El Crimen Del Padre Amaro; Better Housekeeping

El Crimen Del Padre Amaro is the kind of movie that normally gets 50 bonus points just for existing. This Mexican melodrama about the travails of a young priest is set squarely in reality (no exorcisms here) and it draws its multiple plot strands straight from the newspaper. Among other things, it touches on an impoverished small-town parish's struggle to resist accepting dirty money from drug dealers?a very real problem in Latin America, and in parts of the United States as well. There are disagreements over politics and the fine points of theology; the conflict within the church between ritualistic conservatives and street-fighting liberals, so familiar to those who grew up Catholic in the 60s and 70s, goes a few more rounds.

The film's central character, 24-year-old Father Amaro (Gael Garcia Bernal), even grapples with the age-old (and quite topical) problem of celibacy. The poor guy really wants to keep his vow, but he's all too aware that other priests have been getting a little action on the side for years?including one of his colleagues at the church, whose identity I won't reveal here. When Amaro remarks that the church could avoid a lot of problems by rethinking the chastity issue, he might as well be talking about himself. A life without carnality seems less attractive to Amaro the longer he spends in the confession booth with comely teenage parishioner Amelia (Ana Claudia Talancon), a honey-voiced angel who admits to fantasizing about Jesus while she masturbates. (Amaro is confused; at first he thinks Amelia is referring to someone else named Jesus.)

Ay caramba! If the above synopsis sounds like a Spanish-language remix of Miramax's "controversial" 1994 melodrama Priest, well, it kind of is. Amaro is better than Priest, thank goodness, but it's still pretty lame and corny?a modern, Mexican equivalent of one of those battling priest potboilers from the 1940s or 50s that would have filled out the first half of a double bill with a heist picture. It's based on a late 19th-century Portuguese novel by Jose Maria Eca de Queiroz and retains a certain high-minded classical dryness, and while its laundry list of issues seems contrived, at least it doesn't ask you to cheer its collared heroes as they violate every sacred oath in existence. (Priest was chock-full of hypocrites in collars, including a heterosexual priest with a mistress and a gay priest who doffed his collar at night and went cruising; it was outraged not by the behavior of its outwardly godly characters, but at the stuffy old church that cramped their style.)

But in the end, director Carlos Carrera and screenwriter Vicente Lenero can't make up their minds whether to poke fun at the characters or take their earnestness seriously. Nor can they decide whether to criticize their flawed priest heroes or criticize the institution that asked them to conceal and suppress their human appetites. It's a thoroughly confused movie. In one section, it implicitly condemns the parish's elderly padre, Father Benito (Sancho Gracia), for accepting donations from the local drug lord and overseeing the baptism of his infant child; in another, it revels in Amaro's idyll with Amelia almost as if it's rooting for them. (Oh, come on, I'm not spoiling anything; you saw The Thorn Birds, didn't you?) Amaro tries to rally (cynically) at the end by portraying its hero as a guy who'll sacrifice his passion for career advancement?a hard, clear-eyed, very 70s ending it hasn't earned the right to embrace.

Better Housekeeping Directed by Frank Novak It must be No Bonus Points week in the film section. Better Housekeeping is another feature I'd normally be inclined to enjoy?a satire of lower-middle-class American life, told in a self-consciously ragged, documentary style. (The film was originally called Good Housekeeping?a not so sly joke on a certain magazine's idea of domestic bliss?but the Hearst corporation forced a last-minute title change.) It's not a pseudo-documentary like Interview with the Assassin, though; it's more like a Christopher Guest movie crossed with Jerry Springer. In the press notes, writer-director Frank Novak thoughtfully lays out his esthetic strategy in language that sounds almost like a manifesto; he describes his style, Cinema Al Dente, as a more controlled variation of Dogme 95?a raw, spontaneous-seeming style that nevertheless makes room for little filmmaking details like art direction, good sound and proper focus. "If the acting or dialogue sounds like it's in a movie, if it lacks realism, it's no good," he writes.

Better Housekeeping contains little that looks or sounds like a Hollywood movie, that's for sure; the camerawork is wild and deliberately unpretty, the surroundings are cluttered and realistic; the characters are resolutely Middle-American, lower-class white, and they don't especially give a damn if you like them. The central plot has married couple Don and Donatella (Bob Jay Mills and Petra Westen) fighting an escalating duel of wills as their marriage disintegrates; think War of the Roses for a buck twenty-five. Don, a loudmouthed, whining party animal, is furious over his wife's lesbian affair and decides on a separation?not a marital separation, but a literal separation of their house, courtesy of a wall built by Don and his buddies.

It's not a bad idea, but it's not enough to sustain a feature?especially not with performances this one-note and caricatured. (For some reason, Novak nails naturalism in almost every detail of the production itself, but allows his obviously talented cast to verge on cartoons.) In the end, Better Housekeeping plays like a heterosexual cousin of those gay camp underground flicks of the 90s that satirized the white working class by having a cast of big city actors (including drag queens) drawling cornpone aphorisms while puffing furiously on cigarettes as country-western music played in the background. Novak didn't mean to satirize his characters, but that's what he ends up with: a satire on people who have no power. What's the point of that?

Framed

Voices, voices: Writer-director Tim McCann's Revolution #9, about a New Yorker (the likable, volatile Michael Risley) who thinks tv commercials for perfume are sending him personal messages, isn't really a portrait of mental illness. It's more of a mindfuck thriller?a cut-rate riff on Roman Polanski, designed to keep you wondering if its hero is slowly losing his noodle or if he really is being persecuted by creepy conspiratorial forces. But it lets its tension go slack early on and becomes a succession of jumpy, scary but repetitious setpieces; its triumph is mainly one of mood. Spalding Gray does fine, unctuous work as the commercial director who's flattered and spooked by the hero's intentions; Hal Hartley dreamgirl Adrienne Shelly is appealing as the hero's fiancee, who stands by her man, but only up to a point.