Movie Nation

The pitch? Twinkly Michael Caine‘s a boozy crank of a writer, with sulky Aubrey Plaza the hapless, put-out “silver spoon” publisher trapped escorting the old drunk on a wintry book tour through, not bookstores, but accommodating bars.

Yes, “Best Sellers” could have been a hoot, leaving no drunk gag unrepeated and no Plaza dead-eyed double-take undelivered.

It isn’t. But that was never the goal of this uneven but sometimes warm, sometimes cute riff on publishing, writers, the book-flogging racket and an old man’s raging at the dying of the light. Neither great nor “awful” to any fan of reading, Johnny Walker Black Label, Caine or Plaza, think of “Best Sellers” as a light, sentimental page turner, more a low-hanging-fruit summer read than highbrow literary fiction.

Plaza is Lucy Stanbridge, who’s taken over her father’s tony New York imprint and is making rather a hash of things. Her YA authors are earning scathing reviews, and nothing else.

She and her aide Rachel (Ellen Wong, funny) brainstorm ideas to save the publishing house, and hit on the idea of reviving Lucy’s dad’s most important discovery. Sure, Harris Shaw hasn’t published anything since his breakthrough novel half a century before. And they’re not certain he’s still alive. But there’s this contract. And once upon a time he got an advance.

He’s “a drunk,” “a recluse” and “a madman” who “shot his last assistant.” He fled Britain as a tax evader and was “kicked out of Ireland for ‘poor behavior.’ IRELAND!”

“The world doesn’t need anything new from me,” he growls.

But he “owes me a book.” And after she’s confronted the souse with this news and gotten past the shotgun he points at the unwelcome outside world, after he’s chased her away and just as she’s about to finally sell-out to an old rival and ex-lover (Scott Speedman), Shaw hands over a manuscript.

All she’s got to do is raid her trust fund, publish “The Future is X-Rated,” publicize the hell out of it and save her company. All he’s got to do is do a “bloody tour” promoting it.

That tour begins with a disastrous but attention-grabbing meltdown in New York. As the cancellations pour in, a better idea supplants the first. They’ll tour bars instead, with the Great Writer doing his tipsy Dylan Thomas meets Norman Mailer shtick and Lucy selling books and pushing the title towards “critical mass,” that moment when a novel enters not just buzz, but the best seller lists.

This is the sunny, silly opening half of “Best Sellers,” Caine doing a foggy, self-destructive, anything-to-NOT-read-from-his-book performance art turn, Plaza’s Lucy driving him around in his ’80s vintage right-hand-drive Jaguar, trying to turn lemons into lemonade. She videos his nightly “BullSHYTE” tirades, the hip young barflies egging him on as his “readings” go viral.

No, the books still don’t sell. But he’s a Youtube star, for what that’s worth.

“I don’t GET it. Hipsters are supposed to love old things! Thrift stores and vinyl and communism.”

He just drinks his Johnny Walker, smokes his White Wolf cigars and hiccups through insults.

“You’re not very good at your job, are you ‘Silver Spoons?'”

The second half of “Best Sellers” slows down, almost to a halt, as assorted personal issues, “secrets” and the physical and psychological damage catches up with one and all.

But Cary Elwes makes the most of two scenes playing an effete New York Times book critic with a Capote complex. He’s the source of that first busted reading. Then we hear him on an NPR interview that manages to be even snootier than the real thing.

And there’s this lovely little touch, a grace note in actress turned director Lina Roessler’s somewhat ungainly debut feature film. Lucy hits on a clever way of getting “readings” of the new novel, its actual words, out before the public — just fans, reading a select passage here and there, video recorded and posted online.

It gets at the special relationship between writer and reader and at that increasingly rare corner of the public that loves words strung together in poetic, evocative sentences and thoughts. Lovely.

You’d have to go pretty far wrong to get me to pan anything pairing up Plaza with Caine, and “Best Sellers” tries its best, at times. But Caine does a grand grump, and Plaza reaches beyond her repertoire of eviscerating, man-eating side-eyes. They make this page-turner worth sticking with until the bittersweet end, and that’s enough.

Rating: unrated, smoking, profanity

Cast: Aubrey Plaza, Michael Caine, Scott Speedman, Cary Elwes and Ellen Wong

Credits: Directed by Lina Roessler, scripted by Anthony Grieco. A Screen Media release.

