Alfie

Alfie
Opens Fri., Nov. 5, at Metro and others

Charles Shyer was the wrong man to remake Alfie, the 1966 cad-lad classic that made Michael Caine a star. Not that there isn't something appealing about the shiny vinyl extrusions of the Shyer factory, like Baby Boom and even, in a ham-fisted sort of way, the Steve Martin remake of Father of the Bride. He may sail a sea of middlebrow cheese, but his comedies of muddle-crass manners have heart.

And that's why he's the wrong mad scientist for the job of reincarnating Alfie. The original character and film scored because they had no heart. It was a high-stakes world in 1966: Girls had no power, except to say no; and the consequences of unwed pregnancy involved a nightmarish visit to abortionist Denholm Elliott. So to succeed as a London lothario, a guy had to have Roman-candle charisma and the morals of a goat. Caine's Alfie boasted both.

Jude Law is at least as skilled an actor as Caine, but Shyer makes his character infinitely nicer. Instead of swinging his dick through Swinging London, Shyer has Law's Alfie putt through Manhattan on a cute little low-testosterone retro-'60s scooter. His day job is driving a limo, wherein he cheats on his "quasi-sort-of-girlfriend," plucky single mom Marisa Tomei. All Alfie's women have more power than Jane Asher, a victim in the 1966 flick (and in life—Alfie-like Paul McCartney was about to dump and diss her by writing "I'm Looking Through You"). The actresses do all they can to animate characters that are just lengths of plastic tubing: Jane Krakowski as a rich limo client; Susan Sarandon's richer Park Avenue sybarite type; and newcomer Sienna Miller as a party girl controlled by no one, including herself. Even the poor girl (Nia Long) who drunkenly gets herself pregnant by Alfie to get back at her faithless ex, Alfie's best friend, is self-determined. Her mere modern discomfiture is unlike the horror of a girl facing abortion in 1966.

Shyer is the last guy on earth who could reimagine the scary thrill of 1966 sex in 2004. Despite all Law's charm and skill, his Alfie is a lightweight lady-killer. He's like a phony, gelded, Nutrasweetened imitation—not of Caine, but of Hugh Grant in About a Boy. Law is 20 times the actor Grant is, but Shyer has no idea how to use that talent. Nor can he craft an emotional arc to his story; it's just a static sequence of good-looking but disconnected and lifeless scenes. Alfie's soliloquies to the camera (a startling device in 1966) now pack less punch than Dobie Gillis'.

Speaking of TV, there are a few traces of a better movie not made, courtesy of Shyer's junior co-writer, Elaine Pope. She's a former Seinfeld scribe who's probably responsible for Alfie's Superman doll and his Superman pajamas and sheets. The conniving but not quite caddish Seinfeld bachelor character represents a plausible midpoint between the cold 1966 Alfie and Shyer's warm, mushy Alfie. That single guy I might buy. But we always have reruns for that. (PG-13) TIM APPELO

Bright Leaves
Opens Fri., Nov. 5, at Varsity

You can be forgiven if you've never heard of the 1950 melodrama Bright Leaf, which starred Gary Cooper and Patricia Neal, but maybe you'll be moved to rent it at Scarecrow after seeing Ross McElwee's typically ruminative, personal documentary about his family's link to that movie and North Carolina's tobacco culture. McElwee (Sherman's March) hears from a cousin that Cooper's brash character was based on their great-grandfather, who apparently had the Bull Durham tobacco formula stolen from him by the rival (and later fabulously wealthy) Duke family. A compulsive filmer, as he admits during his regular wry voice-overs, McElwee naturally thinks there's a movie to be made about how the family legacy was, in a sense, twice appropriated by others.

Yet Bright Leaf, which we see in occasional dull clips, is mainly a MacGuffin for the director. He's more concerned with the ambivalent complicity of those who've traditionally made their living from a farm product that happens to kill its users. Not that McElwee is pointing fingers—he's the most genial of narrators and interviewers as he trains his camera on farmers, friends, and cancer patients. The growers aren't evil; and even those in denial about their crop's health consequences have all suffered tobacco-related deaths in their own families. A Southerner who now resides in Boston and teaches at Harvard, McElwee clearly loves Southerners too much to shame them directly. Even if his own family didn't end up as rich (or as guilty) as the Dukes, he notes, successive generations of McElwee doctors have benefited from "a sort of agricultural-pathological trust fund" by treating so many patients with tobacco-caused diseases.

McElwee's best quality as a filmmaker may be his sympathy, and his worst aimlessness. There's no argument or thesis to Bright Leaves, just observations that spill out like fragments from a loosely rolled cigarette. It's a diary, true in formless form to his other work, which seems awfully anachronistic compared to current documentary art. There's no pointed humor or outrage à la Michael Moore, none of the intellectual rigor of Errol Morris, nothing revelatory like Tarnation or Capturing the Friedmans. However amiable, the movie just winds and meanders and disappears into the air, like a trailing stream of smoke. (PG) BRIAN MILLER