VITAGRAPH FILMS
Toledo on a Crimen spree.
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El Crimen Perfecto
Opens Fri., Sept. 23, at Harvard Exit
Following last year's paella Western 800 Bullets, Spanish director Álex de la Iglesia continues his streak of caustic social satires framed as send-ups of Hollywood genre clichés. In the pitch-dark comedy, a smug ladies' man (Guillermo Toledo) accidentally kills his slimy boss and is blackmailed into an affair with the homely colleague who helps dispose of the corpse. The plot's surreal contrivances and flashy movie references render it at once hermetic (most of the action takes place inside an enormous department store) and allusive (Hitchcock and Buñuel quotes abound). And having a butt-ugly female lead (Mónica Cervera) might count as daring, if only de la Iglesia hadn't gone on to self-consciously mock the rule that movie stars must always look unnaturally perfect. At its most ludicrously self-referential, the film achieves the perfect meta-moment when Toledo, seeking pointers on how to get away with murder, buys a copy of Dial M for Murder (released in Spain as Perfect Crime) and notices the title scans incorrectly as Ferpect Crime. (NR) JORGE MORALES
Everything Is Illuminated
Opens Fri., Sept. 23, at Uptown
Elijah Wood looks worried, but not in the usual "Will Gollum kill me in my sleep to steal the One Ring?" kind of way. The expression is meant to convey the concerns of his American tourist character, Jonathan Safran Foer, traveling among the anti-Semites of rural Ukraine in search of his grandfather's shtetl, destroyed in the Holocaust, and the woman who saved Grandpa Safran from the Nazis. In Liev Schreiber's adaptation of Foer's novel, however, Wood's endearingly quiet, fretful quality comes across as, "Will this crazy Russian actor/musician with bad teeth steal the movie from me?"
The answer is yes, and that's not a bad thing, since Illuminated works best as a comic buddy picture: the meek, bespectacled New York writer, who dresses like a mortician and obsessively Ziplocs various tokens and clues into plastic baggies, forced to befriend a loud-mouthed Slavic hip-hop clown, Alex (Eugene Hutz), his translator and tour guide. There's a certain Jim Jarmusch road-movie vibe as Alex and Jonathan pile into an ancient Trabant with Alex's taciturn grandfather and "officious seeing-eye bitch" of a dog (required because the grandfather insists he's blind, even though he's also driving). Schreiber finds low-key humor in Jonathan's vegetarianism and fear of dogs (though he employs too many cute cutaways to Sammy Davis Jr. Jr., a well-trained border collie), plus Alex's highly irregular and highly entertaining English.
Not that Foer's 2002 debut novel is mere picaresque. Very ambitious, largely successful, and somewhat cloying, it's a serious, fragmented meditation on memory and identity, divided between his family history—reaching back to the 18th century—and Alex's very up-to-date, malapropism-filled commentary. In the book, Jonathan and Alex have equal narrative weight. Here, Jonathan is relegated to mostly watchful silence, leaving Wood (see interview, p. 76) mainly with the job of reacting, and Hutz the task of becoming a star. (The Ukrainian gypsy-punk leader of the band Gogol Bordello has got some of the same swagger and soulfulness of a young Travolta, and Schreiber even tosses in a nod to Saturday Night Fever.)
Directing his first feature, Schreiber presumably wanted to avoid getting bogged down in a Semitic Roots that would be further complicated by Foer's Borges-like prism. So he keeps most of the movie in the present, concentrating on Jonathan's search, with just a few childhood flashbacks and recollections of World War II. All roads lead to the two grandfathers (Alex's and Jonathan's) in a reductive yet satisfying way. For Schreiber, it's a sensible, abridged approach to Foer's expansiveness: Everything Is Illuminated, yes, but not everything can be included. (PG-13) BRIAN MILLER
A History of Violence
Opens Fri., Sept. 23, at Meridian
David Cronenberg wants to have his critique and eat it, too. His ideas are pretty simple in History (which is based on a comic book, in fact), and he goes about filming them in a simple yet sneaky manner. Viggo Mortensen plays a nice guy named Tom, who lives in a nice Indiana town with his nice wife (Maria Bello) and two nice kids. Can you see where this is headed? Cronenberg has made a career (Crash, Spider, Naked Lunch) out of exploring the flip side of normalcy, and History is no exception. A Canadian, he has some things to tell us about those white picket fences and polite Midwestern smiles below the border. It turns out that the expanse south of the 49th Parallel is a teeming cauldron of lies, crime, and, yes, violence.
Well, call me naive, call me American, but how exactly is this news? History begins with so cheerful and idyllic a setup—Tom runs a diner full of friendly customers, lovely wife Edie is a lawyer, the kids are doing just great!—that I expected Mortensen to bend down and find a severed human ear in the grass. David Lynch has been to this small town before and with a lot more art. Cronenberg acts with all the portentousness due an artist, but History is merely a thriller—and a good one—wearing shoulder pads and heel lifts.
