Those Heartbreak Kid numbers have gotten slightly worse. The Farrelly Brothers/Ben Stiller film did about $4,585,000 Friday and was projected yesterday to end up Sunday night with $14,434,000, which was less than the $15 to $16 million that was projected midday Friday and over $5 million less than the $20 million that handicappers were expecting a day or two earlier. This morning’s weekend projection, based on yesterday’s ticket sales, is a limp $13,756,000.

Jonah Weiner‘s 9.27 Slate piece about what he believes to be unconscious racism on Wes Anderson‘s part (“Unbearable Whiteness”) is interesting reading, but what I liked the most was reading a line from Bottle Rocket — spoken by Luke Wilson‘s Anthony — that I’d forgotten.

“Anthony’s last girlfriend sent him into a psychological tailspin, we learn, when she made a bourgeois proposal,” Weiner explains. “Over at Elizabeth’s beach house,” Anthony says, “she asked me if I’d rather go water-skiing or lay out. And I realized that not only did I not want to answer that question but I never wanted to answer another water-sports question, or see any of these people again for the rest of my life.”

If you come from a well-tended family and you don’t have some kind of thought like this sometime in your teens or your 20s, you have no soul. Of course, sooner or later you grow out of this, and then down the road you start working your tail off — sometimes successfully and sometimes not — so you can make enough money to afford to be with people who ask each other on weekends if they’d like to water-ski or lay out. Not that you want to hang with them, but you want to be able to afford access to their realm.

This is one of the meanest, most heartless pieces of analytical celebrity journalism I’ve ever read. I’ve never written anything this insensitive or pointless. You don’t pack it in if things aren’t working out. Maybe if you’re struggling or uncertain but not after you’ve already made it. What you do in a jam is redefine, rethink, reinvent. Quitting is completely out of the question. Anyone who suggests this is some kind of fiend.

The most important thing in Dennis Lim‘s 10.7 N.Y. Times article about two Joy Division movies that the Weinstein Co. is distributing — Anton Corbijn‘s Control, a feature film, and Grant Gee‘s Joy Division, a documentary — is a line that sums up Corbijn’s film very neatly. It says that Control “largely resists the temptation to assign blame or explanations.”

To me, that’s the all of it. In a very stark and disciplined way, Control is a “this happens, and then this happens” telling of a true-life story that does more than just relate events. Corbijn’s stripped-down, no-dramatic-emphasis approach (along with the film’s exquisite widescreen black-and-white photography) lends a certain bleak distinction, and this is what stays with you days and weeks after.

“Todd Haynes‘s Dylan film isn’t about Dylan. That’s what’s going to be so difficult for people to understand. That’s what’s going to make I’m Not There so trying for the really diehard Dylanists. That’s what might upset the non-Dylanists, who may find it hard to figure out why he bothered to make it at all. And that’s why it took Haynes so long to get it made.

“Haynes was trying to make a Dylan film that is, instead, what Dylan is all about, as he sees it, which is changing, transforming, killing off one Dylan and moving to the next, shedding his artistic skin to stay alive.” — from Robert Sullivan‘s “This Is Not a Bob Dylan Movie,” an eight-page piece (onlline anyway) about I’m Not There in the 10.7.07 issue of Sunday N.Y. Times Magazine.

There’s a good Chris Jones story about Benicio del Toro in the current Esquire that explains the genesis of a certain white T-shirt that the 40 year-old actor wears in Things We Lost in the Fire — a T-shirt with the words SAME SAME printed on the chest. Not just in a jogging scene (when you can read it plain as day) but in other scenes also — covertly, under shirts, jackets and overcoats, unseen but “there.”

“It became very important to him that Jerry” — Del Toro’s junkie character — “wear the T-shirt in Things We Lost in the Fire,” Jones writes. “It made perfect sense to Del Toro that this would be so.

