Stars and Bars Review

Almost nothing here works, and the failure is instructive. William Boyd adapted his own novel about an English art expert sent to rural Georgia to buy a Renoir from a family of armed eccentrics, and what read on the page as dry unease becomes broad flailing on screen. Pat O'Connor directs as though volume were the same thing as energy.

Daniel Day-Lewis gives Henderson Dores a strangled voice, a permanent cringe and a great deal of running, and it is the rare case of a careful actor deciding that a thin part needs more rather than less, which is exhausting well before the halfway mark. The supporting bench is stacked and wasted. Harry Dean Stanton gets one good scene and then vanishes, Joan Cusack and Laurie Metcalf are handed a single trait each, and Maury Chaykin shouts.

The Georgia locations are shot flatly, with none of the heat or the strangeness the premise needs. The closing stretch, in which Dores walks through Manhattan wearing a cardboard box, wants to be absurdist and plays as embarrassment. The one thing the film catches is the polite contempt that Englishmen and Americans can hold for each other while smiling.