This review was first published on InterfaithFamily.com on Feb. 27, 2009.

You wouldn’t know it from the trailer, but Two Lovers is one of the most spot-on portraits of modern Jewish life to come along in years. Then again, the trailer doesn’t tell you much of anything about this quietly powerful film. Movies that capture the nuances of real relationships don’t lend themselves to catchy marketing.

Isabella Roselini and Joaquin Phoenix in a scene from Two Lovers.

Directed by James Gray (We Own The Night), Two Lovers tells the story of Leonard Kraditor (Joaquin Phoenix, Jewish on his mom’s side), a mentally unbalanced Jewish man who is torn between the woman his parents want him to like (Vanissa Shaw) and a mysterious non-Jewish neighbor (Gwyneth Paltrow, Jewish on her father’s side). The setting is Brighton Beach, one of the most Jewish zip codes in the country. Leonard lives with his parents, owners of a dry cleaning business. He spends his days sleeping, working for his father and popping pills to fend off his chronic depression.

As Phoenix portrays him, Leonard is a teenager trapped in an adult body. His posture is a slouch, his voice a mumble, his walk a shuffle. Like an adolescent, he bristles at his parents’ attempts to help him. The excuse for his erratic behavior–including a suicidal attempt or two–is his break-up with his fiancé after she learned they were both carriers of the Tay-Sachs gene. But Gray smartly never tells us whether Leonard has ever acted his age. Indeed, his childlike sweetness draws two beautiful women to him.

Leonard meets Sandra Cohen (Shaw) at a family dinner with Sandra’s parents, who are looking to buy Leonard’s father’s business. (And Leonard’s father, we later learn, is looking to sell so Leonard will have healthcare after he dies.) A successful corporate type, Sandra is nonetheless intrigued by Leonard after seeing him dance with his mother at the family store. She’s Jewish, he’s Jewish; she’s single, he’s single. In the eyes of Jewish mothers everywhere, they’re a perfect match.

Michelle (Paltrow), on the other hand, is a Jewish mother’s nightmare: underemployed, emotionally unstable and not Jewish. She matches Leonard pill for pill.

While Sandra’s and Leonard’s relationship goes on the fast track–by week three, he is an honored guest at her brother’s bar mitzvah–Leonard silently pines for Michelle, who is entangled with a wealthy married lawyer. At quiet lunches with Sandra, he nervously watches his phone for a text from Michelle. Would he be as interested if she were not so unattainable? As with all adolescent infatuations, who can say?

Despite his white bread name, Gray comes from a rich Jewish background. It shows. I have rarely seen a film get so many subtle Jewish cultural details just right: the pot roast at dinner, the goofy candle-lighting at the bar mitzvah reception, even the smell of mothballs in Leonard’s parents’ apartment.

Gray and his co-writer Ric Menello smartly underplay the intermarriage card. Leonard’s parents never say a peep about Michelle’s religion, but Jewish viewers know they’re holding their tongues to avoid blowback. At the same time, they gently encourage his relationship with Sandra–but, like clever Jewish parents everywhere, say nothing about her religion either.

The screenplay is so subtle and finely tuned that it’s nearly impossible to say what Gray’s attitude toward intermarriage is. The film could as easily be read as a critique of inmarriage as it could be read as a warning against intermarriage. Leonard is willing to abandon his family–and by extension, his tradition–for the faint hope that the beautiful non-Jewish woman will love him back. But Leonard’s relationships with Jewish women are no sunnier. One left him because their future children might suffer from a horrible terminal disease, and the other holds interest only as a placeholder. For Leonard, inmarriage is either a loveless arrangement of convenience, or the source of genetic doom.

In the laudable absence of a simple message about intermarriage, I propose another way to read this film. It serves as a critique of the Jewish community’s flawed approach to intermarriage.

On the one hand, young Jews are told not to intermarry because their children won’t grow up to be Jewish; on the other, they’re told to marry Jewish because it’s the right thing to do. This binary approach is irrelevant to most young Jewish people. We will love and marry whomever we want in this diverse, mobile society.

But Leonard’s romantic choices are a direct reaction to Jewish sermonizing against intermarriage. The twist is, he doesn’t heed the warnings–he rebels against them. He chases the non-Jewish woman precisely because she offers an escape. He rejects the Jewish one simply because she is his parents’ preference.

It is surely not Gray’s intent, but Two Lovers shows how the Jewish community’s message on intermarriage isn’t merely pointless, it’s potentially destructive. If you treat adults like children, they’ll act like children. Much like Leonard, the Jewish community needs to grow up.

This interview was originally published on InterfaithFamily.com on Jan. 16, 2009.

