The Importance of Being Earnest; Sleepy Time Gal; Insomnia

Beware the new film version of The Importance of Being Earnest. It's The Worst Film of the Year, a distinction that cannot pass without note. Yes, theater has lost its once-central cultural position to the big-screen adaptation of comic books and lousy tv shows, but Oliver Parker "opens the play up" to deny that language is its glory. Parker loses the right to adapt Oscar Wilde. Not just because his 1999 film of An Ideal Husband was Merchant-Ivory stodgy, but because this Earnest amounts to a desecration. Some essential cultural value is destroyed.

First he Baz Luhrmannizes?brutally mixing inappropriate actors and accents, and stupidly adding pop tunes. Then Parker violates Wilde's spirit. With every line a work of genius, Importance made mirth of romantic desperation and social sophistication, as two artful swains woo two cagey ladies. Its title isn't simply a joke but a slyly stated principle. Yet, in the final scene, Parker cynically has Ernest lying to his betrothed, which makes the climactic line, "I have finally discovered the vital importance of being earnest," meaningless.

Borstal Boy's drag performance of Earnest caught much of the subversive subtext in Wilde's exercise. But this insult to theater and the Ealing comedy tradition amounts to Twin Towers-style cultural terrorism. Did none of the actors here?from the all-wrong Reese Witherspoon to queer-profiteer Rupert Everett?realize Parker's rewriting was odious? Even damn Judi Dench neglects her obligation to British theatrical history by participating in an Earnest that gives Lady Bracknell a flashback as a dancehall girl! Casting Ian McKellen as Bracknell couldn't be as perverse. Morrissey would thrash the lot with an appropriate apercu!

Sleepy Time Gal Directed by Christopher Munch Aging actors can hide their lines and wrinkles or use them to dramatize weathered experience. Al Pacino in Insomnia and Jacqueline Bisset in Sleepy Time Gal are better watched than listened to, because at this stage of life the emotions their faces convey are consummate. Playing harsh-to-the-point-of-unlikable characters, both actors are magnetizing?after all, they're movie stars. Their familiar appeal engenders trust, even though the movies test one's patience.

For Bisset, Sleepy Time Gal breaks through the oblivion facing no-longer-young actresses. She gets to play what might be her first realistic character; you look at her aghast because the former starlet is now gorgeously adult. As Frances, a middle-aged woman dying of cancer, she attempts to reconcile with her grown children, a gay photographer (Nick Stahl) and the daughter she gave up for adoption who is now a lonely lawyer (Martha Plimpton). Bisset toughens the story's search for love by portraying Frances as diffident; her refusal to give in to pity or make things easier for anyone around her mirrors the obstinate approach of Christopher Munch, the film's director-writer.

Munch's best known for the John Lennon-Brian Epstein rumor-pic The Hours and Times and the stultifying travelogue Color of a Brisk and Leaping Day. His dreariness is not itself a virtue, although it seems to be inseparable from his artistic stance. He was fortunate to find an actress who has Bisset's allure yet is never florid. Despite dialogue like "You as a nascent being seem destined for extraordinary things," she humanizes his uneasy balance between emotional misery and formal rigor. Choosing a title like Sleepy Time Gal (alluding to young Frances' Southern radio station ID, as well as the mature Frances' big sleep), Munch deliberately defies audience interest. It's a sign of his contrariness and ambivalence. He means to find universal sentiment in obscure culture and in his characters' secret histories, yet he's averse to the broad strokes and direct effects of commercial filmmaking. You can't blame him after seeing Callie Khouri's cornball The Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood, but what distinguishes Sleepy Time Gal's somber version of the same bad decisions and cruel circumstances in a woman's life also makes it slightly off-putting.

Sleepy Time Gal's splintered family saga pursues the covert sympathies people experience without realizing. Frances revisits the ex-lover (Seymour Cassel) who fathered her daughter; the daughter, in search of her mother, has a brief but affectionate affair with an older man (Frankie Faison), who was also one of her mother's lovers. The racial mix goes nicely unremarked upon. Each subplot conveys the unseen ties that bind immediate families and the families we may not even know we belong to. But Munch's bleakness is at odds with the awe he wants viewers to feel. It is a depressing irony of the indie film movement that artists who reject Hollywood's surface sentiment choose, instead, a surface austerity.

Sleepy Time Gal's best moments?Frances' giving up the ghost, that liaison between Plimpton and Faison?are surprisingly close to the Olympian, lyrical view of mankind's hidden emotional network that Alan Rudolph creates. Some critics praise Munch's schematic style, with its non-narrative visual etudes, then reject Rudolph's poetic satire. But that's just misguided preference for cramped art over emotional expanse. A better irony is that Munch virtually had to resurrect a Hollywood actress to make his best, most resonant film.

Insomnia Directed by Christopher Nolan A friend phoned to ask, "Is it true a movie called Insomnia actually has a lead character named Dormer? How sophomoric!" I answered that he just summed up the career of Christopher Nolan, the director of Memento whose big-budget big break is this boringly obvious story of a depressed police detective, Dormer (Al Pacino), who ironically can't get to sleep because he carries so much guilt. Nolan borrows from the 1997 Scandinavian thriller that starred Stellan Skarsgaard, but Nolan's always borrowing. His film noir crutch?as in Memento's ludicrous oversimplification of La Jetee's time-bending?is just the thing that makes sophomoric viewers exclaim his very little talent. In a Chris Nolan film there's nothing to Munch on.

Nolan specializes in noir because in today's film culture audiences are suckers for whatever's pessimistic and joltingly violent; it's the sophomoric preference for cynicism over hopeful idealism, trust, beauty. The only surprise in Insomnia is Hillary Swank playing a rookie cop in the Alaskan wilds where Dormer comes to assist in an unsolved murder case. Swank looks up to the experienced Dormer with wide-eyed, convincing trust. But Nolan is more interested in Dormer's sleepless suffering (he's unused to the midnight sun) and contrives to?whaddya know?shoot a film noir in daylight! That means he can borrow again from Kubrick and show Dormer driving through the mountains and snowscapes as if using B-roll from The Shining. Nolan doesn't base his film in ideas, he throws in showy gimmicks like a jittery flashback, closeups of blood-soaked fibers and vibrating windshield wipers. After such repetitions, Dormer'd surely fall asleep.

At least Insomnia is more tolerable than Memento, and that's almost entirely due to Pacino's shaggy-dog integrity. He seems to be carrying with him the memory of Serpico, showing Dormer hiding out from an internal affairs investigation back in his home precinct in L.A. This isn't another thoughtless, jingoistic paean to police power. Obviously, Pacino?unlike Denzel Washington in Training Day?has been paying attention to the news. Pacino's aged face and bent back suggest the moral load of police corruption. He plays Dormer not as a matter of sleep deprivation but as a longing to regain the honesty he lost in the course of corrupted duty. (Sean Penn and Jack Nicholson missed this dramatic detail in the similarly plotted The Pledge.) This characterization is more honorable than the silly blue wall of sentimentality in James Mangold's Cop Land. Pacino's acting is not sophomoric; he's brought his 70s integrity into the amoral new century. Chris Nolan affects style, but Pacino's got soul.