No to the last, until the movie’s ridiculous ending, but to be fair everything looks really great along the way. The suits, the furniture, the cars, Charley’s hi-fi, George’s splendid glass house — the look of the movie is obsessively curated, and A Single Man is as dapper and fussy as its single man. (How dapper? George even looks sharp while reading on the john. How fussy? Ford devotes a comic montage to George’s dissatisfaction with various potential head-blowing-off locations, ending with him pulling a sleeping bag onto his bed in hopes that he might not mess up his sheets.) The movie’s airlessness extends to Ford’s distracting decision to have his cinematographer, the talented Eduard Grau, shoot the film in desaturated color — and then to boost the tones into supersaturation at moments when George feels the flickers of emotion. It’s an exhausting, schematic directorial choice that underlines each scene, giving George’s supposed emotional journey the depth of a childhood game of “Warmer… Colder!”

And it’s a choice that demonstrates the lack of care Ford gives to the actual emotional lives of his mannequins. Again and again, showmanship trumps the hard work of delving into a character, and Ford never makes a coherent case for his character being their aesthetics, an opening voice-over from George about hiding his true self notwithstanding. (Compare A Single Man to a movie it seems to aspire to be, Todd Haynes’s Far From Heaven, and its flourishes seem hopeless next to that movie’s neat entanglement of style and substance.) And so a purportedly potent scene like the flashback — for example — in which George receives the news of Jim’s faraway death over the phone is undercut by the unmistakable voice at the other end of the line, that icon of early-’60s style, Jon Hamm (in an uncredited voice cameo). Firth emotes like crazy, but all most viewers will think during this crucial moment is, “How come Don Draper’s on the phone?”

Nicholas Hoult

Trying his best to overcome — or to match — the overload of A Single Man, Firth gives the kind of showy performance that I didn’t know he had in him. (Or, rather, the kind of performance that until now he’s admirably restrained himself from giving.) Moore is, as always, excellent as a blowsy Brit at loose ends. When George tells her she needs to forget the past and start living in the future, she replies, with a pitch-perfect mix of devil-may-care and self-mockery, “Living in the past is my future.” But her character makes no sense; really, would a devoted friend — whom we see, in flashback, consoling a crying George in the pouring rain just after he’s learned of Jim’s death — so casually disparage her friend’s loving relationship of sixteen years?

And Hoult, once the boy of About a Boy, has transformed into a dreamboat in a fluffy white sweater, with the sharp eyebrows and blinding teeth of a young Tom Cruise. But there’s little to Kenny other than an unexplained attraction to George and a vague dissatisfaction with life. “I can’t wait for the present to be over,” he grouses late in the movie, just one of many references to advancing time in a film that can’t lay off the shots of ticking clocks. “The present’s a total drag.” While watching this lovely, lethargic, deeply disappointing film, you may be forced to agree. At least when the present’s over and the future arrives, A Single Man will be safely in the past.

Note: Parts of this review also made their way into an IM chat about the movie on The Awl.

"The other day I felt stupid. Fuck that day."

“What do I mean,” a teacher asks a class of problem students late in Precious: Based on the Novel Push by Sapphire, “when I say ‘The protagonist’s circumstances are unrelenting’?” It’s a question that seems wildly out of place in this particular classroom setting, given the difficulties these troubled teenage girls have shown thus far with basic skills — reading, writing, not being horrible to one another in class. Paula Patton, the actress who plays the teacher in question, delivers the query with a bit of a sly smile, because it’s addressed not to the students, of course, but to the movie itself.

But it turns out she’s asking the wrong question of Precious, directed by Lee Daniels. After watching this much-praised, much-criticized drama, you may ask: What, if anything, does it mean that the protagonist’s circumstances are so fucking unrelenting?

The troubles endured by Claireece “Precious” Jones, the teenager played with great sympathy by Gabourey Sidibe, are legion: Physical abuse, sexual abuse, rape, two pregnancies, obesity, self-loathing, illiteracy. By the time that Precious learns that on top of everything else, she’s HIV-positive, half the audience at the screening I attended gasped in horror and the other half half-laughed. It’s to both Precious’s credit and to its detriment that the movie doesn’t believe in doing anything halfway; if Daniels’ willingness to go over the top causes the movie to leap into full-on exploitation at times, it also fosters a fearlessness in his actors that’s responsible for the movie’s most stunning moments.

Precious, 16, dark-skinned and enormously overweight, spends the worst parts of her life in a fantasy world: Amid popping flashbulbs, she’s a celebrity, she’s rich, she’s fabulous, she’s wanted, she’s thin, she’s white. In real life, those worst times include being raped by her father, beat up by neighborhood punks, and — most frequently — relentlessly and horrifyingly abused by her mother, Mary, played expertly by the comedian Mo’Nique.