Running time: 1:42

Today’s trek on Around the World with Netflix is a Romanian drama about power, obsession, guilt and regret.

“The Father Who Moves Mountains (Tata mută munții)” takes us into the Romanian winter where a politically-connected father (Adrian Titieni) frantically tries to organize the rescue of his son, lost-in-the-snowy Bucegi Mountains.

Mircea could be a villainous hero or a heroic villain in this tale. His obsession, the bullying and bribing, reason-ignoring and rule-bending he does in pursuit of his single-minded goal summons up memories of Romania’s bad old days, the Ceausescu police state where having power meant the rules were different for you.

He’s older, retired, a man who cheated on his first wife (Elena Purea) and is about to be a father again with his younger second bride (Judith Slate). He’s dyed his hair and his beard to match his new wife and new life.

When we meet him, he’s clumsily decorating a Christmas tree. We instantly gather that he’s important enough to ignore his phone, which is blowing up, to pay little heed of the TV, which is reporting two missing college kids in the mountains.

Then he answers the call. He rushes to the ski resort where this happened. The rescue team’s leader (Valeriu Andriuta) assures him that everything that can be done is being done. He won’t let Mircea go up to look for himself because “we’d have to rescue you” (in Romanian with English subtitles).

Mircea pleads “We can’t wait until morning,” and that “I have to do SOMETHING,” to the searchers and to his trusted aide (Virgil Aioanei).

He doesn’t want to hear “It’s in God’s hands now,” is even willing to pay the searchers to redouble their efforts. He’s not used to hearing “No.” He won’t stand for “nothing more can be done.” The family of the coed his son was hiking with are here, and relating “clairvoyant” relatives’ intuition to him, but he holds his temper.

And then his ex-wife arrives, and we pick up on their unresolved issues and the grief and rage which her Orthodox faith cannot lessen. His current wife shows up, too, pregnant and increasingly concerned.

When the once-powerful man takes matters into his own hands, her concern seems justified.

I like the way writer-director Daniel Sandu (“One Step Behind the Seraphim”) doles out the layers of Mircea’s entitlement, the help he summons that would not be available to the average citizen in today’s Romania, his “not my problem” attitude toward the family of others missing on that mountain.

The film never crosses from drama into thriller. There’s little suspense, and like Mircea, the viewer can wonder where the sense of urgency is.

The tech and military efficiency deployed in the story’s third act doesn’t change that, or fundamentally alter Mircea’s mental state or sense of lost power and the lack of control.

Titieni’s performance takes the character from brusque to what can feel like a performative level of compassion and concern, into guilt for the son he wasn’t there for and the wife he abandoned.

Mortality works its way in here as well. He can’t keep up with the search teams, can’t bull his way through this predicament toward any satisfactory conclusion.

The rocky terrain and snowy fog make a striking setting for this intimate morality tale, and Titieni’s compelling turn as a figure whose bull-in-a-china-shop present suggests a sinister past make this story of power, influence and their limits when life and death are on the line well worth watching.

Rating: TV-MA, smoking, profanity

Cast: Adrian Titieni, Judith State, Elena Purea, Virgil Aioanei,
Tudor Smoleanu and Valeriu Andriuta

Credits: Scripted and directed by Daniel Sandu. A Netflix release.

Running time:

The perilous state of our fisheries and endangered status of American commercial fisherman are explored, in depth, in “Fish & Men,” a new documentary centered on the dying commercial fishing industry of Gloucester, Massachusetts.

Filmmakers Darby Duffin and Adam J. Jones dip their toes in decades of fishing practices, destructive innovations, global economics and often day late and sand-dollar short government regulation to give us another dire warning about the state of the oceans and our ability to consume their bounty.

Overfishing, vast “factory trawlers” from China, Vietnam and elsewhere, are devouring seafood stocks outside the reach of U.S. government regulation, which has restrained smaller operators and sought to protect fish populations through “the most heavily regulated fishery in the world,” our own.

Scientists from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration have been caught flatfooted, time and again, regulating here, closing fishing windows there, to no avail.

U.S. fish consumers don’t know where their fish is from. It’s sometimes caught here by a factory trawler, shipped to China, processed and dosed with chemicals, then shipped back and served “fresh” in markets and restaurants where unsuspecting consumers don’t know tuna isn’t supposed to look that pink, that it’s “tailpipe tuna.” It’s been gassed to give it that color.