“‘For me, it just, you know, said something about being levelheaded, not taking those ups and downs,'” Del Toro tells Jones. “‘I thought it said something about, you know, like, how to stay in that middle. Like, too happy would trigger him one way, too sad would trigger him another way, too much money would trigger him one way, not enough money would trigger him another way.’

“Except the film’s director, Susanne Bier, didn’t like the T-shirt,” Jones relates. “She didn’t get it. Maybe it was the language barrier; probably it was that Del Toro is flat-out hard to get. Either way, she resisted, and the Bull dug in his hooves, back and forth like that, until Bier finally relented, and today we see Jerry jogging in this curious T-shirt, spun out of some L.A. kid’s graffiti and a Vancouver souvenir shop.

“But that wasn’t the end of it. Del Toro’s known as Benny the Troublemaker not for nothing. There are other scenes, several of them, in which only he knows he’s wearing the T-shirt, a silent rebellion. He turned it inside out, wore it under blankets and bathrobes, even sneaked it onto a shelf in the background. For him, SAME SAME had become his mission. ‘Because at that point, I am that guy,’ he says. ‘I become the book.'”

Thanks to The Envelope‘s Tom O’Neil for the link to my Things We Lost in the Fire review.

All great actors are at least a little bit eccentric; some a little more so. One reason that Benicio del Toro is such a phenomenal actor is that he’s always considering the eccentric-weirdo whims that flash in his head (call them inspirations, sugges- tions, orders…whatever) and acting accordingly. All hard creative people receive messages from their inner well-of-wisdom all the time. Sometimes the messages are frivolous or unformed, but other times they tell you exactly what to do or say or the move you need to make.

I did some work on a Los Angeles magazine cover story in the summer of ’95 about the “New Noir” movie generation — guys like Bryan Singer, Don Murphy, Roger Avary, Benicio Del Toro and others who’d recently made films that had a film-noirish criminal edge.

Every big name who was featured in the piece met down at Smashbox Studios in Culver City, and the idea (hatched by editor Andy Olstein) was for everyone to hold a snub-nosed .38 or a .45 automatic and aim it at the camera. They were all okay with this except one — Del Toro.

He conveyed his opposition by motioning me over to a corner, or maybe an unoccupied room. (It happened 12 years ago; a couple of details are foggy.) He looked sad, grim. “I don’t want to do this thing with a gun,” he said. He didn’t like weapons, and he hated the cliche of aiming one at the camera. He wasn’t just disagreeing with the concept — the idea of posing with a gat seem to really disturb him deep down.

I could see that the idea was messing with his head, or perhaps with some core belief system…who knew?…so I figured what the hell. One guy not holding a gun wouldn’t be so bad, I reasoned, and it’ll probably add something to the layout. Uniformity is a mark of mediocrity, after all. So I told Del Toro not to sweat it, “this’ll be cool,” and went over to Olstein to break the news.

Gare du Nord

Olstein didn’t want to hear it. Everybody had to point a gun, he said. I should have worked harder to persuade Olstein that arguing with Del Toro was pointless, that it didn’t matter anyway, that it would give a certain distinction for one of the young Hollywood bucks to not hold a gun. But Olstein wouldn’t back off so I pussied out and went back to Del Toro to tell him Olstein was adamant. So was Del Toro. He’d dug in his heels and that was that.

Benicio went before the camera an hour or so later and refused to hold the gun, and Olstein finally caved.

The next time I ran into Del Toro along was at Gare du Nord in Paris on January 1st, 2000. He’d brought in the new millenium with some actress (I forget who) somewhere in the city, and was now waiting for a train to London where he was shooting Guy Ritchie‘s Snatch. We compared notes, talked a bit, shook hands and I walked off to rent a car. Cool coincidence, nothing more.

I’ve run into Benicio a few times since — at press junkets, a few parties, at the Mercer Hotel in Soho last year — but I’ve never quite forgotten that vulnerable but really complex look on his face — pained, worried, intractable — when he said what he said at Smashbox. Serious guy. Meant it. Formidable.

