriam falling for their good looking neighbor Blair (Bruce Greenwood) and then a thing about Barney getting early-onset Alzheimer's.

I guess Alzheimer's is some sacred cow these days and it totally untouchable as a topic to discuss, but I have to say that I didn't give a crap about this part of the story. It just felt like a hat on the top of a story with already too many hats. The story moves along at such a glacial pace, the two hours of the run feel like 12. By the time we get to Barney forgetting stuff, I already thoroughly hate him to his core. He's a total asshole and undeveloped child of a man who can't put his toys away and is always crying about not getting a second helping of cake.

The script, adapted by Michael Konyves (a veteran of made-for-TV sci-fi junk, it seems), is so terrible you never really identify with anyone. Well, that's not totally true: you identify with anyone who is not Barney - or anyone onscreen fighting against Barney, which happens in every scene. I think this is not supposed to be what we are supposed to feel, though. I think we are supposed to feel like Barney is an anti-hero, a rebel hero, and we're supposed to feel some sort of tremendous pathos when he fall victim to old age and dementia. But it doesn't work that way. His situation becomes pitiful, clearly, but he's such a jerk, it's hard to feel bad for him.

Director Richard J. Lewis (a veteran of made-for-TV junk) gets so lost in the structure of the story that we forget what the hell the movie is about. The format begins with flashbacks to Barney's earlier days living hard as a younger man intercut with moments from the present where he feels bad for himself. It seems that this is done so we can explore the suggestion (from the cop) that he killed Boogie. But halfway through the film we discover that he didn't kill Boogie and that the film really isn't about a murder mystery (as we had thought), but just a story of this badly behaving man. We continue to get flashbacks, though, which seems rather silly and unnecessary by this point. A more chronological timeline would have worked much better for the film - and the thing with the cop, which feels like it was once a bigger element that was mostly cut out in editing, should have been lost altogether.

Paul Giamatti's performance is sleek and showy and he's gotten attention for it form several places (including a Golden Globe nomination). I guess it's the best thing in the movie, but that's not saying much. There was a chair in one shot that just sat there and didn't do anything and that was probably the second best thing in the film. Oh - and of course there was the amazingly terrible hair, which was probably better than the chair and Giamatti's performance. What a mess of a movie!

Stars: .5 of 4