I still had to giggle at the circumstances of my watching this on my Kindle Fire on the gym stair master with the file I ended up on (you'll see below). Life is kinda funny sometimes. It's OK to just sit back and laugh.
As one would expect from a movie like this, we jump back and forth between the past and present, and the first flashback is to Rome in the mid 1970s. The wigs and the wardrobe are almost as bad as how these characters talk to one another...
Dr. Smooth (Boogie) is back, folks. Here we meet the young (lol) titular Barney played by the great Paul Giamatti and his shithead friends. Boogie is trying to finish his novel, Vanessa's Pussy. I said VANESSA'S PUSSY...
While in Rome, Barney knocks up a broad and so they have a shotgun wedding when she's like 8 1/2 months preggers. It's an ungodly scene...
The baby arrives stillborn (sad) but it's supposed to be funny because the baby is black? It's his black friend's baby. Haha. Barney punches him in the hospital and then his new bride kills herself a couple weeks later. Sad?
Who's to say... "That's 'a life!" they might say in Rome. Flash-forward some amount of time and our hockey-obsessed hero is back in Montreal working his way up the ranks as a TV producer. He's introduced to the aristocratic Minnie Driver. If Wife #1 was out of his league physically, Wife #2 is out of his league societally. And here we're introduced to Barney's father, the ex-cop Dustin Hoffman, who is lovable and funny in a way, I guess. At the "Meet the Parents" fancy dinner, he regales them with some workforce stories and mistakes the fish for chicken...
At the goddam second wedding is where he meets Wife #3. Can you believe this guy? Classic Barney! Rosamund Pike has the beauty but also that cool factor which Minnie Driver was lacking...
The line read on "thank you I will" ? That's a chef's kiss in my book.
On his honeymoon with Minnie Driver he gets a reluctant blowjob which hilariously cuts to him looking dour in the present...
Sometimes you're just sitting in the back of cab reminiscing quietly about blowjobs you didn't want. Normal stuff. It's around this part where the Alzheimer's chaser plot line starts hit. I almost bailed. I can't handle movies like this that end with the main character getting Alzheimer's. It's one of the cheapest moves in the book. But thankfully I stuck around because the great David Cronenberg makes a cameo in this as a sleepy director on the TV set! Of all the movies...
At this point Barney is ready to make his movie and divorce the rich Minnie Driver in favor of the less rich Rosamund Pike because... what else, TRUE LOVE baby! But first he meets dad at the bar for some trite dialogue about this predicament he finds himself in...
Luckily (luckily?), the divorce scenario is sent into high gear when Boogie comes for a visit at Barney's lake house to kick a heroin habit. Here he A) gets caught screwing Minnie Driver which will allow Barney to divorce HER with cause, and B) he accidentally dies. This accidental death is set up as a mystery because there was a gun involved and the body's disappeared, but honestly the film itself doesn't even give a shit about this subplot. Needless to say, he uses this window to go off and marry his third and final wife and they have two kids and a really happy life and one unbelievably awesome freeze frame of Paul Giamatti jumping into bed to have sex with her...
But this being a decades-spanning melodrama, Barney of course has to fuck up that relationship before he can get Alzheimer's. He screws a random slut at the bar one night and she falls for their vegan neighbor Blair. Oh, also, Dustin Hoffman dies in a whorehouse and the people who run the whorehouse don't call the paramedics or the police, they call Barney. Because they had Barney's phone number? Sure, OK. So Barney goes down there to see his dead dad in the whorehouse and laugh...
The last 20 minutes or so is basically the Alzheimer's thing. It's not TOO bad. Giamatti has an epic A+ freak-out over it and also over the fact that he's not getting Wife #3 back, the true love of his life. That's called a double whammy, folks...
And that's called... ACT•ING!
The movie tries SO hard to make you like Barney even though he's pretty awful most of the time. We learn he didn't really kill Boogie right before he himself dies and the movie ends with Rosamund Pike visiting his gravesite with an open spot next to it for her, which... awkward! These movies are really weird, man. I guess I can see why people like them, and if you're gonna make 'em, it certainly helps to have actors like these in them. Not to say I ever wanna watch it again.
It's just so sad we're never gonna get to read Vanessa's Pussy :(
CHRONOLOGICALLY
⫷ EPISODE 556C - (YOU ARE HERE) - EPISODE 558 ⫸
⫷ EPISODE 556C - (YOU ARE HERE) - EPISODE 558 ⫸
Barney's Version is a 2010 Canadian comedy-drama film directed by Richard J. Lewis, based on the novel of the same name by Mordecai Richler. The film was nominated for the Golden Lion at the 67th Venice International Film Festival. It was released on September 10, 2010.
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