Yes, it's a shame that Colin Farrell's johnson was edited out—or haven't you been enjoying those news reports?—because what works in this imperfect adaptation of Michael (The Hours) Cunningham's poignant 1990 novel is hanging admirably loose. In its many quiet moments, World achieves an informal tenderness rarely seen in American movies about male friendship.
Farrell plays Bobby, who was raised as an aimless teenager in the Ohio home of his best friend, Jonathan (Dallas Roberts), after essentially being orphaned. In a '70s prologue featuring doe-eyed younger actors, we see how the boys found solace in each other: Nervous Jonathan idolizes Bobby's counterculture nonchalance, while Bobby craves the stability of Jonathan's middle-class calm. Adulthood sends them onto different paths. Jonathan grows up gay and moves to New York in the early '80s, where he settles into a bohemian existence with roommate Clare (Robin Wright Penn). Bobby is a baker living at home with Jonathan's mother, Alice (Sissy Spacek), until he, too, journeys to Manhattan and, much to Jonathan's distress, impregnates Clare. After some initial consternation, the three friends move upstate in an attempt to redefine the conventional family.
magnolia pictures
Bukowski in his prime?
Related Content
More About
That's a lot of plot, and neither director Michael Mayer nor Cunningham, who wrote the screenplay, is nimble with the heft. Cunningham's dramatic shorthand may frustrate fans of his novel: Gone is the wounded back story of Jonathan's life as a fey adolescent; Alice's narrative voice is missing altogether, leaving Spacek with little to do but exude a hausfrau's bewildered compassion (which she does exceedingly well). Mayer, meanwhile, too often relies on the nudge of a pop soundtrack or Duncan Sheik's overwrought score to deliver his defining moments.
But the film doesn't cheat where it really counts (Farrell's member notwithstanding). The innocent diddling the boys indulge in as teenagers is calmly depicted, as is the embattled but unwavering affection they display as men of differing sexual identities. Bobby and Jonathan share more than one embrace, and the movie never gets moist and well-meaning about it. Neither do the actors. Newcomer Roberts has understated grace; the usually wan Penn avoids easy caricature in a fine turn as a frazzled fag hag; and Farrell finally lives up to his reputation—he gives a real performance here, unforced and convincingly without guile. In a way, World is much like its protagonists: You have to endure its awkward early stages in order to enjoy something refreshingly grown-up. (R) STEVE WIECKING
Maria Full of Grace
Opens Fri., July 30, at Seven Gables and Meridian
Grace ain't what Maria is full of. It's shit: high-grade cocaine or heroin packed into 60 or more bulging condoms she swallowed with difficulty in Colombia en route to JFK. If one breaks, she dies; if she steals or loses one along the way to meeting her gangster handlers in New Jersey, everyone in her family dies. Why does she do it? For transporting $350,000 worth of junk, she gets up to $8,000 tax-free. The average Colombian annual income is $1,830.
But if generic poverty were her only motive, I doubt tyro director Joshua Marston's drug-mule movie would've copped film-fest awards from Seattle to Sundance to Berlin. (At the latter, incandescent newcomer Catalina Sandino Moreno tied with Monster's Charlize Theron for best actress.) Moreno depicts an idiosyncratic individual, not a walking social problem in urgent need of a women's room. This Maria is a bit of a wild-child teen. She's fed up about being stuck in a crummy house crammed with crab-apple relatives, sick of her soul-crushing job plucking thorns at a rose plantation. When she informs her no- account boyfriend she's pregnant, he loyally says he's "not going anywhere." That's for sure! Maria is determined to get somewhere, even if she has to hitch a motorcycle ride to low-down, big-time Bogotá. She gets into the drug trade because she's full of beans.
Moreno is a poker-faced revelation. Evidently she looks the part of a drug mule—customs stopped and searched her at JFK in real life. She also fits the profile of a star who can carry a film. All of Marston's exhaustive social-milieu research would've come off as dead and labored without her animating presence to render it real. The prick of the rose thorn, the bark of the boss, the X-ray gaze of customs officials, the fangs of the gangsters—her big, luminous eyes make us register every emotion. (Though her director is American, the dialogue's mostly in Spanish, with subtitles.) Her co-stars are pretty good, too. The villagers vividly convey the mind-forged manacles that trap small-town types. Her best friend, Blanca (Yenny Paola Vega), achieves an artless realism as a dumb, impulsive kid who tags along on Maria's drug-mule maiden voyage.
The Colombians they meet once they perilously escape JFK are plausibly good and bad without being Goodness and Badness personified. The drug lords are scary without being generic. One good guy, a kindly Colombian travel agent and activist (Orlando Tobon) who helps families bury the drug mules who die, is an actual person who does such work daily.
Marston has done his homework. What makes it artwork is Moreno's performance. He's no great shakes at handling cameras or crafting cinematic rhythms, but his star keeps us riveted as her ordeal takes its course. She can't overcome the movie's central problem: a plot that proceeds as predictably as peristalsis. Watching Maria, you realize just how crucial the intercutting between parallel narratives was to the impact of Traffik, Traffic, and most successful drug-smuggler flicks. With only one story and one possible outcome, as here, it's tough to sustain suspense.
