Movie Reviews: Boarding Gate, Run Fat Boy Run, Priceless

 JUST ADD WATER There’s really only one reason to check out Just Add Water, and it’s Dylan Walsh’s wistful, smiling-through-the-melancholy performance as Ray, a man so defeated by life that he can no longer muster any resistance to the daily humiliations he suffers at home and at his blue-collar job. After discovering duplicity in his own home, Ray shakes off the doldrums, goes after the woman of his dreams and finally stands up to the Neanderthal teen bullies in his neighborhood. Unfortunately, bracketing Walsh’s thoughtful performance is a depiction of small-town, working-class life that swims in both formulaic indie-flick irony and Hollywood condescension. Jonah (Superbad) Hill’s pause-laden, deadpan turn as Walsh’s virginal/depressed teen son — a minor variation on Hill’s patented performing style — is the embodiment of writer-director Hart Bochner’s perspective on his subject matter. Cheap, familiar shots at the diet, wardrobe and whiled-away days of the movie’s largely poor, white characters are balanced by thick slabs of sentimentality, especially in the subplot featuring the black ho with the ebonic name. Walsh nearly redeems the whole thing: His eyes flicker with an intelligence that isn’t in the script, and he graces his character with layers of inner life in a film that coasts on surfaces. (Sunset 5) (Ernest Hardy)

 GO  PARTITION British Columbia stands in for the Punjab, northern India, in all but a few sequences of Partition, a surprisingly effective Canadian production about a star-crossed romance between a staunch Sikh farmer (Jimi Mistry, from The Mystic Masseur) and a terrified, but surprisingly resilient, Muslim refugee (Smallville’s Kristen Kreuk) in the period of horror that followed Indian independence and the creation of Pakistan. The movie’s Romeo and Juliet approach is hardly novel: Recent Bollywood treatments include Yash Chopra’s earnest Veer-Zara (2004) and the brawny Punjabi action pulp of the Sonny Deol vehicle Gaddar: A Love Story (2001). Partition doesn’t add many new ideas to the mix, but the deep colors and complex textures supplied by Indian-born cinematographer-turned-director Vic Sarin seem to embody the intensity of his boyhood memories, and the movie avoids both sentimentality and cynicism. In a small supporting role as a ferocious anti-Muslim Sikh whose hatred begins to fall away, Irfan Khan (The Namesake) gives the sort of effortlessly authentic performance that can make the entire world of a movie feel more plausible. (Fallbrook 7) (David Chute)

Magnet Releasing

Argento flashes her come-hither stare.

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More About

• Larry Bloch
• Grace Lee
• Asia Argento
• Sikhism
• Religion

 PRAYING WITH LIOR This doc is a hardcore tearjerker; its subject is a boy with Down syndrome preparing for his bar mitzvah. Lior Liebling enjoys leading others in prayer so much that he is known as “The Little Rebbe.” His mother died of breast cancer when he was 6, and director Ilana Trachtman milks the boy’s honest, simple sorrow for all it’s worth. Trachtman’s movie is not technically accomplished, but it’s redeemed by the deliciously complex, practically Balzac-ian family at its center. Lior’s father is a prominent rabbi who demands a great deal from Lior even as he adores him. Stepmother Lynne is devoted to Lior, but her place among the Lieblings seems precarious and hard-won. Lior’s siblings are thoughtful and frank about the challenges of living with their brother and longing for their mother. Everyone still reels from the loss of Devorah, whose fierce love for both her children and her religion dominates the film, almost against the family’s will. I would have liked to see Trachtman focus more on these dynamics and less on Lior’s sunny, prayerful disposition. He is undoubtedly a charmer, but Trachtman’s prodding, leading questions make the endeavor distinctly uncomfortable. At times, the film dances perilously close to painting him as a holy fool, rather than a boy who loves to pray and lives to please. (Music Hall; Town Center 5) (Julia Wallace)

 PRICELESS Priceless begins as standard, unconvincing, assembly-line French farce and ends as a cop-out, feel-good rom-com. In between, it develops into something considerably more interesting. Audrey Tautou slinks off Amélie’s ghost as the unrepentant gold digger Irene — waif-thin and tits out — pissed that her partner/benefactor Jacques (Vernon Dobtcheff) has fallen asleep drunk on her birthday. In the bar, she meets Jean (Gad Elmaleh) — splayed out on the couch, he seizes the opportunity to seem like a rich layabout rather than a bartender. A series of unconvincing events later, Jacques discovers Irene’s tryst with Jean, and then Irene discovers Jean’s own poverty. Jean ditches his job to follow Irene to Nice, allowing her to bleed him dry — for love on his part, revenge on hers — before he unexpectedly becomes a gigolo for Madeleine (Marie-Christine Adam), a widow no less mercenary and exploitative than Irene’s series of men. Now colleagues in sexual survivalism, Tautou and Elmaleh give the lengthy middle passage a rancid fascination: Unlike American formula romances, which simply assume that glamour and riches come with the territory, co-writer/director Pierre Salvadori makes explicit how gold digging undermines both parties. Then everyone lives happily ever after regardless, which is even more cynical. (ArcLight Hollywood; The Land­mark; Playhouse 7; Town Center 5) (Vadim Rizov)