Watch “Barney’s Version” Movie
Barney Panofsky, a Montreal policeman’s son, meets his third wife at his second wedding, a gilded gala that he stumbles into halfway between his wayward bohemian youth and his distempered dotage. Barney, played with shambling energy and vulgar elegance by Paul Giamatti, catches a sudden, breathtaking glimpse of Miriam (Rosamund Pike) and pretty much forgets about the unnamed ninny he has just married (even though she is played by the lovely Minnie Driver). This movie entails about the riddle and the compelte version of this riddle will be tackled and stated in the whole movie.
The answer to this riddle comes obliquely later that same evening, when Barney chases Miriam down aboard a train about to leave Montreal for New York, where she lives. In her hands is a paperback copy of Saul Bellow’s “Herzog,” possession of which surely signals, at the very least, a high tolerance for vain, verbose and vulgar Jewish men.
Barney — the picaresque antihero of “Barney’s Version” — is, in more ways than one, a cousin of Bellow’s Moses Herzog. He is the last surviving fictional brainchild and alter ego of Mordecai Richler, a novelist who, like Bellow, was born in Quebec but who, unlike him, stayed there, turning Anglophone Jewish Montreal into a northern sister city of Augie March’s Chicago.