in which the good guys win and all's right with the world

The week of panic and sleeplessness is done now. I've been waking up weary every day, not remembering my dreams, with only vaguely troubling recollections of nights poisoned by sisyphian tasks and trying to find my way through convoluted'd like to see them eating their left-brain, pragmatical, evil-wins-because-it-has-more-money words on a hefty Catalan platter today.

It's hard to say what did the trick, exactly. Man U hit the pitch all gangbusters and superpowered, controlling the game for the first ten minutes. Granted, Barca have a sort of tradition of starting slow, probing and exploring, finding their passing rhythm before making their first move, but in those first ten minutes I think Ronaldo created at least three chances for himself... all saved by my boys, of course. (The backline played tremendously yesterday. Sylvinho and Pique were downright heroes, and Carles Puyol is a damn superman, reining Ronaldo in over and over and getting continually battered for his troubles. I hope he's sitting today in a hot-tub full of supermodels. Certainly he's earned it.) And then somehow Cameroonian marvel Samuel Eto'o slipped up the touchline with the ball at his feet and tapped it past keeper Van der Sar into the net, ten minutes into the match, and I've never seen anything so quickly and finally turn an entire tide. It was like the parting of the Red Sea. Like all the life drained right out of Ferguson's men, and they were transformed in that one instant from a smoothly-oiled fighting machine into a pile of disengaged parts, still fighting, but without effect.



If you've never seen Barca play, you're missing a great pleasure. The footwork, the pace, the aesthetics of the passing... Andres Iniesta and Xavi Hernandez are like two halves of a single person when they move the ball between them up the pitch. Much of the greatness of Barca lies in its youth training, a school known as La Masia. Boys are trained early in the ways of Beautiful Football, and a great many of them stay with the team for many years, a rarity in these days of nomadic players following the siren call of their bank accounts. Both Iniesta and Xavi rose up out of this youth program, as did manager Pep Guardiola (seen flying, below), first goalkeeper Victor Valdes and superstar Argentine forward Lionel Messi, as well as more recent additions Sergi Busquets and Gerard Pique. Intrepid Captain Puyol has been a staunch Catalan for nearly his entire career.



But these are the giggly mutterings of the near-exhausted. I've got that same empty feeling I had after the marathon that was the World Cup, this time with a patina of happiness washed across it, but there's that melancholy, too. The season's over. I'll have nothing but World Cup qualifiers, never my favorite dish on the menu, for a good three months. Add to that the prospect of three more months of nothing but summer fare at the cinema (GI Joe?! Trans-frickin'-formers?!) and I'm at a loose end. I've been watching the first season of Alan Ball's True Blood, which I'm enjoying (cajun country, vampires, and all those stellar character actors that get work on HBO. What's not to like?), but I'm jonesing for an obsession. My immediate impulse is to go out and watch Star Trek again, see if I like it as well as I thought I did the first time, put off Terminator Salvation for a few more days, and hope that if I leave myself open and vulnerable, some god or other might show up in the form of a flash of brilliant inspiration. Here's hoping.

there are times when tim roth is my freaking hero

Everybody knows him. If you're American, you probably didn't see him first in those early, gritty films about poverty and thuggery in England (Alan Clarke's Made In Britain, Mike Leigh's Meantime), but Quentin Tarantino saw to it that his laugh is etched in your mind from a moment that may have altered cinematic history in our time: in Resevoir Dogs, when the guy whose ear Michael Madsen's just taken during his little torture-dance asks Roth, "How do I look?" I may be misremembering my timeline, but it seems to me that a whole new Comedy of the Grotesque was invented in that scene, the repercussions of which have yet to play fully out. Roth has worked with Tom Stoppard on Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead and Vatel, Stephen Frears on the Terence Stamp comeback vehicle the Hit (available this month for the first time on DVD), Robert Altman on Vincent and Theo, and Francis Coppola on Youth Without Youth. In all these many years, I have yet to see him act badly, but there's one performance that stands like a giant over them all.

