Holiday Movies

By RICHARD CORLISS, Richard Schickel

It's as if the folks who run Hollywood thought, Nobody's busy in December, so let's fill their idle hours with lots of movies--serious ones as well as silly. By one count, the studios are releasing 66 features this holiday season, up from an already ginormous 58 last year. (Just on their own, Cate Blanchett and Kate Winslet seem to be starring in about 30 of them.) Who has the spare time to consume all this fabulous entertainment, other than Donald Rumsfeld?

"We do," your humble critics reply. We've slogged to dozens of screening rooms, propped our eyes open with toothpicks and dutifully agreed (poor us) to be paid to watch the movies you will soon pay to see. Amid the welter of ordinary movies and atrocious ones, we've found nine worthies--some with just good intentions, many that hit the mark. These are the more ambitious films on display this month, and they ardently hope to be around on the last Sunday night in February. For this is the season when kids write to Santa, and Hollywood starts dreaming of Oscar.

DREAMGIRLS Show biz is so in love with itself, some-times it just has to sing. One of the most powerful self-addressed valentines was the musical Dreamgirls, which fictionalized the making and packaging of Diana Ross and the Supremes. The 1981 show, written by Tom Eyen and Henry Krieger and directed by Michael Bennett, now gets its own makeover--into a just-this-side-of-fabulous movie.

Spanning the '60s and '70s, Dreamgirls is about the pop-cultural battle of glamour vs. soul: of Deena (Beyonce Knowles), the pretty singer, vs. Effie (Jennifer Hudson), a vocal volcano but a bit plump. Curtis (Jamie Foxx), their manager, banking on Deena's smooth sound and looks to peddle the Dreams to white audiences, will do anything to make the sale. The piece plumbs the lure of compromise, the risk of diluted dreams and broken hearts.

Writer-director Bill Condon has made some compromises too: pumping up the role of a James Brownish belter to get Eddie Murphy more screen time, handing Beyonce a new ballad to even out a story that belongs to Effie. But, hey, that's show biz, and Dreamgirls has plenty of visual pizazz to match its cast's charisma. American Idol's Hudson is sensational, mixing tenderness and the truculence of an oughta-be star.

It's great to see a movie musical with a smart sense of the genre. All Dreamgirls lacks is the amazing energy and passion of the original. In a way, the film is less Effie, more Deena.

LETTERS FROM IWO JIMA Last year, as he was preparing to shoot Flags of Our Fathers, his caustic epic about the U.S. invasion of Iwo Jima, Clint Eastwood got a script by his researcher, Iris Yamashita, about the soldiers on the other side of the battle and the losing side of the war. That cued Eastwood to make an Iwo Jima diptych and, after scouting Japanese filmmakers, to direct it himself (though he doesn't speak the language). The result is a unique, bifocal view of ground war--the men who fight it, the propaganda attending it, the awful way it ends.

Whereas Flags became a story of manufactured heroism, Letters is a poignant dirge for the defeated. In anticipation of the U.S. attack, Japanese soldiers have dug miles of tunnels to live in and fire from. But everyone, from the stalwart general (Ken Watanabe) on down, realizes that this anthill is to be a mass tomb. Waiting for an enemy with superior firepower, knowing you can't leave, knowing you can't win, knowing you will die--this is the tersest summary of war.

Terse is the word for Eastwood's directorial style. It rarely editorializes; it doesn't emote or orate. It just tells the damn story of a soldier's honor, which means doing the job no matter the odds--indeed, no matter the mission. And like Flags, Letters offers a metaphor for the war in Iraq. The movie says that to live another day, in a mortally dangerous hellhole, is the best one can expect and the most one can do.

THE PURSUIT OF HAPPYNESS That most agreeable of actors, Will Smith, keeps (as they say) "stretching." The question posed by The Pursuit of Happyness (the bad spelling is part of the story) is whether he's eventually going to bend himself completely out of shape. You have to wonder if making us feel bad for about 99% of a movie in order to make us feel good later is really a healthy thing for the actor or for the audience patiently enduring a string of bitter blows as his character, Chris Gardner, struggles to claim his share of the American dream and maintain his loving relationship with his son (played by Smith's own child, Jaden). You also have to wonder why director Gabriele Muccino chose to dramatize the poor man's plight by having him run constantly through the streets of San Francisco. What ever became of quiet desperation?

