Changeling

Motherhood, Interrupted

2008 // USA // Clint Eastwood // November 5, 2008 // Theatrical Print

C - The most rote film that Clint Eastwood has directed in at least a decade, Changeling is a grim, sprawling, fairly unremarkable period drama. It's not a bad film by any means: gloriously detailed, solidly acted, and shot with a cool, painterly eye. It's also maddeningly predictable to the point of tedium, and at least forty-five minutes too long given the absence of any narrative shakeups. Is is really possible that the man behind the Olympian deconstruction of Unforgiven and the bleak soul-searching of Million Dollar Baby could create a film bloated on such uninspired to-and-fro? The term "well-made" as backhanded compliment never seemed more appropriate: Changeling is a film that cues its required quota of approving nods and gasps of outrage, an archetypal Serious Adult Drama. Again, not a bad film by any means, but I can't shake the impression that it's a step backwards for the veteran American un-auteur.

In 1928 Los Angeles, telephone technician and single mom Christine Collins (Angelia Jolie) lives with her young son, Walter (Gattlin Griffith) in a modest bungalow. After working late one day, Christine returns to an empty house. Walter has vanished, and Christine is shocked to discover that the police won't even begin looking for her son until 24 hours have passed. (If only she had lived in the era of Law & Order, she would have known this.) Christine's interactions with the notoriously corrupt Los Angeles police department only go downhill from there, particularly with respect to the imperious, condescending Captain Jones (Jeffrey Donovan). Eventually, miracle of miracles, the LAPD presents Christine with Walter, alive and well. Except: "That's not my son!," Christine exclaims for the first of several hundred times. In the glare of the press' flashbulbs, Captain Jones grimaces and quietly pleads with Christine to take the strange boy home, "on a trial basis."

Case closed, the police declare cheerfully, for they need the public relations coup of a reunited mother and son. Christine, however, will not be dissuaded. Her insistence that "Walter" is not her Walter eventually leads to a personal crusade against the LAPD, wherein she joins forces with a local activist minister and radio host (John Malkovich). When Christine goes public with her accusations, Jones waves his hand and she is hauled off—er, "escorted"—to a mental hospital, where casual misogyny gives way to clinical sadism. Fortunately, Christine's salvation and vindication are set in motion when the no-nonsense Detective Yberra (Michael Kelly) heads off into the desert for a routine deportation. His search leads him into the ugly heart of one of the most notorious crimes of the early twentieth century, and therein may lie the answer to Christine's ultimate, aching question: Where is my son?

Changeling provides a rare, harrowing glimpse of a fading (but not vanished) nightmare-America, where the police behave like cruel potentates and women are little more than bothersome children to be dismissed and punished. The film's moral and social commentary, while admirable, is scraped too thinly over too vast a landscape. Changeling aspires to tackle sexism, psychiatry, police corruption, the treatment of children, criminal guilt, and the death penalty. However, Eastwood and screenwriter J. Michael Straczynski are just nibbling at a Serious Issues buffet. Earnest and decidedly unambitious, Changeling is so aggressively Sociology 101 in its tone that one can envision the Discussion Questions: "How does the LAPD's treatment of Christine reflect society's perception of women in 1928?" The film's shallow approach to such matters undercuts their novelty and necessity.

Happily, Jolie is a comfortable fit for the material and the era. Smokey-eyed and crimson-lipped beneath her flapper hats, she captures the doggedness and vulnerability that a credible mother-in-peril role demands. Still, it's essentially a serviceable portrayal, as are most of Changeling's performances (Malkovich in particular seems to be phoning it in). Only Michael Kelly manages to engage, especially in the film's pivotal and unquestionably finest scene, where Yberra's interrogation of a child suspect is swept along on a tide of shock and swelling dread. While Changeling's drama might be merely competent, its period trappings are wondrous, a landscape to truly savor. Rich in 1920s and 30s detail, it's the sort of feature that production designers live and die for. Fiercely meticulous without ever exhibiting an indulgent streak, Deadwood alum James Murakami's Los Angeles commands our attention in every shot.

