Jonathan Poritsky

It’s entirely pos­si­ble that I’ve seen this film before, but it’s also pos­si­ble that I never swal­lowed it down all in one sit­ting. I’ll be brief:

There is only one thing not to love about Martin Brest’s Scent of a Woman: the very seri­ous hunk of jarls­berg that must be downed while watch­ing it. Certainly, the film reeks of early 1990s over­writ­ten performance-vehicle sen­ti­men­tal pieces of cheese whiz. But that goes down much bet­ter if you take it with a grain of salt. Read on…

A solid if uno­rig­i­nal indie flick with mov­ing per­for­mances and a tight, quirky script is what I had hoped to see at the movies. Instead, I saw Sunshine Cleaning, which plays like an idea try­ing des­per­ately hard to find a story.

The film fol­lows Rose Lorkowski, played by Amy Adams, a down on her luck sin­gle mother in Albuquerque who makes ends meat by clean­ing houses. Rose’s sis­ter, Norah, is a for­mer punk-kid who never grew up, can’t hold down a job, and lives with their idio­syn­cratic father, played with respectable charm by Alan Arkin. When Rose’s police offi­cer boyfriend, who is mar­ried, tells her how much money there is to be made in clean­ing up messy crime scenes, a light­bulb goes off and the tiny glint of a plot begins to form. Of course, the two sis­ters start a busi­ness clean­ing up crime scenes while deal­ing with their own emo­tional hangups.

Duplicity opens qui­etly at an embassy soirée in Dubai. Clive Owen barely approaches Julia Roberts at the margherita table when we are thrust into this svelte lit­tle caper. Director Tony Gilroy, still glow­ing from the suc­cess of Michael Clayton, returns with his crack team (we’ll get to them) to cre­ate what this hum­ble critic believes is the best major release of 2009 so far.

Mr. Owen and Ms. Roberts play Ray Koval and Claire Stenwick, two for­mer state spies who take cor­po­rate intel posi­tions at com­pet­ing house­hold prod­ucts firms, Equikrom and Burkett & Randle (B & R). When B & R leaks the exis­tence of a top secret project, the game is on to see who can get to the spoils first. That is really all I can put down here to keep the film inter­est­ing for you, so let’s dive into the meat of it. Keep Reading at the can­dler blog.

This film was added to the queue in antic­i­pa­tion of Ed Zwick’s Defiance, which I ended up see­ing and hat­ing enough to add a few dozen other DVDs to the top posi­tion in the mean­time. I’m pretty tough on Mr. Zwick, espe­cially after the dis­as­ter of The Last Samulrai, but Blood Diamond, which is flanked by those two ter­ri­ble releases, is some­thing else entirely. Certainly, the movie is full of his own bom­bas­tic style: things blow up, women bring redemp­tion to men, and there are plenty of tears and soppy music. However, this is a film with a true heart, and a mes­sage that is seem­ingly more vital than most polit­i­cal drama­ti­za­tions that are released while a con­flict rages on.

The story fol­lows two men, Daniel Archer and Solomon Vandy. The first is a white dia­mond smug­gler and self-proclaimed sol­dier of for­tune played by Leonardo DiCaprio. The sec­ond, played by Djimon Hounsou, is a black fish­er­man who becomes entan­gled in both Sierra Leone’s civil war and the inter­na­tional dia­mond trade when his vil­lage is attacked by rebels. They are both African, and that is the point.

It seems as though Mr. Zwick sets out to make Gone With The Wind on every out­ing. He finds sin­gu­lar bits of schmaltz amid nations brought to the brink of armaged­don and uses them as his macguf­fin to, well, blow a bunch of shit up and teach us all a les­son by the end of the pum­mel­ing. If ever this tac­tic works, it works best in Blood Diamond. Most of where this film stands apart is in the actind. Mr. DiCaprio and Mr. Hounsou bring a great deal of heart to the table. Archer as the cold hearted cynic who, sur­prise, light­ens up a bit by the end, and Vandy as the lov­ing man-child who dreams for a sim­pler world, where he could live in peace with his family.

My favorite moments in this film is a scene where Archer must pre­tend to be a jour­nal­ist and Vandy must pose as his cam­era­man so that they may get a free ride towards the giant dia­mond around which the film cen­ters. Bear in mind, at the point, Vandy has lost his fam­ily, his home, and he has very litt­tle to gain by find­ing the dia­mond any­how. Still, he pulls Archer aside and yells at him “I can­not do this!” He is refer­ring to lying. The scene is both heart-warming and heart break­ing, but in the end I found myself chuck­ling. The film would be bet­ter with more of this, but that is all we get.

I absolutely rec­om­mend giv­ing this one a view­ing if you haven’t yet.

I’ve been look­ing for­ward to Tony Gilroy’s fol­lowup to his incred­i­ble Michael Clayton ever since I hot wind of it. Apparently, I’m not alone. The 6:30 show I tried to go to was sold out, as is this 7:35 show. It’s packed and there was a line when I got here at 6:50. I’m going into this blind ( haven’t read any reviews) so I’m really excited. Congrats Tony Gilroy. Now let’s just hope I like this one, I’ll let you know tomorrow.