The Men Who Stare at Goats

"If Looks Could Kill"

An odd choice for Veteran's Day, but timing is... everything.

Despite an opening graphic that cautions "More of this is true than you might believe" "The Men Who Stare at Goats" is more of a fantasia based on the reporting of Jon Ronson than an actual true story. Yes, the truth is in the details; during the 1980's there was an army troop training as psychic warriors tasked with perfecting ways of defeating the enemy beyond fighting. These included perfectly legitimate examples of psychological disciplines, like moving past one's fears and one's predilections (it's pointed out that 15 to 20% of "fresh" soldiers usually shot above the heads of enemy combatants—not wanting to kill anybody), heightening one's powers of observation, gaining a psychological advantage over one's adversary by one's actions and thoughts, and moved beyond that into training that was anything but basic.

Ultimately the goal of the so-called "First Earth Battalion" was to make "super-soldiers," "psychic warriors," or "Jedi knights"* who could intuit answers from prisoners, psychically deflect attacks, become invisible, "phase" through objects, and, most diabolically, stop the hearts of their opponents by staring at them.

In the movie, McGregor's Ronson stand-in, Bob Wilton, gets wind of a "New Earth Army" doing some feature work for his local newspaper, but it isn't until he's in Iraq—trying to impress his estranged wife—that "the circle becomes complete" and he meets the closest thing to an adept among the psy-warriors, Lyn Cassidy (George Clooney, looking remarkably like Dennis Farina) who's "been re-activated" on a secret mission to find his former commanding officer and creator of the First Earth Army, Bill Django (Jeff Bridges, who perfects his Leibowskish "bubble-off-plumb" hippie personification and manages to make it poignant). Cassidy appears to be legit, capable of cloud bursting and the one Earher who could drop a goat with a look. He's less than expert in the "sparkley eyes" technique, despite being played by George Clooney (who manages to play it completely straight while pulling off some of the strangest actions of his career).

Director Grant Heslov, Clooney's production partner and script-writer for "Good Night, and Good Luck," keeps things moving at a good clip, moving fast enough to avoid analysis or deep thinking. The story is slight, owing much to, of all things, "Ishtar" (two clueless guys, out of their depth in a Middle East war-zone) while waving an anti-establishment freak-flag that reeks of "M*A*S*H" (with Kevin Spacey as Frank Burns). The story, of remnants of the original NEA operating in Iraq and Afghanistan, seems plausible (given the way those wars have been run), but the story merely exploits true concepts to spin the gauziest of screenplays from, while poking fun at the "Be All That You Can Be" gozo-ness of an Army that's trying "to be wonderful."

Semi-satirical movies are rarely more than semi-amusing. "The Men Who Stare at Goats," however, delivers quite a few belly-laughs.

"The Men Who Stare at Goats" is a Matinee.

* The movie earns many—too many—knowing audience laughs by casting Ewan McGregor (the post/pre-Guiness Obi-Wan Kenobi) as the Ronson-surrogate reporter who is more of a "Doubting Thomas" than a "Padewan Apprentice." It's a little too "on the nose" and is, frankly, done to death, like some of the more winkingly obvious in-jokes in the "Ocean's Eleven" series.

Dodsworth

"Dodsworth" (William Wyler, 1936) "Why are Americans always such snobs?" asks David Niven's snobbish Capt. Clyde Lockert.

Well, the answer is that there are two kinds of people in this world: people who lump people together with presumptive generalizations and those who don't. And the best place to lump people together is a cruise ship. Just ask the captain of "The Love Boat."

Sinclair Lewis's 1929 novel about "us" and "them," maturity of age or the lack of it, and the pull and drag of greener pastures was adapted for the stage, and then film, by Sidney Howard and directed both times by William Wyler.

The tale of two small-town empty-nesters—he's a retired auto manufacturer looking for a new challenge, and she's looking for a long-desired European vacation among the sophisticates—is a long, slow sunset of ships passing in the night and the attraction of what has been missed. For Dodsworth (Walter Huston), the trip is an adventure, eye-opening in the possibilities of what the world has to offer. For his wife Fran (Ruth Chatterton), it is an opportunity to move among the elite, whose charm and manners are nothing like her folksy husband's. Eight years her elder, she resents him for making her appear older than she is to the new crowd with whom she seeks attention and company. Attempting to catch a youth-enhancing lightning in a bottle, she begins to have affairs behind his back, risking their marriage and future. The difference between the two after a long marriage with children is the difference between living a life and living a lie—embracing life or avoiding it.

