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Alan Partridge

Opens Fri., April 18 at Varsity. 
Rated R. 90 minutes.

Between the showbiz parodies of SCTV and the anchorman toolishness of Ron Burgundy, there is a missing link of media satire—missing for Americans who don’t frequent British TV, that is. This step on the evolutionary scale goes by the name Alan Partridge, a broadcast personality with a remarkably unctuous, maladroit style. As embodied in Steve Coogan’s reptilian performance, Alan combines an unshakable and unwarranted vanity with a staggering level of self-interest. He’s a man who’d gladly throw elbows in the direction of women and children who happened to stray into his path to the lifeboats.

Hatched over 20 years ago as a radio character, Alan’s had his shot as a national TV host (which, among other mortifications, resulted in his killing a talk-show guest). At the present stage of his well-traveled career, he’s a DJ at a small-time radio station in Norwich. The station is about to be swallowed by a heartless media conglomerate, and Alan—true to form—does not hesitate to toss a co-worker under the bus in order to keep his own job. When the fired colleague (Colm Meaney) responds by taking the staff hostage, Alan is recruited to act as the crisis mediator—enough of a disastrous idea to offer sturdy comic possibilities.

Outside his periodic revisiting of the Partridge world, Coogan has developed range. His role in The Trip showed off his aptitude for portraying the prickly complexity of a smart, needy soul (a fellow named “Steve Coogan,” bravely enough). The recent Philomena proved Coogan could be in a conventional story without sacrificing his acid touch. But Alan Partridge should keep working for years to come, so tuned-in is Coogan to the man’s toxic egotism.

Undoubtedly Alan Partridge’s references will elude American viewers unacquainted with Alan’s past (especially the importance of a long-suffering assistant, played by Lynn Benfield). But in the Will Ferrell/Steve Carell era, the character of the blissfully unselfconscious dunce is familiar enough to bridge any cultural gaps; the result runs hot and cold, but thankfully without a hint of sentimentality. Coogan scripted with longtime Partridge collaborators, including Armando Iannucci (In the Loop and TV’s Veep); another veteran of UK television, Declan Lowney, directs. Wisely, they’ve made this storyline tight and contained, but it still allows Alan to show his true colors by exploiting a grave situation for his own benefit. They’ve also invented a villain (the corporate suits, not the deranged DJ) unappealing enough to make us root for Alan. That’s a dirty trick, but fear not: He retains the ability to repel even his biggest fans. Robert Horton

Big Men

Opens Fri., April 18 at Sundance Cinemas. Not rated. 99 minutes.

When was the last time you rooted for an oilman? Drill, baby, drill! That’s one of the odd sensations in watching Rachel Boynton’s deeply reported documentary, which reaches from the 2007 oil discovery in the coastal waters off Ghana to the first pumping of crude some four years later. If you’ve read Daniel Yergin’s The Prize, Big Men will be fascinating for its MBA-level study of global petro-politics. Boynton sets a contrast between the “resource curse” of Nigeria, where corruption, graft, and insurrection in the Niger River delta are rampant, and the more open field of Ghana, its smaller neighbor to the west. Jim Musselman, CEO of Dallas-based Kosmos Energy, warns of “the Nigeria model” after tapping Ghana’s Jubilee Field, which will eventually give his Wall Street–backed company a valuation north of $4 billion.

Before that IPO, however, Boynton goes deep into the weeds with her extremely well-sourced and –accessed account. Musselman and his corporate peers allow her into the boardroom; she’s ferried by helicopter to offshore drilling rigs; and she goes on ride-alongs with the AK-47-waving Desperate Underdogs militia of the Niger Delta, whose raids and pipeline attacks are more cynical than they seem. We also see the flaming well spouts and impoverished Nigerians smuggling dangerous black-market fuel for vehicles they could never afford. Politicians come and go, and Kosmos suffers its own coup d’etat.

I won’t say that Boynton (Our Brand Is Crisis) shrinks from hard questions, but her terms of access keep her friendly and fair to all parties. You learn a lot from Big Men (whose producers include Brad Pitt), though not much of it is new or surprising. Should we feel more optimistic about Ghana’s petro-windfall? Is the country more tribally homogenous and stable than Nigeria? And what’s the price of oil today, as affected by events in Nigeria, Ghana, or Ukraine? Even if it lags a little behind the times, Big Men forces you to consider such questions at the pump. Brian Miller

Dom Hemingway

Opens Fri., April 18 at Meridian and Sundance. Rated R. 93 minutes.