"You don't know what real women do! Real women sacrifice."

Slumped in a chair in front of the television in the rattletrap Harlem apartment she and her daughter share, Mary hurls insults, food, and a television at Precious, her constant stream of invective as careful and calculated as a set at the Improv. That Mary knows her daughter’s weaknesses, and attacks them with devilish intelligence, makes her a movie monster for the ages, but I confess that for most of the movie I remained unconvinced by the over-the-top accolades I had heard for Mo’Nique’s performance. Sure, she can swear — at times, her proficiency with profane rage made me wish Bill Condon would just cast her as Richard Pryor, instead of Marlon Wayans — but the role, for the first nine-tenths of the movie, is one (amazing, hideous) note. But then, late in the movie, long after I’d given up on ever understanding what makes Mary tick, Mo’Nique delivers a monologue that is so heartbreaking, so majestically fucked-up and awful and out of control, that I wrote in my notes: “Oh, I get it now.” (Plus, she addresses the speech to Mariah Carey, playing an even-keeled welfare caseworker, which just makes it more impressive! Carey is not at all bad in Precious, although her most memorable moment is Mo’Nique asking her, “So are you Italian or black or Spanish or what?”) Precious is a movie that, for better and for worse, lets its action and dialogue and personality and imagery spill out all over the place — it’s a film that demands not to be obscured — but Mo’Nique’s grubby, outsized performance eclipses the movie nonetheless.

Sidibe, though, is pretty amazing as well. The scene in which Precious cannily steals, and then ravenously eats, an entire bucket of fried chicken is memorable; Precious’s desperate love for her baby, no matter what the circumstances of his conception or birth, is unforgettable. Placed in an alternative school called Each One, Teach One, Precious cautiously flowers, even as she battles it out with her almost-as-traumatized classmates. (Blu Rain, the teacher played by Patton, may be a cliché of a lesbian of color, what with her impeccable suits and her Ntozake Shange posters, but she’s a hell of a teacher.) Throughout, Sidibe conveys, through an emotionally rich and physically adroit performance, not just Precious’s agony and self-doubt but her ferocious will to survive. “The other day I felt stupid,” she says in voice-over at one point. “Fuck that day.”

The movie's poster

Precious gets through her life by making herself absent: Imagining herself away when she’s being raped; staying as invisible as possible when creeping past her snoring mother; disappearing into the back row at her school. The film’s original poster is a striking image, and it gets at the void at the center of Precious, the black hole that is her life. When Precious, stuck in the front row at Each One, Teach One, pipes up in class one day, Blu asks her how speaking in front of everyone makes her feel. “It makes me feel…” Precious replies, then falters. “Here. It makes me feel here.” Precious: Based on the Novel Push by Sapphire can barely overcome its own excesses, but you can’t deny the power of its performances, or the torrent of emotion raging through it. There’s there there.

"While Scrooge remained unaltered in his outward form, the Ghost grew older, clearly older. "

I’ve been dreading A Christmas Carol for a long time. Exactly how long? Thanks to the internet, I can find out! On July 9, 2007, news hit the trades that Jim Carrey would be playing not just Ebenezer Scrooge but all three of the ghosts haunting him in Robert Zemeckis’s motion-capture 3D version of the Dickens classic. My snap response: “Anyone who goes to see this movie deserves what he gets.” I didn’t feel much better when the news broke, a year later, that Gary Oldman would be playing not just Bob Cratchit and Jacob Marley but also Tiny Tim. (Reportedly, to maintain eyelines, he performed his scenes in a trench.)

It’s not that classics like A Christmas Carol are untouchable; one of the finest versions of Scrooge’s story is the 1992 Muppet one, which was hardly faithful to the original, inasmuch as it gives Jacob Marley a brother named Robert (!), and features, as the Marley ghosts, Statler and Waldorf. But the idea of sitting through Jim Carrey, Jim Carrey, Gary Oldman, Jim Carrey, Gary Oldman, Jim Carrey, and Gary Oldman in Robert Zemeckis’s A Christmas Carol just seemed like a horror. I assumed that Dickens’ tale would be not just adapted poorly but Carreyfied: overstuffed with the horseplay and rubber-faced baloney that Jim Carrey brings to his comedy performances.

So imagine my surprise when I discovered that Zemeckis’s A Christmas Carol is, in fact, an extremely faithful retelling of the story, with nearly every single line of dialogue coming directly from Dickens’ original. It’s not at all perfect — in fact, it’s seriously flawed in some very important ways — but it’s not a fiasco, it’s not Carreyfied, and it delivers Dickens’ tale of midnight terror and Yuletide repentance remarkably effectively.