1995 was the year of the Scottish film. Before Braveheart, there was Rob Roy: a sentimental, epic blockbuster evincing traditional Republican family values, hard work, stoical persistence and physical courage, the importance of living by a personal code of honour, and taking up arms against The Man if you're feeling oppressed. I watched it several times in the theatre that summer, partly to take a long and vicarious holiday in Scotland, but mostly because Tim Roth gives one of the most polished, fantastic performances ever put on film.



His name is Archibald Cunningham. From the moment he walks into view, languid, limp-wristed and sleepy-eyed, less like a fop than somehow like a little girl, his mouth a rack of bad teeth periodically displayed in a smile that is simultaneously insulting and obsequious, he commands the screen, stealing the film from powerhouse presences like Liam Neeson and Jessica Lange as well as formidable Brits like John Hurt and Brian Cox. The character is very finely written: a poverty-struck bastard with courtly ambitions, only a total lack of conscience and an unearthly ability in a fencing match to recommend him. Roth turns in a perfect double performance: there's Archibald at rest, when he is out of sight of his superiors, and there's Archibald with courtly airs and careful jibes when in. As if that's not enough, there are various shades in between, when Archibald is in the presence of inferiors or those he has not yet placed in the social hierarchy (the cage in which he lives), and Roth captures them all with a breathtaking effortlessness. He communicates with the motion of a facial muscle or cast of the eye as much as if he were to deliver, Shakespeare-like, a soliloquy directly to the camera. There is no moment when we do not know what he is doing or thinking, although his words often belie the truth, and he never becomes predictable. I'm happy to go out on a limb here and call his final swordfight against Rob Roy McGregor (an excellent vehicle for Neeson), who is brandishing a huge two-handed Claymore against Cunningham's quick sabre, the best duel ever put to film. Not only are acres of nuances exquisitely captured by the camera, not only is the action given plenty of space and punctuated with just the right amount of close-up, but Roth keeps communicating his character to us, silently, while he fights.

He was nominated for a Best Supporting Oscar for it, losing out to Kevin Spacey in The Usual Suspects. Watching it again after all this time has reminded me of a thing that was chewing at the edges of my mind while I watched Heath Ledger as the Joker. Something felt wrong to me, just off-kilter, and I could never put my finger on it; Archibald Cunningham has snapped it into focus. There is no moment in Roth's entire performance which is not absolutely clear: no gesture, no grimace, no spoken word. Every choice is clearly made and clearly delivered. Next to it, Ledger's Joker looks out of focus and unfinished, as if he had all the right instincts about the role but needed more time to rehearse, to set his choices finally and completely, to deliver them cleanly.

Nowadays you can see Roth any given Wednesday night on Lie to Me, one of those 1001 All-Cops-And-Federal-Agents-Are-Smug-and-Self-Righteous shows we apparently love in this country (I hope to God that real cops aren't as obnoxious as the ones on TV. Can you imagine if your husband was killed and Vincent D'Onofrio walked in, turned his head sideways, started playing with your earrings while standing way too close, and asked if you secretly wanted your husband dead?). He plays a specialist in body-language who can tell instantly if you're lying. I've watched one ep. Frankly, it makes me nervous. I've seen too many fine actors lose all love of craft and joy in the process while picking up that astronomical weekly check from those bigwig studios. (And here, insert a wistful hello to my once-beloved Vincent D'Onofrio.) I wish him well with it. His kids will have their choice of expensive universities, and that's nice for him, but I don't give a crap about it. I'm selfish, and I'd rather he keep on acting well.

che part two: revolution as a protracted slog through increasing hardship into utter defeat

Yes, I did indeed see it without having seen part one, which was showing during the weeks that my Sweet Man had his heart attack and super quadrillion bypass surgery (which all seems to have come out just fine, gods willing, and thanks for asking)...