And climate change to raising sea temperatures and stressing and moving cod and other fish to the few cooler waters left for them to thrive in.

One fisherman from Gloucester, whose fishery is “the oldest independent industry in the United States (400 years old),” pulls out his required logbook, noting prime catch and “bycatch” (fish caught inadvertently, but still sellable), ticking off the cod, haddock, etc.

“Gross revenue for the day?” he says, tallying it up. “$350.”

It’s no wonder American commercial fishermen are going under, faced with those sorts of takes and the economics of fuel, ice, crew payments and boat maintenance and payments.

We’re shown Canada’s contentious efforts to bring back fisheries by closing them altogether (it didn’t work) and the Norwegian model, where quotas, controls and all-important price supports ensure a decent living and grant fishing boat skippers and crews both a decent living and a modicum of respect.

Try to forget they also hunt whales and dolphins.

The filmmakers’ fresh angle to all this is talking to not just fishermen, fisheries managers and scientists, but to food writers, chefs, fishermen’s wives and activists, and ending their film with optimistic looks at things like shellfish aquaculture, where mussels, oysters et al are farmed in shallow salt water, improving the water quality of whatever lagoon or bay this takes place and providing seafood jobs. We hear how chefs and the seafood version of “farm to table,” “same day sourced” fish, where you know where the fish came from and who caught it, could be a boon to “buy local/eat local” movements to save fisheries.

But as we hear from food writers who dismiss American tastes and mass produced/processed seafood as “a dough delivery system,” catch the disdain for our narrow idea of what’s edible and our craving of cheap Filet o’Fish sandwiches, Long John Silver’s and Gorton’s fish sticks, the giant hole at the heart of “Fish & Men” comes to light.

This doc, finished in 2019, snobbishly leaves the consumer out of the picture altogether. We’re just proles who need to be “taught” that dogfish and monkfish are delish, that “fishing artisanal” for our “storied seafood” is something we’ll get behind once we know about it.

Price doesn’t figure into the conversation at all. Missing the notion that this was a big deal before the huge pandemic-spike in food prices, ridiculing “tasteless” tilapia and other farmed fish from the unregulated far east without giving a second’s thought to how tight money drove that “trash fish” onto the marketplace, was tone deaf in 2019, and stone cold deaf now.

Americans eat far less fish than most other industrialized countries, and it’s not just because we’ve been “scared away from fish” by news that many species seem fished-out, that “our oceans are empty.” The far more subsidized beef, pork and poultry industries give consumers a cheaper, albeit even more problematic, choice for meat protein.

The dire state of the fisheries isn’t being corrected, climate change isn’t being addressed and small business owner fisherman are aging, retiring and disappearing, with or without another documentary detailing this calamity. But “Fish & Men” still has messages in it we all need to hear, about the need for more shellfish farming, tighter controls and inspections of imported fish and a rethinking of the supply chain that allows fish caught here to be shipped to Asia for cheaper processing, then shipped back and marketed as “fresh” when it’s anything but.

Boat to table “storied seafood” may not save many fishermen. But it could save enough of these “watchdogs of the ocean” to make a difference.

Rating: unrated, profanity

Cast: John Tierney, John Bullard, Sefatia Romeo Theken, Jeffrey Bolster, Jackie O’Dell, Josh Wiersma, Eric Ripert, many others

Credits: Directed by Darby Duffin and Adam R. Jones. A Virgil Films release.

Running time: 1:25

This is something to see.

A circus sideshow tale of “Man or beast?” starring Bradley Cooper, Cate Blanchette, Rooney Mara, Willem Dafoe, Richard Jenkins…I

It’s based on the William Lindsay Gresham novel that was the basis for a Tyrone Power/Joan Blondell classic of 1947, directed by Edmund Goulding.

An early Christmas present, “Nightmare Alley.”

Excellent effects and production values and casting Krysten Ritter as a witch (Why knew?) pays off in “Nightbooks,” a Goosebumped take on Hansel & Gretel.

It’s a kid-friendly horror tale — terror with training wheels on — about children lured with sweets, trapped and forced to entertain the witch each night with new stories designed to chill, thrill and creep out.

But there’s a gaping hole in the heart of it that you can almost guess from that plot description. The stories, invented by a little horror buff named Alex (Winslow Fegley), may be somewhat fancifully illustrated — children act them out in stage fog and in front of dark, expressionistic cyclorama paintings — but are seriously lame and not remotely scary.