It's a tough movie, even tougher coming as it does from the "speak your piece" 1930's, and it still hearkens to values and the lure of the new and glitzy—of those who jump into life with both feet, and those who choose to remain in the shallow end of the pool. And it's interesting to see a movie that not only focuses on "Can this marriage be saved", but "Should it?" It's amazing how contemporary and timeless "old" movies can be. Their wisdom is always showing up the less mature output of its antecedents.

Wyler's direction is unfussy, placing the camera where it can do the most good, and with a large cast roaming about that usually means some deep-focus shots of the entire "stage." The cast alternates between good actors that you like and you want to slap (although given Huston's robust characterization, what woman wouldn't want a bit of her own limelight?) and the performances, though never vocally subtle—gotta pick up that dialogue!—are helped by the director's intricate lighting and camera placement.

And it's always worth checking out a movie with Walter Huston or Mary Astor.

"Dodsworth" became a part of the National Film Registry in 1990—among the second 25 films chosen—and Time Magazine voted it one of its 100 Greatest Movies of the 20th Century.

Don't Make a Scene: Monty Python and the Holy Grail (Scene 32)

The Story: It's all funny, really...even the skewed credits in Nørsk. But my favorite part of "Monty Python and the Holy Grail" comes deep in that very episodic and brutally low budget film (partially financed by the bands Led Zeppelin and Pink Floyd) with a three episode strip that exemplifies what is best in the comedy troupe's methods of madness; we'll be exploring these over the next three weeks.*

The first, as exemplified by this scene—which pyrotechnically blasted whole columns of the film's budget—is their use of archetypal figures...even historical figures...and use them as grist for comedy. Here, we have Merlin. But it's not Merlin. It's "Tim, the Enchanter." And Tim is only too happy to enchant by punctuating his spit-flying Scottish presentation with gasoline-fueled demonstrations of legerdemain. Because an Enchanter is only as good as his enchantments, and Hollywood and Historical Epics always needed to fit those in to "sell" their magicians.

Not that John Cleese needs any help. Cleese ran the extremes of Python performing—he could be the self-contained announcer of "And Now for Something Completely Different..." or he could be a screaming loon in danger of hemorrhaging, and both territories are heard from with Tim the Enchanter, which makes the tag-line especially funny because 1) it's what we're all thinking, but 2) it's breaking the wall between art and artifice, acknowledging that a) it's only a movie and b) it's just a performance. No respect. No respect at all.

The Set-Up: It has been a hard and cruel journey for King Arthur (Graham Chapman) and his knights of the Round Table in their quest for the Holy Grail. Taunted by Frenchmen, disappointed by Camelot (it's just a model), mocked by God, delayed by the Knights who say "Ni!" and the hapless Black Knight, they have recently been forced to eat their minstrels (yay!), when they come across a being who might speed things up a bit.

Action! (shhh!)

Scene 32
[The scene is a rocky countryside. A thunderous boom is heard.]

ARTHUR: Knights! Forward!


[Cut to TIM atop an outcropping, throwing pyrotechnic spells at various rocky crags. The KNIGHTS halt.]

[Suddenly, TIM summons a ball of fire on the very spot he is standing. But he is gone! Just as suddenly, TIM reappears in a cloud of smoke just a few feet away from ARTHUR. He continues to toss a couple more fiery spells.]

ARTHUR: What manner of man are you that can summon up fire without flint or tinder?

TIM: I... am an enchanter.

ARTHUR: By what name are you known?

TIM: There are some who call me... Tim?

ARTHUR: Greetings, Tim the Enchanter.
TIM: Greetings, King Arthur!

ARTHUR: You know my name?

TIM: I do.

[Blows flames from his staff]

TIM: You seek the Holy Grrrail!

ARTHUR: That is our quest. You know much that is hidden, Oh Tim.

TIM: Quite.

[Shoots a rocket from his staff at a tree, which explodes]

[KNIGHTS OF THE ROUND TABLE applaud politely.]

ARTHUR: Yes, we're, we're looking for the Grail. Our quest is to find the Holy Grail.

KNIGHTS: It is, yes, yup, yes, yeah.

ARTHUR: And so we're, we're, we're, we're looking for it.
KNIGHTS: Yes we are we are.
BEDEMIR: We have been for some time.
ROBIN: Ages.

ARTHUR: Uh, so, uh, anything you can do to, uh, to help...

