The Gleaners and I review

A big, warm embrace of a picture, “Big Eden” is as much about family and
community as it is about romance. Winner of the Audience Award at last year’s
San Francisco International Lesbian & Gay Film Festival, the movie centers on
Henry (Arye Gross from TV’s “Ellen”), a successful New York artist who returns
to Big Eden, Mont., after his beloved grandfather suffers a stroke.

Once home, he encounters two romantic prospects — the high school buddy
with whom he’s still obsessed (Tim DeKay) and the town’s taciturn general-
store owner (Eric Schweig, “Last of the Mohicans”).

Writer-director Thomas Bezucha creates a real sense of place — the
sweeping mountain vistas, the pine-paneled living rooms — and of a tight-knit
community. In this little town, it’s a given that the storekeeper, Pike, would
help deliver meals to Henry’s grandfather or that everybody would pitch in to
build Henry a studio.

Much of the romantic stuff is predictable, but Bezucha throws in some
twists. The high school best friend, for example, is a real person instead of
just a straight-guy villain toying with Henry’s heart. Now a divorced father
of two boys, he truly loves Henry but has trouble with the gay part. DeKay
gets across his character’s anguish at Henry’s escalating demands.

Gross fully inhabits the emotionally stunted Henry, and he’s heartbreaking
in a scene in which Henry cannot come out to his grandfather (George Coe, in a
fine performance), even though the old guy is practically begging him to.

The movie belongs to Schweig, though. An actor of enormous grace, he takes
a character teetering on caricature — the stoic American Indian — and makes
him original. Schweig puts his physicality to good use, stammering and
sometimes appearing to swoon as unexpected feelings overwhelm Pike in Henry’s
presence. He’s especially charming in a scene in which Henry invites Pike to
dinner and the big man rushes to change into a nicer shirt — a red cowboy
number — for his date.

Seeing middle-aged, regular fellas get so worked up over each other is a
treat, and the good intentions of the story override the movie’s overdose of
folksiness. For instance, in Big Eden, Adam and Steve are just as welcome as
Adam and Eve. It’s unlikely that the whole cowboy town would really applaud
all the queer goings-on, but it’s a lovely sentiment in a lovely movie.

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This film contains raw language.

– Carla Meyer

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‘THE GLEANERS AND I’

THE GLEANERS AND I: Documentary. Directed by Agnes Varda. (Not rated. 82
minutes. In French with English subtitles. At the Rafael Film Center.)

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We should all be so lucky, 50 years into a career, to have the enthusiasm
and playfulness that French filmmaker Agnes Varda brings to her latest work. A
shoot-from-the-hip documentary about scavengers and recyclers — one might dub
it “Trash Redeemed” — “The Gleaners and I” is more than anything a testament
to Varda’s vitality.

Varda (”Vagabond,” “Cleo From 5 to 7″), 71 when she made the film, is focal
point, narrator and comic relief. Faced with the high cost of filmmaking, she
decides to pick up a handheld digital video camera and hit the road,
unfettered by large film crews and production schedules.

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Inspired by the classic Millet painting “Les Glaneuses,” which shows 19th
century peasants combing fields for leftover grain, Varda seeks out their
contemporary equivalents. Amiable and full of questions, she buttonholes them
in fields and roadsides, at Dumpsters and outdoor urban markets.

City dweller Francois boasts that he eats only what he finds in the trash –

on principle. Louis the painter makes whimsical art from castoffs. The poor
gather misshapen, oversize potatoes that harvesters leave behind, and a family
of wine lovers picks plump grapes at an abandoned vineyard.

Varda’s subject matter is surprisingly rich, but it’s her own energetic,
curious nature that gives the film its snap. Discovering a clock without hands
at a junk sale, she appropriates it, takes it home and gives it a prominent
perch. It suits her personality to a T, she says, and then films herself
skulking behind it with an impish grin.

– Edward Guthmann

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‘BREAD AND ROSES’

BREAD AND ROSES: Drama. Directed by Ken Loach. Written by Paul Laverty. (R.
110 minutes. In English and in Spanish with English subtitles. At the Lumiere.)

