parisdamagedfacts

Drama. Starring Sally Field, Ben Chaplin, Julianne Nicholson and Clea
DuVall. Directed by Steve Stockman. (R. 97 minutes. At Bay Area theaters.)

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Anyone in the mood for a film about caring for a parent with a terminal
illness should rent “The Barbarian Invasions” or “One True Thing” — both
extraordinarily moving re-creations of a wrenching experience that is sadly
part of the life cycle. “Two Weeks” attempts to tell a similar story, but,
although well intentioned, has the superficial gloss of a TV movie of the
week.

The cast, led by Sally Field as a mother dying of cancer, fails to make
their characters believable. Much of the problem is the broad way they’ve been
written. The four offspring are so predictable that from the moment each
arrives at Mom’s cozy suburban home in North Carolina, you know exactly how he
or she will respond to every medical crisis.

Attempts at black humor, although not unrealistic during such a trying
time, fall flat. Far worse than not laughing at the jokes, you’re unlikely to
be moved to tears at sad moments. Filmmaker Steve Stockman, directing his first
feature after a career in commercials, has said “Two Weeks” is loosely based on
what he and his siblings went through before their mother’s death. But he
proves unable to delineate the universality of his experience.

Stockman also shows bad judgment in having the oldest son, Keith (the
British actor Ben Chaplin, who hasn’t drawn a good role in Hollywood since “The
Truth About Cats and Dogs”), be a film director. It gives the endeavor the
whiff of a clunky first novel that’s too obviously autobiographical.

In the opening scene, Keith has persuaded Mom to sit in front of his video
camera and hopefully talk candidly about herself. Clips from his film within
the film are interspersed throughout, serving a couple of functions. The
primary one is to show Field still looking good — dressed in bright blue and
as perky as she was as Forrest Gump’s mom — while in scenes before and after
she appears apparently in no makeup with tubes piping drugs through her veins.
The other point presumably is to learn something about this woman who inspires
such devotion from her kids. But her responses to her son’s questions are
vague. Asked why she divorced their father, she replies, “I don’t know.”

Field’s strongest moments are with Julianne Nicholson as her only
daughter. The actresses communicate a kind of girlfriend relationship between
their characters. Their moments together have a sweetness lacking in the rest
of the movie. Clea DuVall has the thankless role of the daughter-in-law from
hell, who finds a way to avoid being of any help, refusing to even bundle up
the laundry because she hasn’t had her morning coffee. Such an unreasonable and
belligerent attitude at a time of crisis contributes to the movie’s distancing
air of unreality.

For “Two Weeks” to work, you have to be invested in the characters.
Stockman’s failure to bring them to life makes it hard to care about the death
in this family.

– Advisory: Tough-to-watch scenes of medical procedures.

– Ruthe Stein

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‘Puccini for Beginners’

Romantic comedy. Starring Elizabeth Reaser, Gretchen Mol, Justin Kirk and
Julianne Nicholson. Directed by Maria Maggenti. (Not rated. 82 minutes. At Bay
Area theaters.)

“Puccini for Beginners” was written and directed by Maria Maggenti, who
wrote and directed “The Incredibly True Adventure of Two Girls in Love” from
1995, about two lesbian teenagers. Maggenti also wrote the screenplay for the
1999 Kate Capshaw picture “The Love Letter.” Like those two previous efforts,
“Puccini for Beginners” is literate and sensitive, characterized by witty
dialogue and smart, emotional two-person encounters.

In “Puccini for Beginners” Maggenti takes a stab at a screwball romantic
comedy, with Elizabeth Reaser as a lesbian novelist who, in the aftermath of a
painful breakup, gets involved with a woman (Gretchen Mol) and also with a man
(Justin Kirk), not knowing that these two were, until recently, engaged to each
other. We know it, though. In many ways, this is a winning picture, thanks to
its family resemblance to Maggenti’s previous work. But there’s a drag on this
film, and that’s the character of the protagonist, Allegra. She’s just not a
nice person, which could have been OK, except it seems as though she’s supposed
to be.

It’s just hard to sympathize with or even have much respect for someone
who, while purporting to be an artist, spends her entire life taking the subway
back and forth between sexual assignations. In a sense, a comedy like this
depends on our caring whether our heroine gets busted: It’s funnier if we have
a reason to worry that one of her lovers will find her out. But what’s to worry
about? She doesn’t really care about either of them. Meanwhile, the people with
whom she’s involved are thoroughly earnest, sincere and in love. If anything,
we hope that these two find her out, so that they can stop being involved with
this callous, uninterested lover.

This is not to say Allegra is repellent. We understand why she does what
she does. It’s just that, in the stakes of the story, as created by Maggenti,
she really has nothing to lose, and so we have no reason to watch.

