One assumes from watching last year’s The End of the Tour (2015) that author David Foster Wallace (Jason Segel) committed suicide in 2008 because he was so out of synch with ordinary social life.  Donald Margulies, the gifted playwright, provides a depiction of Wallace as a shy but defensive weirdo, an often unlikable if brilliant neurotic.  He is sans a wife or a girlfriend, has experienced deep depression—and, frankly, doesn’t stand a chance.

Directed by James Ponsoldt, The End of the Tour is a lesser film than Ponsoldt’s The Spectacular Now.  Though interesting, it is so short on drama it has only limited potency and appeal.

Sideways (2005), by Alexander Payne, is the one about the atypical road trip taken by the wine expert/aspiring novelist, Miles (Paul Giametti), and his horndog friend Jack (Thomas Haden Church).

An absorbing comedy-drama, piercing and droll, it points up the theme of when the development of liaisons with other people is not matched by moral development, the manifestation of character.  These liaisons, these love affairs, are strongly desired, but are guardedly or hastily formed by men who are boys, i.e. Miles and Jack.  A boy, even so, can see himself as a loser, as Miles does, and so we sympathize.

Il Bidone (The Swindler) is a notable Federico Fellini film from 1955.

Broderick Crawford stars as a member of a trio of crooks, cheating people out of their money in less than prosperous Italian towns.  The Crawford character is forty-eight years old and has a daughter he rarely sees, and, as critic Vernon Young pointed out, he is “a lonely swindler” (my italics).  Plus, because of his conscience, he is running out of steam, but not yet ready to let go of degeneracy.  Not at all.

Albeit not a great Fellini movie, Il Bidone is truthful and pretty incisive.  A little less humanistic than, say, I Vitelloni and Nights of Cabiria (man, thou art vile), it also presents fewer circus-and-Catholicism motifs than those pics.  Seeing Giulietta Masina, a Fellini regular (and ex-wife), in this movie nicely erased my memory of her in the last F.F. movie I saw her in: the terrible Juliet of the Spirits. 

(In Italian with English subtitles)

 

What might be a decent novel is, here, an unsatisfying film.  The script is wobbly, and the strikingly handsome Burt Reynolds, with his star quality, is miscast as an ordinary, somewhat less-than-virile gent.

Starting Over (1979) does effectively focus, though, on the internal psychological ping-pong experienced by divorced and recently unattached people.

Directed by Alan J. Pakula.

 

The central character in The Song of Bernadette (1943) is a good girl who becomes a devout and holy one.  In Lourdes, France she sees a vision of a lady who eventually says “I am the Immaculate Conception” and so convinces all that she is the Blessed Virgin.  The film, well directed by Henry King, is about changes and revelations related to the soul. . . Really, a Protestant doesn’t know what to make of a pronouncement like “I am the Immaculate Conception,” but this might induce one to contemplate whether all his theological beliefs are true. . .

Although I’ve never read the Franz Werfel novel on which the movie is based, I can declare Bernadette a beautiful and sensitive cinematic work.  Jennifer Jones enacts a spiritual person flawlessly.