Barney's version - 2010

I didn’t like it much. It was a good movie, well done and all that, but I didn’t like Barney. The character, I mean; the actor was good. Let’s not talk about his father now, I totally disliked him.

The story: 

In 1974 Barney (Paul Giamatti) is in Italy, living in Rome where he marries a girl because she’s pregnant, although his stoned friend Boogie (Scott Speedman) tries to convince him to walk out on her. Shortly after the marriage Clara (Rachelle Lefevre) delivers a stillborn child, and Barney finds out that he wasn’t the father: it was in fact another one of his ‘friends’. Barney is understandably shocked and upset and leaves Clara alone in the hospital and goes to stay with Boogie. A few days later he finds a letter from Clara. Boogie was so stoned all the time that he forgot to tell him about it. The letter sounded desperate, and when Barney goes home to her, he finds her dead: suicide. He meets her father (Saul Rubinek) and I was very glad that he threw him out, the guy was obnoxious, recalling how Clara was always weird, and had tried before to commit suicide and no matter how he tried to help her (with electroshock) not caring about expenses, she kept ‘embarrassing the family’…

After her Barney meets another girl (Minnie Driver) and they like each other and soon get married, but Barney hates her family, plus at the wedding he meets Miriam (Rosamund Pike) and falls in love with her!

He tells her that same day, but of course she tells him to go home, he just met her at his own wedding! Barney goes home, but keeps sending her flowers every week, until she tells him to stop it. He’s still married after all, so Barney plans to get a divorce. Boogie is staying at his place in Montreal apparently to clean himself up but it doesn’t look to me like he had any intention of staying away from drugs… when Barney finds him having sex with his wife, he’s not much upset because it’ll make it easier for him to have a divorce, yet he has a fight with Boogie. Barney asks him to testify in the divorce case, but Boogie doesn’t seem to agree with him on how many favours he owes him. Boogie’s always on something, and Barney is often drunk, so they have some words, then Barney stumbles on something and falls down, firing a shot with the gun that his father (Dustin Hoffman) had given him as a present, his old gun from his policeman days. 

We see Boogie falling down into the water while Barney lays unconscious. He later calls the police to search for Boogie, and a detective becomes convinced that he killed him, but can’t prove anything because the body is not found. 

As soon as he signs his divorce papers, Barney calls Miriam asking her out on a date. Miriam accepts, and even if the first meeting is a disaster because he’s so drunk she has to help him to his room after he throws up, she doesn’t go away. They walk, and talk, and like each other. 

The next years are shown very quickly: they get married and have two children, Kate (Anna Hopkins) and Michael (Jake Hoffman), and have a happy marriage. When the children grow up and leave home, Miriam wants to go back to work in a radio station. Barney is not happy about it, but it’s important for her, so she starts working in the radio where her friend Blair works (Bruce Greenwood). 

Barney doesn’t listen to her interviews on the radio because he spends his time drinking and watching games in bars: she’s hurt but still loves him. 

Barney is jealous of Blair without reason and tells him that she thinks he’s gay, and again Miriam is angry that he should act like that, saying such things and also getting drunk and falling asleep on the table when they have guests for dinner… 

One day she tells him that she wants to spend a week in New York, staying with Michael, but she doesn’t want him to go with her. They’ve been together every day since they got married, she simply wants a few days away. He seems unable to cope without her, and what does he do? He gets drunk in a bar and has sex with a girl. When Miriam gets home she says she missed him, she loves him, but when she finds out what he did she’s so hurt she leaves him. 

Now we’re back at the present, this was all a sort of flashback. The movie started with Barney calling Blair in the middle of the night to ask about Miriam, because some time after the divorce she married him. 

Barney is losing his head, he keeps forgetting things. At the tv studio where he works they realize the situation when he makes a scene, saying that he’s upset because his good friend Leo the painter just died, not remembering that he went to his funeral the year before. Kate cries when he breaks things up at home because he can’t remember Miriam’s phone number. Miriam meets with him and is heartbroken to see him like this. Both Kate and Michael stay with him in his last days, and shortly after, he dies. Very quickly indeed, only weeks, maybe a few months later (we don’t know how long for sure, but Leo died in 2009 and Barney died in 2010).

This is his story. One last thing: Boogie’s body was found, with no gunshot wounds. It’s not clear how he died, though. He thinks of him watching a canadair picking up water to extinguish a fire in the forest, so what happened? He got picked up with the water and dropped with it, and that’s why it looked as a parachuting accident??

Anyway, the movie was well made, but I despised his father completely and I didn’t much like Barney either. At the end they show that he was a good man, that he secretly wrote to Miriam’s radio under the name Alphonse of Montreal, and that he paid a guy to write good things on a paper to please her actress Solange (Macha Grenon), so she believed that they adored her in Bulgaria, and he also wanted Kate to keep it up under his death.. he always loved Miriam till the end and always hoped that Boogie would turn up alive one day. Ok, he had a heart, he was a good man, but I don’t like people who keep drinking so much all the time and then act like idiots and think that saying I’m sorry is enough to make everything ok again. It’s not.   

ITA la versione di Barney