Surviving Picasso

Surviving is right: The script leans heavily on Arianna Stassinopoulos Huffington's Picasso: Creator and Destroyer -- the biography reviewers likened to a trashy novel -- but this movie is a dreary endurance test. It's hard not to wish classy smutmeister Zalman King had been at the helm, instead of the deferential, decorous James Ivory. Ivory bleeds the life right out of such riotously sordid scenes as the one in which two mistresses (Susannah Harker and Julianne Moore) fight tooth and nail over Picasso (Anthony Hopkins) while he blithely works on Guernica. As Francoise (Gilot, though her surname is never mentioned), newcomer Natascha McElhone -- who ...