Barcelona by Stephen Farber After seeing a lot of potboilers, you can understand why a gifted maverick director like Whit Stillman turns his back on by-the-numbers plotting and shamelessly manipulative filmmaking. He's an artist who trusts the audience to make its own discoveries rather than a con man who wants to pummel crowds into submission. Unfortunately, in his new movie Barcelona, Stillman has moved so far in the opposite direction that he's drained the picture of a crucial spark of energy. Stillman's wisp of a story takes place in Barcelona in the early '80s. His main characters are a prissy young businessman, Ted, and his slicker cousin Fred, a navy lieutenant, who court women while they contend with a growing anti-Americanism. As he showed in Metropolitan, Stillman has a marvelous ear for dialogue; he has an affection for blabbermouths who, in this case, expound on the merits of dating plain women or of shaving against the grain. Stillman takes characters who could easily become stereotypes and proves that they have quirky, original--if sometimes deranged--minds. But this time his canvas is too limited. Aside from the two American cousins, no one else registers strongly; the Spanish women never emerge as distinctive individuals. Stillman's dramatic instinct falters badly. When the navy man confesses late in the movie that he is attracted to the woman his cousin has been dating, it seems like an afterthought; the possibility for a highly charged comic or dramatic triangle is completely shortchanged. Toward the end Stillman throws in a shooting by an anti-American terrorist, but his heart isn't in the melodrama, and it seems arbitrary and anticlimactic. There's one other significant flaw. While Chris Eigeman has exactly the right cocky charm as Fred, Taylor Nichols is really too much of a drip as the nerdy Ted. Nichols was amusing in a supporting role in Metropolitan, but he doesn't have the charisma to carry a movie. Barcelona confirms that Stillman has talent, but a bit more Hollywood flash wouldn't hurt. What did you think of this movie? Sound off in the Movie Forum.