Undaunted, and convinced that these were films that ought to be given the fullscreen cinematic treatment, I took my seat in the darkened house after the Cuban revolution had been won and just as one shaven-headed Comrade Guevara (Benicio del Toro) was wending his way to Bolivia to do his level best to see communism proliferate throughout the new world. The upside is that I got to see it in its fullscreen cinematic glory. The downside is that because I'd missed the buildup in Cuba, the whole venture seemed doomed from the outset: two hours plus spent with a band of patriots getting scragglier, hungrier, more discouraged and disease-ridden, with nothing but camaraderie and noble rhetoric to buoy them up. Even if you didn't already know that Che left a handsome young corpse in a Bolivian mountain village, you're not long into the film before you can see they're heading inexorably for a bad end.

That said, this is not a gruelling film (as are, for instance, Synecdoche, New York in an interesting way and Australia in a gruelling way). It's not difficult to sit through, it doesn't feel too long, and it's done with such a deft, light touch and a facility with the unexpected that one becomes engrossed in spite of any nagging political misgivings or preconceptions.

The politics of Guevara's legacy (hero of the people? bloodthirsty egoist chasing his own martyrdom? are the two mutually exclusive?) are of course endlessly debatable. Although this camera tries to keep an objective distance, one cannot avoid the magnetic draw of Benicio/Che's effortless and unswerving charisma, and I daresay even the most pacifist among us feels, almost unconsciously, a certain disrespect toward the leader of the Bolivian communist party (played by Lou Diamond Phillips, a yuppie sweater slung across his absurdly natty outfit as he trudges through the jungle to meet with Che) who refuses to endorse an armed revolution.

The script is startling in its utilitarianism. It hasn't got a funny moment. It has no small talk in it, except early on at a Cuban party, shot very much like it might have been in an early-70s docustyle (aka Medium Cool or the Candidate or fill in your favorite Robert Altman film) where the director gets all the period details right in costume and setting then wanders around listening in on what folks are talking about. Other than that, nobody says anything that's not about the matter at hand, which is usually something like what will we eat tonight? will we pay them for the pig or just take it? where is the ambush set? where can we cross the river safely? we need medicine. Do the villagers trust us? can we trust them? how can we bolster morale? and that may be a pretty fair depiction of jungle guerrilla warfare.

This project was originally slated for Terrence Malick to direct (a human who I sometimes in giddier moments think I love over all others, unless you count Mr. Spock as a real person). Soderbergh gives a few tips of the hat towards the other director in some moments of gorgeous nature cinematography (a shot straight up at overhead trees took me back to that brilliant final shot of the New World, and one from above of water reacting to soldiers wading through it might have been lifted directly from the Thin Red Line), but you'd never mistake this for the Malick version. For one thing, the inimitible Terrence tends to take the bones of history, dissemble them, and let them resettle in new and interesting shapes as he shoots. This one feels more structured by events as they have been set down in The Stone Tablet That Is History. (Please note: I do not mean that is a bad thing. I enjoy the playing-fast-and-loose-with-history only when it is a mad, visionary virtuoso like Malick doing the playing.) Also, although the jungle is a major player, here is not that strange and wonderful Malickian sense of man, ants, tree-limbs and musk-oxen being equal parts of one and the same vast and mysterious entity.

So much for what it's not. What Soderbergh DOES give us is a story intriguingly told via almost random but chronological dips into the daily lives of these soldiers, in short pieces with little attention to follow-up, scenes edited tersely but without sacrificing breathing space. And, of course, he gives us the preternaturally photogenic Benicio del Toro (I've always thought that Johnny Depp would love to look like del Toro; lose the obstacle of his extreme prettiness without losing photographability). The bulk of the film is done in medium or long shot with an apparently populist view to avoiding an overemphasis on the man himself, so when we finally get a sustained closeup (during an asthma attack about 2/3 of the way down the road), he is almost hypnotically fascinating to watch, a godsend and a revelation. During those final, quieter scenes of imprisonment, I found myself wishing for a different film, one in which I could spend more quality time with Che... Although, in retrospect, I think it's more time with Benicio I'm really looking for, and that, I'm happy to say, will soon be satisfied when the long-salivated-for Wolf Man movie comes out.