Reviewed here:

• The Last Lear
• The Girl in the Park
• A Thousand Years of Good Prayers
• Poor Boy’s Game

The Last Lear, by Rituparno Ghosh **

A would-be filmmaker, Siddharth (Arjun Rampal) coxes a retired stage actor, Harish Mishra (Amitabh Bachchan), to make a movie, a format he dismisses for its fakery.  During production, the actor is gravely injured.  Meanwhile, his co-star, Shabnam (Preity Zinta), has an unco-operative husband who suspects her every move even when she is visiting the ailing old man.

The Last Lear can’t make up its mind whether it should be a talky soap, or a celebration of the craft of a great actor.

Amitabh Bachchan, in his first role in English, holds the screen whenever he has it.  We learn that Harish’s one great wish as an actor had been to play Lear, a chance he never had.  He regards the Bard as superior to anything the movies could accomplish, and we get wonderful glimpses of Bachchan performing bits of Shakespeare.  These are the best scenes in The Last Lear, but they don’t sustain the 2’10” running time.

There are long, repeat, long conversations between the co-star, Harish’s assistant and his nurse on the social subjugation of women.  Alas, this cannot hold a candle to the main thread.  They throw off the film’s balance, and we long for scenes in flashback of Harish playing Shakespeare.  The ending, a gloss on the final scene of King Lear, is a gem, but I wish the director had just made an adaptation of Lear without all of the clutter.

Girl in the Park, by David Auburn **

At the outset, I must admit that I would love to see Sigourney Weaver in a role that wasn’t driven by crisis or emotional turmoil.  Last year, we had Snowcake with Weaver as a kind heart hidden within an autistic woman, and this year, she’s a distraut mother wrestling with the disappearance of her young daughter.

We begin in a park, 16 years before the main action, where Julia (Weaver) is sitting chatting with other mothers while their children play.  Then, one moment, the child vanishes, never to return.  Julia becomes obsessed and inconsolable, and this leads to the end of her marriage.

Flash forward.  One day, Julia encounters Louise (Kate Bosworth) who lives by her wits and is a good con.  Julia projects her lost daughter Mattie onto Louise, but we, the audience are dubious.  Louise moves in with Julia and life goes reasonably well except when Julia tries to exert motherly control over Louise’s coming and goings.  The inevitable crisis arrives when Julia refers to Louise as “Mattie” at a family gathering, and everything comes unglued.

Along the way, we have learned that Mattie was probably abducted and murdered all those years ago, but Julia refused to accept this situation.

A sad story, yes, but not one I will bother with again.

AThousand Years of Good Prayers, by Wayne Wang ***

Henry O is magnificent in this delightful, small film about relationships between generations with the added complexities of immigrant cultures.

Mr. Shi (O) has come from China to visit his daughter Yilan (Faye Yu), very much the modern American woman, living in a dull suburb of Seattle where she is a university librarian.  His attempts at closeness run aground on her stubbornness and guilt.  She has both a failed marriage and an affair with a married Russian more concerned with his immigration status than with Yilan.

A touching sequence involves Mr. Shi’s attempt to visit his daughter where she works.  He takes the bus.  Everyone is helpful, at least until he reaches a security guard at the university, but Shi is so much a fish out of water.  On another occasion, he waits for his daughter to come home on the last bus, but she is with her lover.

In time, Shi meets an old Iranian lady in a park, and the two converse, with much lost in the translation bothways, about life and parenthood.

This is a wonderful script adapted by Yiyun Li from her own short story, but it depends on Henry O’s wonderful acting.

A Thousand Years of Good Prayers won the Golden Shell award as best film in the San Sebastian film festival, and a Silver Shell as best actor for Henry O.

Poor Boy’s Game, by Clement Virgo ***

[In fairness to this film, I have to admit that I was dozing a bit during the screening, my fourth of the day, but give a good review on the basis that anything that can keep me awake at this point in the festival has to be doing something right.]

Poor Boy’s Game, set in Halifax, addresses the tension between black and white communities with a story of unlikely connections that complicate a simple view of racial rivalries.

Rossif Sutherland (yes, another from that clan) plays Donnie Rose, fresh out of jail for assaulting and disabling a black youth, Charlie (K.C. Collins).  In time we will learn that Donnie, as a juvenile, took the fall (and a shorter sentence) for a friend who was actually responsible, but only a handful of characters knows this.  While in jail, Donnie learned to box, but he also acquired a black cellmate and lover.  This thread is never picked up by the story, but it gives Donnie an “outsider” feeling to his community that only we understand.

The black community wants revenge, and Ossie (Flex Alexander) challenges Donnie to a boxing match.  Ossie’s trainer, George (Danny Glover), is also Charlie’s father, and he cannot stomach more violence as an answer to his son’s tragedy.  Instead, George trains Donnie for the match and is reviled for his choice.

Glover’s performance as George is the heart of Poor Boy’s Game.  My one quibble is with the way the fight is settled, a twist that might seem melodramatic, but the quality of acting offsets this wrinkle in the script and sustains the feature-length story.