Movie Reviews: Dance Flick, Night at the Museum: Battle of the Smithsonian, Easy Virtue

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Comments (0) By L.A. Weekly Film Critics Wednesday, May 20 2009

Easy Virtue

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GO O’HORTEN The premise of this gentle existential farce from Norwegian director Bent Hamer is little more than an excuse for a series of deadpan vignettes about love, death and the meaning of life. Forced into age-mandated retirement, longtime train engineer Odd Horten (Bård Owe) quite literally goes off the rails and spends most of the movie dazedly wandering the wintry streets of Oslo, searching a mazelike airport for a prospective buyer for his boat, chatting up the recently widowed proprietress of a tobacco shop, and — in the film’s loveliest sequence — riding shotgun with an avuncular old drunkard who prides himself on the ability to drive blindfolded. Above all, Horten — like his Seuss-ian near namesake — seeks a sense of purpose. Hamer, whose Kitchen Stories tipped its hat to Tati and whose Factotum made an admirable stab at Charles Bukowski, here achieves a tone somewhere in the ballpark of Kaurismäki, with Owe’s wonderfully stoic face rarely bending as it observes his fellow man in all his small-scale absurdities. The images, lit by the cameraman John Christian Rosenlund, have the incandescent glow of storybook illustrations. The movie, on its own modest terms, satisfies greatly. (Royal; Town Center 5; Playhouse 7) (Scott Foundas)