Meet Barney (Paul Giamatti). He’s rude, mean, drunk, depressed and heartless. He ditches his wife during their wedding, he may have shot his best friend and — now I really begin to question his personality — he’s a hockey fan. Ready to settle in for 132 minutes with this guy?
“Barney’s Version,” a sour, plotless and witless comedy-drama based on the final Mordecai Richler novel, wants to remind you of “Sideways” and its forlorn drink-moistened soul search. Giamatti is an ideal casting choice, but even this talented actor can’t sell a lovable-jerk story that forgot to put in the lovable.
In the 1970s in boho mode in Italy, young Barney undergoes a brief and loveless marriage to a woman (Rachelle Lefevre) he marries because she is pregnant with their child — who, it turns out, is not his. And stillborn.
If Barney is traumatized by these and other bleak developments, he doesn’t show it. Soon he’s back in Canada cynically scamming up money for Israel by preying upon the fears of his fellow Jews. Then he’s stumbling into a high-paying career making a cheesy TV soap he will stay with as we check in on his tantrums, outbursts and hangovers over the course of 35 years.
A TV producer who is happy to make a lot of money and delighted to have the privilege of entertaining large audiences might be a refreshing movie character, but why be original when you can be smug? Barney is of course the self-hating kind, an agonized trash purveyor given to guzzling expensive Scotch and delivering cheap quips.
Needing a second wife, he falls toward marriage with a braying motormouth (Minnie Driver) given to saying things like “I’m verklempt” and “to die for” while she makes I’m-drying-my-nails hand motions.
Driver and Dustin Hoffman, as Barney’s uncouth cop father (extending his “Meet the Fockers” shtick) do a painfully broad matzoh-minstrel act that would be plenty to ruin this movie even if the rest of it worked. When asked whether he mistreated suspects “gratuitously,” the cop says no –“I always got paid.” Ba-dum. “You never know what tomorrow’s going to bring — so get to shtupping and multiply already,” he tells the couple in — Daaaaad! — one of many purely TV moments in the film, flairlessly directed by longtime “CSI” producer Richard J. Lewis.
Barney deserts his new bride during their wedding to drink shots at the bar and watch a hockey game. Then, spotting a pretty girl (Rosamund Pike) across the room, he flirts her up and declares his undying love for her — because she knows some cigar trivia and passes him a note with a hockey score on it. Later he proves his obnoxiousness to her on a date by getting drunk and vomiting. Naturally, she falls in love.
If Giamatti was a deeply uneasy soul in “Sideways,” here he’s merely a shallow jerk. Are we supposed to think Barney’s a misunderstood genius when he never says anything cleverer than “to let you finish that thought would be an insult to stupidity”? Does that one-liner even make sense?
After the movie bobs along for 100 minutes of frivolously handled unpleasantness, it finally turns serious about one thing — Barney’s mortality. Sorry, Barney: You never treated anyone with respect. Why should anyone respect you?