They sound, in point of fact, like what they are supposed to be, a child’s idea of what a scary story might be — underwritten, plot-and-setting heavy, obvious.

Alex is in mid-meltdown when we meet him, a kid whose parents are heard discussing his troubling “obsession with horror.” He’s yelling about how bad this, that or the other story he’s written is when he storms into the elevator with an idea of burning them in the basement boiler room of their apartment complex.

But that elevator never arrives. Not there, anyway. He finds himself on a darkened floor, tempted into a darkened apartment where “The Lost Boys” is playing on TV. He can’t resist taking a bite of the pumpkin pie next to the television.

And when he wakes up, there’s no getting out of this strange, many-roomed, Hogwarts maze of an apartment. A bleached blonde witch (Ritter) demands, “Is there ANYthing special about you at all?” You know, something that would cause her to “let you live?”

“I write scary stories.”

Thus begins his Sisyphean task, coming up with something out of his backpack filled with his tales that will move his sharpest critic. The witch corrects, criticizes and insults the “The Playground,” “The Cuckoo Clock” and other short stories.

Let’s just say Alex is not exactly the second coming of Edgar Allan Poe. By rights, the witch should lose patience, lose her temper and bake him into a pie or something for these seriously-lacking scribblings.

There have been other kids lured there, trapped in this apartment. He learns that from Yasmin (Lidya Jewett), another survivor. There’s also a vast repository of horror tales in this never-ending library. Some are in published books, others in notebooks, stories written by hand by other, earlier children.

In those stories, in what long-term prisoner Yasmin has picked up and in Alex’s racing mind their might be clues to a way of getting out of this perilous purgatory.

There’s a lot of goo and slime to be endured. A (digital) hairless cat who can turn invisible is prone to pooping on the kids’ PB&J sandwiches). If you’re nine, you were probably sold on the story with just that plot element.

But there are troubling other rooms and gardens and creatures — crawling, buglike story-eaters called “shredders” — to be faced and bested. And every night, the witch returns, digs into a big meal and demands to be entertained with a story. Talk about pressure.

The act of writing is hard to render cinematic, and director David Yarovetsky (“Brightburn”) doesn’t succeed where others have failed. A little boy stomping back and firth, spitballing plots and ideas? Very “writer’s room.”

Despite moments of kiddie torture, the ongoing threat posed by our witch, who “won’t just kill you” if you fail, doesn’t raise the stakes or hackles. And while the finale works up a fine level of sound and fury, it’s something even a ten year-old — or at least one who’s been read “Hansel & Gretel” — could see coming.

The idea behind this Sam Raimi-produced movie is that the next generation of horror fans have got to start somewhere. “Goosebumps” or The Brothers Grimm or J.A. White (the author of the source novel here) are just gateway drugs to “Insidious/Annabelle/Amityville/Halloween,” right?

This may very well accomplish that, and one gets the sense they signed Ritter up for a franchise. But throwing a lot of production design at the limp stories within this recycled tale doesn’t make it look or play scary. It just makes it loud and expensive looking. Cute.

Rating: TV-PG, mild frights

Cast: Winslow Fegley, Lidya Jewett and Krysten Ritter.

Credits: Directed by David Yarovetsky, scripted by Mikki Daughtry and Tobias Iaconis, based on a novel by J.A. White. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:43

Another “coming out” tale, another dive into drag?

Another relentlessly upbeat and empowering pop anthem-packed musical?

Another hero who craves fame, the spotlight, who answers the call to perform only he can hear?

“Everybody’s Talking About Jamie” can seem dated and cute and quaint and faintly irritating. The songs are pleasantly forgettable in the modern style. But the pathologically upbeat are often the heroes of the most insipid musicals and can be wearing to spend two hours with.

Here, even the obligatory class bully (Samuel Bottomley) feels defanged, the “rules are rules” teacher-villainess (Sharon Horgan of TV’s “Catastrophe”) isn’t so much intolerant as annoyed at the spotlight-hogging diva in her class.

Who isn’t?

And yet “Jamie,” the London West End hit about a Sheffield teen who craves the spotlight and longs to be a drag queen, overcomes those cloying, built-in irritants and wins you over in spite of itself.

It was based on a documentary (sampled in the closing credits) about an aspiring teen drag queen that came out a decade ago — which accounts for the somewhat dated feel of it all. “Kinky Boots,” the movie, came out in 2005 and was turned into a musical in 2012, after all. But sometimes we need to be reminded of the breathtaking pace of social change and tolerance.