For a review of Defiance, see Unheralded Heroes of the Holocaust.

Edward Zwick is Jewish, but that is hardly a litmus test for what projects he takes.

"It informs who I am psychically, characterologically, morally, ethically, spiritually," the 56-year-old director says. "It is a strong influence, but it is by no means a solitary influence."

Zwick directs Daniel Craig and Alexa Davalos in a scene from Defiance. Photo: Karen Ballard.

After making films with such varied settings as the Civil War (Glory), 19th century Japan (The Last Samurai), war-torn modern Africa (Blood Diamond) and the first Gulf War (Courage Under Fire), Zwick has directed, co-written and produced Defiance, based on the true story of the Bielskis, a group of Jewish brothers who saved 1,200 of their fellow Jews from the Holocaust by hiding them in the Belarussian forest–and fighting Nazis along the way. It’s his first film about Jews, but it’s certainly not his first work to explore Jewish life.

Zwick made his name in the ’80s as the co-creator of thirtysomething, the short-lived but hugely influential series about a group of youngish urban professionals who yearn to have it all. At the center of the show was an interfaith couple, Michael (Ken Olin) and Hope Steadman (Mel Harris). They were in part based on Zwick’s own intermarriage. Zwick says experiences from his own life (as well as that of thirtysomething’s then-intermarried co-creator, Marshall Heskovitz) "inevitably" found their way into the show. Episodes on the December dilemma and the death of Michael’s father explored conflicts and concerns unique to interfaith couples.

In his own life, he considers himself "religious" but not "observant"–"I’m not a member of Facebook either. I find it hard to do much of anything in groups," he says–but affirms that Judaism is the dominant stream in his 22-year-old son’s upbringing. His wife, who became a Quaker during the Vietnam War, has much to do with that. "She was as much a prime mover, maybe even more so [than me], that he be bar mitzvahed," he says. "She wanted him to have some experience of religious training in his life." In December, Zwick took his son on his first trip to Israel as part of the Defiance press tour.

Prior to Defiance, Zwick was reluctant to tackle the Holocaust on film. He didn’t know if there was anything he could add to the rich lineage of films about the 20th century’s worst genocide. But he feels the story of the Bielskis is something fresh. "The standard iconography of victimization doesn’t take into account the impulse to resist that was present in so many cases," he says. "With the exception of the uprising in the Warsaw ghetto, there had actually been very little done on resistance."

Yet he has no interest in saying where he stands on the ethical debate at the center of Defiance: whether it is better to save Jews or kill Germans. "I would prefer people to make their own conclusions. My job as a filmmaker is to present the story such that that conclusion is inescapable to the individual. If I haven’t been able to do that by making the movie," he says, "I don’t want to prescribe."

This review was originally published on InterfaithFamily.com on Jan. 16, 2009.

Also see my interview with Edward Zwick.

Is there any purer pleasure in war film than watching Nazis get shot?

Devoted to the thematic orthodoxy that "war is hell," modern war films offer few guiltless pleasures. What joys there are are usually small: comrades from different social strata bonding during a break from battle, soldiers finding some foodstuff that would barely qualify as a delicacy in peacetime, the hero returning from the front with his arms and legs intact.

Daniel Craig as Tuvia Bielski and Liev Schreiber as Zus Bielski star in Defiance. Photo: Karen Ballard.

But the death of Nazis supplies a joy far beyond these morsels of normality. Seeing good stomp evil is of course satisfying. But for the Jewish viewer especially, watching a Nazi die on screen offers a taste of the revenge that history never let us have.

The most exhilarating–and memorable–moments of Defiance come from our ready acquiescence to the Nazi-killing fantasy. These moments are all the more invigorating because they’re (mostly) true.

Loosely based on a nonfiction book by Nechama Tec, Defiance tells the story of the Bielski brothers, a quartet of Jewish siblings who saved more than a thousand Jews from the ghettoes and concentration camps of Belarus. Like many of director Edward Zwick’s (Glory, Blood Diamond, The Last Samurai) protagonists, they are unlikely heroes. They come from a poor village family. They were in and out of trouble as kids. But what made them outsiders during peace makes them ideal rebels during war: they are naturally distrustful of authority, and they know how to survive in the forest.

Zwick’s and Clayton Frohman’s script traces the Bielskis’ evolution from refugees to avengers to saviors. After finding their parents murdered by collaborationist police, Zus (Liev Schreiber) and Alex Bielski (Jamie Bell) flee with their child brother to the woods. They are soon joined by elder brother Tuvia (Daniel Craig), who has left his wife and child behind in Minsk.