Marley and Marley

The first clue that this might not be the fart-joke-fest you’re fearing comes early, in a striking scene that expands on the book’s memorable opening lines. “Marley was dead, to begin with,” Dickens wrote, and Zemeckis shows us the dead Marley, rigid in his coffin. Ebenezer Scrooge stands in a funeral home, unwilling to respond to the undertaker’s open palm with the expected gratuity. When Scrooge finally, balefully, gives up a few coins, he immediately snatches the pennies off dead Marley’s eyes. The Victorian gloom, the shocking violation of a body, Scrooge’s callous parsimony — it’s all a bit overwhelming.

From there, we go on to the familiar story beats: Scrooge in his office, abusing his poor clerk Cratchit and declining an invitation to dinner from his nephew (Colin Firth). Scrooge at his front step, surprised by the door knocker assuming Marley’s face. And Scrooge before his meager fire as the ghost of Jacob Marley approaches, laden in chains. Marley, his hair wild, his teeth awful, his eyes rolling back in his head, is frightening enough (in fact, the whole movie seems far too scary for younger children); even more frightening is the afterlife Marley reveals, when Scrooge looks out his window and sees dozens of miserable ghosts floating through the air, each engaged in some hellish exercise as Sisyphean as hauling around a chain for eternity.

"Link by link, and yard by yard"

Zemeckis’s Carol, it turns out, is smart and scary in equal measures. Dickens’ story may be a cultural trope by now, but it still holds an elemental terror: Who doesn’t regret mistakes of his past, or fear onrushing death? Who isn’t forging his own chain, “link by link, and yard by yard,” even if it isn’t as long as Marley’s — or Scrooge’s? Zemeckis’s fealty to the original — in its language, and in its awestruck respect for the power of eternity — is striking in its seriousness.

Of course, it’s not long before Scrooge is flying through the air, whacking icicles with his face. Zemeckis seems to view a truly dramatic Christmas Carol as too tough a pill for family audiences to swallow, and so he does his best to juice things up with a couple of hyperkinetic action sequences, each more beside the point than the last. Kids in the theater — those who hadn’t already left, frightened — loved watching Scrooge shrink to mouse size and slide through a pipe, and if this is the trade audiences must make to avoid, whatever,  a Scrooge who rides a skateboard and says, “Bah humbug, dude!” it’s a trade I’ll gladly make. But Zemeckis could well have cut nearly all of these sequences and had a better movie at the end.

Not to mention a movie that wasn’t so visually chaotic. There are still bugs in Zemeckis’s motion-capture technique, in which the performances of live actors inspire the movements of animated characters, first among them the fact that he still hasn’t traversed the uncanny valley: No matter how strong the technology, humans still look off-puttingly inhuman. CGI excels, though, in portraying grand spaces, and some of the film’s views of snow-covered 1840s London — its streets bustling with carriages but miraculously shit-free — are wondrous to behold. It’s too bad we speed through them so quickly, and so frequently, as to make 3D viewers headachy and miserable.

Charles Dickens

Jim Carrey, it turns out, plays a completely passable Scrooge, and excellent Ghosts of Christmas Past and Present. (I hope Disney paid him scale for his performance as the Ghost of Christmas Future, as it’s just an enormous shadow that points a bony finger but never speaks.) Oldman has moments of charm as Bob Cratchit, and thank heavens, his performance as Tiny Tim is tiny enough that you might forget it’s a 50-year-old man on his knees in a trench. And Zemeckis, for all his directorial overenthusiasm, has taken a revolutionary idea — just faithfully adapt a classic story! — and made from it a film of A Christmas Carol that might even be better than the Muppets’. Charles Dickens, as played by Gonzo, would be proud.

"I was like a blond farmboy on a distant desert planet."

The Men Who Stare at Goats, a poker-faced comedy about paranormal research in the United States military, has a lot of problems. Director Grant Heslov hasn’t mastered the kind of deadpan buffonery that, say, Steven Soderbergh made look so easy in the Ocean’s series. Peter Straughan’s screenplay rests uneasily in the gray zone between earnest current-events drama and stoner comedy. And despite an opening title that proclaims, “More of this is true than you would believe,” The Men Who Stare at Goats invents most of its major plot points and, sadly, greatly exaggerates the history of military interest in the paranormal. That is to say: While some small parts of this fact-based movie are true, the bits that you’ll most wish were true are not.