ARTHUR: ... would be... very...

ARTHUR: ...helpful...
GALAHAD[Stepping forward impatiently]: Look, can you tell us wh-

[TIM throws a fireball in front of him. He stumbles back, holding his leg.]

ARTHUR: Fine, um, I don't want to waste any more of your time, but, uh I don't suppose you could, uh, tell us where we might find a, um, find a, uh, a, um, a uh--

TIM: A what...?

ARTHUR: A g--, a g--

TIM: A Grrrrrail?!

ARTHUR: Yes, I think so.

KNIGHTS: Yes, that's it. Yes.

TIM: Yes!

KNIGHTS: Oh, thank you, splendid, fine.

[TIM shoots fire from fingers at rocky slope.]

ARTHUR: Look, you're a busy man, uh--

TIM: Yes, I can help you find the Holy Grrrrail.
KNIGHTS: Oh, thank you.

TIM: To the north there lies a cave -- the cave of Caerbannog -- wherein, carved in mystic runes upon the very living rock, the last words of Olfin Bedwere of Rheged

[creates thunder]

TIM: ...make plain the last resting place of the most Holy Grail.

ARTHUR: Where could we find this cave, Oh Tim?

TIM: Follow!

TIM: [he turns back] But!! Follow only if ye be men of valor...

TIM: ...for the entrance to this cave is guarded by a creature...

TIM: ...so foul, so cruel that no man yet has fought with it and lived!

TIM: Bones of full fifty men lie strewn about its lair! So, brave knights, if you do doubt your courage or your strength, come no further...

TIM: ...for death awaits you all with nasty big pointy teeth!

ARTHUR: What an eccentric performance.



"Monty Python and the Holy Grail"

Words by Graham Chapman, John Cleese , Terry Gilliam, Eric Idle, Terry Jones, and Michael Palin

Pictures by Terry Bedford and Terry Jones and Terry Gilliam

"Monty Python and the Holy Grail" is available on DVD from Columbia-Tr-Star Home Video.

* Those three being their ability to take historical concepts and toy with them, their extremely comical use of violence, their satirical use of language, and their hap-hazard way of getting out of skits.

(That's four)

Right! Those FOUR being their ability...

Amelia

"Well...See Ya"

There have been enough bio-pics on Amelia Earhart that the only interest this one could hold would be in Mira Nair's presentation, or in any clarification of "The Mystery"—Earhart's disappearance during the last leg of her round-the-world flight. "Amelia" provides neither. It's is Nair's most conventional film, focussed on nailing the period details and the pictorial splendor of airborne sight-seeing. And as the particulars of the disappearance are so sketchy, the best the film can be do is merely suggestion (with a little obfuscation, but we'll get to that)*, "Amelia" comes off as a grandiose Lifetime movie—an "Aviatrix Flick"—that, while it occassionally gets off the ground, never really soars.

The problem is Amelia, herself. After many records and accomplishments (which the movie ticks off studiously), her story ends in silence and perceived failure, which unfairly casts a pall over the woman's storied existence. And Amelia was a taciturn presence, not unlike Lindbergh, projecting confidence by competence, her super-ego revealed only in her goals. Hilary Swank is a perfect choice to play her—thin as a rail but seeming corn-fed, horse-toothed with a helmet of straw—and she obviously did her research on Amelia's voice. But Earhart's newsreel performances are merely performances and Swank's Amelia has the same air of phoniness that Cate Blanchett's Katherine Hepburn had in that other aviator movie. Richard Gere as publisher George Putnam (and "Mr. Earhart") has the same vocal problem, affecting an accent that wavers up and down the East Coast. Faring better is Ewan McGregor as Gene Vidal (father of Gore), with whom Earhart worked with the government to establish air-routes and create the first commercial airlines; that the movie makes more hay of a speculated affair between Vidal and Earhart than that accomplishment is part of the film's weakness.

The buffeting lift and drag on this film may be attributable to two strong scriptwriters building on each other's work: Ronald Bass, who, if anything, tends to making his characters too likable, and Anna Hamilton Phelan, who doesn't (particularly in "Gorillas in the Mist: The Story of Dian Fossey"). The two seem to clash on who Earhart "is," a symbol or human being, devoted to flying or feminism, faithful or philandering. Such "takes" on her character fly afoul of the issue that the film should have focussed on and never strayed from: the "true path" of seeking freedom. It's the one through-line of Earhart's life, from childhood (which the movie skimps in detailing) on. It is only in Earhart's narration (taken from her writings, no doubt heavily influenced by publisher husband Putnam) that emphasize a still clean sky with borderless landscapes below, a world without limits on the ground or in the sky, whichever your sex. That her life on the ground is forever hemmed in, trying to secure funds for that freedom, could have made a dramatic metaphor if the film-makers had bothered to notice.

