According to Barney

The film opens with the scene of Barney Panofsky ( Paul Giamatti ) dialing a certain Blair phone number ( Bruce Greenwood ) to call Barney's wife to the phone. Blair refuses, and Barney hangs up. The next morning, his daughter informs him that Blair had a heart attack at night. Panofsky goes to work - the set of the television series "Mallie from the North", the producer of which he has been acting for several decades. After the end of the working day, Barney goes to the bar and meets detective O'Hearn ( Mark Eddy ), who demands that he confess to someone else’s murder.

The picture is transferred to 1974 , Rome , Italy . Barney introduces his best friend Buggy ( Scott Speedman ) to the girl Clara Charnofsky ( Rachelle Lefebvre ) and declares that he will soon marry her. Barney later confesses to Buggy that the wedding will take place only because Clara is pregnant. Several months pass, Barney and Clara officially register the marriage. Almost immediately after the wedding ceremony, Klara has a miscarriage and the baby is born dead. The doctor says that Barney’s wife is in perfect order and will be able to give birth to more children, but the father of the dead child is not Barney, but his close friend Cedric ( Cle Bennett ). Panofsky leaves Clara and moves to Buggy. Coming to Clara a few days later, he discovers her dead and realizes that the girl committed suicide.

A year passes. At the party, Barney meets a girl in a red dress ( Minnie Driver ; whose name has not been revealed throughout the film) and the next day comes to her dinner with her father Israel ( Dustin Hoffman ). A couple of months later, Barney registers his second marriage. As a gift, Israel presents its son a revolver, which he used as a police officer. At the wedding, Barney meets Miriam Grant ( Rosamund Pike ), who turned out to be a distant relative of his second wife. After the conversation ends, Panofsky realizes that for the first time in his life he has truly fallen in love. He catches up with the girl, but she says that there can be no question of their relationship, because Barney is already married. Panofsky is planning to divorce his wife quickly: he leaves Buggy with her and leaves for New York . Arriving back, Barney discovers them in bed and rolls up a scandal, after which his wife announces a divorce. Buggy, having drunk heavily, declares to a friend that he slept with his first wife and will sleep with the third. Having reached the pier, Panofsky threatens to shoot him in anger, but while Barney walked towards Buggy and aimed at him, he stumbles and falls, the gun shoots, and Buggy falls into the water.

Barney calls the police and tells Detective O'Hearn that Buggy is missing. The detective, in turn, does not believe the suspect, explaining this by the fact that two bullets were fired from his revolver (one Barney shot in the air to frighten Buggy). Police leave home without charge for lack of body. Panofsky later called his second wife and said that he was now a bachelor. Barney leads Miriam on a date and, according to tradition, they get married in a few months. They have a son, Michael ( Jake Hoffman ), and a daughter, Kate ( Anna Hopkins ).

Eighteen years later, Michael leaves to study in New York, and Miriam gets a job leading to a local radio station. Miriam leaves for New York to visit his son. In the absence of his wife, Barney has sex with a young girl. When Miriam returns home, Panofsky reveals to her the whole truth, and she files for divorce. Meanwhile, Barney reports the death of his father, Israel, who died during a sexual intercourse with a prostitute in a brothel.

The action of the film is back in our time. The police find the remains of the deceased Buggy in the nearby highlands, the medical examiner claims that the Buggy died from falling from a high cliff (it turns out that while the Buggy was in the water and Barney was unconscious, a fire plane took water from the lake, accidentally taking the Buggy with him , while Barney believed all his life that he just washed off, but one day he will return). Barney begins to show signs of dementia , he finally forgets relatives and friends. In the last scene of the film, Miriam, following Jewish tradition, lays a stone on Barney’s grave and leaves the cemetery.

The film was positively received by most of the world's film critics, who, for the most part, noted the powerful acting work of Paul Giamatti and Dustin Hoffman. The overall rating on the Rotten Tomatoes website is 80%, and the audience rating on the IMDB website is 7.3 ^{[3] [4]} . Many film analysts read Jamatti's next Oscar nomination, but the actor did not enter the shortlist ^[5] .

• “A film, just like your life, most falls to the soul right when you don’t know what will happen next” (Rafer Gazman, Newsday ^[6] )
• “Extremely interesting, and possibly the most accurate movie adaptation of Richler today” (Michael Rechtschaffen, The Hollywood Reporter ^[7] )
• “The film takes some time to warm up, but“ According to Barney “is a wonderful film that will leave you thinking about your life.” (Matthew Tumi, ABC Radio Brisbane ^[8]

• “According to Barney” on the Internet Movie Database