All that stipulated, it is awfully hard to dislike a movie in which a mustachioed George Clooney tries to convince a whimpering Ewan McGregor of his own psychic abilities by snapping, “Haven’t you ever felt like you were different? It’s the Jedi in you!”

Adapted from Jon Ronson’s book of the same title, The Men Who Stare at Goats follows Ann Arbor reporter Bob Wilton (McGregor) on an ill-fated trip to the Middle East in 2003. Wilton’s wife has just left him for his prosthetic-wearing editor — “that one-armed fuckhead Dave” — and Wilton, a milquetoast without much direction in life, heads to war, eager to prove himself in her eyes. Stuck in a Kuwait hotel, Wilton runs into Lyn Cassady (Clooney), a “supersoldier” who claims he’s been trained by the U.S. Army in remote projection, cloudbursting, telekinesis, and something called “sparkly eyes.” (In a highly enjoyable tossed-off scene, Cassady, driving through the desert, demonstrates “sparkly eyes” for Wilton, repeatedly glancing over at him intensely. Sparkly eyes look like regular eyes, but funnier.) Wilton might not be much of a reporter — at one point he can’t even remember a local guide’s name — but he knows enough to follow a crazy person into the desert in search of a story.

Long hair, short mustache

Soon enough, Cassady and Wilton are wandering the barren sand dunes, bickering in the blazing sun like a modern-day Beatty and Hoffman. In between being kidnapped by Iraqis, rescued by Americans, and trapped in a firefight between two private security companies, Cassady tells Wilton the story of the New Earth Army. A special division instituted, he claims, at Fort Bragg in the 1980s by long-haired officer-turned-shaman Bill Django (Jeff Bridges, in full flower), the New Earth Army created soldiers with paranormal powers: They could locate a prisoner thousands of miles away, disable an enemy with positive thoughts, and, utilize sparkly eyes for whatever it is they are meant to do. By far the most satisfying scenes in The Men Who Stare at Goats are these flashbacks to a gentler time, as Jeff Bridges hands out daisies to generals and encourages George Clooney to dance like no one’s watching. Neither Bridges nor Clooney are afraid to be silly; indeed, they seem to relish the opportunity, with Bridges basically revisiting the Dude, and Clooney signifying his embrace of the New Earth Army ethos with a ridiculous long wig — although, incongruously, he maintains his closely-trimmed mustache.

The arrival of disgruntled science fiction writer Larry Hooper (Kevin Spacey), however, throws Project Jedi (as it was known) into disarray. Soon soldiers who had been trained to spread peace are sitting in rooms with de-bleated goats, intently trying to stop their hearts. And years later, in the Iraqi desert, Cassady and Wilton find what remains of the New Earth Army, using select principles from Project Jedi for torturous ends.

All this is pretty silly, of course. (The ending is particularly silly.) There was a Bill Django, it turns out: Jim Channon, a lieutenant colonel who did indeed write a manifesto for a New Earth Army. (Sample: “Soldiers can be the principal moral ethical basis on which things political can harmonize in the name of the Earth.”) But, as far as I can tell, no Project Jedi was ever created, and no long-haired, pot-smoking soldiers ever paraded around Fort Bragg. But if Heslov, best known as the Oscar-nominated screenwriter of Clooney’s Good Night, and Good Luck, can’t quite pull off the complicated tone of a movie that wants to revel in the possibilities of a new age army while simultaneously mocking the goofball hippies who would believe in such a thing, his actors maintain perfect pitch throughout, and make The Men Who Stare at Goats a lot more fun than it has any right to be. Especially welcome in minor roles are Stephen Lang as the grinning general who sponsors Project Jedi, and Stephen Root and Nick Offerman as fellow New Earth Army recruits.

Clooney has made a career out of alternating between roles that exploit his innate leading-manliness (the Ocean’s movies, Out of Sight, Michael Clayton), and roles that subvert it. He’s giving one of his Coen brothers performances here, going way, way over the top, his Cassady a mix of O Brother’s unhinged hayseed and Syriana’s washed-up spook. It’s to his credit as an actor that he’s happy to do both, and if The Men Who Stare at Goats isn’t exactly a timeless classic — five years from now, it’ll come on cable and you’ll think, Oh yeah, that movie — it epitomizes the force for moviemaking good that Clooney’s movie-stardom has become.

Early in the movie, Wilton asks Cassady how he amplifies his supposed paranormal powers. Clooney, staring soulfully into the distance, intones that it takes a lot of focus, blah blah blah, then comes right out with it: “I find drinking helps,” he says. “And listening to classic rock. I like Boston.” Needless to say, it isn’t long before “More Than a Feeling” rocks the soundtrack. It’s the perfect theme song for The Men Who Stare at Goats, its mix of earnestness and cheese just right for a movie that happily dispenses both.