Gardner is based on a real character, a bright and ambitious young man who had everything required to succeed--except the right skin color. Do we believe he will triumph? Of course we do; they don't make major motion pictures about uninstructive failures. Do we care about Gardner and son? Oddly, we do, because they are so appealingly played. What more might we wish for them? A movie that's a lot less repetitive.

THE GOOD SHEPHERD Skull and Bones, the most notorious of Yale's secret societies, must have been--and for all we know still is--pretty weird: nude initiation ceremonies, people singing The Whiffenpoof Song at inappropriate moments, a range of blond debutramps with permanent lockjaw to meet and marry. As The Good Shepherd would have it, Bones was the perfect breeding place for another, grander secret society, World War II's Office of Strategic Services, which morphed into the CIA. Robert De Niro's movie (skillfully written by Eric Roth) is a very persuasive and thoughtful study of how the youthful and more muscular scions of the Wasp patriciate imposed their values, their sense of entitlement, on the U.S. and what that endeavor cost us--and the patricians.

The film focuses on Edward Wilson (Matt Damon), a composite of historical figures, who starts out wanting to be a poet and ends up being the bureaucrat at the center of some of the CIA's most notorious activities. Damon is terrific in the role--all-knowing, never overtly expressing a feeling. Indeed, so is everyone else in this intricate, understated but ultimately devastating account of how secrets, when they are left to fester, can become an illness, dangerous to those who keep them, more so to nations that base their policies on them.

CURSE OF THE GOLDEN FLOWER The knives are out at the palace, and Gong Li is staring daggers. Chinese cinema's haughtiest diva plays a 10th century Empress who is having an affair with her stepson while, she suspects, her husband (Chow Yun Fat) is slowly poisoning her. That's just for appetizers in a menu of long-lost parents, eloping lovers and the minor distraction of a civil war out in the grand courtyard.

Director Zhang Yimou (Hero, House of Flying Daggers) and his screenwriting collaborators seem to have swiped bits from Shakespeare's four main tragedies: the conniving wife from Macbeth, the jealous husband from Othello, the raging father and three skirmishing children from King Lear and the pileup of dead royals from Hamlet. There's swordplay and a supporting cast of warriors in the CGI thousands, but the most thrilling spectacle is the clash of ids and egos.

Fans of epics in the Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon tradition may be confused or annoyed by the intensely lurid tone of this movie. Well, all that means is that it's different--gorgeously garish, both in the color scheme (bold tints against the chrysanthemums of the film's title) and in the splash of wild emotion.

Chow, the long-ago supercool star of Hong Kong crime movies, parades a magnificent malevolence he's not unleashed before. And Gong Li, working for the first time in 11 years with the director (and ex-lover) who made her an international star in Ju Dou and Raise the Red Lantern, shows a passion that has never been so animated or tearful.

This is high, and high-wire, melodrama. It's less soap opera than grand opera, where matters of love and death are played at a perfect fever pitch. And grand this Golden Flower is.

BLOOD DIAMOND When a Hollywood star sports a foreign accent for one of his characters, viewers are tempted to say, Stop trying to hide; we know it's you. But Leonardo DiCaprio is such a resourceful actor, and such a magnetic movie presence, that he can persuasively slip into the character of Danny Archer, a diamond smuggler from Zimbabwe who's on the trail of a rock the size of Kilimanjaro. Blood Diamond, the fitfully engrossing drama from director Edward Zwick (Glory, The Last Samurai), links Danny with the diamond's discoverer, Solomon Vandy (Djimon Hounsou, ever noble), whose family has been seized in the brutal 1990s Sierra Leone civil war and sent to a refugee camp.

The movie's political message--that buying a diamond ring may unwittingly finance terrorism--is buried under two plot questions: Will Danny find Solomon's diamond? And will he locate a furtive decency under all that artful scheming? Neither holds much suspense, since 1) this is an action movie and 2) DiCaprio takes lots of risks as an actor, but playing a total rotter isn't one of them.

