Shared Darkness

Leslie Bibb), and two sociable, foul-mouthed sons, Walker
and Texas Ranger. Yes, life is good for Ricky, and his win-at-all-costs
approach has made him a national hero in short order.

A frightening crash, however, sends him to the hospital and robs him
of his nerve, and Ricky falls on hard times. Booted from his racing
team and left by his wife, Ricky returns to his small hometown and gets
a job delivering pizzas. Cal and Lucius (Michael Clarke Duncan), his
ex-crew chief, try to coax him back into action, but it takes
reconnecting with his father and mother (Jane Lynch) and former
assistant Susan (Amy Adams) to put Ricky back on the winning track.

On a more than subliminal but hardly politicized level, Talladega Nights plays as a filmic extension of the trademark man-child obliviousness Ferrell brought to his Saturday Night Live
interpretation of President George W. Bush. Squinty and possessing of
an unerring confidence — he describes himself as a big, hairy American
winning machine — Ricky’s mantra is, “If you ain’t first, you’re last.”
He’s funny, yes, but he works as a character at least partly because
he’s such a product of the current zeitgeist — a swaggering cowboy
brought down to Earth. It’s no particular coincidence, either, that the
movie’s “villain” is a gay Frenchman, Formula One racecar driver Jean
Girard (an amusing Sacha Baron Cohen), who shows up to challenge Ricky
for NASCAR superiority and expedites his fall from grace.

As a film, Talladega Nights evinces much more of a sense of rootedness than Anchorman; cinematographer Oliver Wood (The Bourne Identity)
captures the pulse-pounding reality of the racing sequences in
poker-faced fashion, and director Adam McKay and Ferrell’s script has a
more finely attuned and (nominally) realistic trajectory. While still
seeded with whiplash reversals, the underlying impulses and motivations
are all real, and part of the difference between the two collaborations
is that Talladega Nights drags the audience in on the
characters’ pop-psychological evaluations. Ergo, dim bulb Cal is
subconsciously aware that he holds jealousy over Ricky always finishing
first and refusing to share the spoils (“I’ll just bury it deeper down
inside!” he exclaims agreeably after Ricky declines to let him win),
just as Reese is aware of his primal urge to sabotage things when he
gets a belated chance at some semblance of familial normalcy. The old
adage is “if you can’t fix it, feature it,” and Talladega Nights
does this to wryly winning effect, even going so far as to tweak the
movie’s sponsor and product placement deals, of which Ricky is
obviously a proxy holder.

While not without a small handful of dry spells, the laugh factor in Talladega Nights
is certainly as high as if not higher than anything else this summer. Possessing pitch
perfect timing and finely honed improv instincts, Reilly and Cole are
excellent additions to the cast, and really flesh out their characters.
Ferrell, meanwhile, delivers another indelible and hilarious character
— deserving, indeed, of his own ballad. (Columbia, PG-13, 108 mins.)

Swimming Pool, Mulholland Drive or even Identity,
there’s neither a strongly rooted and compulsively sympathetic central
character, nor an engaging, swirling elusiveness to the movie that
keeps it dancing ahead of total cognition until after the final reel.
Gabriel in and of himself is a well sketched and fully
three-dimensional character, and decently embodied by Williams, but his
obsession here with Pete seems arbitrary (the result of heretofore
obscured paternal instincts?), leaving the actor to fall back on that
trademark look of intestinal discomfort that substitutes, variously,
for pained worry, pained compassion and pained disappointment. As it
moves forward, the film, too, becomes rife with implausibilities. Joe
Morton plays Gabriel’s agent in a few scenes and Sandra Oh wanders in
as a friend of his, and while they feed and agree with Gabriel’s
doubts, none of these ostensibly bright people seems to have any good
ideas about how to discern the truth in non-dangerous and non-creepy
ways. Without stronger connective tissue to the factitious disorder on display, The Night Listener is an exercise in moody obligations. (Miramax, R, 82 mins.)