"I'll eat you up, I love you so."

Where the Wild Things Are, directed by Spike Jonze from a screenplay by Jonze and Dave Eggers, is many things: a kids’ movie that many kids won’t like; an experimental narrative that reportedly cost $100 million to make; and a minor masterpiece that will likely lose its studio, Warner Bros., a great deal of money. It seems less interested in entertaining children than in replicating childhood, as carefully, beautifully, and creatively as possible, on a screen. Watching the entire film, about nine-year-old Max and his adventures on an island inhabited by Wild Things, is an experience not unlike spending ninety minutes with an actual nine-year-old: You’ll be in turns exhilarated, nervous, bored, entertained, awestruck, annoyed, and deeply in love with this precocious, hyperactive film. In the end you’ll be grateful for the time you’ve spent with Where the Wild Things Are, even as you’re itchy for some grown-up time alone.

Surely you already know the story of Where the Wild Things Are, such as it is: Boy shouts at mother. Boy escapes to island and dances with wild things. Boy returns home to a warm dinner. The end. In finding a particular child’s life in the margins of Maurice Sendak’s elemental tale, Jonze and Eggers run the risk of overpsychologizing their nine-year-old hero (played by newcomer Max Records), overloading him with divorced parents, money troubles, an inconstant sister. But the details of Max’s life are so deftly sketched in the film’s first twenty minutes as to make Max seem not a typical movie character but a typical kid, not at all unlike me when I was nine, or you when you were nine, or any child. (Well, it’s true there is something to his destructiveness that seems particularly, if not exclusively, boyish.)

He’s a child who likes stories; before his big tantrum, he shares a quiet moment with his mom (a wonderful Catherine Keener), inventing a tall tale about tall buildings that turn into vampires, which his mom carefully types up for him. And so when he throws a tantrum — spurred on partially by his mom’s new boyfriend (Mark Ruffalo), partially by his sister’s ignoring him in a time of need, partially by a teacher’s woefully inappropriate explanation of the eventual heat death of the universe — his anger becomes a story, the story of Max running out of his house, getting in a boat, and sailing off into an adventure.

Reviewers who have complained about the glumness of the Wild Things, and declared the movie itself unrepresentative of childhood, must’ve had formative years free of the sadness and self-doubt that I, and everyone I know, endured. To my mind the mix on the island of childlike joy (wrecking stuff, building stuff, running through the woods screaming) and childlike sadness (mourning lost friends, worrying about fitting in, raging at the unfairness of things) feels exactly like childhood felt. It’s a time when you’re absolutely free to let your imagination run wild, but also a time when adults withhold information from you and force you into bed at 8:00. And as I watch my children get older — girls, yes, and younger than Max, but encouragingly destructive — I see their joy and sorrows both, and find them both touching, and do my best to foster their joy and understand their grief, even when it is just grief about something stupid like the fact that I have no answer to the question “Why is that a candle?”

And the Wild Things are thrilling: Big, clumsy children with expressive CGI faces, poor impulse control, and turbulent emotions, they convey a real danger even when you’re sure, as a viewer, that everything’s gonna be okay. Hurt feelings and ripped-off limbs notwithstanding. Their voices might sound a little overly familiar, but the actors playing them aren’t simply riffing, in the tradition of children’s movies, on their own image; they’re acting. If Carol, the Wild Thing with whom Max spends most his time, sounds a little too much like Tony Soprano — especially during some very heavy breathing — James Gandolfini is still giving a hell of a performance. And Lauren Ambrose, as the dreamy Wild Thing K.W., is fascinating; her character provides the movie’s biggest narrative surprise and most bravura visual moment, an act of kindness that transforms K.W. into a mix of protective sister, biological mother, and dangerous monster.

"I have a sadness shield that keeps out all the sadness."

Near the end of the movie, Max sits with a small, goat-shaped Wild Thing named Alexander (Paul Dano), who reveals that he knows Max isn’t really a king. “You’re just regular,” Alexander says, and Dano’s voice conveys both admiration and disappointment. Where the Wild Things Are is a movie about learning to be regular, earning a small measure of control over one’s emotions and, thus, over the world outside one’s self. It is akin not to a children’s book, truly, despite being adapted from one. Instead, it is a close cousin to the unique sub-genre of literary fiction about children for adults — serious attempts to decode the inner character of children like Mark Haddon’s The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go, and Tony Earley’s Jim the Boy.

