Duddy Revisited, Sort of

The dominant memory I think most people have of The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz (1974) is Richard Dreyfuss’s immense energy, informed by huge doses of chutzpah.

Apparently Dreyfuss thought his debut-feature performance was the end of his career, but he was thankfully wrong.

There was also the famous scene in which avant-garde film-maker Friar, played to drunken, dissolute perfection by the late Denholm Elliott, makes a video for the ambitious Duddy’s company, which specialises in bar mitzvahs.

According to one site he intercuts African dances and circumcision rites in his work of “art”. I seem to remember him using World War ll themes with screaming German Stukas. Maybe that was included, maybe it’s another movie. These are the tricks memory plays on us.

Anyway, Barney’s Version has very much the same feel. Our protagonist is still in the film business, running a company called Totally Unnecessary Productions. He also has an important male figure who my old man would have called a “character”. Dustin Hoffman just gets less mannered and therefore better and his slightly corrupt, retired cop and father Izzy is a pleasure to behold.

But then the whole thing teems with memorable characters, though Africans might be offended that the one person who gets no continuity happens to be black. If he gets Barney’s first wife pregnant and gets a deserved whack for it, then Scott Speedman’s drunken, drugged-up writer shtups Barney’s second wife but our dubious hero remains loyal to him. Just saying…

Barney is a hard-drinking, perpetual cigar-smoking, ice hockey-loving, capitalist, Jewish Canadian. The big secret to his character is his passion, his chutzpah because, let’s face it, the portly and hirsute Paul Giamatti is not exactly leading-man material.

Granted, he has to play Barney from about 25 to 65, and he did get his Golden Globe for that, but whether the beautiful and slim Rosamund Pike’s Miriam would be as attracted to and tolerant of him as she is, level-headed though her radio announcer persona might be, is debatable. And if she is so tolerant of his many vices, why then does she leave him and their children for a single lapse of discretion by Barney?

Lastly, what other version is there? The one in which a detective tries to prove that Barney actually murdered that useless writer friend of his? It's not a really developed version, though it takes a delicious swipe at the media for getting the story all cock-eyed.

If the film is never boring, often hilarious and a rich tapestry of characters and mores, then it's a sometimes uneven echo of  Duddy - and it requires a little suspension of romantic disbelief.

Neil Sonnekus