Film Reviews: Get Smart, Guy Maddin's My Winnipeg

BRICK LANE Bracket the fact that it’s an adaptation of Monica Ali’s great big treat of a 2003 novel about displacement and feminine emancipation, and British director Sarah Gavron’s tale of a young Bangladeshi woman unwillingly transplanted to London’s East End is absorbing enough, moving enough and visually attractive enough to provide a perfectly acceptable night out at the movies. Schooled in silent endurance, Nazneen is estranged from her rural home, beloved sister and much-older bear of a husband. As the rapidly changing post-9/11 racial politics of England take shape around her dingy housing estate, Nazneen tries to accept her fate — until she meets a handsome young convert to radical Islam (Christopher Simpson) who rocks her world at every level. With a limited budget, Gavron had no choice but to prune Ali’s huge cast of Dickensian supporting characters, but in the process, she’s also replaced the novel’s teeming vitality and tragicomic drive with a prettified lyricism that drags the story down. As Nazneen, the exquisite Indian actress Tannishtha Chatterjee is too inert to express the untapped reserves of strength, passion and defiance that will transform this quiescent village girl — which leaves the excellent Indian actor Satish Kaushik, as her Micawberish husband, to carry the weight of the difficult balance between tradition and modernity that lies at the heart of every great migrant journey of the soul. (Royal; Playhouse 7; Town Center 5; Fallbrook 7) (Ella Taylor)

Jody Shapiro/Everyday Pictures

What the puck? Maddin’s Winnipeg

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More About

• Get Smart (TV Show)
• Winnipeg
• Kamal Hassan
• Guy Maddin
• Andrei Nekrasov

Jody Shapiro/Everyday Pictures

(Click to enlarge)

What the puck? Maddin’s Winnipeg

DASAVATHARAM Famed for his multiple roles (quadruplets in Michael Madhana Kamarajan) and Lon Chaneyesque physical transformations (a dwarf in Aproova Sagodharargal), “Universal Hero” Kamal Hassan pulls out all the stops for this uneven but hugely ambitious Kollywood blockbuster, the most expensive Tamil production of the year. Here Hassan appears as no less than 10 characters in a self-penned, head-spinning screenplay that begins with 13th-century religious persecution and ends amid the Asian tsunami of 2004. The disparate threads are tied together by a treatise on the interconnectedness of things and the mysterious ways in which God may (or may not) work. In between there is no shortage of violent action, wacky comedy and, of course, musical numbers — a three-hour head rush of cinematic delirium that couldn’t have been made anywhere else in the world. All over the map and not always in the best of taste, the picture falls short of its state-of-the-art ambitions, but the rickety CGI and mostly so-so musical numbers (the opener is, however, spectacular) are countered by exuberant pacing and Hassan’s go-for-broke efforts. His shifting body language delights in roles as diverse as elderly Indian grandmother, Japanese karate master and, yes, George W. Bush, despite unconvincing, rubbery makeup. But it’s as a bumbling, Telugu-speaking intelligence officer that Hassan effectively steals the movie from himself, a surreal achievement appropriate to the lunacy on display. (Culver Plaza) (Joey O’Bryan)

GET SMART As old Broadway shows are revived, new Broadway shows get spun from old movies so that new movies may be fashioned from ancient TV series. It’s an iron law of the culture industry that turns out to be a pleasant surprise in the case of Get Smart, the late-’60s sitcom retooled as a vehicle for Steve Carell. The most successful of the half-dozen spy shows that materialized in 1965, the original Get Smart was distinguished less by its absurdist attitude than by its catch phrases and casting. Standup comedian Don ­Adams drew on his nightclub William Powell impersonation to play Maxwell Smart, the dense, inept, officious Agent 86. No less deadpan or baroquely bumbling than the Adams original, Carell’s Smart is actually smarter. He’s also more lovably neurotic — a know-it-all intelligence analyst obsessed with his weight who dreams of becoming a real spy. As directed by Peter Segal, Get Smart redux is less a parody of a genre that had already passed into self-parody many moons before the TV show was in reruns, and more an all-purpose (and often quite funny) goofball action comedy in which ridiculous banter alternates with slapstick car chases and midair stunts. And though it acknowledges the post-9/11 world, Get Smart has no political subtext beyond a mild but persistent hostility toward the Bush administration. (Citywide) (J. Hoberman)

GO  NEVER FOREVER Had Emily Watson’s stranger-shtupping martyr in Breaking the Waves woken up midboink one day and realized, Hey, hot sex with an anonymous cock donor beats the hell out of joyless self-sacrifice, the result might have been writer-director Gina Kim’s floridly plotted but acutely detailed erotic melodrama. In a worldlier (as in: of this world) variation on Watson’s self-abnegating holy innocent, Vera Farmiga plays a blue-eyed wraith whose successful Korean-American husband (David L. McInnis) attempts suicide over their failure to conceive. To save her spouse (or so she believes) and deflect his devout family’s withering scrutiny, she hires a dirt-poor Korean illegal (Jung-woo Ha, from Kim Ki-duk’s Time) to impregnate her on the down-low, offering $300 a pop with a hefty fertility bonus. The twists required to rig the movie’s romantic and emotional crises sound loony in synopsis, but Kim — a South Korean native who chronicled her tortuous American journey in Gina Kim’s Video Diary — focuses so fixedly on the particulars of gesture, transaction and body language (especially hands) that she almost hides the blatant scaffolding in plain sight. The fearless, frequently nude Farmiga conveys the awakening of passion in a spectrum of small, subtle shadings; among other virtues — including Matthew Clark’s rapt camerawork — the movie has some of the hottest, most precisely modulated sex scenes since A History of Violence. (ImaginAsian Center) (Jim Ridley)