From Out of Africa and Cry Freedom to The Constant Gardener and Catch a Fire, Hollywood has paraded its love for stories about Africa--as long as they're mostly about white people. The poignant suffering of the blacks is a backdrop to the play of Danny's mixed motives. And, honestly, that's enough, since DiCaprio, here as in The Departed, proves himself the most watchful and watchable actor of his age. Since his teens, he has known how to make moral dilemmas seem both profound and sexy, and at 32 he just keeps getting better.

MISS POTTER The movies are ever awash in cheap, uplifting sentiment, which is to the genteel audience what cheap, degrading violence is to adolescents: the turn-on that dares not speak its name. So it's somewhat grudgingly that we recommend Miss Potter.

It is the story of Beatrix Potter, she of Peter Rabbit and dozens of other much loved children's books. When we meet her, she is a superannuated virgin, living with her well-to-do parents, writing about her "friends," the woodland creatures. She claims to talk to them, which may account for some of the twitchiness that occasionally mars Renee Zellweger's performance in the title role. Potter, however, is made of willful stuff. She finds a publisher (Ewan McGregor) for her books, falls in love with him, achieves best-sellerdom and, in this telling of her life, status as a largely overlooked feminist icon and an early environmentalist.

Al Gore would love her. But, dammit, so do we. It's lovely to see her preserving her vision for her books against commercial compromise, even more warming to see her fight for love and for keeping her beloved Lake District landscape a green and pleasant place. The director, Chris Noonan, doesn't play to our sentiments, he just lets them naturally evolve--even the animation of a few of her drawings doesn't feel especially forced. The result is an honorable and curiously winning film. BREAKING AND ENTERING Anthony Minghella's basic filmmaking impulse is toward the romantic epic (The English Patient, Cold Mountain). He likes to do long, ultimately unhappy love stories set against agitated historical backgrounds that impinge on the fates of his lovers. Breaking and Entering, though set in contemporary London, is a film of that character.

A firm of landscape architects keeps being robbed by an acrobatic young man. Will (Jude Law), one of the practice's partners, traces him and enters into an affair with the boy's mother (Juliette Binoche), who's a widowed seamstress trying to put the miseries of her Bosnian past behind her. The affair is perhaps understandable because Will is unhappy at home. His partner Liv (Robin Wright Penn) has a near autistic daughter, whose care obsesses and distracts Liv. Eventually order and forgiveness are imposed on these troubled lives.

The film is handsomely mounted and well played (particularly by the always magical Binoche--such a wonderfully alert actress), but somehow it never draws one into its schemes. Possibly that's because Minghella (who also wrote the script) has too much on his mind--the costs of urban gentrification, the unhappinesses of emigre and bourgeois life. Minghella is a decent-minded filmmaker. And a liberal-minded one too. He wants his characters to emerge morally instructed and reasonably happy. But it's not a lofty goal, and this is a movie that plods while we keep hoping it will soar.

NOTES ON A SCANDAL Smirk, smirk. Pretty, slightly ditzy schoolteacher (Cate Blanchett) gets it on with one of her teenage students, and predictable consequences follow. But Notes is not really about age-inappropriate sex or child victimization. The boy involved is always the rather ugly aggressor in this relationship. If there is a victim, it is Blanchett's Sheba, addled by an unhappy marriage, failed artistic ambitions and, soon enough, by another relationship--this one from hell. It is with another teacher, Barbara (Judi Dench), who is their school's battle-ax--cruel disciplinarian, cynical commentator on the hopelessness of its lower-class student body and, yes, a scheming lesbian. Once she discovers Sheba's crime, she attempts to use it to blackmail her. Dench is nothing less than great in this role. It's hard to recall a recent performance of such unrelenting ferocity, such a thoroughgoing devotion to the domination of another life.

Notes on a Scandal is melodrama trying to pass itself off as a slice of realistic life. But director Richard Eyre and screenwriter Patrick Marber keep forcing us past disbelief and into the perverse pleasures of nastiness. If nothing else, their film is the perfect antidote to all those warm, forgiving schoolboy dramas we've endured through the years. This corn is not green; it is rotten down to the last kernel.