Last night I saw the final, slightly shortened cut of Derek Cianfrance‘s Blue Valentine at the Hamptons Film Festival. It’s about ten minutes shorter than the Sundance version I saw nine months ago, and it really got sunk in this time around. Call me a flake if you want, but it’s a cleaner and less mannered film now, and I felt curiously touched and moved by it even. Certainly by the acting.

This is a Best Picture candidate, I now feel, and Michelle Williams is a Best Actress contender, for sure. I suppose I was so distracted the first time around by Gosling’s intense but curiously mannered performance that I couldn’t see the forest for the trees.

Maybe my initial reaction was due in part to Sundance exhaustion (which can lead to a kind of fuck-all peevishness), but somehow the neo-Cassevetes vibe seemed to amount to much more this time.

My Sundance ’10 review wasn’t exactly a pan. I called Blue Valentine “a pretty good film made by some undeniably talented folks who would rather shoot themselves than make another relationship movie in the same old way.” I expressed irritation with Gosling (“always doing that rob-bop-a-loo-bop, always focused on behaving in his own particular way and making damn sure that we notice this”) but I didn’t convey disdain or disrespect for Blue Valentine as a whole.

Gosling is a trip though. I met Cianfrance at a party late yesterday afternoon, and it hit me finally that Gosling has literally based his performance on an imitation of Cianfrance — particularly the director’s high forehead, thinning-hair coif (in those parts of the film in which Gosling is playing “older”) and his dese-dem-dose patois. On its own terms the performance is still bothersome in certain ways (the fact that Gosling smokes about 87 cigarettes during this film, several of them while carrying his daughter around, drives me up the wall) but at least I get now what he was doing, weird as that may sound.

In any event, the new Blue Valentine is proof that making a film shorter really can lead to salvation from time to time. It was trimmed, of course, at the urging of distributor Harvey Weinstein, and as such is now one of the best arguments for the Harvey Scissorhands approach that I’ve ever seen.

Us critic Thelma Adams, Blue Valentine director Derek Cianfrance following last night’s showing in East Hampton.

Here are portions of the January 2010 review that I still stand by:

“[This] is an old-fashioned arthouse relationship movie with next to no story but an intensely observational art-bubble thing going on in which we’re shown a relationship between Ryan Gosling and Michelle Williams in two time periods — young, hot and feverishly in love and somewhat older, frustrated and not in love or certainly less so.

“For the most part Blue Valentine is about Cianfrance showing off his John Cassevetes chops — one deep invadin’, high falutin’ close-up intimacy moment after another with the camera doing the old duck-and-weave.

“It’s basically about Gosling and Michelle Williams giving us their acting-class utmost as a couple of not-very-bright instinctuals who want each other and lah-dee-dah-dee-dah and then they’re older and life is harder with the burden of the cute little daughter and all. I couldn’t tell what was wrong except for Williams being frustrated with Gosling’s blue-collar complacency and Gosling going ‘whassa matter?….wait, wait, whassa matter?’ and smoking so many damn cigarettes (even while holding his daughter) that I wanted to pick him off with a high-powered rifle.

“Gosling is inventive and never predictable, and I’m going to loathe him for years and years to come for this very nimbleness, this determination to imprint and infiltrate each and every film he’s in with a Ryan Gosling mood spray. He’s a behavioralist who lives inside a very deep mine shaft, and when he takes over a movie (as he does this one) you’re suddenly deep in that mine with him and noticing that air is thin and wondering why but feeling it might be time to get the hell out of there, and yet knowing this would be heresy because Gosling is, at the end of the day, a very intense presence with a very shifty bag of tricks that most other actors would never devise, much less resort to. I mean that in a half-flattering way.”

At the end of my Sundance review I wrote that “there’s never a moment in which you’re saying to yourself ‘this is crap, I can’t take this.’ What you’re saying is ‘this a high-end thing made by some fiercely committed people, and I can barely stand it.'” I didn’t feel that way last night. Instead I was saying to myself, “You let your Sundance fatigue get the better of you to some extent, and to a large extent it’s now a better film with some of the indulgences removed.”

