Barney's Version: Go, Mordecai!

Barney’s Version is dedicated to Mordecai Richler, of course. And Leonard Cohen’s “I’m Your Man” plays over the closing credits. And you hear a good-sized chunk of “Dance Me to the End of Love” midway through the film as well. And you can tell that the hero, Barney Panofsky (as played by Paul Giamatti) has found the woman of his dreams because she’s sitting in a Via Rail cabin casually reading Saul Bellow’s Herzog. (Earlier in the evening, she also slipped him a note updating him on the outcome of the 1977 Stanley Cup final—you know, the one where the Canadiens beat the Bruins 2-1 in overtime.)

In short, Barney’s Version is a two-hour-plus celebration of steak-eating, cigar-smoking, whiskey-drinking, skirt-chasing Montreal Jewishness—it aims to be the definitive Montreal-Jew movie the way that, I don’t know, The Friends of Eddie Coyle sums up Irish Catholic Boston. Oh wait—I’ve got a better comparison… Barney’s Version is to Montreal what Barry Levinson’s Avalon is to Baltimore. It’s a film that spans several decades and probably bites off a lot more story than it can possibly chew, and it doesn’t quite cohere into the form of a movie so much as it feels like a whole lot of material. You know what I mean? And yet, there’s a lot of zest in it and a lot of vivid incidents and whole lot of affection lavished upon the characters, and by the time the 130 minutes or however long this thing is are all over, you rise from your seat in the movie theatre and you feel pretty happy and satisfied because it gave you enough to pull through it all to the end.

I guess I should mention that it probably helps to be Canadian if you want to enjoy Barney’s Version, because a lot of the film’s pleasures simply come from the way director Richard J. Lewis captures the look of Canada in the 1970s—which had a distinctively different sort of brown ugliness than the United States in the 1970s. He packs the cast with a murderer’s row of shot-in-Canada all-stars: Bruce Greenwood, Scott Speedman, Saul Rubinek, Maury Chaykin, and Harvey Atkin, and he slyly casts Atom Egoyan and David Cronenberg in cameos as the directors of the crappy TV show Giamatti has been producing for the last 30 years. (Yes, American readers: it is not at all unrealistic to have a terrible Canadian TV show run for more than three decades.)

The heart of the film, though, is Giamatti’s love life—despite his squatness, pudginess, and hairiness (one recalls Spy magazine’s memorable phrase “short-fingered vulgarian”), he has the great good fortune to make three different beauties his wife. First is Rachelle Lefevre, an unstable bohemian who kills herself in a grand, futile gesture soon after she and Giamatti separate. Next is Minnie Driver, who has money and looks but is too shallow and uptight to be a proper match. (Driver gets the funniest line in the film—I won’t spoil it, but she says it just before she gives Giamatti a blowjob.) And finally comes Rosamund Pike, the Bellow fan, whom Giamatti spends years trying to convince her to date him, only to undo their marriage in the space of one stupid night.

Pike is one of those actresses who’s almost always better than her material (she even managed to give an affecting performance in Surrogates, for crying out loud), and while she’s very sexy and appealing in Barney’s Version, lying on her stomach on her honeymoon night, wiggling her lace-pantied bottom for Giamatti’s amusement, her character’s strenuously emphasized goodness is probably the film’s least convincing element. I kind of wished the film had more a joke of her preternaturally patient and loving wifeliness—anything to make her seem a little more human. (Are the scenes showing her rising career at the CBC on the strength of what appears to be the blandest on-air personality in history meant to be satirical? I couldn’t tell.)

In any case, she seems convincingly in love with Giamatti, and I guess that’s really what matters. Even more importantly is that Giamatti holds the screen effortlessly and even triumphs over a lot of distracting (albeit Oscar-nominated) old-age makeup. I don’t know if he does anything in Barney’s Version that we haven’t seen in his previous performances, but he plays even the big emotional moments (a Before Sunrise-style pickup attempt with Pike on the train, an affectionate speech to his dead father, his gradual decline into senility) with a light, comic touch—thankfully it’s as if he doesn’t even realize that he’s playing an iconic literary character. And he nails his scenes with Dustin Hoffman as his father—if Hoffman likes this guy, flaws and all, you figure that it’s okay for you to like him too.

And I did. And I liked the movie about him too, as overstuffed as it might be. (Did I mention the subplot about Giamatti being suspected of murdering his best friend?) Heck, Canada’s a big country. We’ve got room.