I feel as though I'm underselling Changeling's strengths, so let me clear: It's a fine film, an effective slice of drama that marches along from Points A to B to C with nary a hitch. Provided one is comfortable with the plodding pace and engaged in the scenery passing by, there's not much to actively dislike here. Eastwood offers us exactly the sort of straight-arrow storytelling and bland righteousness that's endemic to late autumn prestige pictures. So why do I feel a little bit cheated?

W.

Can't Get Fooled Again

2008 // USA // Oliver Stone // November 4, 2008 // Theatrical Print

D - A schizophrenic, lumbering cartoon, Oliver Stone's W. is not the biopic George W. Bush deserves. Regardless of how much I might loathe the (now lame duck) President and everything he stands for, a figure of such geopolitical and cultural significance begs for evaluation and synthesis. Ideally, a comprehensive and articulate cinematic examination of Dubya will one day emerge. Sadly, what Stone delivers, in the twilight of Bush's presidency, is an aimless, tone-deaf, patchwork greatest-hits compilation with virtually no insight save the most facile. (Did you know Dubya hates his Poppy?) There's a sense of sheepish playfulness in Josh Brolin's lead performance, but it's consciously a part of the performance, and never a facet of the Dubya that Stone aims to present. Brolin's most engaging scenes are little more than party tricks, and surrounding him are two shapeless, pointless hours, eight years of bad dreams squashed into a Play-Doh blob.

There are no shortage of fascinating questions swirling around the personage of George W. Bush. Stone might have approached his subject from a historical or sociological angle, wrestling with how an alcoholic C-student and perpetual fuck-up could become the leader of the Free World. Instead, Stone tackles Bush as a psychological puzzle, striving to discern what makes the man tick. Unfortunately, the director renders Bush in such shallow strokes—and with such a yearning for smug chuckles—that W.'s gestures toward complexity create only disconnected caricatures. When Bush loses his Congressional race to an evangelical good-ol'-boy, he fumes, petulant and weepy, vowing that no one will "out-Christian" him again. Okay: Bush the cynical, entitled power-monger. Then Stone gives us an earnest scene of religious rapture as Bush prays fervently with his minister, complete with beatific light streaming through the stained-glass windows. Now: Bush the vulnerable religious seeker. Which is it? Both, of course, but Stone makes zero attempt to syncretize these personas. He simply exhibits them, like freaks in formaldehyde, and then moves on to new grotesque wonders. Granted, there's often a cleverness to the presentation. During his hazing at Yale, Bush dazzles his fraternity by remembering the names of forty brothers by sight, a feat that hints at his famed affection for nicknames and offers the throwaway line: "Look at the brain on this one!" However, the scene reveals nothing about Bush's character. It's just another patch on the crazy quilt that Stone is feverishly stitching.

The only narrative that emerges is frustratingly simplistic: Dubya covets the attention that his father showers on younger brother Jeb. On this score W. at least presents some lithe drama, as when Stone captures a notorious drunken quarrel between father and son. Elsewhere, the film's more fanciful approach to Bush's Oedipal problems seem downright ludicrous, as in Dubya's nightmares about catching a fly ball or—I kid you not—boxing his father in the Oval Office. It's Bush biopic as envisioned by a high school creative writing class. Most vexing of all, W. simply doesn't seem to have any strong feelings about Bush, and in late 2008 that's just not credible. The most divisive figure of the twenty-first century demands something more than gentle mockery and sympathy. To his credit, Brolin's performance is skillful, the sort of loose mimicry (rather than an impersonation) that the portrayal of a sitting President demands. His Bush is all drawling charm and slumping scoffs, punctuated with flashes of desperation and pure scorpion mean. We can see that Brolin is having fun, and that's part of the problem: He's not portraying Bush so much as he's an actor in a Bush suit. This winking remove crushes any pathos that might have emerged, leaving Brolin to stand around and try to salvage some satirical guffaws.