But some of it's there. Enough to inspire if one wants to look beyond the ghost of the most celebrated "Missing Person" of the last century, and see what she accomplished while she still walked the Earth and conquered the sky.

"Amelia" is a Rental.



* Quibble section: Beyond her standing in front of a Patton-esque American flag backdrop that if one were to calculate beyond the frame would indicate fifty stars, and the montage of filmed endorsements that would be created for a medium yet to be invented—and they don't explain why she came in third in the 1929 "Women's Air Derby"—the details of the disappearance are fudged a bit. Her navigator for the round-the-world flight, Fred Noonan, is depicted as drinking before the fateful flight, which, though it might have happened earlier in the trip did not re-occur preceding that most precarious of hops to the tiny Howland Island landing strip. A recent PBS documentary on a re-creation of the fateful trip (right down to the aircraft used) seemed to hint that Earhart might have ignored Noonan's inclinations to fly south of Howland, where the pilot could have sighted one of two islands that might have accomodated a touch-down, and instead flew north, decreasing their chances with a dwindling fuel supply. But that is just one more theory in the dozens that have been posited in the years to explain the failure to accomplish what was, essentially, a risky maneuver even under the best of conditions.

Gunfight at The Alamo Drafthouse

The state of the contemporary movie-poster is dire; it seems like more posters are being produced for films (for an example, check out all the posters for "Where the Wild Things Are"), but the art direction that goes into them is less than inspired. The fall-back position, the least common denominator for the studios, are a photo-shopped cluster of movie-star heads that say little about the movie, its content or its style (check out the galaxy of posters for this Summer's "Star Trek"). For someone like me that reveled in the work of Bob Peak, Tom Jung, Saul Bass, Frank McCarthy, Bob McGuiness, Howard Terpning, Frank Frazetta, and Richard Amsel, the flood of dismal posters littering movie theaters is too many courses of a bland meal.

But deep in the heart of Texas (the college town/artists' enclave/state capitol of Austin) there is a place where movie poster makers are artists first and press agents second, and that is in the funky movie palaces owned by The Alamo Drafthouse, that still display a showman's glee in presentation.

Including posters. Good 'un's.

Herewith, some unfamiliar posters for some familiar westerns:

Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Events

"Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Events" (Brad Silberling, 2004) Oh, sure. For Hallowe'en on this site we featured flesh-eating zombies and vengeful demons and dead souls that wouldn't stay dead. But in the warm comfort of the domicile, many flights of stairs from the garret in which this is written, the Hallowe'en movie of choice was this (to be heretofore crunched to "Unfortunate Events" to avoid a cramp). It might be the best movie Barry Sonnenfeld never made. It has his insensibility, his florid camera moves,* snappy editing, austere framing and live-action cartoonish gambits (lots of shots of peoples' faces gaping into the camera).

But, it didn't have enough budget and so Brad Silberling took over the project.

Silberling is a chameleonic director; he tends to take on the characteristics of whatever project falls into his lap—handy for his long tenure as a television director of such idiosyncratic shows as "NYPD Blue," but making him hard to pin down as a feature director. How do you explain the disparity between "Unfortunate Events" and his unfortunate "City of Angels?" Before you attempt that, let me trump it by adding the even more unfortunate Will Ferrell vehicle, "Land of the Lost ."

So, it's perhaps fortunate for Silberling that so much of "Unfortunate Events" depends on others. The Lemony Snicket-styled writing—a bit like "Miss Manners" without her morning pick-me-up—of dark, despairing fore-shadowing** inspires a switch-back Rankin-Bass-styled opening that comes crashing to a halt. ("This would be an excellent time to walk out of the theater, living room, or airplane where this film is being shown." says the Lemony Narrator, as read by Jude Law)

"Fade to Black" is the more appropriate phrase. Fade to monochromatic gothic steam-punk macabre, (which permeates the film, like a lighter version of "The Addams Family") as the film takes up the sad misfortunes of the Baudelaire orphans: Violet, a voracious inventor (Emily Browning); Klaus, a voracious reader (Liam Aiken); and Sunny, a voracious biter (Kara Hoffman and Shelby Hoffman). When their parents are killed in a mysterious fire, the Estate (executed by a piggish Timothy Spall), the kids are shipped off to the cunning clutches of Count Olaf (Jim Carrey), a dispicable actor who only cares for the Beaudelaire fortune. Treated as servants by the fiend, he decides to kill them off when it's determined that he'll only get the money when they're adults. And so he leaves them, locked in a car on a rail-road track with the 11:15 barrelling down on them.

