Movie Reviews: Encounters at the End of the World, Finding Amanda, Wanted

KICKING IT Vagrants apparently don’t need a home address to feel a patriotic duty to their homeland, or so attests Susan Koch’s goodhearted but artless ESPN-presented doc on the people who competed in the 2006 fourth annual Homeless World Cup. Organization prez Mel Young, who strives to help raise awareness and improve lives, claims that soccer “can be used to tackle some of the most difficult problems in society,” though that’s never actually verified in this game-footage-overloaded film. Whether coming from Young’s mouth or one of the optimistic players, the film’s wall-to-wall hyperbolic rhetoric never inspires, perhaps because there are too many characters here for any single one to register: There are a Kenyan, a Russian, an Afghan, a North Carolinian, a 62-year-old former bank robber from Spain, and a methadone-addicted Dubliner, who gives the title its dual meaning. It’s hard to imagine how Koch could have made her film any more heavy-handed: perhaps by adding U2’s “Where the Streets Have No Name” to the soundtrack or having the narration delivered by Colin Farrell — both of which, inevitably enough, she does. (Sunset 5) (Aaron Hillis)

Chuck Hodes

Wanted

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GO  LIVE AND BECOME If Live and Become strikes you as a vague title, the young protagonist of Radu Mihaileanu’s film would despairingly agree. His mother’s parting words before she sends him off in the 1984 Israeli airlift of Ethiopian Jews contain none of the specific instructions the boy needs, considering the complexity of his situation. For one, he isn’t actually Jewish — he’s a Christian Ethiopian masquerading as a Jew so he can live in Israel with the French family that adopts him. The child is, as a fellow Ethiopian expatriate tells him, “condemned to live,” and this courageous film plumbs the complications of being so wonderfully and terribly lucky. Renamed Schlomo (and played, at various points, by Moshe Agazai, Moshe Abebe and Sirak M. Sabahat), he lands in a supportive if imperfect family, including a sugary mensch of a mother (Yaël Abecassis), who licks his pimply face in a show of camaraderie when his school proves reluctant to welcome him — one instance of how xenophobia stifles his assimilation. Meanwhile, Schlomo yearns for his real mother, purveyor of that impossible advice. If the film sometimes feels overwrought — at once too long and too short — its subtle motifs and loud silences, as well as the enormity of its subject matter, keep us absorbed until the devastating end. (Music Hall; Playhouse 7; Town Center 5) (Abigail Deutsch)

RED ROSES AND PETROL Dublin poet and university librarian Enda Doyle (a deceptively top-billed Malcolm McDowell, seen mostly in camcorder soliloquies) learns that he’s dying, and then does, so let’s meet his kin as they reunite at the wake to drink, quarrel, open emotional wounds and expose secrets, as all dysfunctional-family-at-a-funeral clichés are wont to do. Uptight daughter Catherine (Susan Lynch) has brought her milquetoast beau back home to meet her sister Medbh (Heather Juergensen), rattled ma, Moya (Olivia Tracey), and confrontational misfit bro Johnny (Max Beesley), whose gauzy flashbacks attest that he’s a jerk because Daddy smacked him around. Apparently lost in some whiskey haze since its AFI-fest premiere in 2003, director and co-writer Tamar Simon Hoffs’ bland-as-boiled-cabbage adaptation of Joseph O’Connor’s play finally hobbles into theaters, reminding us every 15 seconds that even though it looks distinctly American and was shot in California, it’s a fookin’ Irish movie. Yet neither the backyard jigging, lap blankets, spots of tea, Gabriel Byrne name-check, nor forced colloquialisms (Johnny’s girlfriend is “still spreadin’ me balls on toast”) feel at all natural, and there’s nothing “grand” or “sound as a hound” about the cast’s chemistry, the limp dramatic twist or a most regretful gag about snorting cremated ashes. (Music Hall; One Colorado) (Aaron Hillis)

TRUMBO Based on Christopher Trumbo’s play about his hell-raising pop, the Spartacus screenwriter sentenced to prison for refusing to play ball with the witch-hunting House Committee on Un-American Activities, Trumbo the movie feels stage-bound, despite its use of archival interviews with the eloquent titan of the Hollywood Ten. This is no knock: The readings of Dalton Trumbo’s letters to family and friends are starkly rendered — famous faces (Michael Douglas, Nathan Lane, Donald Sutherland, Liam Neeson, David Strathairn, Joan Allen, so forth) recite rousing missives without the aid of sets or props of any kind, save for Trumbo’s own thunderous proclamations in defense of free speech. And there are copious scenes from Trumbo’s work, in which his characters lay down his law: Say everything, but rat out no one. (“I’m Spartacus,” damned right.) Still, the actors steal the writer’s movie, as they wring from his epistles every last drop of blood and sweat spilled by a man punished for believing his country was better than its behavior. (The Landmark) (Robert Wilonsky)