CINEMA PARADISO: THE NEW VERSIONDirected by Giuseppe Tornatore A Miramax release Opens Friday at Ritz at the BourseLES DESTINƒES SENTIMENTALESDirected by Olivier Assayas A Wellspring release Opens Friday at Ritz Five

The movie business, any junior exec can tell you, is awash in numbers. Daily grosses, weekend grosses, net points, prints and advertising, negative pickups. But we don’t talk enough about the numbers that really matter, the ones that tell us how long before we’re ejected from the dimly lit, sticky-floored womb back into the harsh light of day. (OK, so most people see movies at night, but movie critics see most of theirs at 10 in the morning, so forgive the particular reference.) Most movies, obviously, tend to fall within the 90- to 120-minute range. Comedies and low-budget fare tend toward the shorter end of the scale, while budget and drama (especially of the action variety) can push you all the way up to 2:20 or so. After that, diminishing returns start to set in. Long running times decrease the number of screenings theaters can squeeze into a day, which obviously means less revenue -- not to mention the fact that most people would prefer to be back on the street before the meter runs out.

All of which is by way of saying that if your movie starts pushing the three-hour mark, there'd better be a damn good reason for it. There's no question that in the era of DVDs and "director's cuts," more is most assuredly more. The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring wouldn't have been much of an event movie if it had clocked in at a tidy 100 minutes, now would it? (And just wait for the DVD -- the real deal, I mean, not the cheapie due out next month -- for yet another half-hour of Hobbity goodness.) I've watched hundreds of DVDs, and I've yet to see a single deleted scene that didn't belong exactly where it ended up. A handful of directors have the clout and the integrity to resist their inclusion, but once they turn up, it's hard not to seek them out. (I still wouldn't mind a hint of the Ann-Margret character that was totally excised from The Limey, although I've no doubt the movie's better without her.)

So to a certain extent, you can't blame those who might flock to the cautiously titled Cinema Paradiso: The New Version. Since the sentimental excess of Giuseppe Tornatore's nostalgic tearjerker was what made the movie a success in the first place, it stands to a certain kind of reason that throwing more peppers in the pot would only up the ante. But sentimentality abides by the law of diminishing returns as well. With 51 minutes of material restored, Cinema Paradiso now runs for nearly three hours, a scope at which warm and fuzzy adjectives like "touching" and "nostalgic" cease to be sufficient praise. Where the movie might once have seemed slightly shaggy, it now seems bloated, lachrymose, consumed with a sense of its own self-importance.

It might seem superficial or pedantic to judge a movie based solely on length, but around about three hours, the job a movie has to accomplish changes. Telling a story is enough for a two-hour movie, but merely running through plot points won't cut it over the long haul. People who love Lawrence of Arabia or Doctor Zhivago or Ben-Hur might disagree, but if I'm going to keep a seat warm for a hefty slice of eternity, I expect to have the way I look at the world challenged, if not changed. A movie like Atanarjuat or Werckmeister Harmonies uses the long form to force the engaged viewer to re-set his or her rhythms, to breathe at a different pace, something that simply can't be accomplished in an hour and change. Conversely, the ping-pong conventional storytelling becomes tedious, even onerous, like being served too much of your favorite food.

It's especially depressing when usually inventive directors take on the long form and throw their spontaneity out the window. Olivier Assayas, the French equivalent of an American film school brat, has made such invigorating (if self-involved) films as Irma Vep, but in adapting Jacques Chardonne's turn-of-the-century novel Les Destinées Sentimentales, he explicitly apes the gilded traditionalism of Visconti, and the upshot is a film that's easy on the eyes but tough on the backside. You can keep busy filling out your mental scorecard of which clergyman is infatuated with which industrialist's niece, but the story oozes along with or without your involvement. It's too big to take notice.

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February 2, 2006
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