Stone fails to enforce on his cast a unified approach to their portrayals, a disastrous abdication that proves utterly disorienting and emblematic of W.'s unstable tone. Example: The lanky, flint-faced James Cromwell portrays George H.W. Bush as if he were, well, James Cromwell. Thandie Newton, meanwhile, grimaces through a Condoleezza Rice impersonation that might have walked out of a Saturday Night Live sketch. Either approach might have been tenable--well, maybe the former--but both? The juxtaposition just invites tittering. It's like watching David Mamet and Seth MacFarlane collaborate on a stage adaptation of the Bush home movies. Predictably, the result is neither serious nor funny. In a sea of mostly opaque and silly performances, only Elizabeth Banks as Laura Bush and Richard Dreyfuss as Dick Cheney stand out. Banks delivers a low-key, credible portrayal, one that convinces us of the First Lady's natural affinity for compassion and grace behind the Stepford mask. Dreyfuss, meanwhile—perhaps sensing that he's been cast in a ensemble nightmare—goes for the throat and gives us Darth Cheney. Menacing and ruthless, he draws the eye and the ear whenever on-screen, speaking openly about American empire with the hungry look of a Luciferian colonial despoiler. (There is no good in him, I can feel it.)

Due to its focus on Bush's relationship to his father, W. skips over vast swathes of Bush's life: the Air National Guard, his governorship, the presidential elections, 9/11, Hurricane Katrina, and on and on. These exclusions might be necessary given Stone's approach, and W. doesn't claim to be a definitive George W. Bush biopic. Nonetheless, the gnawing absence of so many significant elements reminded me of a student's haphazard class notes, spotted with blanks and misspellings (literally in this case). This in turn lends an awkward, half-assed aura to the story, like a last-minute history project. Add to this the flimsiness of Stone's thesis—familial angst explains the trajectory of Bush's life—and one gets the unfortunate sense that someone should have razed W. to the ground and started over.

Ashes of Time Redux

To Everything, Turn, Turn, Turn

2008 // Hong Kong - China // Wong Kar-wai // November 2, 2008 // Theatrical Print

C - Excess suffuses Wong Kar-wai's Ashes of Time Redux, but not the bombastic sort one might expect in a film that owes most of its narrative elements and a slice of style to the wuxia tradition. No, Ashes is an elliptical meditation first and foremost, a serious-minded discourse on love and loss, replete with swelling strings (just in case you forget for a moment how serious). Wong puts a glowing burnish on this tangled tale of swordsmanship and longing set against impossibly bright desert sands, relying on a lyrical four-part structure that admittedly gets its talons into you. The director's preference for lingering shots and meandering dialogue, while not objectionable on its face, lends Ashes a musty odor of pretension, if only because it highlights the unevenness of his storytelling technique. One wonders at Wong's choices: on the one hand he offers several minutes of a woman caressing a horse--an exquisitely poetic sequence--while elsewhere his transitions are so ambiguous and edits so jarring that the story becomes baffling.

So what of the story? Much of it unrolls from the perspective of Oyaung Feng (Leslie Cheung), who lurks in a crumbling house outside a village on the edge of a vast desert. Feng is a fixer: villagers and outsiders approach him with their problems, and he solves them, typically by retaining a down-and-out swordsman to hack through said problems. Divided into four acts that explicitly evoke the passing of the seasons, Ashes is told through Feng's voice-over narration. Supplicants and mercenaries come and go: Huang Yaoshi (Tony Leung Ka Fai), a rogue who drinks a memory-wiping wine; Hong Qigong (Jacky Cheung), a cocky peasant-swordsman; a grim warrior who is slowly going blind (Tony Leung Chiu Wai); a cross-dressing warlord princess with a double identity (Brigitte Lin); and a poor farmer's daughter (Charlie Yeung) who stands outside Feng's house for months with only her mule and a basket of eggs.

Everyone's problems seem to revolve around murder and love, the latter usually of the unrequited or forbidden quality. Feng dwells outside his clients' woes, a middle-man with a honed cynical eye. The other characters rush headlong into their fates, while he muses on the perils and absurdities of the human condition. He seems to be the sort of man who harbors no sentimentality, but we soon learn that his past holds its own doomed romance, one involving a cold beauty (Maggie Cheung) now married to his brother. All of these tales run together and entwine. The swaggering Huang Yaoshi has enraptured the princess, he's a former lover of the blind swordman's wife (I think), and he also seems to know Feng's old flame. No one is headed for an entirely happy ending, but even the tragic conclusions seem appropriate. Nothing stays the same, muses Feng. The sun sets, the winds shift, and the peach trees will bloom again.

