Barney's Version

Barney's Version resembles Sideways, one of my favourite movies of the last decade or so. Where at the heart of that film was the touching friendship between two men, here we have a sweetly loving relationship between father (Dustin Hoffman) and son (Paul Giamatti). This is the antidote to the Hollywood compulsion to portray Oedipal father-son 'tension then resolution' (a recurring sympton most evident in the remade Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, ie the one where Johnny Depp plays Michael Jackson playing Gene Wilder playing Willy Wonka... which makes only one significant addition to Roald Dahl's plot: the insertion of a 'wild psychoanalytic' explanation of just why Wonka is so wonky... it's because of the lack of approval from his mean dentist-father, of course!). In Barney's Version we have a father who loves his son unconditionally and it's refreshing to see.

The rest of the film is not in such rude health, however, but suffers from memory lapses and identity-crises. Of course it's a film about memory lapses and identity-crises... but it starts out as a Sideways-style portrait of an endearingly-dysfunctional male then becomes a murder-mystery and then finally a brooding study of Alzheimer's. Neither of these three stories is finished, just as none of Barney's women are believable (why is he so obsessed by the cold, detached Rosamund Pike character?). Ah, but isn't this how the film cleverly comments on the mystery of narrative construction? I'm not convinced. The movie suffers from having no way to replicate effectively the self-reflexivity of Mordecai Richler's original novel, which includes footnotes inserted by Barney's son to cover gaps in his memory and thus comments on the reliability of memory and narrative. In the end, the film is like a biopic of a famous person that we ourselves mysteriously can't recall. Without the context of a real life viewers are familiar with through the media - despite the brilliant acting of Giamatti - we're unable to understand just why the story of this man should be so important to tell.