Barney's Version (2010)

Jack and I loved this story of flawed man (Paul Giamatti) and his three wives, his best friends, his ups, and his downs. It took 12 years for seasoned producer Robert Lantos to bring his friend Mordecai Richler's 1997 novel to the screen, finally using a writer and director with little experience, Michael Konyves and Richard J. Lewis (not the comedian), respectively. Giamatti (after I wrote about him in Cold Souls he was in The Last Station) is at the top of his always-high-level game here (he won the Golden Globe for this role), aging 40 years over the course of the movie (kudos to the Oscar-nominated makeup chief Adrien Morot), as the curmudgeonly TV producer. Somehow we don't wonder why insulting, heavy-drinking (his favorite bar is called Grumpy's), cigar-smoking Barney Panofsky can attract such beauties (the wives are played by Rachelle Lefevre, Minnie Driver, and Rosamund Pike), because he can be funny and smart and loving, just like his dad Izzy (short for Israel) played by Dustin Hoffman (won Oscars for Rain Man (1988) and Kramer vs. Kramer (1979), nominated for Lenny (1974), Tootsie (1982), and Wag the Dog (1997); I also loved The Graduate (1967), Midnight Cowboy (1969), Dick Tracy (1990), Stranger Than Fiction (2006), and Last Chance Harvey, and I didn't hate Ishtar (1987), even though it's frequently a punch line). 

In a bit of ironic casting Hoffman's son Jake Hoffman, plays Barney's son, Izzy's grandson. Although some of the movie is shot in Rome and New York, it's Canadian through and through. Lantos, Lewis, Konyves, Lefevre, Saul Rubinek (who plays her father), Scott Speedman (who plays Barney's best friend Boogie), and Bruce Greenwood (who appears later, and for a minute I thought he was an older version of Boogie) all live in Canada. Richler was Canadian (he also wrote The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz). The characters are mostly Canadian and live in Montreal. Iconic Canadian directors David Cronenberg, Atom Egoyan, and Denys Arcand have cameos (as two TV directors and the maître-d at the Ritz). My only quibble is a small one: Pike, a radiant blonde in Die Another Day (2002), Pride and Prejudice (2005), An Education, and the upcoming Made in Dagenhem (she was also good, and not blonde, in The Libertine (2004) with Johnny Depp), has varying shades of brown hair in this movie, even though her character Miriam is, you should forgive the expression, a shiksa goddess (they are usually blonde). Perhaps the filmmakers wanted not to have Barney's three wives be a redhead (Lefevre), a brunette, and a blonde. Pike's dark hair makes the Englishwoman look faintly Asian, but she isn't and I must also mention that her American accent is flawless.

The music, by Pasquale Catalano, is lovely, but there are only 17 minutes of it on the soundtrack CD, which doesn't have the Nina Simone song on it and now I've forgotten which one it was. There's a mystery from the middle of the movie that is "explained" at the end. It's not really possible that it could have happened that way, but, I believe, it's taken from the book. Definitely see the movie and ONLY AFTER YOU'VE SEEN IT, read this spoiler.