Barney's Version

Synopsis: Barney Panofsky (Paul Giamatti), an irascible television producer in his mid-sixties, finds himself the subject of a book accusing him of a murder. He reflects on his life and how he got to this point.

Barney's Version is based on Mordecai Richler's award winning novel, his last and, considered by many to be his best work. Therein lies a good deal of the film's strength and all of its failing. The strength is the poignant humanity with which Richler endows Barney's story. Barney Panofsky is an ordinary guy, and not one to ingratiate himself with his fellow man. But as the saying goes, there's no cynic who was not once an idealist and beneath his dyspeptic exterior there is heart and imagination and something more: a willingness to give it a go, come what may.

Richler takes 400 pages to tell Barney's story as he evolves from being a naively good-natured bohemian living la dolce vita in Rome in the early 1970s to a dyspeptic cigar-chomping, alcoholic producer of a low grade daytime soap opera.

Trying to compress this amount of material into two hours is where the film strikes problems. We see Barney as he was and Barney as he is now, and both aspects are very well done but the quarter century or so intervening is dealt with by a short montage of photographs of his children. Ideally this material would have been made as a two-part film but clearly this was not an option for the film-makers who spent ten years working on the project and clearly decided at a certain point that they just had to get on with it.

The changes in Barney's behaviour we have to take for granted as part of the general process of life's attrition. That is acceptable but there accompanies it a shift in tone which is somewhat disorienting. Anyone who has seen the trailer will be expecting a comedy but this material is virtually all drawn from the earlier stages of Barney's story. As the film progresses it acquires a far more maudlin, even outrightly funereal, tone as Barney squanders the love of his adored wife (Rosamund Pike) and sinks into self-loathing isolation. This process feels like it has a good deal of truth to life in it but as an entertainment it wrenches us rather unkindly out of our high spirits as the latter part of the film turns from the good-humoured account of Barney's follies to document his decline and fall. The latter tends to feel drawn-out despite a neat twist that ties off one of the main narrative threads

Overall, however, Barney's Version has much to recommend it. Paul Giamatti gives another first-class performance as Barney and if you liked him in Sideways (2004) you won't be disappointed here. A shout out must go to the make up department who do wonderful job with making Giamatti look thirty-five or sixty-five. Dustin Hoffman is a hoot as Barney's Dad, a straight-talking retired cop with no time for social niceties; Minnie Driver plays a Jewish princess to perfection; and the always elegant Pike is a luminous presence as Barney's true love, Miriam. If you think that Barney's son looks like Dustin Hoffman, well, no surprise, as that is Jake, Dustin's own son, whilst in the collegiate spirit of independent film-making, four noted Canadian directors make cameo appearances: David Cronenberg and Atom Egoyan play directors of Barney's dire TV soap; Wake In Fright director, Ted Kotcheff, plays the conductor on the train; and Denys Arcand, the head waiter at the Ritz.

Canadian film-making is as financially embattled as its Australian counterpart in competing with the Hollywood behemoth and is characterised by a low-key, self-deprecating sensibility that is not dissimilar to our own. Barney's Version is a fine example of both aspects at play and is certainly deserving of your movie-going dollar.

 

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