Nicely “opened up” from the stage production by choreographer-turned-director Jonathan Butterell, “Jamie” bounces by, amuses occasionally and touches often by remembering a little history and underscoring “how much things have changed.”

It’s the story of Jamie New, played by screen newcomer Max Harwood, a daydreaming 16 year old whose life goal, which he dare not reveal in “careers” class, is to become a drag queen and an “Insta(gram)” star. With classmates named Denzel and Tyson and more than a few kids sure they’ll find their way to “Britain’s Got Talent,” it’s no wonder Miss Hedge (Harwood) is at her wit’s end trying to impose “realistic expectations” and “real jobs” goals on this lot.

Jamie’s BFF Pitti (Lauren Patel), a Muslim with a Hindu first name (“Thanks, Mum and Dad!”), might be the only one with things figured out. She’s determined to get into med school and become a doctor. Her first mission, the self-centered Jamie believes, is being “the best friend a boy who sometimes wants to be a girl could wish for.”

His Mum (Sarah Lancashire) dotes on him, and covers for the fact that his divorced Dad (Ralph Ineson) wants nothing to do with him. Jamie has an idea, but lives under the illusion that his father is supportive, no matter what.

The kid tests the dress code at school, easily fends off what bullying there is, and finally figures out a public way of acknowledging his life’s goal. He’ll come to prom in drag.

That’s how he meets the proprietor of the House of Loco, an aged queen played and sung by Richard E. Grant. In the film’s stand-out performance and best number, he croons a history lesson which is exactly what “Everybody’s Talking About Jamie” is about.

“Let me tell you how it used to go, Freddie played on the radio,” Hugo, aka Loco Chanelle, sings. “The Iron Lady couldn’t stop the show.”

In fashbacks presented as old show footage, and news coverage of protests, he teaches Jamie whose shoulders he’s standing on in his new ruby red heels, the activists who wore drag as armor, the “warrior queens of the ’80s.”

The “I’m gonna be the one, I’m gonna kiss the sun” numbers are plentiful and generic, but well-staged and choreographed. The show didn’t get to me until Patel’s Pitti sings more downbeat but still hopeful numbers, that “I know that somewhere, they’re ‘playing your song.'”

The show’s structure is “get him to the prom” by overcoming obstacles banal. But to get Jamie there, he needs a mentor. This is how Grant makes the picture, a veteran character actor who’s made fey fops a specialty, his lectures about “You can’t just be a boy in a dress,” dig into drag in winning and informative ways.

“Shoot first, or they’ll shoot you,” Hugo declares, noting the “warrior” (hurling insults from the stage) nature of his generation of drag, when it was “not just a TV show, it was a revolution!”

Patel turns a “straight best friend” cliche into a quietly compelling sounding board, and never lets us see the wheels turning.

And Harwood does well enough by a preening character who is as capable of teen cruelty as any classmate, and frankly often unlikable.

That sort of applies to “Everybody’s Talking About Jamie,” too. This predictable predicament, that flash of foreshadowed bullying threaten to bring it to a halt. It meanders about, plays as entirely too tame, tries too hard to be adorable at times.

That it still manages to tickle and touch the heart is its own minor miracle.

Rating: PG-13 for thematic elements, strong language and suggestive material

Cast: Max Harwood, Lauren Patel, Sharon Horgan, Sarah Lancashire, Ralph Ineson, Samuel Bottomley, Karen Horgan and Richard E. Grant.

Credits: Directed by Jonathan Butterell, scripted by Tom MacRae and Dan Gillespie Sells, based on their stage musical. An Amazon Studios release.

Running time: 1:56

Agreeably shambolic, with a cast far funnier than the script suggests, “Lady of the Manor” is a ghostly comedy that comes apart more often than it comes together.

It feels and plays as largely improvised, with the improv lines rarely landing laughs.

Melanie Lynskey, Judy Greer and Ryan Phillippe seem so right in their parts that you’d think this comedy from writers/directors Justin and Christian Long could not miss. But it does, and more often than not.

Lynskey, seen recently in “Mrs. America” and “I Don’t Feel at Home in this World Anymore,” is Hannah, a Savannah (actually, Tampa/St. Pete) stoner/slacker vulgarian who barflies her way into a gig dressing as the lady of one of the historic city’s many manor houses, leading tours without memorizing any of the history she’s supposed to impart.