Striding naked through an orchard in the south of France, Jude Law manages to look like both a man completely in control of his fate yet also completely lost. “I’m scared,” he confesses one moment; the next, he delivers a proud three-minute speech on the magnificence of his cock (being vigorously serviced, just out of frame), which would gladly deliver world peace and provide for starving orphans—if only it could. The problem is that Dom (Law) and his cock begin the film in prison; he can’t help anyone, least of all himself. His virility, anger, and confidence have been confined for 12 years, because this safecracker refused to rat on his boss. The orchard comes later, as do random plot complications including a car crash, the theft of three-quarters of a million pounds (Dom’s reward for keeping mum), our hero’s grown and estranged daughter, and a petty London mobster who threatens to cut off Dom’s cock. (Why do we keep returning to that topic?)

Back to Law: Aren’t we all glad he’s no longer pretty? His hairline is what it is, and his youthful beauty has now grown blocky, like a modernist building slathered with stucco. And it suits him. Law’s lately been challenging himself with meaty roles on the English stage, including Hamlet and Henry V; he’s nobody’s Romeo these days. The best bits in the stylish, lurching Dom Hemingway are the mini-soliloquys where Dom gets to rip loose on the various indignities inflicted upon him. There’s a trace of Lear in this plaintive hoodlum, who soon after prison is broke, betrayed, homeless, and spurned by his daughter (only one, but still). Lamenting the “pestilence” of his misfortune, he chews on the word like a lemon yet refuses to swallow his pride. Law is the first, best, and almost only memorable thing here. (Though the pleasure of seeing Richard E. Grant in yellow aviator shades and cravat cannot be denied.)

Still, the plot peters out pretty fast and familiarly. American writer/director Richard Shepard (The Matador, The Linguini Incident) creates nice little gangster filigrees for Law’s delectation, but not much story for us. There’s money to recover, the matter of the daughter (Emilia Clarke), a safe to crack, and an old-school criminal’s code that Dom insists on honoring while the rest of the world does not. “I’ve got magic fingers,” grandiloquent Dom insists of his trade; but really, he’s all mouth. Brian Miller

PThe Final Member

Runs Fri., April 18–Thurs., April 24 at Grand Illusion. Not rated. 75 minutes.

“My dad has been collecting penises as long as I can remember,” says the daughter of Sigurdur Hjartarson, curator of the Icelandic Phallological Museum, who proudly displays his samples from every mammal, from a 2mm hamster penis bone to a sperm-whale specimen that looks like a six-foot geoduck. Every mammal, that is, except one—and the quest to be the first human enshrined, in an odd sort of reverse tontine, is the subject of Jonah Bekhor and Zach Math’s beautifully crafted documentary. The two candidates are Pall, a dapper elderly man who can already claim to have Iceland’s best-known organ (his sexual conquests, he says, number circa 500—not bad in a nation of only 300,000). His rival is Tom, a Californian who . . . well, just wants his penis to be famous. (He’s nicknamed it, and imagines it as a comic-book hero.) Pall seems the front runner, for patriotic reasons; then again, there are shrinkage issues at 93. Also, Hjartarson would really prefer his exhibit to be of “legal length”—five inches, as defined by an old Icelandic folk poem: “One in the hair, one in the skin, and a third and a fourth and a fifth one in.”

It gets better, much better, but I can’t say more, because Bekhor and Math’s adroit deployment of each WTF and OMG plot twist is what makes the film so completely absorbing. It’s this adroitness, even more than the abundant humor (there’s no deadpan like Scandinavian deadpan), which might make you suspect it’s all a scripted put-on. It isn’t, but this is sublime storytelling, right up to the poignance of the ending. Of course you expect documentarians to be sympathetic to the human need to be remembered, but The Final Member’s tenderness toward its subjects transcends the norm and remains long after you’ve gotten all the chuckles out of your system. Gavin Borchert

The Galapagos Affair: 
Satan Came to Eden

Runs Fri., April 18–Wed., April 23 at 
SIFF FIlm Center. Not rated. 120 minutes.