Will your kids like Where the Wild Things Are? Maybe not. It’s not scary but it is difficult. Unlike most children’s movies, it is not engineered to generate pleasure responses every twenty-five seconds. Put it this way: When my daughter spends long stretches playing with a single beloved friend, the charged atmosphere between them seems to cause them to toggle from unadulterated love to tantrumy rage within seconds. A lot of kids will respond the same way to Where the Wild Things Are. But I’ll also bet that when they’re adults, the memory of seeing it will be sharp and vivid in their minds.

Much has been made of the battles Jonze went through in adapting Maurice Sendak’s slim book into a film. (Struggles the director of Adaptation must surely have expected.) On set, Jonze struggled with awkward Wild Thing suits; in Hollywood, he maneuvered around nervous studio suits. For several years, film fans pleaded with Warners to let Jonze release the movie he wanted to make, rather than wrest control of this shaggy beast and re-edit it into something more commercial. It’s possible that Warner Bros., sensitive to the hue and cry, let a unique and creative artist finish the film his way. But it seems more likely that the studio realized that a traditional childrens’ movie could never be coaxed from the footage Jonze had shot — hand-held, gorgeous images filmed (by cinematographer Lance Acord) on a barren Australian coast — and threw up their hands. If they couldn’t make money off of it, they may well have thought, at least they can buy some goodwill. For a movie this fascinating, I’m happy to give it to them.

"Isn't it nice to meet a young person who wants to learn things?"

The Coens aren’t the only ones concerned with serious men. Jenny, the heroine of Lone Scherfig’s An Education, is also on the lookout for a serious man — or un jeune homme serieux, as she takes pains to pronounce, casual français being the height of sophistication for a 16-year-old in 1961 England. A bright girl on the cusp of adulthood in a country on the cusp of dramatic change, Jenny, played by Carey Mulligan, is hungry for independence and rapacious for experience. “I want to read what I want and listen to what I want,” she declares, and she gets her chance when she’s taken under the wing of an older man, David (Peter Sarsgaard), after he gives her a ride home from cello practice in the rain.

 Nick Hornby’s screenplay, based on a memoir by Lynn Barber, adroitly dramatizes the state of the clever teenager desperate for more. David doesn’t offer Jenny sweet talk but instead engages her in a conversation about Elgar, and soon he has talked Jenny’s parents (bewildered Alfred Molina and touching Cara Seymour) into letting him take her to a concert, and then out for dinner along with his friends Danny (Dominic Cooper) and Helen (Rosamund Pike). In the impossibly glamorous company of these grown-ups — who know about drinks and talk about literature and listen to jazz — Jenny gets a taste of the life she’s dreamed of, a life that puts dull Twickenham and her awkward classmates far behind her.

Needless to say, there are complications. One is that David, Danny and Helen are not exactly nobility, and as Jenny becomes aware of how they make the money that funds their excursions to Oxford and Paris, she struggles with her own response. “Don’t be bourgeois, Jenny, you’re better than that,” David chides her, playing expertly into her fears, then flattering her: “We’re not clever like you, so we have to be clever in other ways.” Though the complications aren’t unexpected or even all that well-handled, An Education is still an enjoyable, well-acted drama that convincingly portrays an accelerated adolescence in a turbulent time.

In large part the success of An Education can be traced to its excellent cast, and Scherfig’s specific, well-considered direction of them. Mulligan, first seen in America as Nina being wooed by Sarsgaard’s Trigorin in last year’s excellent Broadway revival of The Seagull, is sharp-edged and appealing as Jenny, bouncing nicely off both the quiet David and her hapless, blustery father. Jenny’s put-on worldliness, even in a crummy airport hotel, is charming, and the moments when she lets her guard drop are genuinely touching.

The rest of the cast is exemplary, especially Pike as an experienced woman who asks her beaux no questions and tells Jenny no lies, and Molina, who sees his careful plan to make Jenny the first in his family to go to college falling apart for the unlikeliest of reasons. Emma Thompson and Olivia Williams give tart performances as disappointed staff at Jenny’s school, and Sally Hawkins is notable for how diametrically opposed in spirit her small but important role in this film is from her sunny turn in last year’s Happy-Go-Lucky.

“Action is character,” Jenny’s English teacher tells her. Jenny interprets that to mean that “if we don’t do anything, we don’t become anybody.” It’s no spoiler to note, with pleasure, that Jenny’s at least a little bit wrong. For all her mistakes, her character is not ruined. The person she becomes depends not only on the choices that she makes, good and bad, but on the wit and strength she’s had all along. For all its embrace of the sophisticated life, there’s an old-fashioned ideal at the center of An Education, one that Mulligan’s starmaking performance drives home. David would find the idea hopelessly bourgeois, but in the end An Education is a celebration not only of the sense of adventure that waylays Jenny, but of the moral compass that sets her straight again.