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Ken Loach (”My Name Is Joe”), Britain’s bard of the underclass, never
shrinks from difficult material. In this, the first film he’s directed in the
United States, Loach turns his compassionate eye toward Mexican and Central
American immigrants working as underpaid janitors in Los Angeles office high-
rises.

The material is promising — a David-versus-Goliath tale, complicated by
language and cultural gaps — but Loach and screenwriter Paul Laverty draw
everything in simplistic, overstated terms. The good guys are pure and spunky,
the bad guys bellicose and one-dimensional, the conflicts stripped of nuance.

Instead of the aching realism we expect from Loach, nearly everything in
“Bread and Roses” seems fake. The characters slip into soapbox cliches when
the screenwriter wants to make a political point, and the actors, with the
exception of Adrien Brody as a brash union organizer, press too hard.

The heroine, Maya (Pilar Padilla), is a Mexican emigre who finds work
cleaning offices with her sister. Her boss (George Lopez) is a crude monster
who will do anything to sabotage union organizing, and her sister (Elpidia
Carillo) is more interested in paying her husband’s medical bills than in
fighting for workers’ rights.

Loach presumes our sympathy for Maya, but when she robs a store to help a
friend go to college, and then pays the price, the outrage we’re supposed to
feel isn’t there. Loach wants us to see her as a victim, but the circumstances
don’t support it: one more flaw in his earnest failure.

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Advisory: This movie contains raw language.

– Edward Guthmann

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‘SIMON MAGUS’

SIMON MAGUS: Drama. Starring Noah Taylor, Rutger Hauer. Written and
directed by Ben Hopkins. (Not rated. 106 minutes. At the Lumiere.)

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The title character of Ben Hopkins’ “Simon Magus” is some conflation of
village idiot, mystic savant and interfaith troublemaker. As played by Noah
Taylor, Simon is either insane or suffering from Tourette’s syndrome in a town
with no one to diagnose him. When a land dispute threatens to turn ugly, Simon
gets caught up in a gentile-Jew conflict over a property that could bring
prosperity to his little village.

A neighboring Christian faction wants to win the land by using him against
his fellow Jews, who already despise Simon for being a freak with unexplained
mystic powers. Hopkins struggles to give us a reason to stay concerned.
Everything is put forth in such visually expansive but starched, overstated
terms that it’s like watching a yeshiva-student film commissioned by the Tim
Burton Institute — a would-be diabolical fairy tale that never rises to the
occasion of its creepiness.

Near the end of the 19th century, Simon lives in the medieval-looking
Polish town Silesia, a Jewish community in the grip of mysticism. Silesia
hasn’t been the same since the town failed to get a station on the railroad
that was built a few years before. Building a train stop would turn things
around, modernizing Silesia and making whoever did it wealthy.

The land where such a station could be built belongs to a squire and
bibliophile (Rutger Hauer), who is willing to sell it. And thus begins a
showdown between the poor Jewish scholar Dovid (Stuart Townsend), who wants to
buy the land to impress the stubborn widow (Embeth Davidtz) he loves, and
Maximilian Hase (Sean McGinley), the villainous Christian merchant who
apparently already owns most of the town. Aware that Simon is privy to other
people’s secrets (he’s visited by a demon called Sirius, played by Ian Holm),
Hase seduces Simon to be his spy, telling him that Christians will treat him
more kindly than the Jews, who have banned him from temple.

If the synopsis isn’t riveting, neither is watching Hopkins execute it. The
film has a persuasive murkiness and one extended mythopoetic final sequence
that’s almost moving in its silence, and Taylor as Simon encourages sympathy
in spite of the character’s more repellent attributes (shvitzing, being
impressionable, borderline devil-worshiping).

But convention rules, anyway. You know evil has rolled in because the fog-
machine fog has rolled with it. The villain sneers, and someone in the film-
score department is banging a timpani in slow motion, meaning there’s probably
tragedy around the corner, but things are too earnest and sleepy to be sure.

– Wesley Morris