Nightwatching

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      Directed by Peter Greenaway. Starring Martin Freeman and Emily Holmes. Rated 18A. Opens Friday, April 3, at the Cinemark Tinseltown

      Because it’s a pain in the ass to show what really goes into the creative process, artists of all kinds are usually freighted on-screen with what you might call spiritual melodrama—a special brand of gossip reserved for geniuses and other famous freaks.


      Watch the trailer for Nightwatching.

      On its meticulously art-directed surface, Peter Greenaway’s vision of Rembrandt van Rijn isn’t quite kitsch. But the combination of bloodless tableaux (the director’s specialty), faux-Shakespearean dialogue, and laughably overwrought improvisation constitutes its own brand of bullshit. At more than two hours, with almost no depiction of the groundbreaking painter at work and few views of the paintings themselves, there’s time to spread a lot of highfalutin manure.

      Although one is initially intrigued to encounter the physically appropriate Martin Freeman (late of The Office [British edition] and Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy) as Rembrandt, the film quickly proves itself a dimly lit Hall of Shame for all actors involved—especially Freeman, who struggles all too visibly to stay on top of absurd material. Others include Eva Birthistle as Rembrandt’s fatally coughing wife, Jodhi May as a coarse later mistress, and Toby Jones as—well, I have no idea who he was supposed to be.

      The pathetic nub of a plot involves our Remby’s conviction that subjects of his famed military painting later called The Night Watch were part of a conspiracy to murder one of their number. Greenaway’s attempt at CSI: Olde Amsterdam is filtered randomly between scenes that refuse to resonate with each other, and amid speeches that (Cockney-inflected profanity aside) become increasingly incomprehensible to whatever’s left of the audience. The fact that screeching orchestral music drowns out much of the palaver doesn’t help. But in the end, it doesn’t hurt, either. Here, the painter sometimes has no clothes—the emperor, none at all.

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