The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz

When I was in college, I saw a film called The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz. The movie starred Richard Dreyfus and it was the film that brought him to attention. I recall the movie as realistic, funny, and very well-lit; it was a blandly made film – but, for some reason, it has remained in my memory, albeit faintly. Duddy Kravitz like the recent Barney’s Version is based on a novel by the late Canadian novelist, Mordecai Richler. Richler seems to have been Canada’s version of Saul Bellow, a Jewish novelist writing in the naturalistic tradition of the great Bildungsroman authors of the 19th and early 20th century. (in Barney’s Version, everyone seems to be reading Saul Bellow novels – a rueful commentary on the apparent rivalry between the writers). Barney’s Version is like the earller picture – it chronicles the life and struggles of a Jewish hustler with primary focus on relationships with women. The film is very closely observed, class-conscious and presents a picture of middle-class (and upper class) Jewish life in Montreal. Like Duddy Kravitz, the film is very bland in style; it’s shot modestly and transparently – in appearance, the film looks like a typical Hollywood comedy with efficient TV sit-com mise-en-scene. Barney’ Version, notwithstanding its humble appearance, is extremely ambitious. Paul Giamatti plays Barney, a selfish, witty alcoholic, following him from swashbuckling youth to dotage. The film’s emphasis is Barney’s three marriages. Initially, we see him marrying a wild hippy girl in Rome – she commits suicide; then, he marries a stereotypical Jewish princess from Montreal effectively played by Minnie Driver. For the majority of the film, Barney is married to an intellectual woman, a radio-caster from New York with whom he has a happy relationship. In each case, Barney’s drinking and his lack of any impulse control – he blurts out awful things and acts on whims – ruins his marriages. Barney’s father, a tough-talking Montreal cop, is played by Dustin Hoffman. The film indulges in Jewish stereotypes to the extent that, like the Coen’s A Simple Man, the movie would be deemed anti-Semitic except for the fact that it derives from echt-Jewish sources. About every twenty minutes, the film shows Barney committing some cringe-worthy act – I don’t know any recent film with such a high-quotient of embarrassing cringe-inducing scenes. Although the film suggests that Barney may be some kind of wounded and profound soul, it seems that his problem is a lot simpler – he’s a chronic drunk. I liked the move a lot. The story, which veers between low, somewhat implausible comedy and tragedy, is engaging, if highly episodic; the acting is uniformly excellent, although the Jewish schmaltz is laid on a bit heavy from time to time. There are a number of interesting minor characters and, even, a sort of crime mystery aspect to the picture – for a while, the film resembles Woody Allen’s Crimes and Misdemeanors in that Barney may have committed a murder and “got away with it.” Dramatized with a wealth of events, and generously abundant in good, emotionally moving scenes, the picture’s major flaw is its attempt to gin-up unnecessary sympathy for Barney – Barney is a reprobate but he’s witty and charming and we don’t really need to see him destroyed by Alzheimer’s syndrome, a theme that dominates the last fifteen minutes of the rather long film. Since we see Barney drinking hard liquor, more or less, continuously – if you took a swig of whiskey every time Barney did, you’d be unconscious long before the film’s melancholy ending – it’s hard to know whether he is suffering from Alzheimer’s or more prosaically, alcohol-induced Korsakof’s syndrome. Too often films aspire to poetry and unearned profundity; Barney’s Version is just prose, but it’s strong meaningful prose that tells a powerful story. (The only other film I know comparable to this picture in biographical scope is Michael Powell’s The Life and Tiimes of Colonel Blimp, a picture that shows the life of a representative man, a British military officer from the Boer War through the end of World War Two – the stakes are far higher in Powell’s film and the hero’s life is treated as an allegory for the decline of the values that supported the British empire, but the structure of the movie is eerily similar. Powell’s hero like Barney has relationships with three complicated and difficult women – all of them played by Deborah Kerr as embodiment of the Ewig-Weibliche.)