[If] O Lucky Man! is a celebration of success, it is of success in a bad world, a world in which, as the sophomoric cynicism of the song lyrics has it, "only wealth will buy you justice" and "Someone's got to win the human race/If it isn't you, then it has to be me." And, in being a kind of apologia provita sua for the director, it seems to me very much a work of bad faith and guilty conscience. To be sure, Anderson doesn't exempt himself from the film's indictment of the world's corruption: he in fact portrays himself much less indulgently than he does his hero, and without the defense of the hero's innocence…. And yet for all the self-criticism that the film implies, for all its bitter knowledge about the character of that establishment to which star and director have gained entry and the...