When the youngest brother stumbles upon a dazed group of survivors, the Bielskis become reluctant caretakers. At this point, saving other Jews is only a distraction from their main goal: getting vengeance for their parents’ death. In a very effective montage, the Bielskis terrorize surrounding villages, making it known that collaborators will pay with their lives.

But as the number of refugees swell, Tuvia has a change of heart. "Our revenge is to live," he tells his followers. But Zus, who is portrayed as the gang’s toughest–and most cynical–soldier, is disdainful of the helpless middle-class Jews that keep streaming into their camp. "These are the Jews who would lock up their daughters from us," he tells Tuvia. As their camp grows into something resembling a ramshackle town–replete with school and blacksmith–Zus leaves to join a band of Russian partisans whose sole purpose is to fight the Germans.

Early on, the film illustrates the darker side of the Bielskis’ project. Tuvia kills a collaborator despite his cries for mercy; Zus steals the coat of a milkman who has already lost most of his milk to the Germans; a threatening young man in the Bielski camp insinuates to a beautiful newcomer that she should be his "forest wife." But what starts as a tough-minded portrait of the compromises necessary to save lives morphs into a much more conventional, and often clichéd, tale of Hollywood heroism.

Tuvia becomes the stereotypical modern hero, questioned during times of struggle, but always proven right, and always motivated by selflessness. His heroism, while inspiring, isn’t relatable. Liev Schreiber gives the more interesting, and charismatic, performance of the two leads. Typically cast as a sensitive modern man, Schreiber is a revelation as an uneducated country boy who thinks with his fists. Somehow he seems about a foot taller than normal.

As we watch the two brothers’ parallel lives among partisans of peace and partisans of war, it becomes clear they are meant to serve as opposing poles in the classic ethical debate: which is more important, saving civilians or killing bad guys?

The problem is, the film’s head says save civilians, while its heart says kill bad guys. As interesting as it is to watch a new society hatch from nothing in the Belarussian forest, it’s downright transfixing to see a Nazi soldier get stabbed in the heart. This may be the curse of Schindler’s List. We’ve seen Jews get saved before (many times actually), but we haven’t seen Jews get back at the Nazis. Defiance is supposed to be a sober Holocaust tale, but it’s at its best when it’s an action movie.

There may also be a bit of male bloodlust at work. While I couldn’t get enough dead Nazis, the three women I saw the film with were uneasy with the brutality the Bielskis inflict on the Germans. While I found almost all the romantic scenes to be hogwash, I suspect my friends found them to be humanizing. But that still doesn’t excuse Zwick’s unfortunate tendency to force-feed the audience their intellectual broccoli.

In the prelude to the film’s culminating battle scene, the fleeing Bielski partisans come to a dead end in the forest. Ahead of them is a seemingly unpassable swamp. Yet they forge ahead, not knowing where they’ll end up, in a nice allusion to the Biblical Exodus. But Zwick and Frohman can’t leave well enough alone. "God will not part these waters," says Asael, making explicit what was already obvious.

The final battle encapsulates all that is right and wrong with this film. When Zus emerges from the forest, without armor, machine gun in hand, and mows down members of a German tank unit, shoots the gunner and drops a grenade in the turret, it’s as energizing as a skydive. But what follows–I won’t reveal what–is so trite, formulaic and plainly silly that I felt like my parachute didn’t open. A true story this amazing doesn’t need a Hollywood ending. It already had one.

This review was originally published on InterfaithFamily.com on Oct. 10, 2008. Also, in the interest of full disclosure, Jenny Rapaport of Lit Soup pointed out that Norah says “minion,” not “minyan,” as I claim. Oops.

About halfway through Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist, Norah (Kat Dennings) makes an offhand comment to Nick (Michael Cera) that left me floored–and probably made no impression on the rest of the audience. As they engage in an awkward tarry of flirt-and-retreat, flirt-and-retreat, they exchange information about their post-high school plans: Nick is going to Berklee School of Music in Boston, and Norah is going to Brown, 50 miles away in Providence, R.I. Her eyes staring at the floor, Norah mutters about their future proximity, "I really wouldn’t mind getting away from my minyan duties."

Kat Dennings plays Norah in Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist.

It’s a statement as remarkable for what it doesn’t say as for what it does. Norah never defines "minyan," and the non-Jewish Nick never asks. (If you’re wondering, a minyan is the quorum required to hold a Jewish worship service.) The conversation tumbles on, and Norah’s religious responsibilities are never mentioned again.

Are director Peter Sollett and screenwriter Lorene Scafaria assuming an extraordinarily high level of cultural literacy from their audience? I don’t think so. Rather, I suspect they want to authentically portray a world where Jewish identity is as casually displayed as loyalty to a sports team.