“Don’t worry, my ex-roommate used to watch ‘Downtown Abbey!'”

She spends a lot of time in her hoodie and pajama bottoms. She hits the pipe, a lot. She belches, stumbles, fumbles and swears, a lot, and finishes off each tour group with a farewell equally out of character.

“As Lady Wadsworth used to say, ‘You don’t have to go home, but you can’t stay here.'”

Part of the gig is that she gets to live in the house, owned by an old Savannah family whose patriarch (Patrick Duffy) is running for mayor and whose ne’er do well son (Phillippe) figures he’s entitled to sexual favors from his latest hire, Hannah. Hannah figures this, too.

And that’s what brings the ever-so-proper ghost of the original Lady Wadsworth (Judy Greer, perfect) out in protest.

She drawls out “trollop,” and exhortations about what “a lady” should “NEVER do.” Hannah isn’t having it. She seeks help with this “old fashioned BITCH ghost” from a history professor (Justin Long), hoping a supernatural sage “cleansing” can be arranged, even an exorcism.

“Not like (with) an old priest, but a hot, young like ATHLETIC priest who can really take a beating!”

Eventually, the ghost and the tour guide reach a rapprochement, and Lady Wadsworth starts prompting Hannah on the tours, giving her “lady” comportment lessons, bread making lessons and diction lessons — “Say it without laughing, DICTion!”

Greer’s snooty, elitist Old South drawl colliding with Lynskey’s dazed doltishness is the reason to see this. That’s not enough.

There is a “plot,” a mystery to be solved, played up as a third act afterthought.

Not filming in Savannah means the film feels unmoored from its “Midnight in the Garden/Forrest Gump” dripping, drawling drollery.

The script is thin on laughs that aren’t built on drugs, drunkenness and the lazy comic’s best friend, “dick” jokes. The Long brothers were aiming for something with a “Bridesmaids/Girls’ Trip” vibe — vulgar hilarity. Neither they nor their cast were up to that level of crude.

The leading ladies gave me a chuckle or two, but the poor dears were on their own. The writing-directing (and in Justin’s case, co-starring) Long brothers let down the side.

There’s no reason this cast with this story in this setting shouldn’t have been something almost hilarious. There’s little evidence on the screen that was ever going to happen.

Rating: R for language (profanity) throughout, sexual material and drug use

Cast: Melanie Lynskey, Judy Greer, Ryan Phillippe, Tamara Austin, Justin Long, Luis Guzman and Patrick Duffy

Credits: Scripted and directed by Christian Long and Justin Long. A Lionsgate release.

Running time: 1:37

This Sundance award winner gets a theatrical release Oct 15, and comes to HBO Max. Looks lovely

Leslie Odom Jr. and Cynthia Erivo are the couple separated by time, or reunited by it, in this mid October romantic fantasy.

There was a time when Clint Eastwood, in the vigorous youth of say five years ago, was famous for whacking lines and pages of extraneous dialogue from any script he was acting in and/or directing.

That’s far from the case in “Cry Macho,” an absurdly chatty melodrama that shows Eastwood at his most enfeebled, making a screen elegy with little elegance, no pace, little excitement and the kind of clock-watching boredom that One Take Clint wouldn’t stand for on his set, much less sit through in a theater (or on HBO Max) himself.

“This looks like an interesting town,” his character, Mike Milo observes as he drives the teen (Eduardo Minett) he’s delivering from Mexico to the kid’s father (Dwight Yoakam) on the other side of the border.

Mike says he’s going to take a nap, to which the kid prattles, “Tired, eh? Old man needs a nap?”

Yeah. It’s what he just said. And that town? The camera shows us how “interesting” it might (or might not) be. Another statement of the obvious.

That sort of inane clutter is nothing compared to what screenwriter Nick Schenk (“Gran Torino,” “The Mule”), working from a novel by the late N. Richard Nash, saddles poor Yoakam with. Playing a wealthy horse trader and rodeo owner, Yoakam’s first pages are all exposition, giving Mike’s entire history, “before the accident” and “after the pills and the booze.” Yoakam’s Howard Polk character is filling in the story almost all the way to the final credits, half-hearted rants that begin with “You OWE me” and finish with LONG explanations of why that might be.