What to do, what to do?

Based on the first three "Unfortunate Events" books ("The Bad Beginning," "The Reptile Room," and "The Wide Window,"), the film is as episodic as could be with the child-endangering machinations of the Count the single unsavory thread running through it. Upon Carrey's every entrance, Silberling takes the wise course of just hanging back, giving Carrey a wide shot (with distorting anamorphic lens) and keeping any other actor out of giggling range. So much of his performance is ad-libbed, you could make the case that it's Carrey who's driving the bus; things calm down considerably when Billy Connolly and Meryl Streep take possession of the children (and the movie), but gears up again when Carrey dervishes his way into the scene (Connolly stays out of his way, but Streep engages him, going eye-to-eye).

It's a good thing, too. "Unfortunate Events" could have turned excessively mordant to the point of leeching all the fun out of it, production-designed into stasis if Carrey wasn't there to break windows (and characters) in the proceedings. In that spirit, the cast is rounded out by such anarchic spirits as Catherine O'Hara, Jennifer Coolidge, Cedric the Entertainer, Dustin Hoffman, Jane Lynch, and Craig Ferguson that flit around the corners to keep things from getting too predictable, and deservedly more than a little off-kilter.


* He started out as the Coen Brothers' cinematographer.

** It's fun when doled out in tea-spoons of dread and low dudgeon, but if you want to hear it overdone, listen to the director and author Daniel Handler's commentary track on the DVD. Handler (as "Lemony Snicket") acts like your staid Aunt Petunia, who goes all-fluttery and horrified at the movie, which is funny for ten minutes, then overstays its welcome...by two hours.

Post-"Graduate" Studies

"The Graduate" (Mike Nichols, 1967) During the summer of 2009, the small rom/com "(500) Days of Summer" contained a line that hit home on many fronts. The romantic hero (says the police blotter-like narrator) formed his romantic ideas at an impressionable age due to "a mis-reading of 'The Graduate.'"

An easy thing to do.

Lots of young romantic kids grooving on the surface-tension of the movie, missed Mike Nichols' (and scenarist Calder Willingham and Buck Henry's) wise, dispassionate warning of a life led for instant gratification, something that went right over the heads of a clan preparing for "The Summer of Love." When we first find Benjamin Braddock (Dustin Hoffman) he's going nowhere mighty fast: first, stuck in a plane seat, then on an airport's "moving sidewalk"—life going by, him standing still. He'll spend his first summer out of college in much the same way. His first night home, he'll be hiding in his room (to avoid his parents' celebratory welcome home party) "worried about (his) future."

But the world will have none of it. Along with the free advice ("plastics...") and the pinched cheeks that will continue through his adulthood, Ben is coerced into driving the wife of Ben's father's partner home from the party. Once there, "things get a little weird." Dressed in her leopard-print coat,* Mrs. Robinson (Anne Bancroft) reveals herself to be quite the predator, as well as revealing that she's neurotic, alcoholic and...oh, by the way, Mr. Robinson (Murray Hamilton) won't be home for hours. Yes, as a matter of fact, she is trying to seduce him,** and Ben barely makes it home uncompromised by Mrs. and Mr. Robinson, who gets home sooner than expected.

But Ben is feeling pressure at home. Dad wants him to think about graduate school and is trying to hook him up the Robinson's daughter, Elaine (Katharine Ross). To an extent he does a little bit of both by spending time in post-graduate studies with Mrs. Robinson, who becomes fiercely adamant against Ben dating her daughter. He also finds out that the Robinsons have a marriage of convenience as she became pregnant with Elaine and that was the thing to do.

It's pretty apparent that after four years of schooling, Benjamin doesn't listen very well. Forced into a date with Elaine, he's determined to screw it up, succeeds all too well, then, having reduced her to tears, decides that he can't be that much of a heel and makes it good to her. A romance begins to take shape, but is quashed when Ben reveals to Elaine that he had an affair with her mother.

Against all odds (or reason) Benjamin begins pursuing Elaine, culminating in a rescue at the church of her wedding, where they famously escape on a bus, having defied convention, their parents, and get things their way.

