Ride with the Devil (15) Selected cinemas
The gifted and truly versatile Ang Lee, a Taiwanese film-maker who firmly eschews any predictable paths, adventurously chose to follow his two charming films of Asian family culture clashes, The Wedding Banquet and Eat Drink Man Woman with a trio of striking literary adaptations in Sense and Sensibility, The Ice Storm and now Ride With the Devil, based on Daniel Woodrell's 1987 novel, Woe to Live On, which is set during the American Civil War.
The drama unfolds in 1861, on the Kansas-Missouri border while the official military campaigns are being fought miles away and the pro-Southern Bushwhackers engage in guerrilla warfare on the back roads and across the countryside. Often posing as Union soldiers to deceive and entrap their foes, these men are mostly young and inexperienced and the focus of the film is on two of them who join the unit led by Black Jack (James Caviezel from The Thin Red Line).
One of them, Jake Roedel (Tobey Maguire) is the son of a poor German immigrant and the other is his friend since childhood, Jack Bull Chiles (Skeet Ulrich), whose father is a Missouri plantation owner. Taking refuge from the harsh winter, the two friends become involved, in turn, with a young widow (played by singer Jewel in a likeable film debut).
The contemporary resonances of this thoughtful anti-war drama are evident throughout, although never emphasised with any heavy-handedness, and the movie proves as powerful in its superbly staged action sequences as it is touching in its quieter moments - most memorably when Jake, one of the few who is literate, reads aloud a heart-wrenching letter from a woman whose sons are caught up in the war.
Handsomely photographed by Frederick Elmes and hauntingly scored by Mychael Danna, Ride With the Devil is imbued with the humanity and honesty which are trademarks of Ang Lee's work. Marking yet another bold diversification for him in its subject matter, it achieves a remarkable balance in drawing sympathy for its homicidal characters while never flinching from depicting the horrific consequences of their actions. Effectively cast as the most dangerous and unhinged of them is the young Irish actor, Jonathan Rhys Meyers.
At the film's core is another vivid, apparently effortless performance from Tobey Maguire, one of America's brightest, most interesting young actors who showed so much promise recently in Pleasantville and Ang Lee's The Ice Storm, and soon will be seen to even more impressive effect in The Cider House Rules.
Jakob the Liar (15) General release
If the movie-going audience was divided over the merits of Roberto Benigni's Life is Beautiful, with the majority finding it affecting and worthwhile, then those of us who considered that film meretricious, morally suspect and aesthetically ill-judged will view with trepidation the prospect of another "Holocaust comedy", especially one which stars Robin Williams. It comes as a welcome surprise, then, that Jakob the Liar, while no masterpiece, avoids the sentimental excesses one might have feared. Directed by Hungarian-born Peter Kassovitz (father of La Haine director Mathieu Kassovitz, who takes a role here), Jakob the Liar, based on a book by Jurek Becker, is set in the Jewish ghetto of an unnamed Polish city in the winter of 1944. With most of the population already deported to the camps, the remaining inhabitants have lost all hope of surviving, until Williams, the proprietor of a long-closed cafe, overhears news of the Russian advance on a German radio.
The news seeps out into the rest of the ghetto, where the inhabitants jump to the conclusion that Williams has a radio of his own concealed somewhere (a crime punishable by immediate execution), and implore him to tell them more news. Reluctantly at first, he starts to fabricate stories of their impending liberation, bringing hope for the first time but also sowing dissension among those who have reconciled themselves to certain death.
While several of the key roles in Jakob the Liar are taken by Americans, this is essentially a European project, which goes some way towards explaining the relative success of this absurdist black comedy. The horrors of the ghetto may be sanitised, but they are not completely elided, and Kassovitz films the action in a palette of subdued, almost monochrome colours. Most importantly, Williams gives an unusually restrained performance, without the kind of self-indulgence which has characterised his work in recent years. It's left to the other actors - Alan Arkin as a cynical, fatalistic actor, Liev Schreiber as a rather dim young boxer - to carry most of the black comedy.
This isn't the first attempt to treat the Holocaust on these terms - Michael Verhoeven's My Mother's Courage attempted a similar approach a couple of years ago - and one can see why Mitteleuropa-style absurdism might be considered an appropriate way to tackle this subject. The problem is that Kassovitz's film ends up pulling its punches: the bleakness and horror of its characters' predicament is unavoidably softened, and the ending is a cop-out. Whether fiction film is an appropriate way at all to deal with these events is open to debate, but Jakob the Liar is certainly not the worst example in recent years.
Left Luggage Club (IFC, Dublin)
Questions of Jewish identity and the shadow of the Holocaust also hang over Jeroen Krabbe's directorial debut. Krabbe is an actor of some repute, and Left Luggage received several awards at last year's Berlin Film Festival, but it's hard to see why; this is a simplistic, predictable and unevenly performed film, directed with no great flair.
Set in Antwerp in the early 1970s, Left Luggage stars Laura Fraser as Chaja, a rebellious and impecunious young philosophy student whose parents both survived the concentration camps. When she takes a job as nanny to a Hassidic family, she is forced to confront some questions about her own Jewish identity and her place within Belgian society. Her burgeoning friendship with the mother of the family (Isabella Rossellini), and the tragedy which ensues, brings her closer to her own parents: her mother (Marianne Sagebrecht), who denies the past completely, and her father (Maximilian Schell) who is determined to retrieve two pieces of luggage buried somewhere in the city by his family before they were killed by the Nazis.
This is a heavy-handed, unimaginative film which rams its rather obvious points home with no subtlety. Fraser is unconvincing, and even old-stagers like Schell can do little with their cardboard characters. Only Rossellini manages to come out with some credit, but her intelligent, understated performance seems out of place amidst so much mediocrity.
The Out-of-Towners (12) General release
Arthur Hiller's 1970 version of Neil Simon's screenplay was an enjoyable enough piece of fluff, with Jack Lemmon and Sandy Dennis as the hicks from the sticks adrift in New York for a night. This updated version, with Steve Martin and Goldie Hawn taking the roles, has little enough to recommend it; Martin's comic timing seems to have deserted him, and Hawn is irritatingly over the top, while John Cleese, as a snooty hotel manager, is the only one who seems to be having any fun.
