Themes emerge on days two and three of a film festival, as
the common issues that have fascinated filmmakers in 2014 become apparent:
our modern need for attention, often via celebrity; our disconnect through
technology that was designed to bring us together; a longing for an individual
success in a world in which climbing any sort of ladder seems to get more and
more difficult. Are these issues really there in the films of TIFF 2014 or does
the art of seeing five or six movies a day force the brain to make connections
that otherwise won’t be made? Who can say for sure? However, Lou Bloom’s
sociopathic need for success in “Nightcrawler” on day two isn’t dissimilar from
Alice Krieg’s more defined borderline personality disorder in Shira Piven’s “Welcome to Me.”
In Piven’s film, the increasingly interesting Kristen Wiig
plays Alice, a woman who hasn’t turned off her TV in over a decade, spending
most of her days and nights watching old VHS tapes of Oprah Winfrey’s show, and
convincing herself that she’s a winner if she believes she is. Her doctor (Tim
Robbins) doesn’t like the fact that Alice has gone off her meds, and her
friends (including Linda Cardellini and Alan Tudyk) worry about Alice’s
self-destructive behavior. What’s one of the most potentially dangerous things
that could happen to someone who should arguably have round-the-clock care?
Complete financial freedom.
Alice wins the lottery–$86 million. She decides that she
wants to inspire others the same way that Oprah inspired her. Arriving on the
set of a late-night infomercial, Alice convinces the team behind the program to
launch “Welcome to Me with Alice Krieg,” by cutting the flailing network a
giant check. James Marsden, Wes Bentley, Joan Cusack, and a tragically wasted
Jennifer Jason Leigh play the people behind “Welcome to Me,” a collection of
Alice’s rambling thoughts, reenactments of painful memories from her past, and
even live pet surgeries for those looking to get their dogs neutered.
It’s undeniable that we live in an era that often takes
people who need mental care and turns them into quasi-celebrities through the
medium of reality TV. It’s plausible that an “emotional exhibitionist” like
Alice Krieg would get a decent following in a culture that values oddity as
much as humanity, and Piven’s film gets at the inherent selfishness of mental
illness in interesting ways. Until it doesn’t. “Welcome to Me” is half a movie,
a film with an interesting set-up but a shallow follow-through. It also falls
into a sub-category of filmmaking that increasingly aggravates me in that it presents
mental illness as something of a punchline instead of a reality.
If a line can be drawn from “Nightcrawler” to “Welcome to
Me,” it certainly could stop at Noah Baumbach’s “While We’re Young” along the way. Baumbach’s most easily
accessible, commercial film produced big laughs at its world premiere on
Saturday night, attended by stars Ben Stiller, Naomi Watts, Adam Driver and
Amanda Seyfried.
Reuniting with his “Greenberg” writer/director, Stiller
plays a documentary filmmaker named Josh without the traditional, societal
focuses of work or family. Oh, he works, but he’s been making the same film for
ten years. And he tried to have kids with his wife Cornelia (Watts) but it didn’t
work out and the two have decided to go on without children of their own, even
if that’s the life path of all of their friends, including a close one played
by Ad-Rock of the Beastie Boys (complete with Khakis and gray hair that should
make viewers of my generation feel their age).
Just as Josh and Cornelia are starting to notice that not
having a family is giving them less in common with the people in their lives,
they run into Jamie (Driver, who is easily the MVP of the film, doing possibly
his best work to date) and Darby (Seyfried) after one of Josh’s documentary
film classes. Jamie is a fan, which instantly intrigues Josh. And the fortysomething
couple and the twentysomething couple begin to hang out, bringing cultural
differences between the generations to the surface. The “hipster generation”
has often been painted as one that has pushed away the technology with which
they have grown up. And so Jamie and Darby work on a wood table that he made;
he uses a typewriter; she makes her own ice cream, with flavors like avocado;
they have a massive vinyl collection; you get the idea. Josh and Cornelia find
themselves drawn to the energy of this youthful world, leaving their friends
behind, buying new clothes and going to hip-hop workout classes.
At its core, “While We’re Young” is a relatively standard
mid-life crisis movie. We’ve seen dozens of movies about men and women who
reach a certain age and try to recapture youth, although Baumbach portrays that
effort as more of a poisoned venture than you might first expect. Without
spoiling the film, Baumbach seems to be saying that hipster-ism is a façade,
but not in the judgmental manner you may expect. This is just the way it is.
Sure, you may disconnect from Facebook and hold beach parties in the street,
but you’re still an asshole.
There were BIG laughs at the Wales on Saturday night; “While
We’re Young” is the kind of film that could easily break out of the independent
film release pattern to find mainstream success. Almost too much so. Many of
Baumbach’s targets here feel a bit too easy and the paint strokes a bit too
broad. It’s shooting Kangol hat-wearing fish in a bourbon-soaked barrel. So,
while it’s way more fun than Baumbach’s fans may expect, it’s also a bit easy,
and I expect it will age poorly, being more of a commentary on our era than a
timeless piece about generational rifts. It’s fun, but a bit flat, and it was
interesting to hear the divided response to it immediately after the film as
fans of Baumbach’s work, most notably “Frances Ha,” seemed disappointed, while
those cold to him embraced something a bit more accessible. I’m in the middle.