The movie Eastwood was angling for was an elegy to machismo, with maybe a hint of whimsy as an old man passes life lessons on to an impressionable boy. But in his stooped, sunken-cheeked state, there’s not much he can do with a line like “I used to be a lotta things, but not now.”

Parking him in a 1970s Chevy Suburban, the ancient tough guy can barely see over the steering wheel. He’s 91 trying to pass for 70something. And he can’t.

An opening scene set in 1979 has aged Mike showing up late to Howard Polk’s ranch, enduring a pointless, exposition-filled chewing out, and getting fired. It takes the entire opening credits to set up, and a couple of pages of Yoakam chewing to get through.

And it’s almost pointless. “One year later” Howard’s in Mike’s house, giving him the “you owe me” speech, asking (not hiring) him to go south of the border and fetch Polk’s estranged son from his “nutcase” Mexican mother.

Mike reluctantly agrees, drives South and promptly stumbles into a posh party at her lavish estate, where he’s captured by her hirelings. And then Leta (Fernanda Urrejola) proceeds to try and ply Mike with drinks and throw herself at the Gringo Viejo, who must be twice her age.

Feel free to slap yourself on the forehead over that. But not too hard. Another woman does the same in the second act.

The kid? He’s gone bad, “cock-fighting” and what not. But sure, if you can find him, take him away, Leta says.

She’s not serious about wanting the 13 year-old sent away, and the script and performance aren’t serious about how “bad” this kid is.

Rafa (Minett) dotes on his rooster, “Macho,” caves in to the whole “come live with your dad” pitch in an instant, even though he “hates” him, and generally gives the old man and the viewing audience nothing to grab hold of as “conflict” between the cuddly, weakened old cowboy and the kid, who is a pussycat. Minett comes off as “child actorish.” He’s as tough as a Disney Channel tween.

Things happen to trap them in Mexico in that “interesting” town they pass through. That’s where cafe owner Marta (Natalia Traven) doesn’t let the language barrier stand in the way of becoming smitten with Mike, whose “way with animals” gives him the chance to break a few more horses, teach the kid to ride and literally lay his hands on injured goats and elderly dogs, an aged healer from Texas bringing comfort to this tiny hamlet.

As unthreatening as Mike is in his advanced years — Eastwood walks gingerly these days — nothe Mexican bad guys crumble in his presence. Repeatedly.

The man’s lived his whole life in Texas ranch country, and doesn’t speak a word of Spanish (no subtitles are added, a nice touch). But damned if he didn’t he learn ASL somewhere along the way.

The character isn’t as interesting as he might have been, and the kid is barely worth the effort listening to his conversation requires, for Mike or the viewer. As was just as obvious in “The 15:17 to Paris,” One Take Clint is not a good fit with a young actor who could use help with his performance, the benefit of a second, third or fifth take to give the camera something interesting.

The plotting and a couple of the performances are straight out of vampy, overwrought telenovelas. Eastwood has slowed down and lost chunks of technique just in the short time since playing “The Mule.” But let’s not blame the players for the instantly-insipid script that Schenk tempted Eastwood with, like Tom Selleck peddling “reverse mortgages” to gullible seniors.

Truth be told, the damned rooster, who never gets into a cockfight but goes after anybody who threatens young Rafa, steals the movie. Pity he isn’t billed.

Time was when Eastwood would dare to allow silence to do his talking, stillness to set the tone and his spare style to hide his polished technique. Now, he can’t be bothered to disguise anything.

“Let’s talk,” the kid says when he and Mike first meet. “Not here,” Mike says, and you can see Clint-the-director in a rush to get another location in, trying to lend color to the next banal conversation he must realize he’s got to get through, because he’s forgotten he wouldn’t have to get through them if he whittled things down.

That editing made many a screenwriter seem sharper and more profound than was warranted, a way Eastwood protected them from their worst impulses and made lean, flinty dramas and thrillers.

Here, he doesn’t protect anybody — not the green, subtlety-impaired kid, not the writer and not himself. 

A screen elegy is supposed to make you sad and warm and give the viewer an appreciation for all this character and the actor playing him was, and a little of what remains.

“Cry Macho” just generates pity.

Rating: PG-13, for language (profanity) and thematic elements

Cast: Clint Eastwood, Fernanda Urrejola, Eduardo Minett, Natalia Traven and Dwight Yoakam.

Credits: Directed by Clint Eastwood, scripted by Nick Schenk and N. Richard Nash. A Warner Brothers release.

Running time: 2:05