Just Memorable

Paul Giamatti is the anti-pretty-boy movie star: Balding, exophthalmic, slightly bowed and flabby, he specializes in curmudgeons — the garrulous oenophile in “Sideways”; the pessimist in “American Splendor”; the fussy, self-aggrandizing, intellectual John Adams. But he can also do tender, caring. Why else would Abigail Adams (especially as portrayed by a luminous Laura Linney in the HBO series) love and respect him so much? So now comes Giamatti as Barney Panofsky: garrulous, aggressive, obsessive, Rabelaisian, bullying, adulterous; yet tender, loving, paternal, generous. And, oh, the wonder of wigs and makeup, youthfully good-looking in the early part of “Barney’s Version,” the film from Mordecai Richler’s last novel. Richler was born in the same Montreal Jewish neighborhood as Saul Bellow and Leonard Cohen. Often compared to both — though why, one wonders, since Richler never tamed his words into fully satisfying narratives or poems and lyrics, as they did. Instead, Richler jammed his contradictory antagonisms toward fellow Jews and anti-Semitism and Quebec separatism into episodic novels such as “The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz” and the valedictory “Barney.” We follow Barney through sunlit, idyllic and idle years as a young man in Rome (Paris in the novel, but Rome is sunnier and more open for cameras: all those piazzas), then three marriages and three decades. We meet his Roman friends — especially Boogie (Scott Speedman) — and his first wife who tricks him to the altar; then his second wife (Minnie Driver, in a dynamite, over-the-top Jewish princess impersonation, complete with a mordantly funny approach to pre-sex hygiene); and finally wife three (the elegant, controlled, radiant Rosamund Pike), whom he meets — and pursues — at his second wedding. Barney lives life big, selfishly. He bullies the crew of the wildly successful soap opera he returns from Europe to produce, misses important occasions while watching hockey in a sports bar, drinks to excess and smokes huge cigars almost continuously. His invective is near abusive.Yet with his father (Dustin Hoffman, acting quietly, charmingly, superbly) or wife three, he is subdued, caring. The conceit of the novel and movie is, of course, a life remembered as Barney would have it. Even the murder mystery that suddenly occurs more than halfway into the film is seen through both unfriendly police eyes and Barney’s softer, more sympathetic vision. Its resolution and the final sad end of Barney are crammed into a confusing, grim, but deeply touching finale saved from bathos by Pike’s final farewell to her husband and by — wonderful surprise — Cohen’s “Dance Me to the End of Love.” Giamatti’s performance is a tour de force. From golden carefree youth to middle-aged, lonely sick man, Giamatti is charismatic and mesmerizing. (No wonder he won a Golden Globe.) While his Barney may be more humane, more charming than the Barney Richler conceived, he is what makes an often inchoate, confusing movie worth seeing and even memorable. “Barney’s Version” is in Great Barrington, MA. It may come to The Moviehouse in Millerton. It is rated R for language, some sex.