Norman Taurog’s blog

When Edgar Mudge (Richard Jenkins) takes his 14-year-old son to church, a
neighbor in their tiny farm community comments on how the boy, Duncan (Emile
Hirsch), is the spitting image of his mom. While the mother — dead at the
start of “The Mudge Boy” but shown in a photograph — was quite lovely, the
resemblance is not advantageous for Duncan. He’s soft in a girly way that
inspires the town’s tough guys to mock him and question his sexuality,
something he’s already anguished over.

Duncan’s dead mother is a powerful presence in this disturbing but
ultimately touching family drama. Her sudden death — never explained, but
surely connected to the booze Edgar finds stashed away in her sewing kit — has
had an enormous impact on her only child, who was brought up to be a mama’s
boy. Duncan continues to carry out her quirky practices, such as keeping her
favorite chicken as a pet and sucking its head because his mother told him it
has a calming effect — sort of Valium for fowl.

Duncan is the one who needs consoling. But his taciturn father is
clueless about how to help him. When he catches Duncan in his mother’s wedding
dress (not the first time he has put on her clothes), his unfeeling response
is to destroy her possessions in a bonfire, as if the boy’s problems will go
up in smoke as well.

Duncan’s sole friend is Perry (Tom Guiry), a town tough who likes to brag
about his sexual conquests. Perry’s bravado is a coverup for his scary
feelings toward Duncan, and it’s only a matter of time before their
relationship reaches a crisis.

Writer-director Michael Burke brings something fresh to a story that
Tennessee Williams and William Inge told often, about the fate of those
constitutionally unable to conform to small-town life. One reason it seems new
is that the number of these stories has dwindled with population shifts to the
city. Cinematographer Vanja Cernjul does a splendid job of capturing the
lonely expanse of Vermont farmland. “The Mudge Boy” is a little picture — the
names of the entire cast would fit on half a sheet of paper — but it’s more
heartfelt than movies with 50 times the budget.

Jenkins, the dead parent in “Six Feet Under,” underplays the live one
here to chilling effect. Edgar holds his own emotions in check and
unrealistically thinks that a teenager is capable of doing the same. Guiry
shows a keen understanding of how Perry’s desire to be honorable is negated by
his lack of maturity. Only Hirsch is miscast. Part of the problem is that he
looks as if he should be attending prep school (as he did in “The Emperor’s
Club’’) instead of hanging out in a barn. Hirsch isn’t a strong enough actor
to make us see past his highfalutin appearance and believe he’s doing anything
except slumming on a farm.

“The Mudge Boy” overcomes the lack of a persuasive lead performance to
draw you into the lives of these troubled souls. The film, which showed to
acclaim at the Sundance Film Festival a year and a half ago, has been slow
making its way to theaters. It was worth the wait.

– Advisory: This film contains explicit sexual situations.

— Ruthe Stein

Documentary. Directed by Mark Achbar, Jennifer Abbott and Joel Bakan. (PG.
145 minutes. At Bay Area theaters.)

At first, “The Corporation” seems as if it might be a filmed diatribe
against corporations as some vaguely defined symbol of monolithic power.
Instead it’s coolheaded and incisive, a thorough and informative study of
corporations, their origins and their place in the modern world. Evenhanded in
its methods, it nonetheless leaves audiences with a cold shiver. Viewers come
away with the uneasy sense that the defeat of communism may very well have
cleared the way for another form of heartless, godless totalitarianism to
threaten freedom — governments of the corporations, by the corporations and
for the corporations.

Directed by Mark Achbar, Jennifer Abbott and Joel Bakan, the picture
discusses the early days of our republic, when corporations were consortiums
sanctioned and limited by the government to perform a specific task (such as
building a bridge). Permission to grow freely came in the latter part of the
19th century when, in a series of bizarre decisions, the Supreme Court ruled
that corporations were legally a kind of person and therefore subject to equal-
protection provisions under the 14th Amendment.

If a corporation can be considered a person, what kind of person would a
corporation be? The movie explores the question by illustrating the tendencies
of the modern corporation — the placing of money ahead of human health and
safety, the ruthless pursuit of profit, the disregard for the community, the
environment and animal life, etc. — and shows an FBI psychiatrist who says
that the typical corporation, if human, would be a psychopath.

A host of personalities appear, each, with the exception of Noam Chomsky,
talking directly into the camera, thus producing an immediacy not usually
found in documentaries. The talking heads come from all sides of the debate.
On the left, Chomsky gets an assist from filmmaker Michael Moore, while the
business world is ably represented by various suited characters who are
remarkably willing to confirm the audiences’ worst nightmares. A smiling woman
talks about how she uses scientific marketing methods to persuade children to
nag their parents for toys. A jovial young man talks about how he uses
guerrilla marketing techniques, hiring actors to talk loudly in public places,
about the virtues of a particular product. An older executive says that the
solution to all the world’s problems is for all the land, air and water to be
privately owned. The movie goes on to demonstrate that we’re beyond that
already. Today, even genes are being patented, along with entire species.