One other thing: Benicio’s junkie character is heavily into Lou Reed in Things We Lost in the Fire, and Reed’s “Sweet Jane” is heard twice in the film — early on and over the closing credits.

There’s some doubt in the air about whether the Weinstein Co. is going to give Wayne Kramer‘s Crossing Over, a Traffic-like drama about the immigration situation between Mexico and the U.S., a modest platform-type release in December. One of the reasons for uncertainty is that the Weinstein Co. recently mailed a list of ’07 films to Academy members, and Crossing Over wasn’t on it.

Kramer (The Cooler, Running Scared) directed and wrote with Harrison Ford, Cliff Curtis, Ashley Judd, Sean Penn, Ray Liotta, Alicia Braga, Alice Eve and Jim Sturgess topping the cast. My personal suspicion is that the Weinsteiners will mainly be pushing The Great Debaters (a Denzel Washington-inspires-the- students drama, based on a true story) along with I’m Not There and Control, but a person on the Crossing Over team believes nonetheless that some kind of limited opening will happen before 12.31.07.

“There’s a very strong possibility that we’ll platform in December (probably mid to late) and go wider in January,” he says. “A Crossing Over trailer should be coming out in the next couple of weeks, and Harvey [Weinstein] seems very supportive of the film. Anything can change, as it often does in this business, but the goal is to release in 2007, specifically because the immigration issue is white hot right now and the film is set in 2007 (in the week that the immigration bill failed in Congress).

“And Harrison Ford, by the way, gives one of the best performances of his career in our film. For all his fans who were disappointed that he didn’t participate in Traffic or Syriana, this one is for them. Also, Summer Bishil from Nothing is Private is a revelation, and look for good performances from Alice Eve and Jim Sturgess. And from Sean Penn, of course, who is incapable of delivering a false moment.”

So there’s a mild story-telling phenomenon afoot these days: movies about two strong assertive alpha males who never meet during the course of the film until the very end, which a friend feels amounts to a kind of cheat. I think parallel-fate stories are interesting as hell, but I know what thsi guy means. You see two tough male leads on the poster and you figure, okay, these guys are going to mix it up on some level. And then they don’t.

The worst case, he feels, was War, the Jason Statham/Jet Li flick “that marketed itself as a big action movie pitting them, when in fact they were only screen together for about 10 minutes and fighting for about five.

“American Gangster is like that too, cutting back and forth between Russell Crowe and Denzel Washington and only putting them face to face at the very end.

“By its nature, The Departed was like that, too, where we never saw Matt Damon and Leonardo DiCaprio on screen together except for that chase sequence in Boston’s North End.

Reservation Road is another example, he feels. “Joaquin Pheonix and Mark Ruffalo meet a couple of times, but they only really come together at the end for that memorable scene.

“I realize that the film is assembled like the book (which has one chapter called ‘Ethan’ and the next called ‘Dwight’) but I wonder if this is something that’s being done to help with budget since you only need the big stars for half the scenes you would normally (i.e., 3 weeks rather than 6 weeks) with little overlap?”

“Can you think of any other movies recently or in the past that followed this trend?”

Yeah, but an excellent one — Michael Mann‘s Heat. Robert De Niro and Al Pacino spoke to each other in just one scene (i.e., the face-to-face over coffee at Kate Mantilini) but is was as good as mano e mano dialogue scenes get, and it was all the movie needed. Note: They also speak to each other in the final scene, of course, but barely. De Niro: “Told you I wasn’t going back [to jail].” Pacino: “Yeah.”

Pete Hammond reminded me that Sidney Poitier and Anne Bancroft never meet at all in a 1965 drama called A Slender Thread — about Poitier trying to talk Bancroft out of committing suicide. And of course, Claude Lelouch used parallel stories (i.e., the lovers never meeting until the end) in in at least two of films — And Now, Ladies and Gentleman and (as I recall) Another Man, Another Chance.

I can’t think of any others, although I’m sure they’re numerous.