The moment also says something about the ambivalence many modern Jews feel toward their religion. Norah’s statement is both come-on and warning: if you’re going to get close, you better understand that Judaism is important to her. But it’s delivered with the same sense of highly affected apathy that Ellen Page perfected in Juno, as if to say, yeah, Judaism is essential, but it’s also kind of a drag. She’s keeping her options open either to put down her religious identity or to celebrate it. It’s the perfect response to a dilemma shared by adolescents and adults alike: how do you reconcile your need to define yourself with your desire to be like everybody else?

As a comedy about two teens falling in love, you’d be forgiven for guessing that Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist is all about the triumph of identity over conformity. But it’s not. While it shares the fairy tale plotline of John Hughes movies, it eschews their easy targets: no principals, jocks or Heathers are to be found.

Instead, its characters inhabit a world of infinite hipness. Nick, the bassist for an otherwise all-gay punk band, makes his ex-girlfriend mix CDs with titles like "Road to Closure, Vol. 12." The ex could care less about the CDs–or Nick–but Norah religiously fishes the mixes out of the trash. Though Norah’s never met him, she’s convinced Nick is her musical soulmate.

Norah is smitten from the moment she spots him on stage at one of his band’s shows. Their paths become entangled in a quest to see a band called Where’s Fluffy that is so indie it doesn’t even announce the location of its shows until an hour before hitting the stage. Careening around Manhattan and Brooklyn in Nick’s disintegrating orange Yugo, the two realize they’re made for each other (of course). Refreshingly, their flirtation is less screwball banter than it is a mix of long pauses, nervous smiles and failed jokes. In other words, it’s tailored to the talents of the stammering Cera.

Dennings, the lesser known quantity of the two, is more a revelation. With Angelina Jolie lips and walnut eyes, her face constantly threatens to break into a pout. But her character is so desperate to be taken seriously that she can’t let anyone see her self-pity–even if that’s her driving motive for much of the movie.

Like the best Judd Apatow movies, Nick and Norah has some wonderful moments of a-ha comedy, where the players derive knowing laughs from their simple, honest portrayal of the rituals and quirks of contemporary youth. I particularly liked the scene when Nick and Norah finally hook up; you see nothing, but hear the kind of intimate whispers–"Your hands are cold," "Your zipper’s stuck!"–that are familiar to, well, anyone.

Michael Cera and Kat Dennings as Nick and Norah.

The film is littered with casual references to Norah’s Judaism. In their only real fight, Nick tells Norah he heard she was a "frigid, jealous JAP." Before the aforementioned hook-up, Norah tells Nick, "There’s this part of Judaism I really like called tikkun olam," which Nick appropriates into a metaphor for two people finding each other. Norah’s mention of a summer camp sexual experiment with Becca Wiener will induce nods of recognition from many 20-something Jews.

Ironically, it’s Norah’s relationship with her Jewish ex-boyfriend that reveals the filmmakers’ attitude toward interfaith relationships. Played by Jay Baruchel (Tropic Thunder), Tal is the ultimate Hebrew hipster: permanent five o’clock shadow, skinny black tie, carefully disheveled hair, emaciated frame. When he’s not texting, he’s hawking his band Oz-Rael’s CD ("It’s like anarchy meets Zionism," he says. "We bring the Jewfire."). Despite the breakup, he still adores Norah and showers her with compliments about her beauty and her maternal potential. To a Jewish mother’s eyes, they should make the perfect shidduch. But he’s clearly not the one for her. Jewish connection is great, the filmmakers seem to be saying, but musical connection is better.

Like Then She Found Me and Knocked Up before it, the film doesn’t make a big deal out of the Jewishness of its protagonists. Their Judaism is just a fraction of who they are, and the filmmakers see no sense in foregrounding their religious differences with non-Jews. For the glass half-empty types, these films are a sign that Jewishness has become little more than a fashion symbol, as dazzling, and disposable, as the latest model of smart phone. For us half-full types, they offer further proof that anyone can share in the Jewfire.

This review was originally published, in slightly different form, on InterfaithFamily.com, on June 6, 2008.

Adam Sandler comedies come in two varieties: mediocre and awful. In the mediocre ones (Billy Madison, The Wedding Singer, etc.), he plays an exaggerated version of himself: bashful, sarcastic, prone to temper tantrums. In the awful ones, he attempts to stretch his range, usually adopting an unbearable accent, and fails. By all rights, You Don’t Mess with the Zohan should have a pedestal reserved for it in the pantheon of crap next to Little Nicky and The Waterboy. Yet, defying all laws of modern comedy, this silly movie about an Israeli commando who comes to America to become a hairdresser isn’t awful. In fact, it’s nearly great.

