Butler's Cinema Scene

Timothee Chalamet, Armie Hammer

“CALL ME BY YOUR NAME” My rating: A-

132 minutes | MPAA rating: R

“Call Me By Your Name” could be categorized as a coming-out story, but that’s oversimplifying things… like saying “Citizen Kane” is a movie about the newspaper business.

Director Luca Guadagnino (“I Am Love,” “A Bigger Splash”) and screenwriter  James Ivory (yes, the director of “Howards End,” “A Room with a View” and the Kansas City-lensed “Mr. and Mrs. Bridge”) are painting on an intimate canvas here, yet their adaptation of Andre Caiman’s novel is an epic of mood and emotion.

It’s about youth, sexual awakening, family love and the warm glow of summers past. It’s enough to make you swoon.

Set in the summer of 1983, “Call Me…” chronicles a lazy but significant six weeks for 17-year-old Elio (an unbelievably good Timothee Chalamet).  The son of an American father and an Italian mother, he’s been raised in Italy with all the intellectual stimulation he can handle. He’s smart, multilingual and maybe some sort of musical prodigy.

Enter Oliver (Armie Hammer), the American grad student hired by Elio’s professor father (Michael Stuhlbarg) for a summer of research on Roman statuary. Oozing a big grin, Yankee self-confidence and nonchalant studliness, Oliver makes a big wave among the town’s young women.

Initially this visitor strikes Elio as arrogant. But Oliver also stirs something else in Elio. Not that Oliver seems at all receptive…if anything he appears oblivious.

Interestingly enough, it’s Elio’s father and mother (Amira Casar) who first notice the slow-burn sexual sizzle that’s been introduced to their household…not that they comment on it directly. But their sidelong looks speak volumes. (They must be the most understanding movie parents of all time. Atticus Finch could take lessons from them.)

Michael Stuhlbarg, Timothee Chalamet, Armie Hammer

As it turns out, Oliver isn’t indifferent to Elio, merely cautious.

Meanwhile Elio is going through the throes of sexual confusion and uncertainty. He loses his virginity to a French girl (Esther Garrel) and then, in a seriocomic moment replete with Freudian possibilities, has sex with a peach from his mother’s orchard.

So is he gay? Straight? Or is sexual orientation a fluid thing, subject to circumstance and availability?

The subject of “Call Me By Your Name” is less a gay encounter than being young and trying to figure out who you are and who you’re going to become.

This all unfolds in a sort of dream memory of a languid summer of bicycle rides, disco nights, river swims and sumptuous alfresco meals. This is a film dripping sensuality.

The acting is stupendous, especially from 22-year-old Chalamet, whose features are a living sea of shifting emotions and desires. The subtlety of his performance is jaw-dropping.  As far as this reviewer is concerned, the Academy should just give him the Oscar and be done with it. The film’s final shot — a long, wordless closeup of the actor’s face — says so much it should be immortalized in some museum of acting and filmmaking.

Near the film’s end there’s a monologue from the professor, part of a father-son chat after Oliver has returned to the U.S. It’s been so exquisitely written and performed (by Stuhlbarg) that it will reduce many moviegoers to tears:

“You had a beautiful friendship. Maybe more than a friendship,” he tells his bereft son. “And I envy you.”

So do we all.

| Robert W. Butler