The Heartbreak Kid was never tracking through the roof, but “it looked like $20 million” or something close to that. Nikki Finke reported late yesterday afternoon that this projection had been scaled back to $15 to $16 million, and now even that figure hasn’t been met. The Farrelly Brothers/Ben Stiller film did about $4,585,000 yesterday and is projected to earn $14,434,000.

That’s a bit of a stunner. Obviously people detected something in the ads and trailers that turned them off to some degree, but what? Marital discord, betrayal, embarassment, humiliation….something. I suspected that the film’s mysogynist element might hurt business after a few days in theatres, but I didn’t see a first-weekend shortfall. The reviews were pretty bad (some were downright hateful), but this is a very funny film at times. Anyway, a big downer for Peter and Bobby Farrelly (remember those Something About Mary days when they were the kings of screen comedy and Judd Apatow wasn’t?) and not such a good thing either for Ben Stiller. It’s a tough world out there.

Good new for Michael Clayton, though. Tony Gilroy and George Clooney‘s corporate thriller opened in 15 theatres, pulled down about a little $12,000 per screen yesterday and is looking at a $44,000 average over three days and a cume of $688,000.

Wes Anderson‘s The Darjeeling Limited expanded to 19 locations and will have earned $29,000 a print by Sunday night.

The Kingdom will be #2 with $9,471,000, off 45% last weekend’s opener. It’s not going anywhere. What does Jamie Foxx‘s quote have to do with the price of rice? Nothing, but the Kingdom shortall will almost certainly be affected by this.

The fifth-place 3:10 to Yuma will end up with $3,190,000. The cume will be about $48,700,000 by Sunday night. It will obviously top $50 million before it’s done, which is pretty good for a so-so western.

Into The Wild expanded from 102 to 135 theatres, and will take in about $9000 a print for a $1.2 million weekend cume.

The Assassination of Jesse James expanded to 61 theatres and will pull in about $6700 a print for a cume of $409,000. It’s pretty much dead. I did everything I could to spread the word about Andrew Dominik‘s superb film, but if the dogs don’t want to eat the dog food you can’t stop them. (That’s a Samuel Goldwyn-ism mixed in with something else.) I pleaded with HE readers to drag their reluctant friends to this film, but very few obviously did. The moviegoers of this country are like unwashed junkies, walking around looking for quick-fix, feel-good movie highs. They don’t read reviews, they don’t care about ’70s movies, they have no depth or patience with anything, and too many of them actually enjoy hanging around Disneyland pod-people environments like the Grove, which are being replicated in every city and country around the globe. It’s pathetic, and on top of everything else it’s going to be Hilary Clinton vs. Rudy Giuliani in the Presidential race.

It’s good to have Pete Hammond‘s Oscar- handicap column back in play, although it’s running on the Envelope this year instead of Hollywood Wiretap. His opening shot is that “a little game is being played” in order to keep the profiles of likely Oscar contenders low, or at least low-ish. As in Presidential politics, nobody wants to be seen as the front-runner too early.

“Smart Academy consultants — battered by this year-round internet and mainstream media interest in the hunt for awards — are starting to act like CIA operatives, doing everything they can to prevent their prime contenders from peaking and burning out before they even open,” Hammond writes.

“One consultant, knowing this column was starting, pleaded with us not to anoint their holiday hopeful (an early front-runner) as an early front-runner. ‘If you mention the movie just don’t say we’re leading anything,’ the consultant begged.

“Another savvy campaigner, having just seen a preview of a late-December entry, waxed rhapsodic about the film’s attributes and called the film absolute perfection, a ‘real contender,’ but then warned us not to say a word. Your secret is safe here!”

A late December entry? Not much of a secret there — There Will Be Blood or The Bucket List or Charlie Wilson’s War, right? And who in their right mind would call a Rob Reiner film “a real contender” and “absolute perfection”?

