O Come, All Ye Dysfunctional

By Richard Corliss and Richard Schickel

Oh, there's no place like moan for the holidays. That's now the tradition for year-end movies, and this year the season of official good feeling is refracted in Oscar-envious films about troubled folks. A schizophrenic mathematician, a slow-witted father, an amnesiac writer, a disfigured playboy, unhappy families in Manhattan and on an English estate--all these sad souls threaten to turn the holiday film scene into a Yuletide reunion at Bellevue. But wait. Most of these tales are ultimately journeys to spiritual health. And if you need a dose of old-movie magic--reach for the Ring. THE LORD OF THE RINGS: THE FELLOWSHIP OF THE RING

STARRING: Elijah Wood, Ian McKellen, Viggo Mortensen, Sean Bean, Cate Blanchett DIRECTOR: Peter Jackson

When he began the job of bringing J.R.R. Tolkien's much loved trilogy to the screen, New Zealand director Jackson may have felt like Frodo Baggins, the lowly Hobbit who assumes the task of taking the Ring of Power on a trek to save Middle Earth. But Jackson proves he is up to it. This first episode shows him well on his way to creating a film epic that nearly matches its source. Fellowship is not simply a sumptuous illustration of a favorite fable; though faithful in every detail to Tolkien, it has a vigorous life of its own--grandeur, moral heft and emotional depth.

Any apt adaptation of The Lord of the Rings is bound to have a gravity about the awful task at hand. Jackson's film has that, but it is also a buoyant experience because the characters are lively and engaging--each actor (especially Wood as Frodo and McKellen as the wizard Gandalf) magically fitting his role--and because the production team put such skill and joy into designing a movie Middle Earth. The landscapes, a cunning mixture of computer images and real New Zealand, bestow a distinct and beguiling personality on each realm.

At 2 hr. 58 min., the film will test children's bladders but not their patience. Like the best fables, it creates a world where the young (and old) can lose themselves and, in identifying with the little Hobbit that could, find their better selves. --R.C.

A BEAUTIFUL MIND

STARRING: Russell Crowe, Jennifer Connelly, Ed Harris, Christopher Plummer DIRECTOR: Ron Howard

What's terrific about Howard's somewhat fictionalized but entirely absorbing biopic about John Forbes Nash Jr., the Nobel-prizewinning mathematician and economic theorist who was for several decades immobilized by paranoid schizophrenia, is the simple, elegant way Howard thrusts us into Nash's disastrously troubled mind. He forces us, without any distracting or distancing cinematic devices, to experience the world as Nash does, and one can't say much more about that because Howard's style brilliantly hides the movie's slowly dawning central surprise.

There are, however, plenty of things one can talk about. Crowe does occasionally struggle with Nash's Southern accent, but there is a compelling conviction, an emotional openness (and humor) in his portrayal of a man living almost entirely within an increasingly frightening fantasy that resonates eerily with America's larger cold war paranoia. Connelly is equally fine as his beautiful, distressed but loyal wife. Finally, after he has been reduced to a near vegetative state by shock therapy and medication, there is authentic inspiration in Nash's decision to fight his way back to a semblance of sanity by using the power of his remaining sanity to conquer his craziness. The result is mainstream moviemaking at its highest, most satisfying level. --R.S.

KATE & LEOPOLD

STARRING: Meg Ryan, Hugh Jackman, Liev Schreiber, Breckin Meyer DIRECTOR: James Mangold

A confession of weakness: the undersigned is a sucker for time-travel movies. Good, bad or indifferent, films that plop at least one character down in the wrong century--where his or her dress, customs and conversation befuddle and occasionally outrage the temporally challenged locals--always delight me.

So it is with Kate & Leopold, in which the dashing but impecunious third Duke of Albany (Jackman) is zapped from 1876 New York (he is in town reluctantly seeking a rich bride) to contemporary Manhattan, where he falls for Kate McKay, a hard-charging market researcher. His transportation is provided by her dreamy amateur scientist ex-boyfriend (Schreiber). Some of his education in contemporary rudeness is supplied by her brother (Meyer), a hilariously earnest, perpetually out-of-work Method actor.

All the actors are expert, but it is as a quite literal comedy of manners (the duke has them; Kate needs them) that director (and co-writer) Mangold's film works best. There are excellent jokes about everything from television to pooper scooping, and given that this holiday film season has come up more than a little short on love and laughter, one can easily forgive Kate & Leopold the slightly excessive lengths and complications to which it goes in search of those rare commodities. --R.S. THE MAJESTIC

STARRING: Jim Carrey, Martin Landau, Laurie Holden, James Whitmore DIRECTOR: Frank Darabont

We know George Bailey's dilemma in It's a Wonderful Life: What if he had never been born? Here's another question: What if that ultimate Frank Capra movie had never been made? We fear Hollywood would have been stuck for a what-if plot for its year-end inspirationals. Michael Sloane's script butters the Capra-corn with another '40s touchstone: Preston Sturges' Hail the Conquering Hero, about a 4-F fellow mistaken as a war hero when he returns home. Here the unwilling impostor is a screenwriter (Carrey) who escapes Hollywood when he's marked for blacklisting and ends up an amnesiac in a town claiming him as its own. Suddenly he's got a father (Landau), a girlfriend (Holden) and the burden of greatness.

