Here's a sample of some dialog from Barcelona:

"Oh, shootings, sure, but thay doesn't mean that America's more violent than other people. We're just better shots."

Leave it to Whit Stillman to have the kind of dialog that could read very different in another context, but in world of these two intelligent but at other times not exactly wise cousins (one a salesman the other a Navy man),it's funny and you even like these guys even when they say something that shows Americans are... ever always so reliably American.

There's always something amusing in seeing men who are so very certain about a worldview, especially if the other knows they're full of it, and Fred especially is one of those people in modern movies. There's also Ted, who makes sure to correct Marta (or try to rationalize) how there is no AFL-CIA, but the way he explains it has this wit about it that is open and clear, like we know how silly it even is to have these nominal distinctions and that institutions should get mocked in such light but direct ways, and Nichols is superb at playing firm but easy to get rattled if hearing a disagreeable thing (America does gasp terrible things no way) and Sorvino can more than hold her own, she's given her own deep insights to play.

Come to think of it, Barcelona is a rich slice of a satire pizza where you can taste the layers but they all mesh well together: white male American superiority is easy to criticize, but what makes the text richer is when sides are being argued for with mixed metaphors (oh those red ants),or how these men are trying to reckon with themselves as relationships get more complicated (oh Ramon),and that this humanizes them. Moreover, it's about how we rationalize the place we're at in our lives, how we may or may not be cut out for something. And it also comes down to manners and customs, what is and what is just not done, whether it's dancing to Glenn Miller by oneself or driving a bottle of Old Crow or talking about a system of government.

In short, this is more amusing than very funny - though I definitely laughed a number of times, and they were big ones ("American Imperialism, what's up with that?") - but it's well done amusement, and eventually there's real drama and stakes that shakes things up in a tragic sense; these are believable characters who know how to talk about how they view the world, but they can't control how the basic things in life go for them.

Watch out for Maneuveur X!

It's the last decade of the cold war and Barcelona has a lot of anti-Americanism. Ted Boynton (Taylor Nichols) is a stiff sales rep from Illinois working for an American company. His intrusive cousin US Navy officer Fred Boynton (Chris Eigeman) unexpectedly visit. They have a history of not getting along and different opinions. Ted insists on dating plain girls. Local friend Marta Ferrer (Mira Sorvino) brings them to a costume party and ends up sleeping with Fred. Fred makes up a story that Ted is a follower of Marquis de Sade. Ted eventually meets pretty trade show girl Montserrat Raventos (Tushka Bergen).

It's Whit Stillman's second movie and is not as compelling as his debut. The cousins are basically the kids from Metropolitan after a few years. They're smart, cosmopolitan, talkative and self-obsessed. The return of Nichols and Eigeman only helps in that sense of familiarity. The problem is that the first movie has the danger and excitement of an unknown future. This one just stumbles from one day to the next. There is nothing to truly drive the movie. The anti-Americanism theme seems to be more like background music that plays throughout the movie. It's an early Mira Sorvino film and she does fairly simple acting with a fake accent. There are some sly funny comedy in a meandering unengaging story.

Ted, a stuffy white guy from Illinois working in sales for the Barcelona office of a US corporation, is paid an unexpected visit by his somewhat less stuffy cousin Fred, who is an officer in the US Navy. Over the next few months, both their lives are irrevocably altered by the events which follow Fred's arrival, events which are the trivial stuff of a comedy of manners at first but which gradually grow increasingly dramatic.

I am not familiar with films directed by Whit Stillman, but going through my list of things to see, I am sure he will pop up a bit. Barcelona, his first studio-financed film, was inspired by his own experiences in Spain during the early 1980s. Stillman has described the film as "An Officer and a Gentleman", but with the title referring to two men rather than one. The men, Ted and Fred, experience the awkwardness of being in love in a foreign country culturally and politically opposed to their own.

Studio-financed or not, this has the feel of a 1990s indie film. Very much in the vein of Richard Linklater and early Kevin Smith. He seems to have come up at about that same time when overly-talky scripts were the rage, sort of taking the Jim Jarmusch backbone and fleshing it out with witty dialogue. I mean this as a compliment, because I really enjoy this sort of film, but they also seem to blend together... maybe after I see a few more, I will recognize what makes a "Stillman film".