Movie Reviews: Adam, Aliens in the Attic, The Collector

OPENING THIS WEEK

ADAM
Other than Rose Byrne’s onscreen radiance and a soothingly warm palette lit by cinematographer Seamus Tierney, there’s not much to get passionate about in this amiable chamber piece from theater director Max Mayer. Hedging just about every bet it lays on the table to the tune of a gentle guitar, Adam spins a wish-fulfilling romance between a recently bereaved young man with Asperger’s syndrome (Hugh Dancy) and his beauteous new neighbor, Beth (Byrne), who all too conveniently happens to work in a helping profession. Writer-director Mayer tries to reduce the improbability quotient by loading Beth up with burdens of her own (including Peter Gallagher, who does “feckless father” in his sleep), which test the authenticity of her values. To his credit, Dancy doesn’t take the showstopping Rain Man route, but, however underplayed, his Adam is all too authentic for most social intercourse. Clogged to the pore with pathos (boxes of mac and cheese stacked in Adam’s freezer), bogus romanticism about mental illness (Adam sees natural wonders the rest of us don’t), the obligatory kindly black helper (Frankie Faison), and the saintly patience of the love interest, Adam only confronts reality at the end, when it timidly owns up to the likelihood that such relationships only work if the healthy partner is willing to become a mother, not a wife. (The Landmark; ArcLight Hollywood) (Ella Taylor)

ALIENS IN THE ATTICwas not screened in advance of our publication deadline, but a review will appear here next week and can be found online at www.laweekly.com/movies. (Citywide)

THE COLLECTOR was not screened in advance of our publication deadline, but a review will appear here next week and can be found online at www.laweekly.com/movies. (Citywide)

GO THE COVE
Late in the infectiously frisky documentary The Cove, an older man calmly gate-crashes an international conference on whaling with a TV screen strapped to his chest, showing bloody images of the mass slaughter of dolphins in a cove off the coast of Japan. It’s a show-stopping publicity stunt by dolphin advocate Ric O’Barry, and also one act of an ongoing ritual of public penance by this one-time hunter and trainer of dolphins for the 1960s television series Flipper. O’Barry came to understand that dolphins cutting up on TV or in aquariums around the world may provide oceans of fun for audiences but that it’s torture for the sociable, intelligent mammals forcibly separated from their fellows and habitat. The sleepy-eyed but intense O’Barry — who slips into Japan in silly disguises to avoid being arrested or attacked by irate fisherman at the cove where dolphins are culled for export or killed — is the perfect star for this forthrightly activist film. But he’s far from the only performance artist in the rousing blend of pop entertainment, faux-thriller, horror movie and naked agitprop that is The Cove, a benign feat of manipulation designed to make you rue every minute you spent ooh-ing and aah-ing at SeaWorld. It’s also designed to make you call for the blood of the Japanese government, which lobbies against international efforts to protect small crustaceans and secretively protects the fishermen who trap thousands of dolphins a year to sell for export or kill for, as it turns out, mercury-contaminated meat that shows up not only in delicatessens around the world but in the school lunches of Japanese children. “You’re an activist or an inactivist,” says director Louie Psihoyos, co-founder of the Oceanic Preservation Society. He possesses the instincts and righteous rage of Michael Moore but without Moore’s bile or self-importance. The Cove is the exuberantly theatrical and often funny story of Psihoyos and his team of overgrown authority-averse schoolboys (and one tender girl). This self-described “Ocean’s Eleven” includes a stuntman and a gung-ho team of designers from Industrial Light and Magic, who create rocks with hidden cameras to plant around the cove and record the mass murder of these lovely mammals. Lovely is the operative word. Skillful and hugely entertaining as it is, I’m not sure The Cove would be as potent as it is if the subject were, say, walruses. Dolphins are the Goldie Hawns of endangered species: bright, playful, cute — and, by some freak of nature, they appear to be grinning most of the time. O’Barry laments the anthropomorphization that has turned dolphins into clowns in aquariums around the world, but he’s not above ascribing human motivation to them. When one of the dolphins stops breathing in his arms, he calls its death a suicide. The Cove is enchanting, horrifying, rousing; but it comes close to making the case that dolphins should be saved because they’re cute and breathe air. Where does that leave the overfished salmon I went home to poach? (ArcLight Hollywood; The Landmark) (Ella Taylor)

THE ENGLISH SURGEON
The English surgeon is Henry Marsh, a British neuroscientist who has been traveling to Ukraine since 1992 to tutor, diagnose and perform operations that the post-Soviet medical infrastructure is incapable of handling. Geoffrey Smith’s well-meaning documentary takes risks: Contextual setup aside, the film’s footage comes from a mere two weeks of shooting Marsh’s umpteenth visit to remove an especially risky tumor. Smith has the guts to show graphic brain surgery, and the sense to avoid maudlin testimonies from friends and family, knowing that no adoring relative could explain why a world-renown scientist sacrifices his time and mental health to repeatedly do the right thing for no reward. But I wish more attention had been focused on Marsh’s Ukrainian friend Igor Kurilets’ struggles with the country’s proudly anachronistic medical establishment — The Death Of Mr. Lazarescu, this ain’t. By focusing on Marsh without any real personal or structural insight, the effect is to prioritize the humanitarian over the far more interesting problem: the system. And the end — a tear-soaked, predictably bathetic visit to the family of a girl who died when Marsh made the wrong call on the operating table — succumbs to the easy sentimentality the film has shirked till then. That a young girl’s death is lastingly sad is the smallest revelation of all. (Music Hall) (Vadim Rizov)