Author: Greg Akers

It’s a black-market goods-for-money exchange, and it happens too easily: On a whim you make a few phone calls and set up the meeting. You follow directions to an anonymous building, place your merchandise on the floor of one room, go into the next, close the door, and wait, listening to the silence tick by as the anonymous buyer examines the wares you’ve left. As you wait, the gravity of the situation hits you, and your doubts begin to scream. You get another call: all clear. The purchase has been made. There’s an envelope full of cash waiting for you.

It’s payment for your newborn baby.

So it goes in the central sequence in L’Enfant, the newest film from the Belgian filmmakers the Dardenne brothers, Jean-Pierre and Luc. The story centers on Bruno, a young, low-life punk who’s into small-time robberies, trying to cobble together enough cash to get through another week. For Bruno, cash is an end unto itself. He can’t wait to acquire more — and then frivolously spend it.

As the film opens, Bruno’s girlfriend Sonia has just been discharged from the hospital along with their one-week-old son, Jimmy. Once reunited, Bruno and Sonia can’t keep their hands off each other. Seeing the baby as a hindrance to their spendthrift life, assuming Sonia feels the same and seeing an opportunity for a big score, Bruno sets up the illegal adoption that will haunt him in more ways than one throughout the rest of the film.

Jérémie Renier plays Bruno. Renier looks like a young Klaus Kinski, minus the brilliant blue eyes. Without Kinski’s piercing eyes, or any life in his own, Renier seems less a calculating criminal than a fly-by-the-seat-of-his-pants troublemaker. Renier perfectly embodies both Bruno’s pre-guilt flippancy and the great silence that follows his betrayal.

The Dardennes won the Palme d’Or (first prize) for L’Enfant at the 2005 Cannes Film Festival (as they did for their 1999 film Rosetta). Here their style is not overtly cinematic: There are no showy visuals, just hand-held-camera storytelling. One of the central images in the film — Bruno pushing a baby carriage around the European cityscape — is portrayed simply. This is a thousand miles away from the prams of Eisenstein or De Palma. It is filmmaking without artifice. In its simplicity, it’s simply art.

The absence of style is well suited. As lurid as the subject matter is, the film does not descend into pulp fiction. Even when violence does happen in L’Enfant, as when one character goes after another with a knife or a gang roughs up a man who has welshed on a debt, it happens either so suddenly that the camera can’t keep up with the action or it takes place in shadow, just at the periphery of the camera’s focus. The Dardennes know this is ultimately a coming-of-age story, and the emotions behind those violent activities are pure and present. To treat the characters with anything other than honest intentions would be a disservice.

The Dardennes lead the audience through a forest thick with recrimination, guilt, and crushing sadness, and their film testifies that sometimes you have to go to extreme measures to re-prove — and reprove — yourself.

The screenwriter (Geoff Rodkey) of The Shaggy Dog and Daddy Day Care is back, and this time the results are … not horrible?

In the last weekend of Hollywood’s spring season, the last before Mission: Impossible III kick-starts the summer by no doubt dominating the box office, Columbia Pictures foisted R.V. upon the American public. As entertainment, R.V. is balsa wood light, but as a moral compass, it sinks like so much scrap iron. The balance between the two tips in favor of entertainment often enough — and successfully so, in its modest way — that R.V. sputters down the road but never actually breaks down.

Robin Williams stars as Bob, patriarch of the Munro family. Forced by his boss to cancel his scheduled Hawaiian family vacation in order to attend a very important meeting in Colorado, Bob hatches the plan to rent an R.V. and take the family there under the false pretenses of a vacation, not revealing his occupational ulterior motive.

Here Williams is in full Clark Griswold mode (from the National Lampoon’s Vacation movies). In R.V., Williams actually tones down his manic, stream-of-consciousness style of comedy, embracing a possibly Ritalin-induced level of calm comedy. No one wants to see Williams purposefully make a fool out of himself yet again. The few times Williams cannot contain himself, the film (and the audience) wilts like a flower in direct sunlight.

