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Film

Indie flicks

The meandering denouement

By STEVE PERSALL and PHILIP BOOTH
Published August 11, 2005

Happy Endings (R) (128 min.) - The writer inside Don Roos simply fashioned more endings than the director inside Roos could gracefully handle. Nearly half of Happy Endings is devoted to setting up emotionally complicated situations for people of middling interest - at least a half-dozen subplots to describe and twice as many characters to sketch.

Then Roos must consider the time required to wrap up these interpersonal relationships; easily the final 30 minutes and a handful of anticlimaxes. That doesn't leave much middle time for Happy Endings to expand on its themes. This should have been a much longer movie, or else a much shorter one.

The closest to a dramatic hub is Mamie, introduced as a sexually curious teenager who matures into Lisa Kudrow. Mamie's experimentation with her stepbrother Charley (later Steve Coogan) results in pregnancy and an abortion. Adult Mamie works as an abortion clinic counselor and hasn't toned down her kinky side, shared with Javier (Bobby Cannavale), a masseur who specializes in "happy endings," which is sex trade slang for orgasms.

Charley grew up gay. He and his partner, Gil (David Sutcliffe), are friendly with a lesbian couple (Laura Dern, Sarah Clarke). Gil even donated sperm to them, but the in vitro process didn't work. Or did it? The lesbians did have a child who they deny is Gil's. Charley's instincts tell him that's untrue, so he tries to catch them in lies. If the baby is Gil's, it could be something to enhance their relationship.

Meanwhile, a carefree singer named Jude (Maggie Gyllenhaal) is teasing her way into the wealthy lives of Otis (Jason Ritter) and his father Frank (Tom Arnold, surprisingly good). Otis may also be gay, but Jude talks him into a job with the band and a guest house at Frank's estate. When Otis' resources are exhausted, Jude seduces Frank to maintain her new, cushy lifestyle.

There's also a greasy student filmmaker, Nicky (Jesse Bradford), who knows Mamie's deepest secret and wants to make a movie about it. The proposed documentary becomes an obsession for Mamie, first as a ruse to get Nicky off her back, then as a means of self-exploration.

It's fun watching Roos set up these people's lives, quirks and predicaments. The filmmaker's cheeky style, which made The Opposite of Sex so enjoyable then disappeared in Bounce, has returned. His best stunt is using sarcastic title cards to explain what everyone's thinking and to announce their future: "She's not dead," reads one when Mamie has a gruesome accident; another tells us young Charley "will be a virgin for 10 more minutes."

The performances, especially Gyllenhaal's, are constantly worthy of attention, even when Roos' material starts chasing its multiple tails. Then we begin noticing the flab; Gyllenhaal has a pleasant singing voice, but three songs, mostly completed, stop the narrative in its tracks. Conflict between Charley, Gil and the lesbians is inevitable, but Roos keeps trying to dodge it. Nicky's clumsy extortion and Mamie's ploys to foil it are redundant. Only the relationship between Jude and Frank approaches any degree of character arc, mainly because Arnold plays the lonely guy so well (his friend Roos from Alcoholics Anonymous wrote the part with him in mind, and it fits like a glove).

But it takes so long for things to end up where we expect them. Just when one subplot reaches a promising point, it's time for Roos to shift our attention. Happy Endings is a movie of wonderful moments interrupted by stretches of clever insignificance. B-

- STEVE PERSALL, Times film critic

The Great Raid (R) (133 min.) - If The Great Raid were a History Channel special, it might be appropriate to beat a drum or two over the impressively photographed World War II period piece, which began production in 2002 and reportedly has been shelved since 2003.

As a theatrical release, though, the $80-million production leaves a lot to be desired. Unfortunately, the whole project feels like a patriotic history lesson, worthwhile for viewers to know and understand, but overstuffed, overlong by at least 20 minutes and often quite dull.

Call it a waste of a perfectly good storytelling opportunity. John Dahl, who demonstrated such a knack for the neo-noir dramatics of Red Rock West and The Last Seduction, switches to war-movie mode for his seventh directorial effort, based on two books detailing the heroic January 1945 rescue of 500 American POWs from a prison camp in the Japanese-occupied Philippines.

Opening with expository material and book-ended with news footage, The Great Raid switches between the tricky rescue operation, devised by youthful Army Ranger officer Robert Prince (James Franco) and overseen by world-weary Col. Henry Mucci (Benjamin Bratt), and the story of the prisoners, including noble malaria-stricken Maj. Gibson (Joseph Fiennes) and his loose-cannon pal, Maj. Redding (Marton Csokas). "We were going to rescue them or die trying," Prince says in a voiceover that feels redundant.

The drama also offers glimpses of Philippine resistance fighters' support of the operation, and the activities of the pro-American underground in Manila, including the work of a brave Army widow (Connie Nielsen) who's Gibson's love interest.

Sure, the final-act rescue of the prisoners offers relief from the two hours of laborious story build-up and might justifiably make a few viewers swell up with pride for the red, white and blue. But it's too little, too late. C+

- PHILIP BOOTH, Times correspondent

Heights (R) (93 min.) - Chris Terrio's feature film debut is another ensemble drama based on the theory that everyone is separated by 6 degrees of awareness, or less. He's inspired by the master of such jumbled fates, Robert Altman, and his worthwhile cinematic descendant Paul Thomas Anderson, mixing a number of disparate lives into one strange brew, then steering them into emotional collisions.

Terrio has a cast of actors able to turn small scenes into vital revelations, and he and Amy Fox, adapting her stage play, make this a decent example of the genre. What Heights lacks, however, is a dramatic foundation that a wide variety of viewers can tap into. The politics of Nashville and the family tensions of Magnolia, Short Cuts and Boogie Nights (not to mention the sex) were fairly universal. Heights is merely a professionally glossed soap opera disguised as independent art.

Glenn Close plays Diana Lee, an Oscar-winning actor readying a Broadway version of Macbeth while directing another play. Her daughter Isabel (Elizabeth Banks) is a photographer living with her fiance, Jonathan (James Marsden), whom Diana doesn't like much. Meanwhile, a reporter named Peter (John Light) is profiling a world-famous photographer by interviewing his past male models, many of whom were degraded by his sexual appetite. Peter's in a similar situation, understandably uncomfortable about researching his lover's sordid past.

At an audition, Diana meets and flirts with aspiring actor Alec (Jesse Bradford). She has an open marriage with her husband and Macbeth director, but can't hide the pain of his fling with a younger woman, her understudy. Heights gradually uncovers a secret about one of these characters that sends the others reeling. It's a fairly obvious secret the way Terrio and Fox arrange their puzzle pieces, so Heights never reaches any grand surprise or crystallizes into something with meaning for all.

This is simply an actors' exercise, not much different from the class Diana teaches in the opening scene, where she urges her students to find their passions, take risks, and therefore make their art more effective. If only the filmmakers heeded her advice. The performances are uniformly good, with high marks for Close and especially Banks, whose days as a bit player in films such as Seabiscuit and the Spider-Man flicks should be over after this. Heights is an easy movie to appreciate for their scenes and some nicely worded dialogue. But we're left with the feeling that these people's lives are nothing like our own, something that Altman and Anderson simply wouldn't tolerate. B-

- S.P.

[Last modified August 10, 2005, 13:50:09]