Paul Giamatti doesn't spring right to mind as the guy to play the title character of Mordecai Richler's sardonically funny and bitterly sad novel "Barney's Version."
After seeing director Richard J. Lewis' sparkling film adaptation, which moves effortlessly between churlish hilarity and aching melancholy, it's hard to imagine anyone but Giamatti as lovably self-destructive curmudgeon Barney.
For all his coarse behavior, Barney on the page seems more conventionally attractive than the schlubby Giamatti. Yet as he did playing the sad-sack romantic in "Sideways," Giamatti just becomes Barney Panofsky, Canadian producer of schlock TV, wooer of women way out of his league, self-righteous and self-loathing arbiter of all that is wrong with the world and the people around him.
This is another Academy Awards-worthy performance for past nominee Giamatti, while co-stars Dustin Hoffman and Rosamund Pike also deserve serious Oscar consideration.
Producer Robert Lantos, a friend of the late Richler, spent a decade trying to adapt the sprawling novel, which hurtles back and forth over 30 years of Barney's life and is told by the most unreliable narrator — Barney himself, as he savages friends and enemies alike while his memory fades from Alzheimer's disease.
Director Lewis, a writer, director and executive producer on "CSI: Crime Scene Investigation," was among those who took a pass at the screenplay before Lantos and Richler's fellow Montreal native Michael Konyves wrote the winner.
The filmmakers have done a terrific job compacting the novel, diminishing or dropping some characters and combining others to present a faithful rendition of Barney's rich, sordid and always interesting life story.
The film still shifts about in time quite a lot, from the 1970s to the present day, as Giamatti's Barney progresses from Canadian expatriate living among bohemians in Europe to rich, gruff, boozy TV producer back in his home city of Montreal.
Along the way, Barney is shamefully cuckolded by his first wife, artistic spitfire Clara (Rachel Lefevre), driven to despise his shrewish, Jewish princess second wife (Minnie Driver, her character known only as the "second Mrs. P."), and smitten for life by his third wife, Miriam (Pike), who also is coveted by a family friend (Bruce Greenwood).
Amid the ups and downs of his romantic and professional life, he copes with conflicting feelings about best friend Boogie (Scott Speedman), a writer whose mysterious fate taints Barney with scandal.
Hoffman is a perpetual scene-stealer as Barney's dad, Izzy, who regales and horrifies listeners with tales of his life as a rare Jew on the Montreal police force.
The heart of Richler's novel is the love story between Barney and Miriam. The filmmakers wisely keep their story focused there, too, scaling back Barney's relationships with his first two wives.
Partly through great costume design and makeup, but mostly through the actors' deft changes in carriage and body language, Giamatti and Pike age authentically through the years. Pike's Miriam grows older with grace and beauty, while Giamatti's Barney gradually goes sour, lamenting the things he's lost, the things he did, the things he failed to do.
Giamatti and Pike create a wonderful portrait of mismatched lovers, she an embodiment of virtue and devotion, he an outrageous, blustering yet big-hearted buffoon that Miriam — and the audience — just cannot help but love.
It's a joy to watch Giamatti rail and plot and scheme, and it's heartbreaking to see him falter and ultimately fade as his life, body and mind unravel.
Literary works inevitably have to lose a lot when adapted for film. Yet the filmmakers have preserved so much of Barney's spirit that Richler probably would be very pleased with how the version he wrote was translated to the version on screen.