Bernard and Doris

 2/4

Starring: Ralph Fiennes, Susan Sarandon

Not Rated (probable R for Language and Some Sexuality/Nudity)

The story of the twilight years of tobacco billionairess Doris Duke and her relationship with her gay butler, to whom she left her entire fortune. - iMDb's plot summary of "Bernard and Doris

That sentence alone made me want to watch this movie.  I have a soft spot for nostalgia based buddy pics, or movies that look back in time at a life long past.  "Memoirs of a Geisha," "For the Boys," and so on.  Sure, they're manipulative but that's part of the charm.  Someone didn't tell that to Bob Balaban.

Doris Duke (Sarandon) is a temperamental heiress with more money than she can spend and is never without a glass of booze (or asking for some).  Early in the film, she fires her butler for bringing her fruit that is too cold.  Talk about your nightmare employers.  Then in walks a soft-spoken man who goes to work before she even interviews him.  His name is Bernard Lafferty (Fiennes), and he's everything she wants and needs: "he puts up with me," she says.  He remains at her side until her death in 1993.

A buddy movie like this needs two things: strong character identification and a director who knows how to skillfully tug on the heartstrings.  "Bernard and Doris" has neither.  The lackluster screenplay shows what happens, but the dialogue is so limp and the situations are so bland that we are told that they are buddies.  Not shown.  The most important part of a movie like this, scenes that show how the bond between them is forming, are missing.

What is does have is two strong actors.  Few thespians are more reliable than Ralph Fiennes and Susan Sarandon.  Of the two, Sarandon fares better.  Probably because she's in a role that perhaps only she could play.  Fiennes is so mild-mannered that Lafferty hardly has a personality to call his own.  The late James Rebhorn makes a small appearance as Duke's sniveling but well-intentioned lawyer, but he only has a minute or two of screen time.

Bob Balaban, known primarily as a character actor, opts to present this movie with as little emotion as possible.  He avoids manipulation, and remains unaware that generating grand emotions is part of the game in a movie like this.  Maybe he wanted to highlight the co-dependency issues going on between the two (both are alcoholics).  If so, its undeveloped.  A director must be sure of what he wants his film to be and how he wants his audience to feel about it.  Balaban isn't sure, so neither was I.

There are elements that work.  Perhaps surprisingly, the chemistry between Fiennes and Sarandon is there.  The two make a good team.  But Balaban never finds a way to capitalize on that.  I rarely felt the intimacy that existed between them.  Probably because it doesn't have a narrative arc.  Just a series of scenes of them as better friends than they were in the previous one.

The best I can say is that it's better than his earlier film, the unspeakably bad "Parents."

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