DIMINISHED EXPECTATIONS

Actually, Branagh isn’t particularly bad in The Gingerbread Man, but the movie is. The credits say it derives “from a story by John Grisham.” ” From hunger” would be more like it. This is yet another film, like Basic Instinct or Jagged Edge, in which one of the characters proves to be so fiendishly brilliant that she is capable of manipulating others into doing almost anything — they’ll fake a divorce for her, defend her in court for free, put their own children at mortal risk, and kill people for her. And yet this Clausewitz of the boudoir lives in a shotgun shack, does nothing but pout, and makes no more than the minimum wage.

The Gingerbread Man is getting good reviews, though, and for one reason only: Robert Altman is the director, and like many icons of the late 1960s and early 1970s, he has defenders who will do almost anything to keep intact the reputation they so ludicrously inflated way back when. Altman has made so many terrible movies — including, during his supposed glory days, Brewster McCloud, about a boy who wants to be a bird — that one might think the onset of his seventies would allow Hollywood to ease him into retirement. No such luck. Like most Altman movies, The Gingerbread Man features a cataclysm intended to symbolize the internal struggles of the characters. In Nashville it was an assassination; in Short Cuts the spraying of malathion over Los Angeles; here, it’s a hurricane. Only the movie itself is so dispassionate and uninteresting that a mildly cloudy day would have been more appropriate.

But then Altman wouldn’t have participated in the latest madness to grip Hollywood: the wet movie. Studio chiefs seem to have gotten it into their heads that wet, their movies will sparkle. There’s been a spate of wet movies in the past couple of years: Waterworld, Speed 2, Hard Rain, Deep Rising, and the upcoming Sphere (which is about a spaceship on the ocean floor and will undoubtedly prove the best spaceship-on-the-ocean-floor film since The Abyss).

With the exception of Titanic, the wet movies have been about as compelling as a waterlogged newspaper. All the dampness is distracting. You can’t watch one of these movies without thinking about how uncomfortable and cold it must have been for the actors. That makes it hard for the suspension of disbelief necessary to enjoy these wildly implausible thrillers. But Titanic‘s astounding success — it will soon be the most commercially successful movie ever made — means that moviegoers will be awash in wet movies for years to come. Bring back Esther Williams.

SATURDAY, JANUARY 31. If Kenneth Branagh is a great actor who can’t successfully play anything but Shakespeare, Ethan Hawke is a terrible actor who can’t successfully play anything. The fact that he was cast as Pip in a contemporary version of Great Expectations would have been enough to keep me from the theater, but his co-star is Gwyneth Paltrow, a delightful actress to whom I feel a particular connection because once, twenty years ago, I babysat her.

Paltrow is the only reason to see Great Expectations, and it’s not, alas, for her acting. Rather, it’s for her wardrobe: As they say in the garment center, a dress hangs on her like nobody’s business, and draped in green outfit after green outfit, Paltrow defines the term “eye candy.”

Otherwise, Great Expectations is very pretty and very awful. It’s not that a good movie couldn’t be produced from Charles Dickens’s book — the 1946 Great Expectations, directed by David Lean and starring John Mills and Alec Guinness, is one of the greatest movies ever made. But you can’t take a story about the rigidity of class distinctions in nineteenth-century Britain and shift it to the present without making a hash of the whole business (not unless you take Jane Austen’s Emma, retitle it Clueless, and turn it into a sprightly comedy).

In this movie, it takes the Pip character (called Finn for some reason) just ten weeks to become a high-society star in New York — all he has to do is board a plane in Florida and get himself a gallery opening in Soho. In the novel, of course, Pip’s journey from hardscrabble poverty to gentlemanly pursuits takes years and has immense psychic costs. The most heartbreaking section of both the novel and the original movie comes when Pip’s wondrously kind uncle and guardian, Joe, visits him in London, and Pip finds himself torn between his love for the man and his shame at Joe’s inferior social standing. Ethan Hawke only gets sullen and angry, and the scene lasts all of a minute and a half, because of course in 1998 New York, a colorful Gulf Coast fisherman uncle would be just the ticket in diversity-mad Soho.

WEDNESDAY, FEBRUARY 4. It’s not often that a movie by a one-time homosexual pornographer is the best thing around, but such is the case with Live Flesh, a stunning new Spanish film written and directed by Pedro Almodovar. Much as I hate to admit it — praising one-time homosexual pornographers not really being my style — Almodovar has become a master filmmaker. Though many of his movies are blasphemous (Dark Habits) or deviant (Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down!) or both (Kika), he is capable of much more. That’s what his delightful breakthrough comedy, the 1988 Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown, showed — and Live Flesh is even better.

That might have something to do with the fact that the film is based on a novel by Ruth Rendell, whose psychological thrillers have made remarkably compelling British television dramas. Live Flesh is about a boy who is literally born in trouble — the son of a hooker who gives birth to him on a Madrid bus on the night in 1970 when Franco imposed martial law. His birth is only the first sign that Victor is destined always to be in the wrong place at the wrong time: As a nineteen-year-old, he has a fling with a heroin addict in a club only to find himself in the midst of a shootout — as a result of which a cop gets paralyzed and Victor gets six years in prison. When he gets out, he finds himself drawn back to the heroin addict who got him into trouble — except that she’s reformed and married the paralyzed cop.

I’ve probably said too much already, because one of the many pleasures of Live Flesh is that it takes so many interesting and unexpected turns it’s best to know as little about it as possible. After fifteen years of mainstream filmmaking, Almodovar has stripped himself of most of his affectations and tells the story with an edgy, unsettling eye reminiscent of another brilliant deviant, Roman Polanski. Live Flesh is moving, exciting, and original — and in Francesca Neff, who plays the heroin addict, Almodovar has found a successor to 1960s European sex bombs like Claudia Cardinale. Dry, wet, whatever, Francesca Neri is a star.

The editorial page editor of the New York Post, John Podhoretz is a contributing editor to THE WEEKLY STANDARD.