Movie reviews: Get Low, Life During Wartime

HUGH HEFNER: PLAYBOY, ACTIVIST AND REBEL Dirtbag Gene Simmons opens the film, flatly stating that every man envies Hugh Hefner. Is that what I was feeling, watching photo ops with frail old Hefner's orange young girlfriends obligingly "keeping him young"? Many young people know only that Hef, an easy-grinning senior in leisure wear, floating on a silicone sea that empties into eternity. Brigitte Berman's premature-eulogy puff-piece documentary resurrects the younger, charismatically aloof Chicago-boy-made-rich in stock footage, while Hefner narrates along through a lifetime of scrapbooks. The putative subject is Hefner's place on the balance sheet: exploiter, or liberator? The peddler of mass-market decadence with a history of editorial stances — pro-integrationist, antisodomy laws — salubrious to the Republic is a worthy topic, but it's bypassed for a familiar culture-wars narrative, with jowly HUAC goons under every bed in the 1950s, as Americans wait for the discovery of female orgasm. Pat Boone, conservative radio host Dennis Prager and feminist Susan Brownmiller are there to blow against the wind of the film's conviction that "the new morality," introduced, in part by Hefner, is an improvement. But Berman is mostly interested in calling hypocrisy on the other side, making an example of onetime antismut crusader Charles Keating, among Hef's other vanquished foes. Playboy "gave us some of the best literature of our time," opines noted literary critic Tony Bennett, among a cast of mostly ridiculous and redundant talking heads. Hefner, the old psych major, wrote the script they're reciting. "Repression" takes a beating, along with abstracted "Puritanism." The inner life of the film's subject, however, is only tactfully skimmed in passing. (Nick Pinkerton) (Nuart)

GO  LIFE DURING WARTIME Daring the discomfited viewer to laugh at shame and suffering, and then wonder why we're laughing, Todd Solondz is back. Life During Wartime shows the misanthropic moralizer as confounding and trigger-happy as ever, his big clown thumb poised over a garish assortment of hot buttons — race, suicide, autism, sexual misery, self-hatred, Israel and, his old favorite, pedophilia. Life During Wartime is both sequel and remake to Solondz's Happiness (1998). The three Jordan sisters — banal Trish, high-strung Helen and hapless Joy — are back, albeit played by an alternate trio of actresses (Allison Janney, Ally Sheedy, and Shirley Henderson, respectively). Trish has relocated from New Jersey to Florida, where fragile little Joy arrives for a visit. Newly separated from her husband, Joy is increasingly disassociated. Trish, however, is only a smidge chastened — even though Happiness ended with her model husband, Bill, en route to prison for drugging and raping several of his son Billy's fifth-grade classmates. Now, Bill (Ciarán Hinds) is about to be released just as younger son Timmy (Dylan Snyder), who's been told his father is dead, is preparing to become a man with a bar mitzvah speech full of quasi-religious masochistic imagery. Does the filmmaker have compassion or contempt for his characters? Is it possible to feel both? Solondz's sensibility has obvious affinities to such masters of cruelty as Neil LaBute or the Coen brothers — but he is less smugly punitive and more obviously tormented. A humanist he's not, but he does seem allergic to hypocrisy. (J. Hoberman) (Monica, Playhouse, Sunset 5)

Life During Wartime

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• Nick Pinkerton
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SPOKEN WORD Scarcely heard from since he helmed two mid-1990s indie hits (Ruby in Paradise, Ulee's Gold), Victor Nuñez has a new family drama that plays like a musty holdover from that era. In Spoken Word, poetry slams still pose as the new punk rock, and the fact that men don't talk enough about their feelings remains a very fresh discovery. Cruz Montoya (Kuno Becker) is a stud on the West Coast poetry scene, trading on street cred ("I want to get shot," goes his signature refrain) and living with a foxy painter. But when he hears that his father, Senior (Rubén Blades), is dying, he returns to his sleepy New Mexico hometown to reckon with his Chicano roots and dance with personal demons. Like the promise of a gun, introducing a father's vintage Impala in the first act guarantees that the son will crash it in the third. Though crudely constructed (the lighting and framing are strictly soap opera), unevenly acted (Becker is a bundle of distracting tics) and bluntly scripted, the film does have an honest integrity — at least whenever Blades is on-screen. He's not a clichéd curmudgeon but rather a quietly resigned melancholic who delivers lines like they've come to him in unpredictable waves, and, in the film's best scene, weeps as he saws through a sheath of saltines. Spoken Word remains Cruz's story, but there's enough of Senior to salvage something out of all that pop psych and bad poetry. (Eric Hynes) (Playhouse, Sunset 5)