David Hare's film version of his production of Wallace Shawn's incisive play is, like much avant-garde theater, off-puttingly mannered at first, but eventually engrossing. The movie consists entirely of the seated monologues of three highly educated denizens of an unnamed but manhattanish domain, where, it gradually emerges, the clashes of rich and poor and/or highbrow and lowbrow have erupted into actual violence and political repression. Mike Nichols's cherubically ratlike Jack is the main focus, set off against Miranda Richardson as his wife Judy, and David DeKeyser as Judy's father Howard. Nichols's fluid delivery of Jack's self-absorbed patter beautifully illuminates the local flashes of Shawn's words and ideas, particularly the title metaphor of one whose social function is the ritual eulogizing of the passing of an entire clan, namely that of the coterie of politically committed highbrows represented by Howard and Judy. The glow of the gilded brick backdrop behind the intermittently interacting monologuists effectively invokes the characters' world of unremarked privilege, but the overall effect of the movie is less cinematic than the equally thoughtful but relatively more dynamic films it calls to mind, Louis Malle's My Dinner with Andre and Vanya on 42nd Street (in both of which Shawn starred), or the filmed Spalding Gray monologues by Jonathan Demme or Steven Soderbergh. If less viscerally entertaining than those films, however, The Designated Mourner succeeds in highlighting the unforgettable character of Jack, the oily mellifluous ironist, and requiring and requiting the concentration of the filmgoer's effort to put the narrative pieces together, an effort aided on the DVD by the alternate soundtrack of Shawn's extended commentary.