The Barbarian Invasions
As baby-boomer deathbed fantasies go, Denys Arcand's ''The Barbarian Invasions'' is a honey, but your response to it may depend on where you fall on life's big curve. Younger audiences may look at this tale of a terminally ill Montreal academic who makes peace with his past and see all the navel-gazing self-pity that drives them crazy in their parents. Older moviegoers may see a graceful, funny, and intensely moving acknowledgment of the mistakes and connections we make in our too-short stumble through the world. Me, I sobbed like a little girl. ''Invasions'' is a sequel of sorts to Arcand's 1986 art-house hit ''The Decline of the American Empire,'' but you don't need to have seen that film to appreciate the new one. In ''Decline,'' Remy (Remy Girard) was only the most aggravating of the upper-middle-class bohos veering between socialist talk and selfish action, but in ''Invasions'' he's at the center of things and still an egocentric handful.
Nearing the final stages of cancer, Remy lies in a Montreal hospital ward that looks like a squalid Third World outpost. (''I voted for Medicare,'' he announces, ''and I'll accept the consequences.'') Still full of bluster and radicalism -- the film's title comes from Remy's response to both the events of Sept. 11 and the malignant cells ravaging his body -- he debates the existence of God with the hospital nun and treats ex-wife Louise (Dorothee Berryman) as though she had never left him over his womanizing.
When Remy's successful yuppie son Sebastien (Stephane Rousseau) arrives from Paris, the two collide like flint and steel. Father has no use for this ''prince of globalism,'' and son can only see a windbag who's running out of air. Sebastien believes in doing what's right, though, and he discreetly pays off the necessary bureaucrats and union toughs to install Remy in a private room. He arranges for his father's old friends -- the aging lefties of ''Decline'' -- to come see him off, he pays his father's students to visit, and he hires Nathalie (Marie-Josee Croze), the junkie daughter of Remy's ex-lover, to procure pain-killing heroin.
Money can buy a lot, it seems -- this is one of the movie's many jokes on the anticapitalist Remy -- but if it can clear a space for resolution, it can't buy resolution itself. Sebastien thaws slowly and perceptibly, both through his friendship with the fallen Nathalie and his growing fondness for his father. Remy, meanwhile, tosses his treasured beliefs against the wall and is shocked to discover that not many of them stick.
''Is there an ism we haven't worshiped?'' someone cracks, and the film slowly and with rich humor peels back the layers of a generation's self-absorption. To find . . . more self-absorption. Either that or a profound embrace of the mystery at the middle of it all. Your mileage may vary.
Yes, Remy is a pompous old reprobate who loves to hear himself talk, but this is what makes him human -- that and the way he finds himself listening more and more to something just out of earshot. And, yes, he gets off awfully easily, surrounded by loving friends and sailing into the unknown like a bourgeois viking.
But sometimes we need our wish-fulfillment dreams of death, if only to fully appreciate what's in front of us as we exit the theater. ''The Barbarian Invasions'' flirts with shallow pieties and glib wisdom, but in the end it dives into the deepest part of the pool.
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