Hollywood reinvents itself in Seattle

The narrative arc, that structural phenomenon we often write about but seldom explain, is all about getting from a worthwhile Here to a satisfying There. It’s the spinal column of most movies, documentaries or features -- the thing that lets them stand up and take a bow. Or, absent that, fall over into a puddle of their own misbegotten hubris and egomania.

In one sense, the narrative arc of America -- post-Columbian, pre-Pacific Ocean -- is a people’s movement across a continent. Horace Greeley’s exhortation to go west wasn’t about taking the kids to Vegas. It was about reinventing ourselves. Have we? Of course, but in the culture of this country, it’s an ongoing process. And on the left coast -- either at the malls or at last week’s Seattle International Film Festival -- reinvention was the name of the game.

The obvious thing right now would be to make reference to “The Hulk,” but the big green guy, a sort of Poppin’ Fresh with a massive hangover, really doesn’t have a handle on his alarming transformations. Harrison Ford, however, does. Admittedly less gruesome than the Hulk’s metamorphoses, Ford’s attempt at remaking himself into a comedic actor in “Hollywood Homicide” should be recognized for its chutzpah, even if it is blood-curdling nonetheless.

Far more delightful, is what Jean Reno and Juliette Binoche do in Danielle Thompson’s “Jet Lag.” Reno, the popular, chronically unshaven French star of action films such as “The Professional” and “Mission: Impossible,” plays a neurotic chef with a father fixation and delivers an amuse bouche of a performance. Binoche, more international in stature but no less French, has always seemed to play characters whose forced dignity obscured their sensuality. In “Jet Lag,” she’s a little trashy and has seldom been sexier.

The stakes get higher when you examine what was in Seattle. Among the most troubling subjects was Louise Hogarth’s “The Gift,” a documentary about gay men who purposely give or receive the AIDS virus. Among the more encouraging things was the slew of South Korean films, from an industry that has emerged as one of the world’s most exciting.

In three unconnected films, the changing state of the world we don’t know was clarified well beyond the borders of entertainment (even if they’re very entertaining films). “The Wild Dogs” by Canadian director Thom Fitzgerald (“The Hanging Garden”) stars Fitzgerald himself as a pornographer sent to Romania to find young girls for his employer’s Web site. What he finds instead is a people whose transition from communism to capitalism has left them little better off than the stray animals of the title -- and whose misery transforms him.

With “In This World,” the ever-mutating talents of Michael Winterbottom take on the human traffic of Afghanistan, tracing a young boy’s perilous journey to London -- which is precisely where Stephen Frears sets his best picture in years, “Dirty Pretty Things.” In it, Chiwetal Ejiofor and Audrey Tautou (yes, “Amelie”) give great performances as fugitives from oppressive regimes (Nigeria and Turkey, respectively) who are not only pursued by the authorities but cruelly exploited, even by their fellow refugees.

Sometimes -- not often, but sometimes -- an utter lack of character development can be a plus. It is in “Overnight,” the story of one Troy Duffy, who once upon a time was the Cinderella story of independent film. His screenplay “The Boondock Saints” was picked up by Miramax chief Harvey Weinstein, who OK’d Duffy as the first-time, untested director of his own $15-million movie. According to the press at the time, Weinstein also bought Duffy the West Hollywood saloon in which he was bartending, to cinch the deal (not true, but this is theater). Not only that, Duffy’s band was going to do the soundtrack.

Can you say “train wreck”? That’s how almost everyone who saw “Overnight” described Duffy’s unyielding arrogance and ingratitude. You can’t take your eyes off the guy, he’s so egomaniacal. And mean too -- to his brother, his bandmates, his producers and, most unwisely, the filmmakers, director Mark Brian Smith and producer Tony Montana, who’ve got Duffy’s epic crash-and-burn on film.

Asked whether Duffy might have been caught up in the moment -- by acting the way he might have thought a tough, indie, Tarantino-saturated filmmaker was supposed to act -- Montana said, “Nah. He was that way all the time.”

What Duffy is going to learn, once the film is really finished and released, is that change is good. And if he has any doubts, he can just ask the Hulk.

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John Anderson is a film critic at Newsday, a Tribune company.