Orson Welles has said any story can have a happy ending...depending where you end it. If Nichols had ended with Ben and Elaine flush with revolution bussing away to their future, it would have been a happy ending.

But he doesn't. He stays on his shot of the two rebels as their expressions change from elation to confusion to...what? Ben has been so focussed on the prize and Elaine, confused and pressured into marriage, that they don't have a plan...they don't even know where the bus is going. The story will go on, and Nichols doesn't cut away until the last moment—he lets us see their expressions change, her looking at Ben unsure, Ben just looking forward still in an adrenaline daze of what he's done.

And what he's done is risk something the whole movie has been warning against—becoming like his parents. Mrs. Robinson has aspirations and dreams that were exploded when she became pregnant with Elaine and she became dependent on a man for her well-being. Elaine, with no degree, is now dependent on the adrift Ben and the only thing on his mind is domestic bliss, although how he'll get there, he probably doesn't have a clue. Their impulsive act of rebellion is a trap to becoming their parents. A lot of people missed that message in the 60's, but it's always been there for anybody not blinded by the comedy and the attraction of its stars.

It occurred to me (after loving the movie for 30 years) when my wife professed to not liking it much because the character of Elaine is so ill-defined and confused. It's not a strong woman's part, despite its screen-time. And Ben is simply a mess—single-minded, shallow, without much motive other than selfish ones. He's very much his parents' son.

So, when "(500) Days of Summer" came out, with its shallow male pursuing a female through friendship and assuming forever is part of the bargain, and its female character who enjoys the friendship but doesn't see it "safe" enough to be permanent,*** the connection to "The Graduate" clicked, all too finally. It is a comedy (in the classical sense), as its protagonists don't even know that by pursuing their course of what they see as rebellion, they've condemned themselves to living the quietly desperate lives of their parents.

On the occesion of its 30th Anniversary, a lot of critics who could do so, re-evaluated "The Graduate," and down-graded it accordingly. Given the new "reading between the frames," I'd actually up-graded as being far more subtle and wise than the comedy aspects of the film would suggest. Perhaps it's time to pay a visit to Sam Mendes' "Revolutionary Road," as well.

What did "The Bard" say? "You say you want a revolution, well, you know/we'd all love to see the plan..."

"Everybody puts Benjy in the corner:" Dustin Hoffman and Anne Bancroft "Graduating"

* This was the 1960's—the term "cougar" would show up forty years later. Bancroft was only six years older than Hoffman at the time.

** We dissected this scene in "Don't Make a Scene: The Graduate.

*** "(500) Days of Summer" has a telling scene, he takes her to see "The Graduate" and she ends up sobbing; what he sees as romantic, she sees as frightening, terrifying...and her situation.

Enchanted April

"Enchanted April" (Mike Newell, 1992) Peering is what the folks of "Enchanted April" do: myopic George Briggs (Michael Kitchen) peers at Rose Arbuthnot (Miranda Richardson) when he finds that she's musical; Mrs. Fisher (Joan Plowright) peers at Lottie Wilkins (Josie Lawrence) to determine if she's daft or just stupid; socialite Carolyn Dester (Polly Walker) does the same; and Lottie peers at the Mediterranean and wonders if she is in Heaven. Those peerages are taking a second look, a re-appraisal—the sloughing off of first impressions for the new, reflected in the eyes of the re-appraisers, and reflect the entire film of four women who revive themselves at a Portofino castle one April.

Two church-women, Rose and Lottie are tired of the dreary English rain and their dreary English husbands (Alfred Molina, Jim Broadbent) and take a Spring holiday at an Italian villa offering "Wisteria and Silence," an extravagance that is shared with two ladies who answer their own advertisement: an aristocratic fuss-budget steeped in the Romatic poets (Plowright), and a flapper, desperate to escape the fawning attentions of shallow men (Walker). Things do not start off well. The trip from boat via carriage is a bit like the trip to Dracula's castle. Once there, territories are staked, habits dig in and clash—but Lottie experiences an epiphany the moment she opens her windows in the morning. It might be Heaven, which clashes with Rose's religious convictions. It might be a cessation of struggle, from which one can suddenly find oneself. Or it just might be a course-correction for life-journeys that have lost their way.

Whichever it is, it is a respite, a way out of many fogs, and a chance to realize that, so far away, there is no place like home. A jolly-good life-affirming flick with a pitch-perfect cast.