We have no reason not to watch, either. Maggenti is an appealing writer,
and it’s easy and enjoyable to float along in the world of this film —
modern-day New York City — listening to the people talk, watching them go
about their lives. On balance, I like this movie, and I like most of the
actors. Reaser I’m not so sure about. Allegra is the movie’s flaw, and it’s
hard to say if the character’s coldness is entirely a function of the script or
has something to do with a certain ungiving quality in Reaser’s performance.

But Kirk and Mol show themselves, as usual, to be comically astute,
skilled performers. Both are excellent listeners; they react intuitively and
spontaneously and have great expressive faces. It’s tempting to say they act
rings around Reaser, but they do have much better parts.

– Advisory: This film contains sex talk and sexual situations.

– Mick LaSalle

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‘Glastonbury’

Documentary. Starring David Bowie, Radiohead, Coldplay, Velvet Underground,
David Gray, Scissor Sisters, Björk, Cypress Hill, many others. Directed by
Julien Temple. (Rated R. 138 minutes. At the Lumiere.)

If Woodstock had only attracted a few thousand patrons the first
year, but somehow stumbled forward, continuing to grow and adapt to the
ever-changing rock music world for the next 35 years, it might have been
something like England’s Glastonbury Festival.

In the heart of the English countryside, a Somerset farm on hallowed
ground, near the supposed burial place of both King Arthur and the Holy Grail,
farmer Michael Eavis has watched these annual pagan rites grow from a few
hippies in his field to a tent city of 150,000 that descends every year from
all over the British Isles.

Filmmaker Julien Temple, probably best known for his Sex Pistols films,
has put together a documentary on this remarkable gathering of tribes. His
film, “Glastonbury,” like the festival it documents, is full of vitality and
music and, at the same time, is a little wobbly, meandering and too long.

A procession of popular British acts that are less influential on this
side of the Atlantic — the Prodigy, Faithless, Babyshambles, Morrissey, the
Chemical Brothers, Blur and Pulp — build to climactic performances by
Coldplay, Radiohead and David Bowie, who has made two appearances at the
festival 30 years apart. As with the festival itself, the music often seems
little more than backdrop to the enveloping festivities.

Temple stitches together footage he shot in recent years with previous
documentaries made in the ’90s and ’70s, along with other pieces of found
footage. Altogether, 900 hours of film were collected for the nearly 2 1/2-hour
movie. Refusing to spoon-feed the story to his audience, Temple tumbles
together the backstory, the logistics and the performances into a nonlinear
narrative that undoubtedly echoes the chaos of the actual event.

After Eavis first put on the festival and lost money in 1970, the
production was assumed by a hippie collective that included Arabella Churchill,
the late prime minister’s granddaughter. The 1971 concert was filmed by
director Nicolas Roeg, who had been the second-unit photographer on “Lawrence
of Arabia,” responsible for all those desert scenes, and also made well-known
features himself such as “Performance” and “The Man Who Fell to Earth.”

The festival’s struggles to grow are openly portrayed, from the skirmishes
with the “travelers,” a Gypsy caravan that staged a competing festival at
Stonehenge in the early ’70s, to the erection of a controversial wall around
Eavis’ 150-acre farm to foil gate crashers. Eavis himself conducts much of the
film’s guided tour of the festival.

Glastonbury now not only attracts more than 150,000 camper-concertgoers
every year, but the proceedings are also broadcast live all weekend by BBC-TV,
co-producer of the “Glastonbury” movie. Surrounded by this countryside rich in
Arthurian and theological lore, the festival has always revolved around
countercultural themes of ecology and politics and has worked to raise funds
and awareness for several important social action groups over the years. It has
also taken place many times in slushy mud occasioned by seasonal downpours.

Director Temple is the exact guy for the job. A young filmmaker who broke
into the scene with the original Sex Pistols feature film, “The Great Rock ‘n’
Roll Swindle,” he has done cunning rock videos with everybody from Mick Jagger
and Bowie on down. Mindful of the festival’s lasting legacy and worldwide
impact, he spent five years planning and shooting the movie.

While the Glastonbury Festival may be somewhat obscure to American
audiences — although Burning Man is a direct descendant of Glastonbury and
Glastonberry is now a Ben & Jerry’s ice cream flavor (brownie bits standing in
for the mud in the mosh pit) — the documentary provides a warm and witty,
detailed look at this parallel universe.

– Advisory: Lots of hippie nudity, male and female. Plus lots of pot
smoking and psychedelic drug use and individuals under the influence. Also
graphic scene of sewage being collected.

– Joel Selvin