Susanne Bier‘s Things We Lost in the Fire (Dreamamount, 10.19) is like a thousand emotional wind-chimes made into a quiet symphony. It’s my idea of a flat-out masterpiece, certainly within the realm of the family-tragedy drama. Bier knows exactly how to make every moment feel true and on-target, and Benicio del Toro‘s lead performance as a heroin addict struggling to recover and stay that way is the best I’ve seen this year from anyone of either gender, country or classification. Yeah, that’s what I said.

Benicio del Toro in Things We Lost in the Fire

I saw Bier’s film yesterday afternoon and came out weak-kneed. I knew it was doing something really right and dead-center five minutes in. Films about healing and recovery (the oppressors in this case being grief and drug addiction) can sound dreary as hell when you read the capsule descriptions, but there are some that settle down into themselves and strike deep, sonorous chords (in the vein of, say, Ordinary People, which isn’t as subtle and carefully shaded as this one). Add the curious but unmistakable chemistry of spot-on performances (i.e., the ones that never seem to try to do anything but wind up doing everything) and you’re left with something that can feel almost miraculous.

Dreamamount is sitting on Things We Lost in the Fire like a chicken sits on an egg. Bluhhhhck! They’re keeping it warm and protected, but they’re not exactly doing the old ballyhoo cartwheel. I’m guessing that the film hasn’t played all that strongly with Average Joes (i.e., a distaste for stories dealing with drug users?), and that reactions from critics haven’t been universally ecstatic (despite others having had reactions similar to mine), and that a logical decision has been made by marketers to (one deduces) put a cap on spending. Promote the film modestly, put it into theatres two weeks from now, and let it die.

Good smallish films like Things We Lost in the Fire are faintly promoted to death all the time by big-studio marketing departments, who are best (here we go with the cliche) at selling “event” movies, tentpolers, comedies. A movie like Bier’s should probably be released by a TLC outfit like Picturehouse or Fox Searchlight or ThinkFilm or Sony Classics. Movies this good should somehow be given flight. I only know I’m not feeling the presence of this film anywhere (not from ads or from fellow journalists…nothing), and it makes me want to kick something.

I don’t care what others may be saying. I know it when I’ve seen something truly exceptional. Movies about small emotional brewings that gradually turn into magic potions simply don’t get any better than this.

And there can be no beating around the bush about Del Toro’s performance as Jerry the junkie, a once-successful lawyer who’s slid down into the pit. Over the course of this two-hour film he climbs out of his drug hole, brightens up, chills out and settles in, relapses, almost dies, and then gradually climbs out of it again. I’m starting to see this actor (whom his friends and Esquire magazine profilers call “Benny”) as almost God-like. He’s holding bigger mountains in the palm of his hand, right now, than De Niro held in the ’70s and ’80s. He’s one of the top four or five superman actors we have out there. There isn’t a frame of his performance that doesn’t hit some kind of behavioral bulls-eye.

I’ll tell you this — when journalists who’ve seen Things We Lost in the Fire go “I don’t know…meh” and then say in the same breath that some other so-so film is “pretty good” there’s some kind of virus out there that I don’t want to give a name to.

I know that at least two critic friends (one of whom I saw it with yesterday) aren’t big fans. But this is a film that’s been kissed by something. Bier (Open Hearts, Brothers, After The Wedding) is a master of intimacy and soul-searchings that feel un-rhymed and.uncalculated, but which really sink in. The behavior in her films never seems pushed or “performed,” and this is no exception. There’s no question in my head that Fire is her best ever.

I’m really not understanding the subdued response so far to Del Toro’s perform- ance. He might floor everyone next year with his Che Guevara in The Argentine and Guerilla, but Jerry is the best thing he’s done up to now — twitchier than Fenster in The Usual Suspects, weaker and more vulnerable than Javier Rodriguez in Traffic, less ravaged and down-heady than Jack Jordan in 21 Grams.

And Halle Berry has saved her career with her fine performance as Audrey, a Seattle-based mother of two who loses her husband Brian (David Duchovny, rejoicing in his best part since The Rapture), a very successful architect and house-builder, to an act of idiotic violence one night. It’s easily her finest work since Monster’s Ball.