Being a serious admirer of Julian Schnabel‘s films, it gives me no pleasure to report that Miral, his latest, doesn’t work. I thought about it all last night after the 6:30 pm showing, and I just can’t fathom how a guy who made a film as strong and moving as Before Night Falls could blow it as badly as he does with Miral. I thought perhaps the bad Venice Film Festival reviews were driven by the film’s pro-Palestinian viewpoint, but no — it’s about chops and flat writing and decisions that don’t blend or pay off.

I felt so badly after last night’s showing that I left the theatre without staying for the q & a. The crowd reaction was very flat when the end credits appeared — no applause, no buzz.

I don’t have time to throw a twelve-paragraph review together (screenings and activities beckon), but I’ll try to have something up by the end of the day. Maybe. I’m very sorry, but things don’t always work out. Art isn’t easy, but Schnabel will rebound. I was going to say “this is just a transitional phase” but what isn’t transitional?

Director-screenwriter Tony Gilroy (Duplicity, Michael Clayton) called this morning with some notes and corrections regarding early reports about The Bourne Legacy, which he’s writing and will also direct.

The Bourne Legacy, for openers, is simply taking the title from Robert Ludlum’s book and “will not use the story,” Gilroy says. “It’s a completely original screenplay.” Secondly, “This is not a reboot or a recast or a prequel. No one’s replacing Matt Damon. There will be a whole new hero, a whole new chapter…this is a stand-alone project.

“The easiest way to think of it is an expansion or a reveal,” Gilroy says. “Jason Bourne will not be in this film, but he’s very much alive. What happened in the first three films is the trigger for what happens. I’m building a legend and an environment and a wider conspiracy…the world we’re making enhances and advances and invites Jason Bourne’s return [down the road].

“Everything you saw in the first three films actually happened, and everyone who got into will be rewarded for paying attention. We’re going to show you the bigger picture, the bigger canvas. When you see what we’re going and see what we’re doing it’ll be pretty obvious….but Jason Bourne’s actvities in the first three films is the immediate trigger.”

Update: Boxoffice.com’s Phil Contrino is reporting that The Social Network will take the weekend with an estimated $15,300,000 by Sunday night with an excellent hold from last weekend, down only 32%. Life As We Know It will come in second with $14,800,000, and Secretariat will be third with $13,800,000.

Earlier: By the idiot-wind standards of weekend box-office, Life As We Know It — an obviously problematic relationship comedy with a 28% Rotten Tomatoes score — appears to have edged out The Social Network yesterday. But that’s just Friday. Others are seeing a Social Network win by Sunday night. Two sources are reporting indications that Secretariat, forecasted by some as a possible weekend champ, will be a third-place runner. “Close as hell” is how Boxoffice.com’s Phil Contrino put it this morning.

Deadline‘s Nikki Finke reported that the critically reviled Kathryn Heigl-Josh Duhamel romance took in $5 million and that The Social Network did about $4.5 million with Secretariat in third place with $4.2 million. But Steve Mason posted figures last night that has The Social Network coming in first with Friday earnings of $4.7 million and $14.75 million by Sunday night, Secretariat second with $4.5 million Friday and $14.5 million cume, and Life As We Know It finishing first yesterday with $5 million but softening over the weekend and finishing with $14 million even.

For what it’s worth, an MSNBC showbiz reporter said that The Social Network appears to be on track to come in first with$15 million, followed by Life As We Know It and Secretariat in second and third place.

The first event I attended after arriving at the Hamptons Film Festival yesterday afternoon was a discussion performance by Miral director Julian Schnabel and moderator Alec Baldwin. It happened at Guild Hall in East Hampton, which is where the festival is pretty much centered.

Knowing that Venice Film Festival responses to Frieda Pinto‘s lead performance were a bit dicey, I asked Schnabel about his reasons for choosing Pinto. I made the mistake of saying I hadn’t yet seen the film (I caught it a couple of hours later) and that my question was “innocent.” Schnabel drawled back, “Nothing from you is innocent, Jeffrey. And I mean that.” Beat, beat. “Naah, I’m just fucking with you,” he added, and then went into his reasons.

A primary factor, he said, is that Pinto closely resembes Rula Jebreal, the Palestinian-born journalist who wrote the 2004 book and the screenplay.

I’m obviously a passionate admirer of Matt Reeves‘ Let Me In, and so I’m posting anything that will keep the fire going. So I have no qualms about running two quotes from two significant admirers of the film — Stephen King and original Let The Right One In novelist John Ajvide Lindquist — that were provided last night by Relativity.