All of this is conveyed with monumental artiness and plenty of moist pondering. Character glide and laze through the Ashes, all of them (even Feng) practically drowning in their lusts and longings. The story flows like molasses at times and then jerks forward with a snap, often leaving the viewer at sea. Wong asks for our patience, but for every moment of gentle beauty Ashes discovers, it spends far too much time fiddling around as though haziness were a storytelling virtue. The wuxia action is sparing, and when it arrives it is usually muddled or perfunctory. However, there are some gems. Wong achieves an outstanding scene of thrilling terror when the blind swordsman faces down an endless army of bandits. The sequence is shot in a blurry, lurching style that captures the confusion of battle, but watch for how Wong highlights the appearance of a menacing left-handed warrior amid the whirl of blades, or how he pauses for half a beat on the breath-sucking sight of saffron-yellow sand grains shifting in the wind. Motifs recur, and this is where Wong exhibits a rich cinematic talent, striking a taut balance between window dressing and metaphor that remains powerful throughout the film. Rugged ridges, dishes of water, pack animals, and bird cages: we register them and they infect our thinking of the film, but they don't devolve into fetishes.

There is no narrative reward to be had in Ashes, in the sense that most viewers might expect. While this makes the film's haphazard style all the more exasperating, it also strongly suggests that Ashes is best approached as a rumination, or at best a package of parables, rather than as a tidy story complete with ribbon. It's challenging cinema, and not always worth the effort, but Wong's original touches lend Ashes an energy and visual allure that ultimately redeem it. The director's refusal to glamorize his setting or his characters—even as he summons a legendary aura—makes the film's tragedies both familiar and potent. Wong's medieval China is one of dusty hills, scrub, and trees like gnarled hands; no pagodas or peony gardens here. It's a land where the people fidget, belch, sulk, grope, and sigh. They do foolish things in the name of love, hate, and glory. The narrator Feng smirks, but he's the one checking the almanac every day to determine how the winds of fortune are blowing. Wong posits that we all have our cages, and that they always shatter eventually, whether we've escaped in time or not.

Rachel Getting Married

You Are Cordially Invited

2008 // USA // Jonathan Demme // October 28, 2008 // Theatrical Print

B - Part discomfiting soap opera, part deliciously nasty glimpse of upper class twittery, and above all a sneaky, naturalistic celebration of music and milestones, Johnathan Demme's Rachel Getting Married is a work as far from the director's The Silence of the Lambs as one could envision. Roiling with familial angst and earnest realism, it's not a concoction that will appeal to everyone. Rachel juggles both ridiculous scenes of ugly misbehavior and helplessly sweet (and often equally ridiculous) sequences of distilled joy. That both of these elements can comfortably coexist in the same film reflects the central theme of Demme and screenwriter Jenny Lumet (yes, daughter of that Lumet): that families are both fundamentally miserable institutions and also refuges of grace and happiness. Often, as in Rachel Getting Married, in the same weekend.

Kym (Anne Hathaway) is the younger sister, a recovering drug addict released from rehab to attend her sibling Rachel's wedding. Demme sticks close to Hathaway throughout Rachel Getting Married, unspooling his tale from her caustic perspective. Hathaway is as riveting as she has ever been here, conveying Kym's interior world through her dark eyes, ragdoll neck, and a quick, snarky tongue that scuttles through the film's crawlspaces. Kym's family is a white, wealthy, liberal New England clan, full of long-ago divorces and eclectic cultural tastes. If Hathaway feels a little out of place amongst her kin and their friends, it's less because she has nothing in common with them—the Best Man, she learns, is in her Narcotics Anonymous group—than because there is an ancient bitterness at work, the source and full extent of which is only gradually revealed.

Rachel (Rosemarie DeWitt), in contrast, is the angel of the family, an aspiring doctor of psychology who has met the man of her dreams in Sidney (Tunde Adebimpe), a barrel-chested black guy with coke-bottle glasses and a broad grin. Warm and adoring, they seem to be the most well-adjusted couple in the film. Throughout the weekend, the father of the bride, Paul (Bill Irwin), is more attentive and anxious towards Hathaway than the daughter he is marrying off. The gently aloof mother, Abby (Debra Winger), lurks around the periphery of the film, appearing late and leaving early. We meet step-parents, distant cousins, fun-loving friends, and a woolly black standard poodle with a tennis ball perpetually in its jaws. Most charmingly, a folk group wanders in and out of the frame, ostensibly the live music for the wedding, but also serving as a kind of dramatic chorus for the film. Their violins, lutes, and drums weave an omnipresent soundtrack that drifts through the windows and doorways.

