Writer-director Neil Burger follows his skillful debut feature, the pseudodocumentary thriller Interview With the Assassin (2002), with this spellbinding tale set in Vienna at the turn of the 20th century. Adapted from a Steven Millhauser story, it involves a mysterious magician (Edward Norton) and his amorous attachment to a duchess (Jessica Biel) who’s coveted by the crown prince (Rufus Sewell). This lush piece of romanticism may seem antithetical to Burger’s previous film, but both share a Wellesian integration of the viewer’s imagination and an equally Wellesian preoccupation with power. Paul Giamatti, at his best, plays a police inspector who serves as an audience surrogate; the effective score is by Philip Glass. PG-13, 110 min. Century 12 and CineArts 6, River East 21, Webster Place.
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): August 18, 2006. Read more
From the Chicago Reader (October 4, 2007). — J.R.
I’d like to think Elaine May had it written into her contract that the Farrelly brothers could remake her most brilliant comedy (1972) only if they left her name out of the press materials. She’s lucky to go uncredited (Neil Simon, who wrote the original script, is less fortunate), because you can’t do character-driven comedy without characters, and this one has only grotesques who change traits from moment to moment. Given the joyless vulgarity and absence of laughs, the frenzied changes in locales and character types hardly matter. A guy who sells sporting goods (Ben Stiller) gets married, drives south with his bride (Malin Akerman) on their honeymoon, and promptly falls in love with another woman (Michelle Monaghan) while discovering he hates his wife, but the ethnic humor that gave May’s movie its charge is replaced by crass mean-spiritedness. If I were in movie hell, I’d rather see Good Luck Chuck again than return to this atrocity. R, 115 min. (JR)
Read more
Gabriel Range’s English pseudodocumentary (2006), written with Simon Finch, shows the imagined aftereffects of the assassination of George W. Bush in Chicago in 2007. Some infotainment reports to the contrary, this film in no way celebrates such an event but shows it leading to further legislation curtailing civil liberties in the name of security once Cheney becomes president. And the larger theme, at least by intention, is the consequences of anti-Muslim bias. But the film proceeds more like a mystery thriller than an invitation to reflect, and that theme gets muddled. R, 93 min. (JR) Read more