King: “Let Me In is a genre-busting triumph. Not just a horror film, but the best American horror film in the last 20 years. Whether you’re a teenager or a film-lover in your 50s, you’ll be knocked out. Rush to it now. You can thank me later.”

Lindqvist: “Let The Right One In is a great Swedish movie. Let Me In is a great American movie. There are notable similarities and the spirit of Tomas Alfredson is present. But Let Me In puts the emotional pressure in different places and stands firmly on its own legs. Like the Swedish movie it made me cry, but not at the same points. Let Me In is a dark and violent love story, a beautiful piece of cinema and a respectful rendering of my novel for which I am grateful. Again.”

In a 10.7 push-back piece, Roger Ebert has accused Salon‘s Andrew O’Hehir of going all goony-bird on Secretariat by calling it “a work of creepy, half-hilarious master-race propaganda almost worthy of Leni Riefenstahl, and all the more effective because it presents as a family-friendly yarn about a nice lady and her horse…in its own strange way, Secretariat is a work of genius.”

It is necessary, of course, for O’Hehir to respond to Ebert today, and then for Ebert to respond again with an “oh, yeah?” and others jumping in. Let’s keep this thing going throughout the weekend, at least. Push comes to shove.

Ebert’s logical side argues that little if any of O’Hehir’s perceptions of underlying Secretariat creepiness are valid, and that O’Hehir is basically pulling these impressions out of hjs ass. That’s really not the case here. I for one believe that Secretariat is rancid with secular Disneyfied Republican nostalgia for the days of white-culture dominance and Christian picket-fence serenity.

Of course, Secretariat director Randall Wallace indulges in standard subterfuge by camoflauging his sentiments in the apparel of a standard horse-racing sports saga. Ebert knows, of course, that the essence of a film can always be detected in the things that are not precisely said — in the subtext and under-currents. And yet he seems to be saying in his retort piece that Secretariat has no subtext, that it’s a simple and straightforward saga with no tricks up its sleeve.

I was okay with much…okay, half of Secretariat. I loved the purely physical and purely spiritual horse-racing aspects. But without precisely “saying” what it believes, this is a film that infers the following in a hundred different ways: “Isn’t the affluent and hermetic white-person world we’re showing you a nice place? The middle-class propriety, ‘O Happy Day’ played on the soundtrack twice, the submissive and gentle-mannered darkie horse groomer and the inferences of Christianity and so on…and wouldn’t it be kinda nice if the world of today with Barack Obama messing things up was a bit more like it? Maybe if we all get together, we can bring some of this atmosphere back and restore some of the old greatness?” Michelle Bachmann, trust me, will absolutely adore this film.

Ebert’s own review, remember, called Secretariat “a great film.” Ebert clearly feels strong emotional ties to the Secretariat legend (as do I — I worship what that horse did in the ’73 Belmont Stakes race), and perhaps by recollections of his own life in 1973 and the way things were going…who knows? He says in his original review that the film made him choke up.

Let’s reconsider what O’Hehir said. Secretariat “uses a ‘true story’ as the foundation for a pop-historical reverie that seems to reference enduring American virtues — self-reliance, stick-to-it-iveness, etc. — without encouraging you to think too much about their meaning or context. Although the troubling racial subtext is more deeply buried here than in The Blind Side, Secretariat actually goes much further, presenting a honey-dipped fantasy vision of the American past as the Tea Party would like to imagine it, loaded with uplift and glory and scrubbed clean of multiculturalism and social discord.”

Responses from the HE chorus would be greatly appreciated.

With the recent departures of Eugene Hernandez and Todd McCarthy creating a certain heebie-jeebie atmosphere at Indiewire, columnist Anne Thompson has been named indiewire’s Editor at Large. A good call, hearty congrats. Seasoned perspective, honcho status, leadership qualities.

Anne Thompson

I don’t have a problem with Kathryn Heigl, as some do (or did), but there’s definitely something clenched about her. And clenched people make me feel clenched. I do know that films of this sort have over-used those instant-dislike scenarios (i.e., a guy being blase and aloof on a first date and the woman despising him for this). There must be other ways, other cliches. Note: I wasn’t even invited to see this thing.