For an hour or so, The Majestic looks like the perfect post-Sept. 11 Christmas card. In repose, Carrey has the right face for this role: handsome-ordinary and lightly fretful. He and an over-the-hill gang of character actors (especially Landau, who does winsome as well as any 70-year-old) ground their fable in Golden Age geniality. But the story has to carry way too much weight, as war remorse battles McCarthyism. The Majestic's makers don't get what made Capra movies invigorating: a ferocious pace and the realization that even the nicest townsfolk have weaknesses and venalities. But that would complicate this all-too-simple tale of American madness, gladness and sadness. --R.C.

I AM SAM

STARRING: Sean Penn, Michelle Pfeiffer DIRECTOR: Jessie Nelson

Sam Dawson (Penn) is an adult with the mental and emotional age of a seven-year-old. But he's "special" in the best sense--a generous, industrious soul, especially when he's with his daughter Lucy (total charmer Dakota Fanning). Lucy is a sweet, bright kid, devoted to her hampered dad, but now that she is 7, she has started to outstrip Sam in reading and social skills. When the state tries to take her from Sam, he hooks up with a frazzled lawyer (Pfeiffer, playing a more harried Ally McBeal) to win the child back.

As the director of this noble weepie, Nelson so overuses visual tricks--zooms, zip pans and multiple perspectives on a simple scene--that she turns the viewer into an exasperated parent; this is a directorial style in need of a spanking. As co-writer, she falls into the truckling-and-treacling mode evident in her script work on Stepmom and The Story of Us. But, lordie, does I Am Sam open the tear ducts! Movie theaters may have to install sluice gates, thanks to Penn's solid, precise and brave performance and his warming kinship with Fanning. He makes the film's shameless sentiment almost as meritorious as it is meretricious. --R.C.

VANILLA SKY

STARRING: Tom Cruise, Penelope Cruz, Cameron Diaz, Jason Lee, Kurt Russell DIRECTOR: Cameron Crowe

He's young and handsome; he runs a flourishing media empire; he has just had sex with an adoring Cameron Diaz. And, oh, across a crowded room he sees Penelope Cruz. How bad can life be? Pretty bad for the hero of this Americanization of the 1997 Spanish thriller Open Your Eyes. After a car accident, he awakes in a face mask, horribly disfigured and wary of everything around him. "Once you've gone over a bridge at 80 m.p.h.," he says, "you don't invite happiness in without a full body search."

Get out the metal detector for this oddball essay on the lure of the forbidden, the lucidity of dreams. Lots goes wrong here, so we'll just pick on the dialogue. Cruz's English is often unintelligible; Lee, who plays the hero's intellectual friend, can't pronounce the word intellectual; and Diaz is forced to utter the most off-putting line in recent movies (let's just say it includes the word swallowed). The poor dear plays a character so shrill and needy that it makes Diaz almost not fantastically attractive.

Every ambitious picturemaker should be allowed one wild misfire at no lasting cost to his reputation. Crowe (Jerry Maguire, Almost Famous) can now put this aside and go back to making good films. As for Cruise: after Eyes Wide Shut, Mission: Impossible II and this serioso goofball psychodrama, he might want to wait a while before he does another movie in a mask. --R.C.

THE ROYAL TENENBAUMS

STARRING: Gene Hackman, Anjelica Huston, Gwyneth Paltrow, Luke Wilson, Ben Stiller DIRECTOR: Wes Anderson

The Tenenbaum kids are--or were--child geniuses, adept at playwriting (Paltrow), tennis (Wilson) and the stock market (Stiller). When we meet them, however, they are still overprotected by their mother (Huston) and have aged into various forms of hostile fecklessness. Director and co-writer (with Owen Wilson) Anderson has confessed admiration for J.D. Salinger's Glass family, and The Royal Tenenbaums can be seen as his take, more comic than tragic, on the costs of being smart in a world that resents intelligence as much as it pretends to admire it.

But these smarties need a good shaking up, and that's the function of their estranged patriarch Royal (Hackman), who reappears in their lives after his own shady career has fallen to tatters. They're not especially happy to see him, but we surely are. For Hackman embodies the energy and outrage the rest of this rather twee family lacks. Royal stirs them all to life, and this great, bumptious performance by an actor gleefully rediscovering his funny bone stirs us to appreciative life too. As with Anderson's Rushmore, there's a certain annoying preciousness to this film--it's not so consistently wise or amusing as he thinks it is--but it has its moments. --R.S.

GOSFORD PARK

STARRING: Michael Gambon, Jeremy Northam, Maggie Smith, Stephen Fry, Helen Mirren, Ryan Phillippe, Emily Watson DIRECTOR: Robert Altman

It's not a bad idea--Agatha Christie meets Upstairs, Downstairs. But something goes wrong in the telling of this tale of murder at the Gosford Park house party, circa 1932. That something can be summed up in two words: Robert Altman. People want him to return to the form of what they fondly recall as his glory days--Nashville, McCabe and Mrs. Miller. But those days are long gone, and we are pretty much left with Altman's signature mannerisms (improvisatory off-camera and overlapping dialogue), attitudes (a glum and witless misanthropy about his characters) and, above all, the lack of dynamics in his direction.

Basically, what we have here is a huge cast of flat-liners. There are exceptions, of course. Smith is both noisily and funnily imperious as an eccentric, impoverished dowager; Northam invests a real character, music-hall star Ivor Novello, with a wry and wistful intelligence; and Fry's self-important detective, cluelessly investigating the murder of their host (Gambon), is also funny. Altman wants us to sympathize with the servants, and it turns out that the crime is justified by a back story of Dickensian sentimentality, but tedium overwhelms caring well before this endless film finally concludes. --R.S.