“I’m you,” blurts out Scott Speedman’s drunken character, Boogie, after he and his old buddy from their youthful days in Rome, Barney Panofsky (Paul Giamatti), get into a tussle and roll down a steep hill adjacent to a pristine Canadian lake.
It’s one of those movie moments that comes after a filmmaker decides it’s time to lay the work’s themes and ideas out on the table in plain view. For the better part of 80 minutes, we’ve been watching Barney huff and puff his way through drug-fueled youthful bliss, two failed marriages, and some later-life familial trouble (estranged son, hatred of his wife’s new husband). If we were wondering what it was all about, we’re told: Barney is a caged-up libertine — a frustrated, neurotic, chaotic soul.
Barney’s world is a reflection of his own inner conflict, and life delivers such an honest helping of misfortune to accompany his shortcomings that you can’t help but feel sorry for the guy. Moments after the hillside wrestling match, it seems like Barney has mistakenly killed his best friend.
Moments before, Barney walks in on Boogie having sex with his second wife, just as another one of Barney’s friends impregnated his first wife (does anyone respect this guy?). The betrayal is tempered by the fact that Barney has been looking for a way to get out of his second marriage. After all, he fell in love with Miriam (Rosamund Pike) on his wedding night, and left the bride at the reception to chase down his new crush and try to ride a train with her back to New York (Miriam doesn’t let him).
Sitting in the distant comfort of our movie theater seats, we’re thankful Barney’s marriages keep going to hell. His first wife is a manipulative, half-crazy artist-nymph who Barney doesn’t seem to like in the first place. Similarly, we wonder why Barney goes through with his marriage to his second wife (Minnie Driver), a spoiled, grating daughter of a rich Jewish man. But Barney is an emotional bureaucrat — he files through love lives with the gusto of a clerk photocopying a government report.
That is, until he meets Miriam (Rosamund Pike) on his wedding night. Miriam is a beautiful and disarmingly elegant dame who is the steadied, emotionally-measured counterbalance to Barney’s prior head cases. Despite his new marriage, Barney pursues Miriam relentlessly, and, remarkably, the two fall in love, even though their first date after Barney’s second divorce degrades into Miriam holding back his tie while he vomits his booze-filled guts into a hotel toilet. How this woman gets caught in Barney’s magnetic field of sweat-filled gloom is one of the film’s many personality mysteries that is never solved.
As a character, Barney may have been as impossible to bear as his first two wives were, if not for the heavy lifting accomplished by Paul Giamatti. Giamatti possesses an innate, gnomish lovability that infuses all the miserable characters he takes on. In the case of Barney, the actor lifts the man out of the mire of personal desolation by finding occasional spurts of light-hearted effervescence. The bubbles are also supplied by the presence of Dustin Hoffman, who plays Barney’s father, Izzy, a crude ex-cop who injects humor by way of the unsubtle charm of the salty classes dressed up in cartoonish blue-collar mannerisms. This all is enough to make Barney’s Version something of a dark comedy with a spotty, uneven tone.
Much of the movie is told through a flashback Barney has after the release of a book about Boogie’s death written by an investigator who casts Barney as the murderer. Lonely, aging, and lost to his soul-wandering, the book would be life’s final insult if only the protagonist’s memory didn’t begin to give out a few years later. Memories unhinged, Barney begins to blend life’s happy moments together, forgetting that he has lost the love of his life. In these late scenes, the film finds occasional poetic moments in its moaning despair.
But Barney’s Version is weighted down by its sweat-drenched brooding. It is an inconclusive character study of a man whose shortcomings are so common they don’t seem to warrant the misfortune that life tosses at him in return. As a result, this cosmic injustice produces an experience of overwhelming pity. Has Barney failed the world, or has the world failed Barney? Either way we are bowled over by sympathy, and yet, like Barney in his later years, not long after we leave the theater, we forget all about it.
Photos courtesy of Sony Pictures Classics
