A thoroughly genial chase film about a foul-mouthed alien, a sort-of bastard child ofE.T. and Borat. All the acting, or should I say mugging, was pitch-perfect, not only by the refreshingly unfamiliar British leads, but also by the reliable American supporting cast, such as Kristin Wiig, Bill Hader and Justin Bateman. This was not a movie you’d go out of your way to see (and in fact, the 6:40 showing at Metro 4 was actually empty), but neither was it a film you had any regrets about spending 1:40 with in the afternoon.

A hauntingly beautiful story of French monks in remote Algeria during a time of civil war, but what impressed me most was the respect it gave and intelligence it ascribed to its viewers. Quotidian events were presented on a par with liturgical, and when crisis came, it was realistic, not overwrought. Whether the monks were saints or oddities depended on your view of religion coming in; the movie depicted them as very human: the leader Christian’s willfulness appeared heroic at first, then offensive to his brethren on closer inspection. The rebels were ruthless, but the government they fought was consistently called corrupt. This story was not about bad guys versus good guys. It was about men caught in a situation beyond their control, struggling for an answer, struggling to help, struggling to survive.
The film itself failed to specify a date or place when it began, giving it a universality that dissipated when a postscript spelled out the fates of the individual monks, for me an unnecessary anticlimax.

“Unpleasant,” “absurd,” “pointless” are the descriptors that come to mind when reacting to this purported comedy, with “insufferable” not far behind. A little Paul Giamatti can be interesting, although I’m tiring of even that, but a whole movie of him smoking cigars, drinking and behaving badly is hard to take. Then there is the question, why would three women – two with looks, one with money – marry him? He supposedly turns into a heartwarming figure at the end, thanks to Alzheimer’s Disease, but by then it is way too late.
While I am on the subject of smoking, have I noted in these pages that every movie I have seen in the last two years, not counting children’s films and a few rare exceptions, has shown a character smoking. In more than a few, such as Barney’s Version, it is hardly a plot point; it is instead a major character crutch. I wonder if some actors could convey “troubled” without a cigarette in their hand? Of course, some will offer the excuse that they are “setting the scene” in the 1950s or before, when smoking was much more prevalent. But even then, many people did not smoke, and more often than not the exact same movie could be made without anyone lighting up. Were the protestors from 20 years ago, like Andy Tobias, rebuffed in their efforts to get Hollywood to go smokeless, or did they just get tired and give up?

Most of the movie was Javier Bardem’s face, which expressed a range of emotions, almost all melancholy. The backdrop was the Europe of 2009’s Gomorrah, this time in Spain instead of Italy, with sweatshops of Chinese illegals, Senegali street merchants, and cops on the take or on the make. A fair amount of explanation was left out, whether from insufficient translation or excessive editing I don’t know, which may have contributed to the ambivalence I felt about Bardem’s character: intense as it was, I was not sorry to see him pass away.