Adam Sandler is The Zohan, here car-surfing in New York City traffic.

The surprising secret to its success is that Sandler plays an affect he’s never tried before: confident. Indeed, the Zohan may be the most self-assured man on the planet. He’s the greatest soldier in the world’s most feared army, and a celebrity on the beaches of Tel Aviv, where women fawn over him and men worship him. Even pelicans give him high-fives. (I said it was silly, right?) The fits of rage so familiar to fans of Sandler films are nowhere to be found. The Zohan is too cocky–in more ways than one–to get frustrated.

But all the glory and adulation have become boring. The Zohan is tired of capturing terrorists only to have them returned in prisoner exchanges. In his over-the-top Israeli accent, he wonders to his parents when the cycle of violence between Jews and Arabs will end. To which his mother replies, "They’ve been fighting for 2,000 years. It can’t be much longer."

Faking his own death after a paddleball match with Palestine’s most feared terrorist, The Phantom (John Turturro), The Zohan flees to America to pursue his dream of working at the Paul Mitchell salon. Clutching his 1987 Mitchell stylebook, the Zohan fantasizes about making women’s coifs "silky smooth." Take Munich and replace Avner with Austin Powers, and you’re getting the idea.

Having never cut human hair before, Zohan ends up in a working class New York neighborhood where Israelis and Arabs co-exist uncomfortably on opposite sides of the street. He takes a job sweeping floors at a salon run by a harried Palestinian beauty, played by the gorgeous (and Jewish) Emmanuelle Chriqui. And then the plot really gets ridiculous. A trio of working-class Arabs, led by Rob Schneider (also Jewish) in brown facepaint, attempts to assassinate the Zohan with Neosporin. But the ultimate bogeyman is neither Muslim nor Jewish. It’s a mall developer who wants to raze the neighborhood, played with a painful lack of timing and professionalism by non-actor Michael Buffer–best known as a ring announcer at pro wrestling matches.

The movie is at its best when it sticks to its core subject: Israeli machismo. Sandler plays the Zohan broadly, as the most sexualized Sabra this side of the Mediterranean, with a fashion sense predating the fall of the Iron Curtain. The script, by Sandler, Robert Smigel and the ubiquitous Judd Apatow, has great fun with the quirks of Israeli culture. Zohan and his Israeli buddies have hyperactive sex drives, making love exclusively to old and overweight women. Their taste for hummus is equally insatiable, as they dip everything from chicken to chocolate in the stuff. Zohan even brushes his teeth with ground chickpeas.

Adam Sandler practices his hairstyling on hot older woman Lainie Kazan.

Ultimately, the Israelis and the Arabs find common ground in their shared attraction to Hillary Clinton, obsession with hackey sack and love for Mariah Carey’s music. They join forces to fight Buffer’s developer and his minions, led by a redneck racist played by Dave Matthews, of the Dave Matthews Band. Even the Phantom finds room for forgiveness.

Zohan’s love affair with Chriqui’s character is predictably simplistic, although it touches on the kind of family opposition and cultural boundaries familiar to people in interfaith relationships. The message of the film–if one’s looking for it–is that America is a place where Israelis and Palestinians can set aside their differences and start fresh. It would be hopelessly naïve if it weren’t true. America’s Arabs are the least radicalized in the developed world, and Israelis here are typically more consumed with making a living than worrying about Middle Eastern politics.

Despite its relentless caricature of Jews, Arabs, gays, Africans, you name it, You Don’t Mess with the Zohan never comes off as mean-spirited. It’s downright refreshing in the way it portrays Schneider’s friends, who are more concerned with the state of the New York Mets than jihad, and older Jewish women, who are presented as suitable subjects for sexual attraction.

About the only people who could be offended by this movie are Israeli men. I suspect, though, that the one thing that will make them mad is that the Zohan and his buddies don’t bag enough hot women. After all, they have a reputation to uphold.

Mark Harris, of Entertainment Weekly, has written a great column about how Quentin Tarantino has been making homages to bad movies not many people really liked–or watched–for going on a decade and a half now. I couldn’t agree more; Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction are masterpieces but everything after (I’ll exclude Grindhouse, because I haven’t seen it yet) has been of dubious quality. The movies are too long, the dialogue needs serious editing, the storytelling isn’t remotely as tight, well-paced and inventive as his first two films. Worst of all, he seems to have completely lost the knack for creating believable characters. His movies aren’t about people anymore; they’re about B-movie cliches, and while that might be entertaining, it makes it hard to care.

My favorite line from Harris’ column?

His fixation on 1970s subgenres has now lasted longer than the 1970s themselves.

