Barney's Version

City Paper Grade: B

by Sam Adams

ALMOST LOVER: In Barney's Version, Paul Giamatti stars as TV producer Barney Panofsky, whose succession of revolving-door marriages comes to define him.

[CITY PAPER GRADE: B]

CSI veteran Richard J. Lewis makes the jump to features with the sprawling story of Barney Panofsky (Paul Giamatti), a hack TV producer who's an intellectual and romantic on the side. Spanning several decades, from Barney's bohemian youth in Rome to his bachelor dotage, the movie, adapted from Mordecai Richler's novel, is pushed forward by his succession of revolving-door marriages, first to an abusive, suicidal poet (Rachelle Lefevre), then a high-maintenance socialite (Minnie Driver). Not until he meets wife No. 3 (Rosamund Pike) at the reception for his marriage to wife No. 2 does Barney get his first taste of bona fide love.

Lewis and screenwriter Michael Konyves drop the annotated autobiography framework of Richler's novel, rendering the title unintelligible, but retain traces of a murder mystery that sits ill at ease with the movie's essentially melodramatic aims. Whether Barney killed his friend Boogie (Scott Speedman) — or whether he is dead at all — remains an open question until the final moments, when Barney's fading memory allows a moment of revelation. By then, the question seems practically academic, mainly a distraction from the rocky relationship between Barney and the love of his life.

Barney's Version isn't a film so much as a series of episodes, without much beyond plot to tie them together. But watching Giamatti and Pike chart their relationship's ups and downs is a rich and worthwhile pursuit, if not one sufficient to fill the movie's running time. Pike, whose most memorable appearances have been in British costume dramas, is subtly but utterly transformed, radiating a matter-of-fact intellectual intensity that never quite showed in Doom, and Giamatti conveys a sense of the weight of time passed, abetted by remarkably subtle makeup work. Even though it's based on a fictional autobiography, Barney's Version has the shapelessness of a real biopic. It's an as-told-to in search of a disciplined ghostwriter.