Movie Reviews: Exit Through the Gift Shop, Handsome Harry

GO  HANDSOME HARRY A fixture of New York City's No Wave scene of the late '70s and early '80s — an era of prolific DIY filmmaking, when everybody seemed to be collaborating with everyone else — Bette Gordon continues her exploration of desire, with Handsome Harry. A road movie ensemble piece interrupted by Fireworks-like flashbacks, HH finds its hero (played by Jamey Sheridan) reconciling with the unpalatable notion that, to paraphrase Oscar Wilde, each man maims the thing he loves. Harry, a well-liked, long-divorced middle-ager capable of only the most awkward interactions with the diner waitress who clearly wants him and the 20-ish son who's driven hundreds of miles to visit him in upstate New York, takes off suddenly for Philadelphia to visit Tom (Steve Buscemi), a dying Navy buddy. "We became men together," Tom reminisces in his hospital bed — rites of passage that torment Harry, who continues to seek friends from the service to assuage his guilt over a heinous act of betrayal and cruelty. Each visit serves as a set piece for the particular pathologies of white midlife manhood: entitlement, repression, rage, self-pity. Gordon films every encounter — some of which droop under too much hectoring (the script is by first-timer Nicholas T. Proferes) — with a hesitant empathy, maintaining just the right tone before Harry's lushly romantic final reunion. In Gordon's films, eros' capacity to disturb and disrupt is celebrated as its greatest quality. (Melissa Anderson)

THE JONESES For a while, at least, a pitch-black (and, therefore, pitch-perfect) tale of our times: Four business partners masquerading as a happy family move into seven-figure suburbia and sell their friends and neighbors — which is to say, contacts and customers — on their early-adopter, newer-than-brand-new layaway lifestyle. David Duchovny, Demi Moore, Amber Heard and Ben Hollingsworth are the client-sponsored grifters; they bait their prey with the latest and greatest gadgets and flash-frozen sushi rolls fresh off the assembly line. But, sadly, the audience is conned most of all. What plays hard and dark for the film's first half goes squishy and blindingly bright as calamity and then outright tragedy lead to the saw-it-coming resolution writer-director Derrick Borte thinks is more sincere than it actually plays. Duchovny is alternately (and suitably) confident and befuddled as the ex–car salesman newly hired to play "Dad"; Moore, as the crew's boss, out to make numbers and not friends, is as icy as the Pomtinis she's pushing on commission; and the "kids," one closeted gay and one slutty, aren't dopes. But for whatever reason, the movie goes soft: Business turns to pleasure turns to hurt, and the moral of the story becomes the story, shrug. Still, there's Gary Cole as the next-door neighbor who buys the sales pitch he can't afford. That's recommendation enough. (Robert Wilonsky) (Citywide)

LETTERS TO GOD The latest offering in Evangelical-oriented entertainment, Letters To God tells the story of an 8-year-old boy who copes with cancer by sending heartfelt epistolary prayers through the mail, which in turn inspire his entire suburban community. "Write a letter to God," an ailing Tyler (Tanner Maguire) advises his older brother. "It's like texting your best friend." Like most fundamentalist fare, the film works unapologetically in the style of sloganeering after-school specials. In dramatic terms, the problem with devotionals is that the end point is always fore-ordained; they're all about answers (the answer, in fact), not questions. But this weakness is also the genre's promise. One doesn't turn to these movies for escapism or suspense but for comfort and affirmation. Letters To God performs this service adequately, even pleasantly — save for the morbid teasing out of Tyler's demise. Yet spirituals also have an Evangelical imperative, which pushes them beyond benign antidrama to hard-sell propaganda. Tyler doesn't just die a good boy, a believer and a saint: He dies a crusading missionary, his cancer exploited to convert everyone from the mailman to his 8-year-old classmates. With little in the way of story or spectacle to offer nonbelievers, the film itself just preaches to the choir. (Eric Hynes) (Citywide)

THE PERFECT GAME Obstructing the potential of a legacy he had begun in the '80s by collaborating on Michael Nesmith's eccentric sketch-comedy movies (Elephant Parts, Doctor Duck's Super Secret All-Purpose Sauce), director William Dear now appears to be your go-to guy for forgettable, family-friendly baseball flicks. Following his Angels in the Outfield and The Sandlot: Heading Home is this Downy-soft, by-the-numbers biopic with Christian undertones — adapted by W. William Winokur from his book — about nine poor kids from Monterrey, Mexico, who became the first non-U.S. team to win the Little League World Series back in 1957. In an uncomplicated role, Clifton Collins Jr. barely has to flex his typical sad-eyed humanism as Cesar Faz, a former St. Louis Cardinals janitor who never got his big coaching break because he was Mexican. Laid off for the same reason and now embittered, Cesar winds up back down South, where he's convinced by a doting young ragamuffin — and encouraged by Cheech Marin's humble priest — to guide an underdog team on the road to victory. Barely dramatizing off-the-field struggles like visa problems and the boys' first taste of good ol' American racism, the film does a disservice to the community it depicts by rendering an inspiring cultural story entirely uninspired. (Aaron Hillis)