After the incredibly disappointing way that last season disintegrated, I did not have high hopes for the season premiere of The Sopranos. (Although technically this is not a new season. It is actually referred to as Season 6B. Last season was Season 6A.) If there was ever any doubt, last, um, season confirmed that David Chase is intellectually allergic to narrative closure and has a disregard for the viewer that borders on pathological. Nonetheless, few characters in fictional history are as interesting as Tony Soprano, so I was obligated to watch another torturous, frustrating, occasionally brilliant season. It’s all going to end in utter crap, of course, but I have to see this thing through to its bitter end.

All that being said, I was pleasantly surprised by Sunday’s premiere. There was little in overall plot advancement, but I’m fine with that. Seemingly major events never have much payoff on this show anyway. No, this episode was a little gem, a tangent episode in its own way, about Tony and Carmela’s trip to Bobby and Janice’s lakehouse in upstate New York. As has been demonstrated numerous times in the past, The Sopranos writers are particularly inspired when they take their characters out of their suburban milieu.

A seemingly pleasant weekend away turns into a debacle when during a night of drinking, Tony goes to far in insulting Janice and Bobby socks him in the mouth. The two massive alpha dogs wrestle their way through the cabin, smashing windows and tables in the process, but their motivations couldn’t be more different. Bobby is little more than an overgrown schoolboy, protecting his woman’s honor, while Tony can’t stop fighting because he is desparate to maintain his status as the greatest warrior. Bobby’s not interested in the pecking order; he just wants Tony to realize the venom in his words.

This episode made me realize that The Sopranos is really just the world’s greatest treatise on passive-aggressive behavior. Just like his mother, Tony doesn’t say what he feels, but assumes that you’ll understand what he wants. If you don’t, it’s your fault, not his, and usually demonstrative of a lack of respect–at least to Tony. Interestingly, as passive-aggressive as Tony can be, he’s a novice compared to the manipulative mastery of his mother and sister. They’re the only two characters in the history of the show who have consistently played Tony to get what they want.

Frankly I would be happy if Chase and co. don’t even bother with plot development this year and just focus on tight, self-contained episodes like this one. One episode, one central plot. That way we can all avoid the inevitable crushing awful disappointment of another season of character stagnation.

SPOILER ALERT******SPOILER ALERT******SPOILER ALERT

Now that’s out of the way…

I was going to write a full review of Pan’s Labyrinth, but time constraints and laziness got in the way. Besides, what more is there to say? I agree with the other critics. It’s a masterpiece. So I thought I’d focus on the ending, which popular critics are barred from discussing.

Incredibly, the ending is somehow both tragic and happy. Ofelia dies, but in death she finds peace, fantasizing that she is reunited with her mother in a beautiful kingdom (or actually being reunited with her mother for eternity, if your inclination is more spiritual). Even though her life is too short, she fulfills one of our fondest hopes: that we die happy.

Interestingly, only at the end of the movie is it certain that the fantasy world is truly make-believe. Because the film starts with shots of the mythical kingdom, we’re predisposed to believe that Pan’s world is real, a magical reality beyond the reality we know–Narnia rather than Oz. The second shot in the film is of Ofelia reading a book about the fantasy world. On paper, this would suggest the preceding images of the kingdom are just a figment of Ofelia’s imagination, but the entrancing visual evidence is so strong we’re not so sure. Numerous fantasy films before have the used the strategy of suggesting that that the fantasy world is not real, only to end in a way that proves that it is real. We’re not about to fall into the trap of not believing again.

But given that the fantasy world is just a product of Ofelia’s imagination, what’s the point? Well, if one imagines the film’s story with Ofelia talking to walls instead of Faun, and nosing around a rotten tree rather than chasing a giant toad, then a dark narrative becomes a horribly depressing one. The tale is reduced to a child going to live with her cruel stepfather, her mother dying in childbirth and the stepfather shooting her. The end.

But Ofelia’s fantasies, imaginary as they may be, give meaning and purpose to her life. The fantasy is not merely an escape, it also motivates an act of heroism (when she takes the baby from Captain Vidal). The fantasy gives her the strength to bear an awful situation. It offers hope when her mother is dying, and gives her resolve in the face of danger. In its way, her attachment to the fantasy world echoes the motivating power of the great illusions that guide our lives: the ideal of a soulmate, belief in God, the promise of permanent happiness. Her plea to an imaginary creature not to kill the baby is no different than a mother’s prayer to God to save her sick child. It’s not the success of the prayer that’s important, but what it means for the supplicant.