There is no middle for Peter Strickland’s fascinating “The Duke of Burgundy,” the highly
anticipated follow-up to 2012’s “Berberian Sound Studio,” which also premiered
here. Strickland introduced the film at its Saturday night premiere with
possibly the funniest bit of preface I’ve heard at a festival. First, he
thanked people “Without whom, you’d be
watching The Judge.” And then he made sure to ask if he forgot anyone,
conveying the story of a fight over a football game that ended with “You didn’t thank me at the premiere!”
Finally, he rattled off a list of supposed film errors he had caught at the
P&I screening earlier that day, including a boom mic shadow at 3:27 and a
compost heap continuity problem at 11:34. Funny guy.
NOT a funny movie. If “Berberian Sound Studio” featured
Strickland playing with audio, “Duke” examines other senses, to the degree that
it has a “Perfume by” in the opening credits and actually goes on to feel like
it earned it. There’s a “Lingerie” credit too, and that definitely took some
work as the film’s two leads are almost always in a state of undress. Paying
homage (again) to Italian film of the ‘70s, Strickland has made a psychosexual
drama about patterns, power, sex and degradation. It’s a fascinating
experiment, one that produces a remarkable sense of unease and uncertainty despite
its beautiful surface. Like one of the insects that serves as its thematic
visual background, it features striking, refined beauty that hides the dirt and
grime from which it comes and to which it returns.
In the film’s opening scene, a beautiful young woman named
Evelyn (Chiara D’Anna) bicycles to a home. She rings the bell, her employer
Cynthia (Sidse Babett Knudsen) answers and tells her that she’s late, and that she should try
not to take so much time cleaning this time. She verbally abuses a shaken
Evelyn. And then, when Evelyn fails at getting the soap off her employer’s panties, Cynthia
has to punish her.
Of course, this relationship is not at all what it seems. Who
has the power? What produces passion? “The Duke of Burgundy” is a film about a
dominant-submissive sexual relationship that subverts the traditional role in
that it is the more “cold” of the two that wants for more warmth. If a partner
demands that her lover be dominant, who is really the submissive?
“The Duke of Burgundy” is a gorgeous film with the kind of
attention to set design, costumes and refined detail that dazzles in every
scene. And yet that beauty hides the kind of behavior that most people would
call disgusting. It’s a film with perfume and lingerie budgets that also
includes the line “Would a human toilet
be a suitable compromise?” Strickland finds a way to blur the ugly and the
elegant in a manner that has rarely been seen before, using the filmic language
of Giallo and even Roman Polanski’s ‘70s works to tell a story that feels
bizarre but relatable, and he draws genuine performances from his two leads. It’s
definitely not a film for everyone—it’s even “stranger” than his last one—but it’s
a remarkable accomplishment of form, as Evelyn & Cynthia’s patterns blur
with the visual patterns of the filmmaker, which blur with the patterns of
insect beauty created by Mother Nature.
The first act of Javier Fuentes-León’s “The Vanished Elephant” has a similarly unsettling tone, keeping
viewers unsure of its final destination. Salvador del Solar stars as Edo
Celeste, a world famous writer haunted by the loss of his fiancée Celia seven
years earlier. As he’s finishing up what he plans to be his final novel
featuring a detective named Felipe Aranda, he gets summoned by Mara (Angie
Cepeda), a woman who lost her husband on the same day that Celia disappeared.
She received an envelope with pictures that may explain what happened to their
loved ones. Meanwhile, an artist making a production of Celeste’s work brings
an actor into the writer’s life who looks disturbingly familiar. He’s the same
man who Edo has pictured as Aranda as he’s written for years. He IS Aranda. Is
he? Or is he someone else? And does he have a connection to what happened to
Celia?
“The Vanished Elephant” starts as a traditional mystery/noir
but develops beats of Kafka or Charlie Kaufmann as it unravels. Who is the
writer? Who is the character? Who is the actor? It’s very confidently made and
features a strong central performance from del Solar but it kind of comes apart
as it progresses. Even as it goes off the rails narratively, it’s never boring.
I wish it came together in a more satisfying way, but it falls apart in an
interesting manner, which is more than can be said about some of TIFF 2014’s failures.
Finally, there’s Midnight Madness entry “Big Game,” a movie that perfectly illustrates the cycle of buzz at
a festival like this one. Going into Friday night, there was little hype for a
film in which Samuel L. Jackson plays the President of the United States, stuck
in the Finnish wilderness after terrorists take his plane down, forced to fight
for survival with only a 13-year-old kid as his companion. After the screening,
Twitter and social media exploded, with many critics and viewers claiming
adoration for it, and suddenly turning the next morning’s P&I into a hot
ticket. I switched plans, jumped in, and realized that the general dismissal of
the film pre-screening was wrong—it’s well made and often fun—but the rapturous
Midnight Madness responses were a bit overblown as well.
“Big Game” is a nod to ‘80s Amblin action films, a movie
with a small budget and obvious character motivations. Jackson is POTUS;
talented newcomer Onni Tommila is the kid; Ray Stevenson is the traitor (no spoiler…it’s
obvious early); Victor Garber, Ted Levine, Felicity Huffman and Jim Broadbent
lead the high-powered cast back in D.C., basically watching the action unfold
via satellite video. It’s a refreshingly simple action movie in the middle of
films that seek to comment on the human condition, and it’s that lack of
complication that I believe critics are embracing. I think, at home, away from
the environment of a festival, it will be revealed to be a bit flat, almost too
simple in its narrative and delivery. Here, as writers try to draw lines from film to film, it’s a nice bit of film festival diversion.
