Movie Reviews: Death In Love, 500 Days of Summer, Severed Ways

CHERI
“For the first time in my life, I felt morally certain of having written a novel for which I need neither blush nor doubt,” Colette said of Chéri, her 1920 novel of the Belle Époque Parisian demimonde. Stephen Frears’s anemic adaptation, written by Christopher Hampton (who also folds in 1926’s The Last of Chéri), would most likely make the author nod off or plug her ears. Chéri, the most celebrated of Colette’s male characters, is a louche 19-year-old millionaire played by Rupert Friend, acting opposite Michelle Pfeiffer as Lea, a courtesan d’un certain âge who has a six-year affair with the insolent androgyne until he’s married off. Frears and Hampton’s missteps begin immediately, with the director providing pinched narration as he recounts, over so many cartes de visite, the histories of other famous ladies who made a handsome living on their backs. It’s the first of innumerable auditory assaults, continuing with Alexandre Desplat’s frantic score and the clash of English and American accents (especially puzzling in the scenes with Brit Friend and Kathy Bates as his retired-prostie mother). Pfeiffer, uncertain how to convey the older, wiser erotomane, resorts to sounding like Samantha Jones auditioning for Masterpiece Theater, her décolletage the only part of this movie getting any air. (M.A.)

GO EASY VIRTUE
Quick! Noel Coward: sage or supercilious bitch? No matter where you stand, Stephan Elliott’s deliciously cheeky screen adaptation of one of the satirist’s lesser-known jabs at the British upper crust will charm your pants off. The movie opens with a contemporary rendition of Coward’s “Mad About the Boy,” impressively sung by Jessica Biel, her customary luminous self as a Roaring Twenties American race car driver who marries into British aristocracy and finds herself on the losing end of a war of words with the groom’s mother (Kristin Scott Thomas). Though Elliott, director of The Adventures of Priscilla,Queen of the Desert, gussies up the action with clever and lyrical visuals, words are what count in this scantily plotted piece (hard to believe that Hitchcock made a silent version in 1928), a light variant on Oscar Wilde’s Lady Windermere’s Fan with the same libertarian message that the morally compromised inherit the earth while the self-righteous wither on the vine. A uniformly great cast (Kris Marshall is a scream as the eye-rolling butler) is upstaged by a hilariously WASP-ish Thomas, who strides away with the movie wearing sensible cardies, QE II hair, and all the best lines as Mummy Dearest, with Colin Firth modestly bringing up the rear as her war-ruined lush of a husband. Easy Virtue may seem like little more than a big, fat mother-in-law joke, but Elliott pointedly recasts it as a nail in the coffin of an increasingly irrelevant gentry. (E.T.)

GO HERB & DOROTHY
Chuck Close calls them the mascots of the art world. Christo and Jeanne-Claude once offered them a drawing in exchange for taking care of their cat, Gladys, for a summer. The passion for minimalist and conceptual art that aging Manhattan collectors Herb and Dorothy Vogel have shared for nearly a half-century is sweet—if obsessive enough for a 12-step program—and has yielded one of the world’s major contemporary collections on a modest income. How did a retired postal clerk and librarian manage to accumulate thousands of important works (Picasso, Pollack, Schnabel), particularly when one of their buyers’ rules of thumb is that everything must fit in their rent-controlled one-bedroom apartment? Former journalist Megumi Sasaki’s warmhearted celebration of these adorable do-gooders—shot as the Vogels negotiated with the National Gallery of Art to take their collection for free (as one artist notes, asking the couple to sell even a single piece is like asking him to cut off a square yard from his painting)—cements their significance to the art world and introduces them to the rest of us. With no curatorial training beyond an instinctual “We like what we like,” watching the Vogels mull over art without fully understanding it only makes their delight more infectious. (A.H.)

GO THE HURT LOCKER
Directed by Kathryn Bigelow (Point Break, Strange Days), the Iraq War drama The Hurt Locker is a full-throttle body shock of a movie. It gets inside you like a virus, puts your nerves in a blender, and twists your guts into a Gordian knot. Set during the last month in the year-long rotation of a three-man U.S. Army bomb squad stationed in Baghdad, it may be the only film made about Iraq that gives us a true sense of what it feels like to be on the front lines. It’s an experiential war movie, but also a psychologically astute one, matching its intricate sensory architecture with an equally detailed map of the modern soldier’s psyche. The Hurt Locker belongs to that subset of Bigelow’s work devoted to the ethos of hyper-masculine communities and the men who emerge as their leaders. Staff Sergeant William James (the brilliant Jeremy Renner) is one such character—a secular god with a penchant for reckless bravado who inspires equal amounts of envy and contempt in the men under his command. Some have heralded Bigelow’s film as an “apolitical” war movie, which is really a way of saying that it arrives mercifully free of ham-fisted polemics. Instead of setting out to prove a point, it seeks to immerse us in an environment—something Bigelow does as well as any director at work today. (S.F.)