Barney's Version

One to add to the list of movies where the theme of religion is writ large; one to to keep in mind for the proposed short season at Phoenix Square during National Inter Faith Week in November. Mind you, it would probsably be easy to do a whole week of quality contemporary Jeiwsh-based films (what with this and the Coen Brothers' A Serious Man). Here's Philip French's Observer review (published in the paper Sun 30 Jan), lifted from the website:

Mordecai Richler, the Canadian novelist who died 10 years ago at the age of 70, worked for many years in Britain writing screenplays and contributing to our literary life. He wrote a series of hilarious, partly autobiographical novels about Montreal's Jewish community, two of which – The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz and Joshua Then and Now – he adapted for the cinema. His books are quite close to those of the Canadian-born Saul Bellow, though funnier and less self-regarding; the last one, the characteristically sprawling Barney's Version, has now been filmed with a wonderful central performance from Paul Giamatti.

He plays Barney Panofsky (Richler probably borrowed the surname from Erwin Panofsky, the art historian who pioneered the study of iconography), a Montreal entrepreneur who starts out in the 1970s supporting his bohemian friends in Rome as a dealer in olive oil before returning home to work as a Jewish fundraiser and the producer of a popular but terrible TV series through his company Totally Unnecessary Productions. Along the way, he has three failed marriages to very different Jewish women, though the third one is extremely happy until he manages through his drinking to screw everything up.

It's an immensely engaging picture about a flawed mensch, with strong supporting performances from, among others, Dustin Hoffman as Barney's father, and walk-on roles for Canadian film‑makers David Cronenberg, Denys Arcand and Atom Egoyan.