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Divan (NR) (77 min.) - A couch is a couch is a couch. Unless, of course, it's the fabled piece of furniture on which a renowned Hasidic rebbe once spent the night in Hungary during the late 1800s. That's the nominal subject of Divan, a moving low-budget documentary from New York filmmaker Pearl Gluck.
Gluck and a series of friends, acquaintances and other commentators are on a quest to come to terms with their shared religious heritage: What meaning, if any, do the rules and rituals of their Orthodox Jewish upbringing in the Borough Park section of Brooklyn have for their adult lives? How should they see the world, if not through the lens of that particular belief system?
Gluck, warm, funny and self-deprecating, allows her curiosity to be her guide on a trip to Hungary, where she negotiates with distant relatives for the divan. In Divan's most affecting sequence, at a grave site, viewers are given a fresh reminder of the extent to which Hitler decimated the Jewish population in Eastern Europe. Gluck returns, if not to her former faith, back into the good graces of her father, who, for the first time, crosses the bridge to Manhattan and spends time in his daughter's apartment. B
Ghoulish meets foolishSaw (R) (100 min.) - Ghouls who can't wait to see Saw will love my assessment: This is a grotesque quasi-snuff film that stoops to unusually low levels of violent depravity. I can envision their smacking lips and their grubby fingers scooping spare change from a skull's head ashtray to buy a ticket.
Director James Wan pays loving tribute to the mechanics of elaborate death, by razor wire, evisceration, even a bear trap with a reversed spring trigger wrapped around a woman's head. The violence in Saw - slightly trimmed to avoid an NC-17 rating - provides its best cinematic moves and the worst feelings of voyeurism imaginable. The violence might be palatable if the rest of the movie weren't so clumsily constructed and amateurishly acted. Wan deals death like a card shark; genuine drama causes him to fold.
The film begins with two men awakening in a dank lair. Both are chained in place, with a corpse (its face blown off) lying between them. In a dreadfully slow-paced setup, we learn they're prisoners of a serial killer named Jigsaw, who believes he's teaching victims to live better lives, right before those lives end gruesomely.
Dr. Lawrence Gordon (Cary Elwes, in what is probably the worst performance all year) is a workaholic who doesn't pay enough attention to his family. Jigsaw thinks kidnapping the family will solve that oversight, and ups the ante by pledging to kill them in six hours if Lawrence doesn't sort out taunting clues and kill the other prisoner, Adam (screenwriter Leigh Whannell). How can either escape? Well, they both have hacksaws that can cut through flesh and bone better than steel.
Jigsaw's identity is the central mystery of Saw, handled like a puzzle for ages 3-5, with big pieces that Wan and Whannell still need to cheat by trimming the edges. So many red herrings swim around Saw's violence that the movie resembles chum. Danny Glover pops in as a tormented detective and delivers exposition. Suspects are plentiful. When Jigsaw is finally identified and his methods explained, nearly everything that preceded it is rendered moot. Except the gore, of course.
Saw is bad filmmaking but, more important, it's bad humanity, first for its grisly themes and then for the filmmaker's disregard of viewers' humanity. This movie merely panders to the ghouls. Wan fails to create another Se7en, winding up with something less than zero. Grade: F
- STEVE PERSALL, Times film critic