While the film's resolution and theme are rather predictable, and the film is not in the top rank of director Akira Kurosawa's work, I LIVE IN FEAR has enough surprises to sustain interest. The shift in focus from Harada to Nakajima and the intercutting of other characters and their reactions to the old man's obsessions serve to highlight the intense performance of none other than Toshiro Mifune as Nakajima. Mifune, in a part far removed from his more familiar samurai roles, is at once stylized and realistic in creating a complex monomaniac. The younger generation takes his fears for granted and thus finds them less intense. Double exposures during the reading of a legal document give drama to what might have been a dry scene. And Kurosawa's use of deep focus cinematography gives even simple scenes layers of meaning and visual interaction.

The film introduces us to upper-class London during The Season. Parliament is in session, glittering parties and exhibitions are being held, and everyone is on the make--for a posting, a husband, or just a good deal. Amidst all the comings and goings, Sir Robert Chiltern (Jeremy Northam) stands as a beacon of probity. An ideal husband, he is the devoted lover of his wife as well as a government assistant minister who is renowned for his honesty and integrity, certain to advance in a brilliant career. But then, the beautiful, ambitious and duplicitous Mrs. Cheverly (Juliana Moore) returns to town, to remind Sir Robert that his whole career and current life have been founded on misappropriated knowledge, his relaying of government secrets to advance the speculations of a wealthy baron. Now the lady wants her own deal--support a corrupt canal scheme for me, she demands, or your career will go down in ruins.

Into this basic melodrama are now mixed the comings and goings of lovers and would-be lovers. Sir Robert turns for help to his friend, Lord Goring (Ruppert Evert), "the idlest man in London," although it is hard to see how he can be so idle when he is involved with so many women. Once in love with Gertrude, Sir Robert's wife (Cate Blanchette), he has also had past dealings with Mrs. Cheverly and is being pursued by Sir Robert's sister, Mabel (Minnie Driver). The advances, thrusts and parries of lies, mistaken identities, misdirected letters, and the inevitable stowing away of different people in different rooms in the same house create a comically tangled plot that ultimately and inevitably reaches a point of perfect resolution. Still, that resolution does have a point to it, Wilde's typically subversive undercutting of Victorian mores in the light of the conflicts of honor and hypocrisy, truthfulness and lies.

The ensemble acting is pitch-perfect. Blanchett is a beautiful and sensuous wife, whose high principles mask naiveté about her husband--and herself. Driver is the perfect kid sister, tired of being pursued by idle young men but pining for the idle older man. And Moore is a Jamesian Old World villainess, one whose self-interest is ultimately superseded by her own amusement at the tangle of events. Northam makes a sharp turn from his charismatic lawyer in THE WINSLOW BOY, portraying a man whose ideal qualities are belied by a fuzzy mustache, a relative shortness, and a hat that isn't quite the right size. But it is Graves, as the rake with a heart, who really shines here. Looking like a walking Max Beerbohm drawing, a man who seems to be only a collection of epigrams turns out to have more heart and depth than anyone might suspect at first.

Wilde's plotting--twisting the confusion one turn further than you would suspect--is given added depth by by Parker's intertextual and extratextual allusions: Northam and Graves relaxing in a steambath, Lord Windemere showing up at a party, the glances exchanged in a theater where Oscar Wilde himself is taking bows for THE IMPORTANCE OF BEING EARNEST. If the play at first seems inconsequential, the themes of fame, lies and hidden lives echo uncomfortably from our knowledge of its creator's own fate and contrast sharply with our knowledge of the sexual inclinations of at least one of its primary players. (In fact, I had to wonder if it was a conscious decision by Graves not to hide the piercings in his earlobes!)

Aside from the acting, the film is a delight to watch. Flowers have not been used so well in a color film since the days of Mamoulian and Minelli. David Johnson's cinematography and Guy Bensley's editing move a script-bound story along at a snappy pace, also creating relationships and connections that words alone cannot. Charlie Mole's enjoyable score slyly punctuates each scene. The film can be enjoyed as a well-constructed play full of witty bons mots, sensually enjoyable for its look and sound, but it can also be appreciated for what it implies. AN IDEAL HUSBAND is a sweet and light confection at whose heart lies a hard and bitter nut.

Lars Von Triers THE IDIOTS depicts another group making the attempt.  Karen, an apparently single, maybe homeless, woman orders a meager lunch at a nice restaurant in the Tivoli Gardens but is distracted when a group of mentally retarded people begin to raise a fuss. Leaving the restaurant with them, she discovers that they are not retarded at all. They are part of a group living communally who seek to mock and exploit society's hypocrisy while getting in touch with their "inner idiot." Karen is taken aback at first, then angry, but then finds the community that they offer to be so enticing that she too wants to find her own inner idiot.

The group's goal is only one of the many disturbing elements in the film, which is often quite funny. Almost every day, I ride the bus with a group of cafeteria workers who act in ways copied by these would-be intellectuals, and I can't help but feel that the reality of their lives is being exploited by the film's commune, if not the film itself.   That is part of the point, though, I think. In spite of the farcical tone of their goal, it is quite serious--and it is easy to mistake the film as attempting a bit of Adam Sandler-ish nihilsitic comedy. As they attempt to re-discover the simple physical joys of existence--the warmth of sunshine, the tactile experience of food--they also begin to face an array of challenges. They react awkwardly when introduced to a group of the truly retarded. They find themselves torn between simplicity and the call of jobs and families. They find their own personalities beginning to encroach on each other, leading to the threat of a personality-dominated cult. And, one by one, we begin to learn some of their pasts and discover some of their motives--what they seek to escape from as much as what they long to go towards. At the end, it is left to Karen, the newest member, to continue the dream and the quest, but whether she is able to do that, or even if she should, becomes doubtful as we learn more about her life too.

