The story of a sensualist, leftist, Canadian professor who abandoned his family. He lays dying in the misery that is a hospital in the Canadian health system (“I voted for Medicare, and I’ll accept the consequences,” he declares). His money-trading capitalist son flies from London to ease his father’s death, bribing the inefficient hospital staff (while one floor is Calcutta, the one below is empty), its corrupt union, and anyone else who can make his father more comfortable. The son gathers the father’s friends and procures him heroin for pain medication. He does it without a whisper of his method, and the father feels free to casually dismiss his child’s success.

In the midst, planes strike the World Trade Center and a television commentator proclaims that it is the first of the barbarian invasions.

Why this image in what is otherwise an affecting and funny family drama? Because the film has more than political overtones and jabs.  David Edelstein writes that the director’s first film, The Decline of the American Empire (1986) suffered from “neocon gloating.”  I haven’t seen it, but The Barbarian Invasions plays as a wholesale assault (by velvet glove) on the excesses of modern liberalism. Socialized medicine is a hell. The union is a crime syndicate. Sexual expression and lack of fidelity breed disaffected children (the London son was estranged, as was his sister, who is away on a boat in the Pacific, and the daughter of a another sexual libertine is a heroin addict who does not speak to her mother). The father’s professor friend boasts of his trophy wife, but that trophy shows its sharp stripes when she angrily objects to the lending of their cabin for the father’s last dying days because it was made part hers after her endless suffering “at the Ikea.”

Yet, when death knocks, the family, such as it is, coalesces, almost in spite of the blows it has taken through the years. Family is family, the bedrock, and there is refreshingly not one, “You weren’t there for us, Daddy!!!!!” extended rant, though an American equivalent would have ten such scenes. Once, upon arriving from London, the sons snaps. It is portrayed as his weakness, and it lasts the 5 seconds he needs to compose himself in front of his ill father (even then, he does not know the father is dying).

Two vignettes are the heart of the film.  First, the father’s coterie are all academics, and they reminisce at how many “isms” they embraced and discarded. The father then tells the story of his trip to China, where he relayed his respect of the Cultural Revolution to a Chinese academic he hoped to bed. She froze, and the father recounts how she relayed the deaths and tortures suffered by her family in that glorious revolution. 

Second, the son’s wife, an art dealer, is sent to a church to inspect religious artifacts.  She declines (the Americans have taken all the good stuff) and a forlorn priest motions to figurines of Mary, Peter, and Christ, in a dusty, cobwebbed basement, asking “So, this is all worthless?”

Capitalism, however, is by no means faultless. The son buys everything, including the attendance of his father’s former students to pay their respects. But the film is political, a strong denunciation, not just of the excesses of modernism, but of leftist, Western liberalism.  And even if you don’t get that message (I can’t imagine the Academy, which nominated the picture for Best Foreign Film, did), it still triumphs as a beautiful story of family and friends re-converging for a humane goodbye to a flawed man.

Director Danny Boyle finds the best use of his frenetic style (Trainspotting, Millions and 21 Days Later) as he navigates the lives of three Indian “slumdogs” (poor, homeless children) through adulthood, all accompanied by the remembrances of one who has won India’s “Who Wants To be a Millionaire?”  He is suspected as a cheat and to the police investigator, for each question, he recounts a vignette that explains his ability to answer. The picture is vibrant, thrilling and wildly romantic and at the end, the audience where I saw it cheered enthusiastically at the screen.  Rightfully so.

John Patrick Shanley adapted his stage play for the screen, both writing and directing, and as a product of Catholic schools born the year the picture is set, boy does he nail the look and feel. From the severity and sweetness of the nuns (the way they care for an older nun who is losing her sight is exactly how I saw nuns care for a clearly senile sister when I was in grade school) to the imbalanced hierarchy between nun and priest (servants to gods) to the design and feel of the Brooklyn grade school, cookie-cutter in many ways to my old Blessed Sacrament parish, it’s clear Shanley has been here.

Philip Seymour Hoffman, Meryl Streep and Amy Adams serve and teach at a Catholic grade school in the Bronx the year after the Kennedy assassination.  Hoffman is the “new church,” Adams is the young nun who wants to believe in his less strict methods, and Streep is the principal of the school, the resolute conservative hammer (her attack on “Frosty the Snowman” is worth the price of admission alone). A concern over Hoffman’s behavior toward an 8th grade boy, the only black kid in the school, drives the plot, but Shanley uses the crisis to have his characters exchange views on faith versus acts, modernity, religious liberalism, raising children and tolerance.  As someone who was schooled by nuns in 8 years of Catholic elementary school, and by the Jesuits in 4 years of high school, I came into the film with certain presumptions that were difficult to stow away. Some of my nuns appeared to loathe children, and one of my priests clearly behaved inappropriately (and it turns out, criminally) with students, but neither of these realities marred what was essentially a happy and more simple time of childhood. At the time, we knew this Jesuit was problematic and it strangely seemed just part of the deal, a simple hurdle or punchline (“Don’t let yourself be alone with Father Bradley” or “Christ. He’s in the locker room again””) You knew to steer a little clear, even if you weren’t really sure why. For ones who were vulnerable and thus not insulated by a casual, “he’s a little strange so watch yourself” attitude, however, Father Bradley was a more menacing and destructive force.  But he was also charismatic and he was impressive, much like the priest in this picture, adding to the lethality.

I offer my reminiscence because my background likely colored my judgment of the picture’s central conundrum, but the film is riveting no matter your background. All the principal actors are fantastic; there is not a time I see Hoffman and do not mourn his pointless and untimely demise.  And Viola Davis should have earned an Oscar for her one scene as the mother of the boy, putting her in the ranks with Beatrice Strait (Network), William Hurt (A History of Violence) and Judi Dench (Shakespeare in Love) for greatest impact in shortest screen time.

Brilliantly acted, expertly paced, endlessly fascinating, topical and armed with an Aaron Sorkin script shorn of the rat-a-tat cutesy, this film was by far and away the best picture of 2010, with a story that sucks you in immediately.  The protagonist, Mark Zuckerberg, is one you alternatively love and hate, but you always care about.  The loosely historical rise of Facebook in the setting of Harvard is about as fertile ground as you can find for a character rich story of treachery, honor and greed.  There is not a false note (save for the final scene, where a second year law associate tells Zuckerberg the score, but I niggle) or a stock character and your allegiances are constantly tested.

David Fincher, who last directed the masterpiece Zodiac, has made a masterful film.