I’d been hearing great things about The Best Years of Our Lives for years. It’s gotten a little bit of a bad rap in some circles as the movie that beat out It’s a Wonderful Life for best picture in 1947, but that shouldn’t take away from what is a classic in its own right.

Inspired by a story in Life magazine, The Best Years of Our Lives is about three veterans who return from World War II and have trouble re-adjusting to civilian life. One is a captain in the airforce (Dana Andrews), one is an older man, a sergeant in the Army (Fredric March), and the other is a young kid, a former Navy man who lost his hands in a ship fire (Harold Russell). They meet on a military plane flying them from Long Beach back home to Boon City, one of those make-believe Hollywood cities that probably was shot on the same lot as It’s A Wonderful Life. You know the kind–it has an airport, numerous bars, a bustling downtown, rich areas and poor areas, but somehow, whenever you walk down the street, you bump into somebody you know. Small-town intimacy with big-city amenities. God bless Hollywood.

The film does something remarkably clever and ahead of its time. On the cab ride back from the airport, Russell is dropped off first, in a clapboard house on a leafy middle-class street. March is dropped off second, and it’s a bit of a surprise for this brusque man–he lives in a luxury apartment tower (Boon City has everything). But Andrews’ final destination is a real shock. He’s a handsome, confident, friendly decorated officer–in short, everything you want a war hero to be–and his parents live in a shack by the railroad. That kind of subversion of expectations in the heydey of conventional story-telling is quite impressive.

The movie goes on to tell their somewhat interlocking stories, doing so with a wisdom about the vulnerability and accomodations of love and an intelligence about class and economics that was rare for its day. I know that noir got its start in the ’40s, but this is not a noir in either spirit or aesthetics. There’s neither the relentless cynicism nor the ominous shadows of noir.

There’s a great scene where March’s angelic daughter tells her parents she’s going to break up Andrews’ marriage because she’s sure that he’s in love with her and not with his hussy of a wife. March and his wife (a fine Myrna Loy) dissect her illusion, premise by premise. March asks something along the lines of “What do you think love is?” “Do you know how many times I told your mother I’m through with you?” March asks. “And do you know how many times I told your father I hate you?” Loy asks. “We’ve had to fall back into love more times than I can count,” March says. The point being, March’s daughter may think she and Andrews are in love, but it doesn’t mean anything if you can’t count on him–and you can’t count on a married man who cheats.

The movie is full of little touches that show the actors, writers and director William Wyler really thought carefully about every scene. In the plane back to Boon City, Andrews offers a cigarette to his two traveling companions. He lights March’s cigarette and then his own. He is about to light Russell’s cigarette. “Are you guys suspicious?” he asks. “Because I am.” And he proceeds to light his own cigarette with a separate match. It’s a subtle reference to the military tradition that sprung up, I believe, in World War II, where only two men light cigarettes at a time. The fear is that a sniper sees the first cigarette, sets his sights on the second and fires on the third.

I love also how the movie handles the soldiers’ initial return to their homes. The cliche is that every soldier rushed back to the arms of his beloved wife and family, but each of the men, especially Russell, is reluctant to leave the cab. March likens going home to “storming a beach.” They all show a desire to go to local bar and have a few drinks. Even though they barely know each other, they’re more familiar with the exclusively masculine, homosocial world of the military than they are of domestic civilian life. That night, March goes for a night on the town with his wife and daughter and he’s as excited to bump into Andrews and Russell at a bar as he was to see his family the first time.

Even with the very conventional filmmaking, there are some beautifully complicated shots, where three characters do different discreet actions simultaneously in the foreground, middle ground and background. But they’re not crowded or superfluous; one scene has Russell in the foreground showing off his ability to play the piano to March in the middle ground, who takes occasional glances back to the phonebooth in the background where Andrews is calling March’s daughter to end their affair. Rarely today do you see shots of that kind of clean complexity.

The Best Years of Our Lives doesn’t have the mythic simplicity or visual power of It’s a Wonderful Life, but It’s a Wonderful Life looks like sentimental claptrap compared to the tough and wise vision of love and life that The Best Years of Our Lives offers.

It’s commonplace to refer to the magic of movies, but, as arts, movies and magic have little in common. Movies ask us to suspend our disbelief. Magic courts our disbelief. Puzzling over how a movie did what it did is, at best, a subsidiary pleasure of watching a movie. Puzzling over how a magician does his tricks is more often than not the only pleasure of watching a magic show.

Magic, in the sense of a magician’s performance art, does not hold up well when transferred from stage to fictional film. An effect that is astonishing on stage becomes pedestrian on screen. (There’s a reason nearly every kind of celebrity in America has been in the movies, except magicians. We know how the tricks are done in movies.)

