Mongol (3 1/2 stars)
Directed by Sergei Bodrov. Written by Arif Aliyev and Sergei Bodrov. With Tadanobu Asano, Khulan Chuluun, Honglei Sun, Odnyam Odsuren, and Aliya. (R)
The epigraph that kicks off Sergei Bodrov's new Genghis Khan biopic reads, "Do not scorn a weak cub. He may become a tiger." If only his many enemies had been able to read, they might have met a better end. Because in Mongol, an account of the infamous leader's life from boyhood to Khan, there's a whole lot of scorn going on.
We're introduced to Temudjin (the future Khan's given name) when he is still a boy of nine. En route with his father to choose a bride, they halt their caravan at a friend's settlement for the night. There, young Temudjin tricks his father—who hopes to broker a peace by marrying into the warlike Merkit clan—into letting him choose an outspoken girl named B?rte as his wife.
Tragedy strikes soon after when Temudjin's father is killed, and the boy, whose own clan refuses to have such a young Khan lead them, is cast into slavery. Though they'd be happy to kill him outright, there seems to be a law stating that a Mongol can't kill anyone shorter than the height of a wagon wheel. His father's rival periodically checks the boy's growth in anticipation.
Enslavement plays a prominent role on the steppes—as Temudjin grows, he escapes, gets captured, and escapes again. Then he's captured again. Bodrov takes a daring road by emphasizing how weak Temudjin was in his early years; rarely does he gain the upper hand for little more than a moment, and for much of the film he's virtually powerless, save for his bedrock belief in himself and B?rte. Separated from his wife for years on end and subject to the whims of his blood brother Jamukha, he learns patience and nurtures his resolve to lead his people. His inevitable rift with Jamukha leads to the events that cemented his name in history.
Mongol's closest analogue in recent film history is Braveheart, but Bodrov's film does without much of the self-congratulation of Mel Gibson's. This film is as much a meditation on what made Genghis Khan the man he was as it is a bloody account of his rise to power, and the long passages that focus on an imprisoned Temudjin, his parched, dust-caked skin giving the impression of an ancient statue, speak to his internal fortitude.
One place Mongol falters is in its insistence on attributing some mystical quality to Temudjin. Thunder and lightning play a large role here—almost always a bad sign in a film—and there are a couple of (I think) metaphorical scenes involving a white wolf that come off as pointlessly mythic. But overall, it's an effective look at a historical figure many know little about, and a promising start to a planned trilogy charting the man's lifetime.
Roman de Gare (3 1/2 stars)
Directed by Claude Lelouch. Written by Claude Lelouch and Pierre Uytterhoeven. With Dominique Pinon, Fanny Ardant, Audrey Dana, Zinedine Soualem, and Michele Bernier. (R)
Roman de Gare, the new film from director Claude Lelouch (A Man and a Woman), is an interesting little thriller for a number of reasons, not all of them related to the story. Starring Dominique Pinon, the squashed-face actor most familiar on these shores for his roles in the art-house hits Jeunet and Caro (Delicatessen, City of Lost Children), it's about a man who may be more—or less—than he claims to be.
When the film opens, author of best-selling novels Judith Ralitzer (Fanny Ardant) is being questioned by police about the disappearance of her secretary, who went missing from her yacht off the coast of France a year earlier. But was he her secretary? Or was he her "ghost," the man truly responsible for the prose that made her a household name?
Lelouch isn't interested in giving us the answers, at least not too quickly. When that atmospheric opening gives way to the body of the film, we find ourselves thrown back in time and on the road with Paul and Huguette, a quarreling couple on their way to her family home in the Alps. When they stop for gas at a highway rest stop, Paul, fed up, leaves her stranded.
It's there that she meets the mysterious stranger played by Pinon, who after offering her a lift confesses that he's the ghostwriter for her favorite author, and that he plans to use her as a character in an upcoming novel. "All novelists are predators," he says, and the story he spins for her is an uncomfortable one that seems to end with a hitchhiker's death. When he then claims he isn't the ghostwriter after all, his story seems more sinister still. Is he the writer? Could he be the teacher and husband who has gone missing from his family? Or worse, could he be George Maury, the escaped pedophile and rapist known as "The Magician" because, like our stranger, he was an amateur conjurer?
Lelouch draws out the suspense, especially during an extended sequence at Huguette's mountain home—she's pressed Pinon into play-acting the part of Paul—in which Pinon treks off into the woods with Huguette's daughter. The soundtrack to their departure is the wailing of a hog in mid-slaughter.