Lumet's script is dense with creamy tension and unraveled, upper-class hysteria. In scenes such as Hathaway's rambling, self-absorbed toast, or Winger's clenched departure from the wedding, Lumet exhibits a fine balance between authenticity and sharp drama. The story gets a little out of hand when she and Demme attempt more lurid pyrotechnics, as in a brutal and awkwardly presented confrontation between Hathaway and Winger. It's these more cartoonish moments that vex Rachel Getting Married most significantly, and at times threaten to topple it under a burden of daytime television tawdriness. Yet one can't help but marvel at Demme's ability to treat his protagonist with such sympathy and sensitivity, while never forgiving her fundamentally unsympathetic qualities. Consider a scene where Hathaway attends a mandatory NA meeting. Nearly everything Demme has presented up to this point has highlighted her distraction and cynicism, down to her outburst of profanity as she stumbles in the door. Then he shows us snippets of members confessing their troubles and trials, and we watch Hathaway's reactions go from agitated to sorrowful. Eventually, she tearfully nods at the words of her fellow addicts, as though at a religious revival. It's a small thing, but indicative of Demme's skill: an unexpected character trait—the significant stock Kym places in the Twelves Steps—revealed in a superb manner.

Demme often backgrounds the family drama to soak in the pleasure of the spontaneous and joyous moments, and it's in these sequences that the home video look to his camera work creates the impression of a real-life wedding (fortunately minus most of the dreary banality). The director and all of his performers rally with such ease and enthusiasm around the rituals, games, and music that it's hard not to get caught up in the pleasure of it all. I dare you not to crack a smile during an ad hoc dishwasher-loading competition between father and future son-in-low—never mind how bluntly it comes to a halt—or the heartfelt toasts and songs offered up during the rehearsal dinner. Indeed, it's the film's music where Demme displays his most effusive tendencies, and reveals his pedigree in creating acclaimed concert films (Stop Making Sense, Neil Young: Heart of Gold). Although Rachel's naturalism calls to mind John Carney's Once from last year, Demme isn't concerned with creation, but with music's rapturous qualities for the listener, and the way it scores the lives of true aficionados. The families of Rachel have music in their bones, perhaps professionally, and the wedding features folk, rock, soul, hip-hop, and an entire samba band (no kidding). It's the kind of outrageous, diverse, exultant celebration that only happens in the movies, but is no less tempting for all that. Admittedly, some of the musical sequences might wear on for a bit, but it's not because they are dull, but because we're frustrated that we can't leap in and cut loose ourselves.

It's tempting to paint Rachel Getting Married as two films—a screechy soap opera on one hand, and a hangout musical on the other—but this isn't quite accurate. It's not really a schizophrenic film, any more than a family that offers both venom and love could be described in such a way. Rather, Demme lets his gaze shift slightly, finding separate vantage points from which to view the same eventful weekend. His focus on the squabbling and closeted skeletons is his concession to Hathaway's eye-of-the-storm view. His more unabashedly adoring approach to the wedding's pleasures represents a shift to an amused, omniscient observer, marveling at how such miserable people can put it all aside in a moment to drink, dance, and laugh.

