Released amidst the throes of award season, Barney’s Version has not attracted a great deal of attention.
Compared to the Oscar pushes made for Black Swan or True Grit, the press awarded to the Richard J. Lewis-directed film can’t help but seem a bit low-key, although the lead actor Paul Giamatti just received a deserved Golden Globe award for best comedic performance.
Inspired by Mordecai Richler’s novel of the same name, Barney’s Version is a two-hour-long drama following the life of the exuberant Barney Panofsky.
Unsightly, overweight, constantly sipping whisky and chain-smoking cigars, Barney is the embodiment of the outsider. He is so politically incorrect and such a blunderer that it’s hard not to repeatedly close your eyes to block out the shame and pity you feel for him.
The plot itself is built around Barney’s hectic love life, and each of his marriages — there are three of them — represent a stage in his life.
It all begins in Rome, Italy, where Barney feels forced into a marriage with a hysterical and pregnant artist, Clara Charnofsky, who is as beautiful as she is amazingly funny. Rome is a wild, almost adolescent time for Barney, as he becomes part of a hip crowd composed of the novelist Boogie (Scoot Speedman), musician Leo (Thomas Trabacchi) and other larger-than-life characters.
The episode ends dramatically and tragically, however, when Barney founds out that his wife’s stillborn child is not his and his wife commits suicide. Turbulent indeed.
Then comes a time in which Barney decides to settle down. He heads back to Montreal where he meets the second Mrs. Panovsky (Minnie Driver) — somehow a very brilliant cliché of the annoying superficial and spoiled housewife — through an intermediary of the local Jewish community.
While perhaps a little too full of stereotyped jokes, their wedding scene is one of the most hilarious and awkward moments in recent cinematic history.
Barney hates his future wife even before he gets legally trapped in a relationship with her, and when his father (another amazing performance from Dustin Hoffman), a retired cop, gives him his gun as a wedding present, it’s unclear whether he’s more likely to shoot his bride or himself out of despair.
This is also a moment during this epic commitment commitment scene in which Barney falls in love-at-first-sight with Miriam (Rosamund Pike). When she is introduced, the movie takes a radical turn.
Transformed by love, the terribly lousy Barney morphs into a pleasant, and at times, touching character.
The lovely Pike delivers an outstanding performance as the beautiful and smart woman fraught with a mysterious grace of seriousness that contrasts sharply with Barney’s grumpy antihero.
Initially, their marriage home seems like a peaceful nest of happiness, and Barney seems appeased and satisfied for good. But of course there is no happy ending in Barney’s Version.
With the help of some terrific performances — Paul Giamatti makes his embarrassing character very plausible and sympathetic, while Dustin Hoffman steals the spotlight in each of his appearances — Barney’s Version takes on a wide range of emotions throughout the lifespan of the eponymous character.
However, when it comes to establishing itself as a depiction of a life, the movie takes both good and bad turns.
The film starts out slow, taking at least a half hour to pick up, and by the end, dips too deeply into sentimentalism.
Emotionally, Barney’s Version is pretty much the opposite of a Disney movie: it goes through complicated matters of life without using any idealism or ellipsis, which is likely why the movie is so long.
Sometimes, the film tries to tug at the heartstrings a little too much, but it does, on occasion, earn merit when it comes to being a sincere sincere depiction of human glory and misery on a very specific individual wscale.