This game of shifting identities is one of the better games played by a director lately. Keeping us guessing, Lelouch continually reorders our emotional responses to the character—curiosity, appreciation, apprehension, and revulsion follow on each other in waves as successive clues lead us to believe each possible identity his true self. To keep it up for an entire film would likely be an annoyance, and Lelouch lets us in on the truth before long. Getting there, however, is the chief joy of the film; what follows is much more conventional. It's not terrible by any means, but his tour de force opening makes the second act a bit anticlimactic.
The acting here is wonderful, carried by the inscrutable Pinon. Screen legend Fanny Ardant puts in a good turn as the haughty and conniving author, whose leonine charms can turn nasty when she's threatened. Newcomer Audrey Dana arrives fully formed, an actress who easily holds her own in scene after scene with Pinon, and the ensemble portraying her family actually feels—a rarity in film—like a family.
There's a curious footnote to the making of Roman de Gare. Lelouch, who had suffered a critical backlash with his last few pictures, shot the film under an assumed name to avoid the presumptive disdain of his detractors. When it was submitted to the Cannes festival, the result was surprising: "They thought they had discovered a wonderful new young director," Lelouch recalled. A fitting coda for a film so steeped in questions of identity.
Hancock (2 1/2 stars)
Directed by Peter Berg. Written by Vincent Ngo and Vince Gilligan. With Will Smith, Charlize Theron, and Jason Bateman. (PG-13)
In an ironic twist, the theater where I attended a recent screening of Hancock was also hosting a midnight showing of an older Will Smith blockbuster—Independence Day—in celebration of the Fourth of July. The earlier film was shot through with the gaudy fireworks of an overwrought patriotism, and while Smith's latest take on the hero tale is just as high-flying as that 1996 film, it's decidedly saltier: Hancock is basically the man from Krypton gone to seed, a boozy immortal stumbling his way through his heroics. Call him Stupor-Man, The Man who Reels.
Hancock is a foul-mouthed, hard-drinking superhero whose crime-fighting skills leave a lot to be desired. While he always gets his man, he usually levels a healthy portion of the Los Angeles infrastructure in the process—freeways, police cars, skyscrapers—and most of his fellow Angelenos are sick of him. Even the seemingly simple act of taking off and landing leaves a trail of rubble.
So when he saves idealistic public relations man Ray Embrey (Jason Bateman) from being flattened by an oncoming train, the crowd that gathers is less interested in toasting him than roasting him—to save Ray, he's derailed the whole train. Before we can ask the question ourselves, an angry citizen starts in: "Why didn't you just fly straight up with him?" It's nice to know that once in a while a character has the same questions we do.
Ray, whose campaign to grow corporate donations to charity is going nowhere, offers to repay the favor by improving public opinion of Hancock—by sending him to jail. (His laundry list of destruction means the city would be glad to arrest him if they could only figure out how to do it.) A lost and lonely Hancock—he can't remember much of his past, and seems to be searching for some essential bit of himself that's just out of reach—eventually agrees, and heads off to the pen, many of whose inmates he's responsible for incarcerating. That animus leads to the film's most talked-about gag, one involving a serious violation of one inmate's anal cavity.
With that gag, the film turns, becoming less of the dark comedy it could have been and reshaping itself into the feel-good fluff of a generic cape-and-tights movie. Once Hancock is gone, the city quickly (and inexplicably, unless director Berg is trying to make a point about our love-to-hate-them style of celebrity worship) realizes that they can't live without him, and the police chief springs him to start fighting crime in a spiffy new leather jumpsuit.
The film does have a bigger twist in store, but it's one that doesn't do much for the story, even if it comes as a shocker when it's revealed. It will suffice to say that Hancock learns more about his shadowy past, and why his most treasured mementoes are a couple of tickets to Boris Karloff's Frankenstein—a film released in 1931.
All the lame derring-do on display in the latter half of Hancock makes one wish for more of what made the early parts so refreshing—namely, the comic disconnect between Smith's disheveled appearance and his compulsion to do some ham-fisted good deeds. Smith has always had good comic timing, even with bad material, and with the charming deadpan Bateman as a foil, the film could have gone somewhere new. As it is, it falls through the cracks, neither funny enough for comedy nor thrilling enough in its action.
Jack Brown can be reached at cinemadope@gmail.com.
