Movie Reviews: Couples Retreat, The Damned United, Good Hair

GO  BELIEVE Sometimes appearances aren’t deceiving: As a cross-dressing comic and sometimes dramatic actor, Eddie Izzard is just as complex offstage as on. The compelling documentary Believe condenses the comedian’s fascinating life into 105 minutes of interviews, archive material and — most importantly to understanding any performer — several decades of performance footage. Believe, which was directed by Izzard’s ex-girlfriend Sarah Townsend, suffers from the problem inherent in most Hollywood biopics: Smashing a man’s life into a series of “very important moments” creates a schizophrenic tone. Townsend also abbreviates several of Izzard’s early street and standup performances, taking away key elements from her story’s arc — the development of Izzard’s onstage persona. Regardless, Believe contains a good deal of footage thrilling to anyone excited by the backstage and onstage workings of live performance. Izzard also gives several genuinely poignant interviews, saving the best — a reflection on how the loss of his mother influenced his desire to be a comic — for a strong emotional kick to punctuate the proceedings. The best moment, however, is the legendary performance in which Izzard appears for the first time in his trademark dress and pantyhose. This magnificent scene and others like it prove that, as with comedy itself, sometimes great material is enough to overcome merely average presentation. (Sunset 5) (John Wheeler)

BLISS If you missed June’s The Stoning of Soraya M., here’s another chance to be reminded of murderous misogyny in another Muslim community — this time, in Turkey. Based on a 2002 best-selling novel by Zülfü Livaneli, Bliss creakily illustrates the clash between ancient, abhorrent custom and modernity. Found unconscious by the side of the road in her village, 17-year-old Meryem (Özgü Namal) is held responsible for her own rape; a distant cousin, Cemal (Murat Han), is summoned to take her to Istanbul to perform the “honor killing” for having shamed her family. The conflicted brute can’t bring himself to murder Meryem, and soon, the two join Irfan (Talat Bulut), a sociology prof they meet while working at a fish farm, on his yacht in the Aegean (filmed quite prettily by Mirsad Herovic) so that enlightenment can be taught, as characters calcify into constructs. Though calling out the abominable oppression of women, even in a vehicle as didactic as Bliss, serves at least some redeemable purpose, that mission is more than a little compromised when it’s suggested that Meryem could find happiness with Cemal — the man who, after he decides not to kill her, settles on verbally and physically abusing her. (Music Hall) (Melissa Anderson)

COUPLES RETREAT Couples, retreat. In the latest from Vince Vaughn and Jon Favreau (co-starring and co-writing), we learn that one compelling reason to make a life commitment is so you will always have someone to eat with at Applebee’s. The movie’s cumulative idea is that, forgetting the delusions of midlife panic, this is all there is, you’re already living the best possible life — a message of sedentary wisdom betrayed when the actual film is as undeniably dreary as a plate of gummy Chicken Parmesan Tanglers. Vaughn, Favreau (flagrantly shirtless), Jason Bateman, and Faizon Love are four buddies, just “regular guys” — meaning, as always, puffy, dull-minded lunks, with Vaughn increasingly being Jim Belushi’s heir apparent. They take their respective significant others on a group vacation to an island paradise, along with maybe 12 pages of sit-comic script outline, to be riffed out into feature length. Arriving at the Eden Resort, our beer-commercial heroes are menaced by enforced couple’s therapy and the resort’s staff of Speedo-wearing homo-macho Euro-Hispanic Others (Jean Reno, Carlos Ponce), who put them through yoga humpings and realityTV–type challenges intended to renew the spark missing from their relationships. The presence of Bateman begs comparison with the funnier-while-thematically-similar Extract, though Retreat also recalls Voyage in Italy, if Rossellini were to replace intimate human insight with lowest-common-denominator doody-boner-bare butt-jackoff haw-haws. (Citywide) (Nick Pinkerton)

GO  THE DAMNED UNITED We call it soccer, but for the Brits, it’s football, and it’s damn serious business. From 1968 to 1974, Brian Clough (Michael Sheen), a manager/coach from the tiny town of Derby, and his assistant manager, Peter Taylor (Timothy Spall), turned a third-rate club into division champs. That success wasn’t nearly as sweet as getting to take over Leeds United, a top-tier team previously managed by Clough’s archenemy, Don Revie (Colm Meaney). In this terrific film, screenwriter Peter Morgan (The Queen, Frost/Nixon) and television director Tom Hooper (John Adams), making his feature debut, use a series of elegantly staged flashbacks to trace Clough and Taylor’s rapid rise to fame, and the hubris that led the former to stumble badly when he got to Leeds, while also wounding his lifelong friendship with Taylor. A movie about soccer that doesn’t spend a lot of time on the field, The Damned United, like everything Morgan writes, is an intimate character study, one that is enriched by a stellar ensemble of British pros, including Jim Broadbent as Derby’s team owner. These actors are good at what they do — like those soccer players who dodge and weave with effortless grace. (The Landmark; Town Center 5; Playhouse 7) (Chuck Wilson)