THE IDIOTS, like THE CELEBRATION (which was made after, but released before, this film), is a product of the DOGME 95 group, which includes von Tier and other Danish directors who reject much of what is taken for granted in contemporary movie-making. The rules include that there must be no printed credits, no artificial sound effects, not even any constructed sets or props not found on the scene. In its way, as von Trier recognizes (see the URL below for an interview), the collective is trying to do on film what the Idiots are trying to do in their lives--efforts that turn out to be equally contradictory and difficult. I've had very mixed feelings about the Dogme Manifesto, but I have to say that, for all its apparently simplicity, THE IDIOTS is the most emotionally complex and challenging film that I have seen in some time.

The story, after a VANITY FAIR article by Marie Brenner, details how Dr. Jeffrey Wigand (Russell Crowe), a researcher and vice-president for Brown and Williamson Tobacco, blew the whistle on those deceitful industry marketing practices that finally led to cracking the industry's seemingly invulnerable legal shield. But the film is not really about the tobacco industry--rather, it is about how 60 MINUTES, crown jewel of the self-proclaimed leader of network news, caved in to industry pressure and postponed airing the Wigand episode, to the ultimate detriment of Wigand and of CBS's reputation.

The film opens in an unexpected place--the crowded streets of a Middle Eastern city, where a hooded figure rides in a car--a hostage perhaps?  But the "hostage" turns out to be Lowell Bergman (Al Pacino), a producer for 60 MINUTES doing groundwork for an interview between Mike Wallace (Christopher Plummer) and a leader of Hezbollah. Returning to the States, Bergman finds a package of tobacco industry documents from an anonymous source. For help in figuring out what the documents mean, he turns to Wigand but is startled when a simple research source turns out to be elusive and hostile. Finally realizing that Wigand himself sent the documents, Pacino gets him to agree to an on-air interview with Mike Wallace. But then, fearing a lawsuit that could spell the end of CBS itself, the network--with the concurrence of Don Hewitt and Wallace himself--pulls the interview. In the meantime, Wigand's life continues to go to hell as he loses work, family, and his reputation, while Bergman has to struggle with his conscience.

There is certainly enough dramatic tension in the story, and the principal actors give it their best. Pacino--to whom being over the top is a way of life--plays an over-the-top role with a certain amount of restraint. Crowe--one of the most quietly effective performers around--radiates tension, anger and despair. And Plummer is very slyly understated in his caricature of Mike Wallace as a preening TV icon whose obsession with his "legacy" is almost as self-destructive as that of the current President. (Wallace, according to reports, is not amused.) There are also surprising delights in supporting performances by Stephen Tobolowski, Rip Torn, and Debbi Mazur (without a New York accent or long fingernails for once). The tension is reinforced by the slick editing and near-high-operatic style that mark so much of Michael Mann's work.

But that slickness is also the film's greatest fault. Mann becomes so involved with network politics that he lacks a context for the events he portrays. The incantation of Wigand's description of cigarettes as a "nicotine delivery system" never has an emotional punch because its consequences are not shown. Bergman's credentials as a former radical journalist are noted several times but his politics are never really aired except that he desires to make the world a better place. Even within the CBS news scenes, the arguments are not really about the forces that shape and ultimately bend network news, but about personalities and commitment to an ideal of journalism that is taken for granted but might not bear close scrutiny. There seems to be no recognition of the cynicism with which so many have regarded TV journalists even before the Wigand scandal. One can add that Wigand's and Bergman's wives (Diane Verona and Lindsay Crouse, respectively) serve as mere polar examples of helpmeets who will not or will stand by their man. Wigand, a character of some complexity, has all of his complications ironed out for us as well. (What complexity we do see is largely due to Crowe's performance, not the script). For all its flaws, A CIVIL ACTION was more complex and handled with greater ambiguity than this tale of one just man and one principled but troubled man versus the corrupting and the corruptible.

Jump ahead some seven decades: A French director played by Jean-Pierre Leaud has decided to remake the series as a film and has cast Hong Kong action star Maggie Cheung in the lead role. But everything seems to go wrong or at least awry. Cheung speaks no French and the crew speaks no Chinese, so they all try to communicate in English. I hadn't realized what a marvelous British accent Cheung has, but Leaud's accent makes it sound as though he's dragging his words through a swamp, which may be the point. A costumiere, who doesn't even speak English, makes a pass for Cheung, which everyone seems to assume that she's accepted, even though she hasn't. On the other hand, Cheung hones her part by actually burglarizing a woman's hotel room. Leaud himself, unable to bear watching the footage that he had shot, suffers a breakdown and is sent away to a rest home. In the meantime, we get continual allusions to the current state of moviemaking, capped by a hilarious interview in which a reporter denounces the "intellectualism" of French cinema, while praising "people's" films starring the likes of Jean-Claude van Damme.

Leaud's own presence cannot help but evoke his own history with that great French director and cinemaphile Francois Truffaut and the whole premise echoes Truffaut's own DAY FOR NIGHT, which co-starred Leaud. In Truffaut's film, art finally gives way to the need to finish the movie.  In this film, there is no conclusion but the mark of a self-absorbed madness. Funny and disturbing, IRMA VEP mourns the cinematic past and doubts its future too.