Complex Characters (and a movie recommendation)

We're in the season of the blockbuster films--mostly long on action, short on character. There are exceptions, of course, including one I saw recently and recommend: "Gone, Baby, Gone." Yes, the structure is a bit clunky in the middle, but it's a fascinating look at a difficult situation and leaves you wondering and discussing how you would have handled the dilemma faced at the end by the protagonist.

It reminded me how much I like films with complex characters. Novelist and playwright Michael Frayn made this observation in an article in The Guardian recently:

"People's personal relationships are not just falling in love with each other, or falling out of love with each other. They're also about ambition, and agreement and disagreement and making common cause; and thinking differently from people about important things. What seems to me to characterise people in everyday life is, overwhelmingly, that they're trying to do something. Everyone's got a project, either a public project or a private project. They're trying to improve the world, or make money, or they're trying to persuade somebody to go out with them, or they're trying to humiliate - but they're all trying to do something all the time.

"And I think it's a good thing if drama reflects that, if you actually see people struggling to deal with the world and each other. If you look back over drama historically, there's a much wider range of subjects. If you look at Shakespeare, for instance, or Greek drama - it's about people with big plans for world conquest, or conspiracies, or defiance of the gods, or vengeance or whatever - there's quite a wide range of undertakings and emotions that get represented."