Audrey isn’t a weakling, but she’s prone to emotionally needy behavior at times. Her kids, a six year old buy named Dory (Micah Berry) and a ten year old girl named Harper (Alexis Llewellyn), are as stunned as Audrey but, being kids, seem to have it in them to cope better and recover faster.

Jerry, caught up in a long downswirl and living in a flop house, had been Brian’s best friend since childhood. He’s dazed and out of it when told of Brian’s death, and has to be driven to the funeral reception. Audrey resented him when Brian was alive — she saw him as pure deadweight –but she feels lost and zombified in the days and weeks after the funeral, and one day she invites Jerry to live with her and the kids in a room attached to, but not part of, the house. Not as a mercy or pity gesture (although it’s partly that), but because she feels on some level that she needs some remnant of Brian to keep on with, or at least be near to.

So she helps Jerry out, and then he helps her out (particularly with the kids), and then things suddenly go wrong due to some moments of near-panic on Audrey’s part, which triggers the same in Jerry and before you know it it’s recovery time again and the slow, always difficult process.

Bier and screenwriter Allan Loeb stay as far away as you can imagine from the standard beats and turns in stories like these, first and foremost being the avoid- ance of romantic entanglement (although this is flirted with briefly). The sense of restraint and searching for “a different way to milk it” in Things We Lost in the Fire is constant and, in its own way, quite soothing. Delightful, in fact.

Cheers to a superb supporting cast, particularly John Carroll Lynch (as a next- door neighbor going through his own strife and uncertainty), Alison Lohman and Omar Benson Miller.

Things We Lost in the Fire producer Sam Mendes (l.), director Susanne Bier (r.)

Sam Mendes, director of American Beauty, Road to Perdition and Jarhead, is one of the producers. I don’t know what he specifically did to help make it turn out this well, but whatever it was, good for him. (Maybe he just got Bier hired, and then sat around and drank Starbucks coffee on the set.) In fact, hooray for everyone and anyone who had anything to do with the making of this film.

I can’t guarantee that N.Y. Times critic Manohla Dargis will dislike this film, and that her kinder, gentler colleague A.O. Scott will review it and say complimentary things, but I suspect this may be the case. A little voice is telling me this.

I ran down to the Four Seasons this morning for a breakfast chat with Michael Clayton director-writer Tony Gilroy, and right away it was relaxation time. I asked him two or three toughies, but we talked about everything and could have gone on and on. It felt so easy and unforced that I figured I’d run 95% of the recording, or about 45 minutes worth. It involves the ordering of food and personal stuff here and there, and the sound skips once or twice.

Michael Clayton director-writer Tony Gilroy in the Four Seasons dining room — Friday, 10.5.07, 10:20 am

Michael Clayton is a tense adult thriller about some unsettled and anxious people, but it’s also the kind of film you’d almost like to crawl inside of and settle down in. (I wanted to taste the Italian bread that Tom Wilkinson carries around in a certain scene.) Like American Gangster, I could have rolled with a three-hour version. Said it last month, saying it again — Gilroy’s film is “always ‘on the case’ and never boring. The material that Gilroy, the director-writer, runs with feels as seasoned and authentic as this kind of thing can be. There’s no shovelling — no ‘oh, come on…give me a fucking break’ moments whatsoever.”

“When critics complain about the dumbing down of movies into franchise popcorn, what we’re really doing is yearning for a terrifically engrossing, tethered-to-the-real-world drama like Michael Clayton.” — Owen Gleiberman, Entertainment Weekly.

“This uncommonly intelligent thriller evokes the great films of the 1970s (All the President’s Men, Klute, Three Days of the Condor) that managed to elicit gritty urban realism while maintaining a suave sense of style and moral complexity.” — Ann Hornaday, Washington Post.

Incidentally, Gilroy mentioned that the latest rumor is that the Writers Guild now may be looking to strike on November 1st. Anyone…?