Sometimes the choices presented in terms of movies in any one week make the film critic’s job rather difficult. The well-made, worthy, but still rather dreary drama? The caper flick that is more enjoyable, but not really very good?
At any rate, this week the reader will have to decide — you choose between two movies that are not quite worthy of “movie of the week” status, each for its own reasons. The films up for consideration are A Map of the World and Snatch.
The first is a down-home drama about a woman who, in a moment of distraction, allows a tragedy to happen. Then, silently
stigmatised by her small rural community, she is accused of a dreadful crime. Her perfectly ordinary family life is turned upside-down and she has to take a long walk back to normality, or the semblance thereof.
Sigourney Weaver — I almost wrote Meryl Streep — plays Alice, a wife and mother raising her often fractious pair of daughters in the setting of the farm so beloved by her husband (David Strathairn). Tragedy strikes in an almost commonplace way — it could happen to anyone. But that doesn’t prevent the strong personal and communal emotions aroused by that fact from oozing out. She is not helped, either, by her tendency to speak her mind, to allow her feelings expression without internal censorship.
Weaver gives a strong performance as Alice, true in every detail. She is sympathetic and likeable, yet one can see how her forthright personality could get her into trouble. She doesn’t quite understand what is happening to her, and the community’s anger is kept rather in the background, though its influence is clear. Strathairn, too, brings some excellently down-played craftsmanship to his role. Julianne Moore, as Alice’s best friend, is simply note-perfect.
A Map of the World is carefully naturalistic, not given to wide-screen gestures of grandiosity. Director Sam Elliott leads us quietly into these ordinary lives, and carefully takes us through their ordinary — yet devastating — emotions. It is all very well done, yet one can’t help feeling that if this movie were showing on TV, with or without stars of Weaver’s calibre, one would take one glimpse at it and switch channels.
On the other hand, Guy Ritchie’s Snatch is undeniably entertaining — at least for as long as it lasts. Ritchie has denied that Snatch is a sequel to his hip Brit-gangster movie Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels, and he’s right. It’s simply the same movie. Or perhaps we can be generous and say it’s Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels — The Remix.
We have the same format of patchworked storylines, worked around a central heist, which, of course, does not go quite as planned. We have various gangsters of varying degrees of competence and we have former footballer Vinnie Jones as a taciturn enforcer. It’s all slickly done, with some interestingly jittery or grainy camerawork, and has a nice vein of black humour, but it is also eminently forgettable. (And whatever will they make of that title in the United States?)
The main difference between Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels and Snatch is that Snatch isn’t as good as its predecessor. That movie’s all-British cast gave it a unity of tone; Snatch, by comparison, is more cosmopolitan, but that in itself pulls it out of focus. Brad Pitt is the chief offender in this regard. There he is, doing a cheap reprise of his Fight Club act, his accent unintelligible (it’s funny for about two seconds), obviously in the wrong movie entirely. Maybe he was just on holiday. At any rate, the starry baggage he trails behind him throws Snatch right off balance and I was left feeling I would rather have simply seen Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels again. If it were the kind of movie you could see twice.