2000: Year in Review

Zero stars

David Mamet's sharp Hollywood satire is a sly, acidically-witted and often hilarious poke in the eyes to the egos, personal lives and would-be wit of the people who make movies. "The Old Mill" has come to the small, idyllic hamlet of Waterford, Vermont ("Where is it? That's where it is!," says the director to an underling over the phone). The director is an amoral jackass named Walt Price (William H. Macy), a would-be streetwise Hollywood hack who has been hired to direct a screenplay by playwright Joseph Turner White (Philip Seymour Hoffman). Flanked by vicious producer Marty Rossen (David Paymer), Walt must deal with the newfound religion of his buxom young starlet Claire Wellesley (Sarah Jessica Parker), and the obsession and ego of major movie star Bob Barrenger (Alec Baldwin), who "likes 14-year-old girls" ("Let's get him half a 28-year-old girl," commands Walt, half-in-jest), all the while trying to ingratiate himself and his crew to the town mayor and his wife (Charles Durning and Patti LuPone). This could've been the tale of how a Hollywood film crew comes in and starts dictating terms, but instead becomes the story of how the good people of the town come to affect and be affected by the crew - especially the star-struck young daughter (Julia Stiles) of the local diner proprieter (Ricky Jay), who is always reminding people of what it would be like to live under Communism. Then there's the writer, who is soon struck by a sharp-witted, word-gifted young book store manager (Rebecca Pidgeon, a.k.a. Mrs. Mamet) who, when they meet, is already engaged to a pompous, self-serving would-be politician (Clark Gregg). How these elements collide in detail I will leave for you to discover. Writer-director David Mamet ("Glengarry Glen Ross") is a talented playwright-turned-filmmaker who has been making relatively small-budget noir-ish thrillers ("House of Games," "The Spanish Prisoner," "Homicide"), morality plays ("Oleanna" and "The Winslow Boy") and (on occasion) outright comedies ("Things Change" and now this) for about twenty years. If this film, like the screenplay he co-wrote for Barry Levinson's political satire "Wag the Dog" (1997), is a bit self-satisfied after a while, it's also razor-sharp and very very funny, and to give away the jokes would be a crime, if not a sin. The humor is knowing and smart, mixing clever dialogue with cutting one-liners (from Walt's typical fallback position "I'll give him an Associate Producer credit" to his motto "It's not a lie. It's a gift for fiction"). The A-list cast is all top-notch and right in their wheelhouse - Macy as the phony Holllywood director who spews false sensitivity when it suits him, Paymer as his almost evil benefactor, Baldwin and Parker as the self-absorbed and destructive stars, and at its center, Hoffman and Pidgeon as the only truly good people in a sea of corruption and immorality. How these two smart, funny people find each other and make it through is the small but effective heart of this movie, rendering Mamet's script as more than one colossal, devilish in-joke ("Did you see the grosses for 'Gandhi 2'?). Okay, so skewering Hollywood isn't exactly anything new - it's been done in ways both light (Christopher Guest's "The Big Picture") and pitch-black (Robert Altman's "The Player") and sometimes the results are a bit mixed, but coming from Mamet's pen (as his "Wag the Dog" did to a slightly lesser degree), it all feels fresher and from a slightly new angle. The results are a comedic gem, memorable and hugely rewarding. One of the year's best films!

Francois Ozon weaves a subtle, hypnotic, seductive portrait of an English professor (Charlotte Rampling) in France who, with her husband, spends summers at a cabin near the beach. One day, her husband vanishes without a trace, and the woman's fear turns to delusion. Rampling is very good here as a devoted wife who must confront new and frightening possibilities about her husband's whereabouts and their relationship. Very well-done, in the Hitchcock mold.