Susan Granger’s review of “Barney’s Version” (Sony Pictures Classics)
Once again, Paul Giamatti (“Sideways,” “American Splendor”) proves why he’s one of the best actors on the screen today, embodying a pudgy, boozing, curmudgeonly TV producer who is extraordinarily proficient at messing up his life.
After the publication of a tell-all book that dredges up his past, Canadian Barney Panofsky (Giamatti) recalls a picaresque confessional tale about “my wasted life” that spans two continents over four decades and includes three marriages. Back in the early 1970s, when he’s producing a movie in Rome, he gets a blonde bohemian named Clara (Rachelle Lefevre) pregnant and dutifully marries her but things inevitably go awry. Returning home to Montreal’s Mile End area, Barney marries his screeching second wife (Minnie Driver), a nameless yet wealthy Jewish princess with advantageous family connections, but at his own sumptuous wedding reception, he discovers the true love of his life, elegant, ethereal Miriam (Rosamund Pike). She eventually becomes his third wife and mother of his two children – until she marries Blair (Bruce Greenwood), a canoe-paddling vegan radio producer. At Barney’s side throughout his misadventures is his gruff, retired policeman father, irascible Izzy (Dustin Hoffman), along with Boogie Moscovitch (Scott Speedman), his dissolute, drug-addicted best friend who simply vanishes one day, leaving Barney as a prime suspect.
Adapted from Mordecai Richler’s last novel by Michael Konyves and directed by Richard L. Lewis (“Whale Music”), it’s drenched with richly dark, comedic yet authentic atmosphere, featuring cameos by directors David Cronenberg and Atom Egoyan helming a soap opera about a Mountie named O’Malley, Jake Hoffman (Dustin’s son) as Barney’s son, and glimpses of Canadian filmmakers Denys Arcand and Ted Kotcheff. But it’s Paul Giamatti’s savvy, smart, self-aware performance that’s most memorable, even at its rumpled, cigar-puffing, buffoonish extreme, evoking memories of Richard Dreyfuss in “The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz” (1974), another Richler novel. While a few extraneous scenes are flawed and far too long, Giamatti’s with Dustin Hoffman are gems.
On the Granger Movie Gauge of 1 to 10, “Barney’s Version” is an irreverent, politically incorrect 7, a poignant, melancholy morality tale.