"Do you take advantage of the new freedoms?"

Back in 2000, the Coen brothers were nominated for an Oscar for Best Adapted Screenplay for O Brother, Where Art Thou?, a movie based — or so its opening credits claimed — “upon the book THE ODYSSEY, by HOMER.” The Coens, puckish as ever in interviews, admitted (or boasted) that in fact they had never read The Odyssey. It’s disappointing that the Coens’ new film, A Serious Man, doesn’t sport a credit claiming to be based “upon the book of JOB, by GOD,” but don’t be surprised if the Academy gets fooled again. Though far more, well, serious than the sepia-toned goofball epic that was O Brother, A Serious Man is just as cheeky in its free adaptation of a story we all know deep in our bones: The man whose faith is tested; the poor sap who looks up to the sky, pleading for the suffering to stop, only to have a bird shit in his eye. And then the whirlwind comes.

Set in the Minnesota Jewish community of the Coens’ childhood, A Serious Man is fastidiously particular in its time (1967) and place (the flat Midwestern suburb in its too-brief summer) but pleasingly open-ended in its philosophy. “What does Hashem want from me?” asks this story’s Job, Larry Gopnik (Michael Stuhlbarg), a put-upon math professor, using the term for “God” employed by everyone in the movie’s world. Someone’s sending denunciations of Larry to the tenure committee, and a disgruntled student may be trying to bribe him, or sue him. His son spends Hebrew school smoking pot and listening to Jefferson Airplane; his daughter is stealing money from his wallet. His brother Arthur (Richard Kind), out of work and crashing at Larry’s house, spends half his day draining his sebaceous cyst in the bathroom and the other half working on “the Mentaculus,” a notebook full of insane scribblings and formulae. And his shrewish wife (Sari Lennick) is leaving him for the unctuous Sy Ableman (Fred Melamed, using his announcer’s pipes to great effect).

As the indignities pile on poor Larry, Stuhlbarg — known to Broadway audiences for his performance in The Pillowman — grows more and more desperate, and more and more disheveled. (Stuhlbarg says the continuity department employed a “haggard chart” to track his misery over the course of the movie.) He consults three rabbis about his plight, each less useful than the last. And he struggles to understand what it is that Hashem is doing to him. Why is his suffering important to God? How can he stop it? Is there a single action he can take that will undo all that’s come before? “Actions have consequences,” he tells a student angry about failing his course. “Yes, sir, often,” the student replies.

Larry comes to believe that his problem might be inaction. “I haven’t done anything!” he wails more than once — to his angry wife, to his divorce lawyer, to the rabbis. Leave it to the Coens to employ, as a crucial metaphor for Larry’s plight, his son’s secret membership in the Columbia Record Club, which has led to a series of pleading collections calls. “Santana Abraxas?” Larry asks blankly. “I didn’t order a Santana Abraxas.”  “Yes, sir, just do nothing, and we’ll send you your next record,” the caller explains.

Everywhere Larry turns, he is confronted with his own inaction. His comely next-door neighbor sunbathes nude in her backyard, and invites Larry to “take advantage of the new freedoms,” but he can’t bring himself to act. (The neighbor is played by Amy Landecker; her pubic hair is played by a merkin she named “Cousin It.”)  Night after night in the fleabag hotel to which his wife’s consigned him, Larry dreams of taking action — sleeping with the neighbor, saving his screwed-up brother — always with disastrous results. If he finally does take action, what will happen to him? Not for nothing do we first see Larry, just after an X-ray at his doctor’s, explaining the story of Schrödinger’s cat to his students.

The Coens’ control of their material is, of course, flawless, and as ever this film begs the question of what purpose the material serves. Is A Serious Man a serious movie? Sort of; sort of it’s a joke, although a dark one with an Old Testament punchline. From its parabolic opening — a short Yiddish-language fable set in the shtetl of a man, his wife, and a dybbuk played by Fyvush Finkel — to its horror-movie shock-cuts to its whirlwind conclusion, A Serious Man is unsubtle, entertaining, full of portent, and signifying … something, that’s for sure.

"You have a lot to live for."

The kind thing to say about The Invention of Lying, the new comedy starring Ricky Gervais — which the comedian wrote and directed with Matthew Robinson — would be that it’s quite often very funny, and that it’s far more thoughtful than most studio comedies. But in the spirit of the World of Truth in which The Invention of Lying is set, where no one has ever told a whopper or a fib or a tall tale or a little white lie or a gentle untruth, I will be honest: I wished The Invention of Lying was better. I hoped for more from Gervais, the certifiable genius behind The Office. I’m glad that the movie was made, and I hope it does well, but I can’t help but think that it could’ve been a lot weirder, funnier, and better if only Gervais and Robinson had had the guts to go all-out in pursuit of their trenchant concept.

