Barney's Version Review
By David Kempler
Old Wives Tale
Barney Panofsky (Paul Giamatti) reviews his life because a detective is publishing a tell-all book exposing all of Panofsky's foibles, including the accusation that Barney murdered his best friend, Boogie (Scott Speedman), years earlier. He takes us back through his many adventures as if we were watching his home movies. The focus is on his three marriages. Through these tales, we learn that Barney has had a colorful life, filled with attractive women and his own surliness. Yet, he can also be very sweet. We get to meet Barney's dad, Izzy (Dustin Hoffman), a retired cop, who is many times more colorful than his son. It is Hoffman's best role in quite some time.
Barney's first wife, Clara (Rachelle Lefevre), is a flaming redhead he met in Rome. She is mercurial, fast with the spoken word, physically attractive and pretty much a phony pain-in-the-ass. I'm not sure if that is what we are supposed to think of her, but that's how she struck me. Her life ends suddenly because she is a tad unstable. I found the whole opening section with her to be frenetic and unappealing.
Next up is wife #2, (Minnie Driver), a Jewish Princess-type who talks, talks, and talks some more. Why Barney decides to marry her is a bit of a mystery, unless you factor in that she is quite a bit better looking than he is. She is the definition of annoying, constantly grating on him from the very beginning. Their relationship reminded me of the honeymoon shared between Charles Grodin and Jeannie Berlin in Neil Simon's magnificent, "The Heartbreak Kid".
In both cases there is no doubt that the marriage is not going to end well. At least in "The Heartbreak Kid" the groom waited until the honeymoon to fall in love with another. In "Barney's Version", the groom makes it halfway through his own wedding party before looking elsewhere. Miriam (Rosamund Pike) is the object of his newfound affection.
"Barney's Version" is all over the place. At times it is extremely entertaining, especially during the wedding scene with wife #2, where Barney and his dad embarrass almost everyone there, except themselves. It is Hoffman's lack of self-awareness or perhaps more accurately his not caring what anyone thinks of him that is the single most endearing part of the film. When Hoffman is onscreen, everything works perfectly. Unfortunately, he is not onscreen enough. Giamatti is his usual offbeat self, and that works too. All in all, "Barney's Version" is a pretty good watch, but when you get little tastes of scenes like his wedding to Ms. Driver, you can't help but wish that the rest of it lived up to that one great scene.