One especially disturbing sequence features two former reporters for Fox
News in Florida, who tell a harrowing tale of TV news censorship. The two
broke a story about the use of antibiotics in dairy farming and its hazards to
both cows and people. The station tried to kill the story and buy their
silence. Then it tried to sit on the story. Then it tried to soften it,
replacing the word “cancer,” for example, with the more benign phrase “human
health problems.”

As Ken Burns demonstrated in “The Civil War,” every documentary could use
a Shelby Foote. “The Corporation” gets one in Ray Anderson, the chief
executive officer of Interface, the world’s largest carpet manufacturer. A
soft-spoken Southerner with a lilting accent, Anderson, a convert to
environmentalism, says he and his fellow magnates are plunderers wreaking
“generational tyranny” — destroying the planet without the consent of the
unborn who will have to live here, generations down the line.

– Advisory: Some images of human and animal deformity will upset
sensitive viewers.

— Mick LaSalle

Comedy-drama. Directed by Philippe Muyl. With Michel Serrault, Claire
Bouanich, Nade Dieu. (Not rated. 79 minutes. At the Rafael Film Center, San
Rafael.)

A movie about the meeting of a crusty old man and a brash, emotionally
needy youngster can be heartwarming in the worst possible way. “The Butterfly,
” however, pulls it off — the film has a sweetness that stops short of
sentimentality.

This low-key French offering focuses on the relationship between Julien
(Michel Serrault of “La Cage aux Folles”), an elderly butterfly collector who
lives with his cat in an apartment, and his upstairs neighbor, Elsa (Claire
Bouanich), the 8-year-old daughter of a seldom-seen working mother (Nade Dieu).
For the old man, the girl has two strikes against her: At night, she
regularly bangs a ball on the floor above his bedroom, and during a visit she
defies his express order and opens the door to the room where he raises
butterflies.

Julien is also appalled by Elsa’s educational lapses — she has no idea,
for instance, what a haystack is. She’s quite bright but spends too much time
by herself (her mother is young and single). Julien sees her one day sitting
alone in a cafe; her mother won’t give her a key to their apartment. Out of
pity, he shows her his butterfly collection.

When Julien leaves for the backcountry in search of an especially rare
butterfly specimen, Elsa hides in his car. He drags the stowaway to the police
station, but she works on his sympathies and soon he’s buying her hiking boots.
A cell phone problem prevents Elsa from calling home, and when she finally
does get through, she only increases her mother’s sense of panic. Meanwhile,
Julien can’t reach the concierge at his building to explain the situation.

Trekking through fields and mountains (all new to her; she says the
scenery looks like a calendar illustration), the two develop a bond, which is
more delicately and quirkily depicted than in some other films with the same
theme. In a particularly touching sequence, Julien makes up a somber story for
the girl about why things are the way they are in this sad world, and
illustrates it with hand shadows.

Writer-director Philippe Muyl works with two simple sources of tension —
early on, we wonder if Julien will get so annoyed with the girl that he’ll
break off contact, and later, when the police begin investigating the child’s
disappearance, the film hints that things might end badly for Julien.

There are other disturbing undertones — the mother’s sense of guilt, the
comment from a hotel clerk that “there are no more parents,” the obnoxious
yuppies encountered at a country shelter, observation of some poachers at work.
Why, the girl asks, are some people rich and some poor? By the end, both
parties have learned something. Meanwhile, Muyl quietly criticizes a society
that tolerates loneliness, selfishness, broken families and similar ills.

The film is serenely shot (by Nicolas Herdt), and the rapport between the
veteran Serrault and young Bouanich is enjoyable. Cynics may object that
Muyl’s central metaphor — the rare butterfly with its suggestion of transience,
transformation, beauty and fragility — is too obvious, but ? don’t listen to
them.

– Advisory: Brief use of harsh and sexual language.

— Walter Addiego

Comedy. Directed by Sergio Arau. (Rated R. 97 minutes. At AMC Van Ness.)

As Nigel Tufnel so eloquently put it in “This Is Spinal Tap,” there’s a
fine line between clever and stupid. It’s a distinction that has eluded the
filmmakers of “A Day Without a Mexican,” who are hoping to ride on “Tap’s”
long coattails by applying the overused label “mockumentary” to their film.

But “A Day Without a Mexican” doesn’t know what it wants to be: either a
goofball satire or a heavy-handed social-message movie.

The story line could have yielded something more satisfying. It imagines
what would happen if California’s Latinos suddenly disappeared — and the rest
of the state had to fend for itself. There are a couple of mildly amusing
moments — the Los Angeles Dodgers, for instance, must cancel a game because of
a shortage of players — but the tone is often that of a preachy after-school
special, down to the instructional messages that regularly flash across the
screen. “Agriculture is California’s # 1 industry … not Hollywood,” reads one.
Got that, class?

For a movie that tries so earnestly to foster understanding of others, it
offers numerous unimaginative, one-dimensional stereotypes, among them a
buttoned-down and heartless WASP senator, a wild-eyed Christian who’s obsessed
with the Rapture, a geeky Asian American scientist, and a queeny and pushy
restaurateur.

“A Day Without a Mexican” has its heart in the right place, but that’s
about all that can be said for it.

– Advisory: Adult language.

— John McMurtrie