Cheryl Hines co-stars as Mrs. Munro, a thankless role that only gives her a few moments to stretch her legs. When she does occasionally get a pitch to hit, she puts it into play. Jeff Daniels supports as the head of the Gornicke clan, R.V.-lifestyle devotees. Daniels acts as R.V.‘s own Cousin Eddie (played by Randy Quaid in Vacation and its sequels). That the film’s primary running gag — the Munros keep running into the Gornickes across the great American West — sounds so limpid but actually wrings a few laughs from the audience is a credit to the talents of Daniels and his on-screen wife, Kristin Chenoweth. An astute casting agent has also placed Arrested Development siblings Gob (Will Arnett) and Buster (Tony Hale) in the film, with Arnett getting his scoundrel on as Bob’s boss and Hale playing a cynical co-worker.

That R.V. tends toward soapbox sentimentality isn’t heartbreaking: The movie isn’t all that great to begin with. But it’s still painful to watch unfold, especially since it has a hard time deciding upon which morals to stand. It flirts with a sell-all-possessions message, even as it has its characters decide to accept a corporate way of life that is ostensibly pious because they will be making tons of money on their own terms. R.V. also spices its script with sermons about the value of family time and honesty in relationships.

R.V. is best when it’s not nice to its characters. As satire, the film gathers some speed and seems to be going somewhere. Overall, though, the movie plays out as straight, rehashed comedy, a parking break en route to any pleasurable movie experience, to be sure.

Based on the novel by Southern writer Clyde Edgerton, Killer Diller follows a young musician/convict who is released from jail to a halfway house with a religious bent, Back on Track Again House. While there, the criminal, Wesley Benfield, is drawn toward the House band, which performs hymns unenthusiastically. The wheels in Benfield’s mind turn as he sees a way to turn the raw meat of the band into the tight blues band he always wanted to play in.

William Lee Scott plays Benfield, bad-boy car thief with a heart of gold and killer-diller blues guitarist. As written, Benfield is a brash young man who has — interjecting through the insolence — a thoughtful, sensitive side, his painful past giving way to joy when he has a guitar in his hand and a tune worth playing in his heart.

Lucas Black co-stars as Vernon Jackson, the high-functioning autistic boy in town whom Benfield uses — and then befriends — after discovering his prodigious ability as a boogie-woogie piano player. Black is a fine young actor who has created a niche for himself in the film industry as a Southern character actor, like a Red West but with more leading-man capabilities. Black brings a manic energy to Vernon that occasionally veers into overacting, not a surprising outcome considering the character description. He is nevertheless serviceable enough not to harm the movie.

The script treatment for Killer Diller was probably really good. As it is, however, the movie is a mess of half-developed plot points, ideas, and characters. The kernel of so many fine things exist here: the line between gospel and the blues where God and the devil dance, the role of fathers and mentors in the lives of young men, and the juxtaposition of religious-school coeds grinding at the juke joint on Saturday night and primly attending school functions with their parents the next day. But Killer Diller does next to nothing with these ideas, instead focusing on the empty-headed trajectory of an unlikable lead character punctuated by a few meager stabs at emotional immediacy.

Worst of all, though, is the actual blues in Killer Diller. Black is somewhat convincing as a piano genius, and some other members of Benfield’s blues band are even genuinely good. Scott, though, looks uncomfortable with a guitar in his hand and is worse when he sings. His songs, including one painfully gaudy Furry Lewis cover, are inelegant and pedestrian, only marginally more interesting than the hymns so derided earlier in the film. Seemingly aware of this, the film doesn’t offer much real-world recorded blues to which the audience might compare the band’s music. In a movie where the blues on display is supposed to be the highest and truest expression of its characters’ emotions, the only thing you’re left with is a longing for the genuine article.