Kathmandu :

Thank God the Oscars are over. In this column last week you had William Goldman, screenwriter and author saying that nobody knew anything. For the Oscars of 2007 we know that the Academy voted for loathsome characters played by Daniel Day-Lewis in There Will Be Blood, Javier Bardem in No Country For Old Men and Tilda Swinton in Michael Clayton. Next year everyone will probably vote for sugary sweet characters until then...

... Dedication is a movie with a lot of sugary sweet characters disguised behind a thin veil of toughness and outright eccentricity.

It shows New York life at its loneliest where lives don’t touch very often and earning a living is fairly difficult. As for love, forget about it. When it does come it happens in a by the numbers routine. 1: Boy meets girl. 2: Boy losses girl. 3: Boy might get back girl if he gives his neuroses a rest.

Writes Roger Ebert, “Henry Roth, the hero of Dedication, is a writer who does one thing correctly: He talks like he’s taking dictation from himself. ‘Life is nothing but the occasional burst of laughter rising above the interminable wail of grief.’ He writes children’s books, which is not in his nature to do, because he hates children along with the rest of the human race. What kind of man goes out of his way to tell children that there is no Santa Claus?

He has written a best seller, Marty the Beaver, with his collaborator Rudy (Tom Wilkinson), an illustrator. Then Rudy dies. This strands Henry without his only friend. Henry, you understand, is a very odd man with a lot of problems, which seem less like a consistent syndrome than a collection of random neurotic tics.

We meet his editor, Planck (Bob Balaban), who sits behind his desk, looking mournful at the prospect of there being no further adventures of Marty the Beaver. He orders Henry to team up with another illustrator, Lucy (Mandy Moore), this despite Henry’s inability to allow anyone into his life for purposes of collaboration on Marty the Beaver or anything else. It’s at about that point that Dedication jumps onto the rails and follows a familiar rom-com pathway: Will these two completely incompatible people work out their differences and eventually fall in love? What are the odds, considering they have the lead roles in the movie? Have we spent all that money only to see Mandy Moore’s occasional laughter fading off into an interminable wail of grief? I think not.

Once Henry and Lucy have been handcuffed together by the plot, for example, I know with a certainty that they will end up in love. But I also know the screenplay structure requires a false dawn before the real dawn. There must be an element that threatens their obligatory happiness. And there is, in the person of Jeremy (Martin Freeman), her former lover, now back in the picture. And there must be a private problem of her own to balance Henry’s peculiarities. And there is, in the person of her mother (Dianne West), who wants to evict her, raising the spectre that she will move in with the Wrong Person.

In a movie of unlikelihoods, the most problematical is Balaban, as the publisher, offering Lucy $200,000 as a bonus to do all she can to make Henry function again. If there was money like that in children’s books, Marty the Beaver would have a lot of new little friends.