The courage to go too far has never before been a problem for Gervais, who in his original version of The Office was perfectly willing to push a joke from uncomfortable to flat-out unendurable. There are signs of that same uncompromising comic sensibility in The Invention of Lying — as when a neighbor (Jonah Hill) answers Gervais’s innocent “How are you?” with an admission that he’s been throwing up sleeping pills all night because he lacks the courage to take a fatal overdose — but the movie’s attention winds up focused, to its detriment, on a wan romance between Mark Bellison (Gervais), a screenwriter, and Anna McDoogles (Jennifer Garner), a … well, we don’t really know. I’ll get to that.

In the World of Truth in which Mark and Anna live, movies consist of orators reading stories from history at the camera, and advertisements — in a bit better done in 1990’s otherwise justly-forgotten Crazy People — are unadorned and frank: “Pepsi: When They Don’t Have Coke.” Interpersonal communication is the most altered, as not only does everyone never lie, no one ever withholds an uncomfortable truth. “I’m definitely not sexually attracted to you,” Anna tells Mark before their first date. “I’m not looking forward to this evening at all.” The result is not a utopia of truthfulness but instead a blunt world of matter-of-fact disdain. Mark, short and tubby and Gervaisian, is told by everyone — Anna, his bitter secretary (Tina Fey), his office rival (Rob Lowe) — what a fat loser he is, and his fellow losers, like his suicidal neighbor, or his best friend Greg (Louis CK), are unable to delude themselves into thinking things will ever get better. After all, in the World of Truth, you can’t even lie to yourself.

That all changes when a stressed-out Mark tells the world’s first lie. Sure, at first he cheats at his job and cleans out an area casino, but soon he’s telling little white lies that make people feel better. (Like convincing Jonah Hill’s suicidal character that he has plenty to live for.) But things get out of hand when the comforting story he tells his dying mother — that death isn’t nothingness, that Heaven awaits her — spreads like wildfire to a populace eager for something to look forward to. Soon Mark has invented not only lying but religion, frantically spinning tall tales about “the man in the sky” who watches over everyone.

As blithely blasphemous as the movie’s view of religion may be, moment by moment, The Invention of Lying coasts less on its ideas and mainly on the anti-charm of Gervais, who’s in pretty much every scene and narrates even the movie’s opening credits in his undermining whinge. (“Oh, the credits. The money people. No one cares about you.”) The movie’s greatest surprise might be Gervais’s range; I never would have expected he had a weeping deathbed scene in him, much less one as moving as this one. And he and Jennifer Garner both commit to the movie’s love story, despite its one glaring shortcoming: It’s never made clear why, exactly, Mark is so deeply in love with Anna.

“You’re the kindest person I’ve ever met,” he says, but she’s not; she’s exactly as kind as everyone else in the World of Truth, which is to say not particularly kind at all. After all, Mark’s invented not only lying but kindness, apparently, if one defines kindness as saying nice things when you don’t have to and doing nice things without being asked. No, the only reason Mark loves Anna at all is because … she’s beautiful. We don’t know what she does, what she cares about — we don’t know anything about her other than that she’s pretty, and she’s been programmed along with the rest of humanity to speak her mind and live entirely practically. “I need to find a genetically appropriate mate,” she protests when Mark asks if they might have a romantic relationship; he might as well be in love with a robot.

This bewildering failure to give Anna any inner life at all — literally, she has nothing other than a fear of being alone, which she of course baldly states from the outset — turns The Invention of Lying from an intriguing conceptual comedy to a failed one. After all, if the lesson that Mark teaches Anna is to see what’s inside a person — to look beyond the truth for a greater truth, in essence — why is it that the pudgy, snub-nosed guy will only settle for Jennifer Garner?

In the end, I wished for the movie to be bigger, messier, more outrageous. I wished for The Invention of Lying to do away with its concept-negating love story and instead embrace the madcap, world-changing possibilities of its premise — less romantic comedy, more Life of Brian. Given the myriad of wildly comic directions in which the story could’ve gone, it’s awfully disappointing that Gervais and Robinson end their movie with … a wedding. (Albeit a funny one conducted by John Hodgman in a country church — sorry, “A Quiet Place to Think About the Man in the Sky,” as the sign outside reads.) Is that really the best that Ricky Gervais could do? I cannot tell a lie: I expected more.