Barney’s Version succeeds as something entertaining

So it’s true, Paul Giamatti won a surprise Golden Globe award for his star turn in the new movie, Barney’s Version. The surprise wasn’t that he was awarded – he turns in an excellent performance – but that he won as Best Actor in a Comedy. Barney’s Version is so far away from conventional comedy “it’s not even funny.”

And it’s equally distant from the rich absurdist tradition of black comedy. It only qualifies under the comedy banner in the most philosophical of definitions – that tragedy sees man as greater than he really is and comedy sees man as somehow less than he really is.

But mostly, this movie version of Barney is pretty much as man IS – a telling mixture of the pathetic and the profound. Barney is a Canadian TV producer who loves women, hockey, and booze. Despite his professional success, he can’t ever quite get a complete grip on his personal life – like when he falls for a guest at his own wedding.

Barney is a great role for Giamatti who gets to play a 20-something bohemian living in Rome and a desperate 60-something warding off illness, and all the decades in between, which include 3 marriages, 2 kids, and a suspicious death.

Giamatti also has a great supporting cast, including Rosamund Pike as the love of his life, and Dustin Hoffman as his crude but life-loving father.

And it can’t have escaped the filmmaker that Hoffman played another befuddled and desperate romantic in The Graduate 40 years ago.