This is not an easy movie to synopsize, so bear with me. A bunch of crazy Germans emigrated to the Galapagos Islands in the early ’30s, some to escape Hitler, some out of crackpot notions of Nietzsche-Rousseau-Robinson Crusoe. In this documentary reconstruction of events leading to several deaths, we have celebrity voices (Cate Blanchett, Connie Nielsen, Diane Kruger, etc.) reading from letters and diaries; archival footage; maps; stills; and interviews with Ecuadorians two or three generations removed from the matter in question. This is partly a forensic project, but don’t expect a final verdict from filmmakers Daniel Geller and Dayna Goldfine (Something Ventured, Ballets Russes). Theirs is yet another example of how manmade paradises inevitably fail because of the contentious men and women who live there.

Dr. Friedrich Ritter, an obsessive follower of Nietzsche, drags his lover Dore Strauch to an uninhabited island in the Galapagos. Living a near–Stone Age existence, they’re celebrated by visiting reporters as a new Adam and Eve. (They also left their spouses, adding scandal to the headlines.) Friedrich, the kind of cranky megalomaniac you’d expect to meet in a Werner Herzog movie, is dismayed by the publicity, which draws other settlers to Floreana. One, who imperiously calls herself a baroness and brings two younger male lovers, is a particular affront to Friedrich. Tensions among the handful of settlers lead to quarrels and feuds—and eventually the demise of three.

Geller and Goldfine are not immune to speculation here; and today, the heirs to Floreana’s settlers have spun such theorizing into a cottage industry. (Come for the tortoises, stay for the murder mystery!) Given the willful eccentrics and sexual intrigue involved, plus the parade of Eden-curious visitors, a fictionalized account would’ve provided more dramatic juice here. Of course Dr. Ritter would’ve disapproved of such liberties, but the Baroness always wanted to be in the movies. Brian Miller

PJoe

Opens Fri., April 18 at Sundance and 
other theaters. Rated R. 117 minutes.

Yes, Nicolas Cage can still act. I don’t understand why people even ask that question. Nobody counts movies like Drive Angry or Ghost Rider—I mean, not people who read newspapers. Those flicks can be ignored as cash infusions Cage needed for his bankers, for the private Caribbean islands, French chateaux, and Ferraris. But for the rest of us there’s an enduring archipelago of quality Cage roles, from Raising Arizona to his Oscar-winning Leaving Las Vegas to Adaptation and the Bad Lieutenant reboot. Despite questionable career choices, his talent has never been in doubt, and he deploys it fully in this small, familiar Texas tale of a tormented loner and a vulnerable teen.

The 1991 source novel Joe was written by the late Larry Brown, a Mississippi fireman-turned-author whose Big Bad Love was filmed in 2001. Brown was very much a regionalist, a close observer of the working-class South, and the spirit of his book is certainly honored by the ever-eclectic director David Gordon Green (Prince Avalanche, Pineapple Express). (As usual, Tim Orr is his indispensable cinematographer.) Green cast many roles here from the Austin streets, which lends even more texture to the simple story of Joe (Cage) mentoring 15-year-old Gary (Tye Sheridan of Mud and The Tree of Life). An ex-con and hard-liver, Joe is kind to dogs, whores, and the all-black forestry crew he employs. When Gary begs for a job, he can see the kid needs help: Gary’s family is homeless; his mother has the vacant eyes of an addict; his little sister is mute; and his father is a violent, scary drunk. (In that role, Green cast a homeless man, Gary Poulter, who drank himself to death after filming. His implacable performance is amazing; no scene I’ve watched this year is so chilling as his slow, shuffling pursuit of another wino—two sad derelicts intent on a bottle that only one of them will drink.)

Green and his players bring plenty of rural color to Joe’s old-as-parchment story: Joe butchering a deer in the middle of a kitchen; his visits to the world’s most inept brothel; his easy banter with the forestry crew (all non-pros); and the “pain-face” lesson he gives Gary (which is really just Cage showing us his methods). When Joe is shot, he dresses the wound with paper towels and electrical tape. Everyone’s down-and-out, but nobody’s complaining. A certain dignity is afforded to almost all these characters, even Gary’s father. Green never stoops to a trailer-trash-Gothic treatment of Brown’s hardscrabble survivors. Says Joe of his temper, “What keeps me alive is restraint,” and restraint is what makes Cage so excellent here. Brian Miller

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