The trick, so to speak, that any good movie about magic must pull off is to create a reality so believable that we’re willing to buy into the magic. We need to be so engulfed in the film’s reality that we watch the magic tricks like the spectators in the film, not the spectators in the film’s audience. Like sports movies, movies about magic must be totally convincing just to be good.

The Illusionist isn’t credible enough to be very good, but it does offer the pleasure of a well-executed but standard magic show. You won’t walk away from it marveling at its achievement, but you will be entertained for most of its duration.

Based on a short story by Steven Millhauser, The Illusionist tells the story of Eisenheim (a typically instense Edward Norton), a late 19th-century magician in the mold of Houdini who delights audiences in Vienna with seemingly impossible tricks: he makes an orange seed sprout instantly into a tree with ripe fruit, he trains butterflies to carry a handkerchief, he turns gloves into crows. His origins, as recounted by Chief Inspector Uhl (an overly breathy Paul Giamatti), are, unsurprisingly, mysterious. Legend has it that he learned his craft as a child from a traveling magician sitting under a tree. When the magician finished his lesson, he vanished. And so did the tree.

As a boy, Eisenheim–then named Edward Abramowitz–fell in love with Sofia, the beautiful daughter of an aristocratic family. Their scenes together as adolescents are shot to look like a silent film, overexposed in the center but dark around the edges, as if a spotlight is shining on the screen. It’s an interesting effect, to be sure, but it unfortunately serves only to idealize Eisenheim’s childhood to the point of unreality. By the time we meet Eisenheim as an adult, arriving in Vienna after decades of traveling the world, he is already a self-assured, secretive master of his craft. He is interesting, but there’s no reason for the viewer to identify with him. He’s too in control to be sympathetic.

One of Eisenheims’s first shows in Vienna is attended by Crown Prince Leopold (Rufus Sewell), the son of the king, and an entourage including the woman he hopes to marry, played by Jessica Biel. Fifty dollars to the first person who guesses who the woman is. When Leopold volunteers her to participate in one of Eisenheim’s illusions, Eisenheim instantly recognizes her as Sofia–and the feelings from their youth return as well.

Despite being dressed up in an overly complex narrative structure, The Illusionist is really a straightforward tale of a man of humble means who loves a woman of high station but is thwarted by her villanous lover. It’s a premise as old as Dickens. While their romance is so synthetic it makes Mr. and Mrs. Smith look sophisticated, there’s something endearing about the movie’s attachment to hopelessly out-of-date tropes. It’s not enchanting enough for the archtypes to avoid being cliches, but it’s fast-paced enough that we scarcely notice how contrived the whole thing is.

The story gets a bit more interesting when Eisenheim overhauls his show into a spiritualist showcase. Sitting on a chair on the stage, dressed in only a white shirt, black pants and black suspenders, he concentrates, as if in a trance, on a spot on the stage. His eyes pinched, his brow sweating, Norton holds up his hand, palm out, as if he might just conjure a dragon from thin air. The result is nearly as good. He brings back the dead, in an effect that is best likened to a hologram.

These performances are so convincing that the people of Vienna begin to look to Eisenheim as a religious figure and perhaps, a political leader. This threat alarms Uhl more than the Prince, whose vendetta against Eisenheim stems mostly from the way Eisenheim publicly embarassed him at a performance at the royal estate. The fact that Eisenheim and Sofia are having an affair doesn’t appear to bother the crown prince much; he’s more interested in Sofia for her family’s political capital than for her body or heart. Between the cult of personality surrounding Eisenheim and Leopold’s machinations to take over the empire, there’s potential for a much more interesting movie here, perhaps one that sees political echoes between Eisenheim the celebrity and Leopold the aspiring dictator. But ultimately, Eisenheim’s love for Sofia is the only story Burger is interested in telling. As the film’s tagline, “Nothing is what it seems,” suggests, there is a twist ending–which is about as obvious as a sixth-grader’s boner at his first dance.

Theoretically, Giamatti’s character should hold this all together, but he doesn’t. Detectives typically make great protagonists, but there’s something about Giamatti’s performance that mildly repulsed me. In an attempt to escape from his sad-sack typecasting, he erred on the side of gravitas, making his character so exxageratedly weighty that he’s sometimes difficult to take seriously.

Strangely, though, despite the film’s numerous flaws, I can’t say I hated The Illusionist. In fact, I kind of enjoyed it, although it certainly left no lasting impression. Dwelling on the twist ending certainly doesn’t help; like most twist endings, the conclusion’s logic collapses under sustained scrutiny. But while I was watching it, I was entertained and gave little thought to how silly the whole thing was. I guess that’s what they call the magic of the movies.