Paul Giamatti is not exactly obvious romantic lead material, but in “Barney's Version,” Canadian director Richard J. Lewis's adaptation of Mordecai Richler's last novel, he mostly pulls it off. This is all the more impressive, given that Barney Panofsky, his character, is largely a schmuck.
Barney is in his 60s when we meet him — a hard-drinking, hugely successful Montreal TV producer, reeling from the divorce and remarriage of his third wife, Miriam (Rosamund Pike). He ruminates on his life through 35 years of flashbacks that make up most of the film.
We start his very brief first marriage, which ends badly (to put it mildly). He gives up a pseudo-Bohemian lifestyle in Paris to return home to Montreal, where he meets and marries his second wife (Minnie Driver). (Only during the end credits did I notice that — like the second Mrs. de Winter in “Rebecca” — she's never given a name.) On the surface, she at first seems perfect — smart, cultured, wealthy and attractive. She's also incredibly irritating, but it's hard to be sure whether it's a fair portrayal; this is, as the title says, Barney's version. It's particularly likely to be biased, since Barney, incredibly, falls in love with Miriam, an acquaintance of his bride ... at his own wedding reception. (Told you he was a schmuck.)
While obsessively pursuing her, his life becomes complicated on a second front, when he is accused of murdering his best friend (Scott Speedman) with a gun given to him by his father (Dustin Hoffman), a retired cop. Did he do it? We see the event unfold, but parts are missing or ambiguous.
Even though it's often comic, “Barney's Version” feels at times like a more serious (or even melodramatic) version of Elaine May's 1972 “The Heartbreak Kid” — another story of a shallow young Jewish guy wanting to dump his new wife the moment he lays eyes on a beautiful shiksa. Miriam's ethnicity is never specified, but she is without any of the cultural markers that are used to signify that Driver's character is Jewish. That is, to Barney she appears Gentile, even if she's not.
Whereas May's film wanted to make us squirm at its hero's behavior, Lewis wants us to empathize with Barney, maybe even be charmed by him. Giamatti makes him understandable, if not exactly sympathetic. The whole ensemble does fine work; though his role is small, Hoffman effortlessly matches Alan Arkin (“Joshua Then and Now”) and Jack Warden (“The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz”) in the gallery of Richler's working-class dads.
Lewis, primarily a TV director, fares much better here than in his previous feature outing, “Whale Music” (1994). At the end, the film flirts with bathos, but it's been absorbing enough along the way to maintain our good will.
-- Andy Klein
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