A Girl Cut in Two

Dirty Pretty Thing

​2007 // Germany - France // Claude Chabrol // October 13, 2008 // Theatrical Print

C - A Girl Cut in Two is a film that can only loosely be termed entertainment, unless you delight in the sight of self-absorbed twits driving one another to ruin. Admittedly, there is a certain fascination inherent in such a thing, and veteran French director Claude Chabrol manages to at least render his characters as engaging trifles. They are little more than wind-up figurines that jostle one another while bumbling through their crippling neuroses, and yet one can’t help but smirk a little at the tragic silliness of it. A Girl Cut in Two could have been an ugly, joyless film about ugly, joyless people, and it’s to Chabrol’s modest credit that it finds the space to provoke and ponder. The film’s character-poles—Charles the arrogant, graying, libertine intellectual and Paul the demented, anxious, foppish playboy—are deeply rotten men. Between these two cads ricochets Gabrielle, a gorgeous weather girl whose place in the film’s moral order is perpetually uncertain. Is she naïve or cunning? An ambitious manipulator or a pitiable victim? A liberated modern woman or a childish dimwit? The film’s sweeping ambiguity with respect to Gabrielle contrasts with its one certainty: she is the least loathsome vertex of the love triangle, and therefore our window into the dire and ludicrous events that unfold.

In the film’s early scenes, Charles (François Berléand) and Paul (Benoît Magimel) meet Gabrielle (Ludivine Sagnier) during chance encounters at a television studio and bookstore, respectively. Both men develop obsessions with her cherubic blonde beauty, but each envisions a distinct personal victory in such a woman. (What she wants never seems to occur to them.) The older, domineering sensualist Charles spies a potential erotic conquest. He relishes exciting her with his celebrity, cleverness, and sexual experience. In the heat of the moment he confesses that he loves her, but his callous, cowardly actions suggest otherwise. Meanwhile, the nouveau riche bad boy Paul perceives in Gabrielle an opportunity to settle down with a perfect little companion, while thumbing his nose at his conservative family. Charm and sweetness come easy to Paul, but he also exhibits an erratic, violent side exacerbated by horrendous insecurity.

Gabrielle apparently sees aspects of both men that attract and repel her, although one has to squint a bit to glimpse the former. Joe Jackson springs to mind: Is She Really Going Out With Them? Gabrielle veers between the two men, alternately huffy, playful, waspish, and despairing. What does she want? Sagnier captures the broad strokes of Gabrielle’s vacillation, and yet at her best moments she also conveys a languid assurance, one that hints at her constant underestimation by those around her. (It helps that a short film of Sagnier reading the back of cereal box would, at minimum, be easy on the eyes.) However, the character as written undercuts the performer, as she is exasperating to point of distraction. She acquiesces eagerly to Charles’ demands for sexually demeaning antics, and shies meekly from Paul’s outrageous verbal abuse. Gabrielle’s moments of wit and sturdiness give way to a woman that seems overwhelmingly wobbly and foolish.

Chabrol follows Charles and Paul at times, but like his obsessed male characters, his gaze is fixed on Gabrielle. Evincing a chilly, bemused approach to his muse, the director seems ambivalent about probing any deeper than the fleeting emotions she dons and sheds like costumes from one scene to the next. Chabrol is interested in the fact of Gabrielle’s uncertainty, but not in understanding its source. In this, there is a troublesome tinge of sadism to A Girl Cut in Two. What is to be gleaned from watching Gabrielle suffer for the narcissistic whims of blackguards? Chabrol refrains from a simplistic framing of his heroine, plainly reluctant to portray her as either a virginal victim or a scheming temptress. From this vagueness, however, Gabrielle emerges as a mere Maltese falcon. She is the pebble that starts a chain reaction, eventually unleashing an avalanche that crushes the richly deserving creeps that surround her. It’s a ghastly spectacle, perhaps even a guilty pleasure, but it leaves us with the question: What are we to feel for the pebble?

Religulous

Shooting Loaves and Fishes in a Barrel

2008 // USA // Larry Charles // October 8, 2008 // Theatrical Print

C - Odds are, you already know whether you will appreciate Larry Charles's Religulous. If you find Bill Maher funny, then Religulous will tickle you. If the notion of Maher confronting the essential horseshit of religious belief via a series of globetrotting interviews sounds engaging to you, then Religulous will spin your dreidel, so to speak. More accessible and yet possessing a narrower, humdrum aim than Charles' sublimely crackpot social critique-slash-Jackass stunt, Borat, Religulous doesn't break any new ground theologically or cinematically. Maher, who has evolved from a Christmas-Easter Catholic to a doubter to a forthright critic of faith, clearly yearns to play the part of the acerbic foil, eager to "go there" and call religious leaders frauds and fabulists to their faces. If you've ever wandered into a watercooler—or Internet forum—discussion about religion, you know the arguments, just as you know that neither Maher nor his hapless subjects will walk away swayed by the other. While the enterprise is a little creaky—"Hey, did you know that there are fundamentalist nutjobs in America?!"—Maher and Charles surprise with an approach both more personal and more forceful than one might expect.

Sticking primarily to the Big Three monotheistic faiths familiar to most Americans—with some Mormonism and Scientology thrown in for bonus crazy—Maher travels to holy sites around the world and talks with prominent religious leaders as well as folks-on-the-street. Some of these conversations veer close to Michael Moore-style (or affiliate news show) ambushes, and one suspects that Maher sometimes concealed his intentions in the hopes of backing his subjects into a corner. Of course, as with The Daily Show, one wonders: Have these people never seen Maher before? Do they not understand his outlook and biases? Or are they just hoping that a little national face time, regardless of the interviewer, will allow them to set the record straight? Maher mostly refrains from bullying or humiliating his subjects, but he does adopt a ruthless, pressing tone that demands intellectual consistency.

There's no devastating insights to be had in Religulous that you won't find in much more erudite and exhaustive best-sellers such as Dawkins' The God Delusion or Hitchens' God Is Not Great. The film's ambitions are actually pretty modest, and its format unfortunately tedious: Maher asks people why they believe ludicrous things absent any evidence, they shrug and hand-wave, and Maher looks at the camera as if to say, "Can you believe this crap?" It's not exactly bleeding-edge social commentary. Yet Maher makes it fairly engaging, I think, because he really is perplexed that so many of his fellow human beings enthusiastically embrace delusions. It's hard to imagine, say, the late George Carlin—a less patient, less haughty, more cynical comedian—ever engaging in this sort of faithless odyssey, much less permitting a film-maker to tag along. Maher has the right combination of self-satisfied intellect and low tolerance for baloney to present himself as a credible foe of faith, but he also maintains enough dim hope in humanity that Religulous doesn't feel like a mean-spirited farce. Vitally, Charles opens the film with Maher's reminisces about his family's early religious life, including an interview with his mother and sister. Thus, while the director engages in some freakshow goggling at religious extremists, the film's angle is not that of a curious outsider peering into an alien world, but an escapee urging his cell-mates to leap the fence.

Maher is funniest when playing the part of the aggressive debater, or when engaging Charles' camera in acidic conversation during their roadtrips. These stances play to Maher's strengths as a stand-up comedian and a fearless moderator. In contrast, his "Professor Maher" shtick—reciting scripted commentary on location at religious locales—comes off as dry and awkward. The Discovery Channel look to these sequences just doesn't mesh well with Maher's asshole glee for upsetting apple carts or with Charles' passion for guerrilla film-making. Indeed, when Charles veers too close to a self-amused, sneering tone—such as his liberal use of video clips to mock his subjects or to slather on heaping helpings of irony—Religulous starts to feel like a half-assed effort in the already stale documentary subgenre of smug liberal polemic.

Fortunately, Charles exhibits a fine talent for crafting the raw material of Maher's combative encounters into neatly edited and annotated comedy. Most engagingly, the director appreciates the value of his film's genuinely unexpected and sobering moments, even if they are outnumbered by the pauses for snickering. When Maher visits an ex-gay Christian ministry, the laughs are pretty much there for the plucking. More memorable are scenes such as Maher suddenly walking out in disgust on an "anti-Zionist" Orthodox rabbi, or when the comedian is unable to coax even moderate, Westernized Muslims to say that the murder of Theo van Gogh was, you know, wrong.

Unlike most polemics, Religulous doesn't claim to be The Film That Every American Must See. Maher clearly declares that his target audience consists of the 16% of Americans who are atheistic, agnostic, irreligious, or just indifferent to matters of faith. The goal, if Religulous could be said to have a raison d'etre beyond knocking comedy softballs over the wall, is to spur that silent minority into action. Maher wants them to openly declare their opposition to fairy tales and challenge the often unexamined Bronze Age superstitions of the majority. If you're a member of that majority, sitting through Religulous may be a tall order, even if Maher does make you chuckle. I enjoyed it, but, then again, I agree with him.