Pasadena, 1928. Single mom Angelina Jolie is a switchboard supervisor who glides around the telephone company on rollerskates. It’s adorable, but her signature smoky eyes and blood red lips mean she’s probably moonlighting as either a tramp or a clown. Scenes confirming one option or the other were, unfortunately, left on the cutting room floor.
The LAPD is corrupt –– so corrupt that the holiest man in town is John Malkovich. So when Angie’s son goes missing, they give her back a “fake boy,” and the evil detective (Jeffrey Donovan) can’t figure out if the ensuing scandal means he should have an Irish accent or not.
We drink every time Angelina hysterically proclaims, “He’s not my son!” We get very drunk, and this may be why we can’t figure out why Clint Eastwood made a cheap-looking Lifetime movie that eventually turns into an “And justice for all!” episode of SVU. Just when the drinking game is starting to get really out of control, there’s a twist so shocking that it’s punctuated by two inches of ash falling off a policeman’s cigarette … in slow motion.
This sobers us up pretty quick. “Really, Clint?” we say out loud, right in the middle of the screening. But no one can hear our cry, they’re so overwhelmed by the sound of Angelina’s constant tears, which just keep flowing, long after the stakes have vanished, because Eastwood can’t help but indefinitely extend the misery. So we shrug. “Oscars for all!” Now for another drink.
Darren Aronofky’s handheld camera follows Mickey Rourke from behind for the first several scenes of The Wrestler. It’s apparently impossible for contemporary directors to use this technique without someone suggesting that they ripped it from a Dardenne film, but its use in The Wrestler feels very different from its use in, say, L’Enfant: it doesn’t produce the same sense of a tension that could break if the camera ever allowed its subject to get too far away. In fact, several times, the camera just stops while Rourke keeps moving, allowing us to appreciate the full physicality of the actor’s performance long before we ever see his face. There must be a cerebral component to the way Rourke approached becoming aging wrestler Randy “The Ram” Robinson, because otherwise I doubt he’d have been able to so deftly navigate the character’s expansive emotional arc while still nailing all the jokes. But this performance goes way beyond the brain, or the precision with which Rourke transformed his appearance, or even the naturalism with which he performs the wrestling choreography. This is a performance that seems to start and end in the cardiovascular system, making everything Rourke actually does seem effortless. As if he’s just breathing it.
A wrestling superstar in the 80s (famous enough, at his peak, to have his own 8-bit representation jumping off the ropes in a Nintendo game), 20 years later Randy is barely holding it together, sleeping in a van when his trailer is padlocked for failure to pay rent, unloading boxes at a supermarket to make the cash from small-time meets stretch to cover his bleach, tanning and human growth hormone habits. Randy remains fiercely committed to the sport, even though his body’s not what it used to be, and even though the sport –– at least on a mainstream, big-money level –– no longer has much interest in him. With the 20th anniversary coming up of Randy’s biggest fight, a face-off with an Iranian flag-waving wrestler by the name of The Ayatollah, Randy’s producer approaches him with “two words: Re. Match.” This gives Randy something to work on other than the hot-and-cold affections of aging stripper Pam (Marisa Tomei), but when a particularly intense fight results in serious injury, Randy has to turn off autopilot and reevaluate his options.
That this all manages, for the most part, to avoid sports film fall-rise cliches and veer into unexpected directions whilst exploring a wide range of feeling, is a minor miracle. It’s a cliche to say that Rourke’s performance is “fearless” but, well, it is. But it only works as well as it does because of the economy of The Wrestler’s construction, and the stealthiness of Aronofsky’s craft.
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I’ve been sitting here for two hours trying to figure out how to shoehorn press conference quotes into a review of The Wrestler, the NYFF closing night film which screened for the press this morning. But Stu at Defamer already beat me to posting the money quotes from star Mickey Rourke. Here’s the part that I planned to use to great dramatic effect, which Rourke spat out in response to the last question of the session, all the while gesticulating with what appeared to be a half-smoked, unlit cigarillo:
“I mean, if I knew it would take me 15 years to get back in the saddle and work again because of the way I handled things, I really would have handled things differently,” he told the crowd. “I just didn’t have the tools. I’m doing things differently this time around — understanding what it is to be a professional, be responsible and to be consistent. Those are things that weren’t in my vocabulary back then. Change for me didn’t come easy; I didn’t wanna change until I lost everything until I realized that you better change, or, you know, blow your fucking brains out. Either you change and go on with life, or you’re just a piece of shit.”
The film finds interesting ways to invert that life lesson. More in a bit. In the meantime, you can read Stu’s full report here.
Voy a Explotar (I’m Gonna Explode) is the contemporary Mexican teenage Pierrot le Fou. It knows this, and it wants you to know it, and it doesn’t care if this makes you hate it on principle. The third feature by Gerardo Naranjo (director of Drama/Mex, co-writer and star of Azazel Jacobs’ The GoodTimeskid), it’s the rare love letter to influence that’s infused with enough personal style and sentiment to transform the stolen into something thrilling and moving.
15 year-old Maru (Maria Deschamps) is a prep school bad girl with a mangy mane of hair and, apparently, a drinking problem. When Roman (Juan Pablo de Santiago), the spoiled little rich boy son of a right-wing politician gets kicked out of his school and introduces himself at Maru’s suburban Mexico school via faking his own hanging at a talent show, the girl is instantly besotted. “He exists, but I also made him up,” she writes in a letter to a friend which doubles as internal monologue. “The best part is that he’s angry.” Roman is equally smitten, and soon the pair are scheming to run away together.
Or so they want their parents to think; really, they’re camped out in a tent on the roof of Roman’s father’s mansion. Maru’s hysterical mother and sister come over to the house to become part of the rescue effort––which, under the oversight of Roman’s distant dad, consists mainly of drinking tequila and waiting for clues to come to him. With a stolen cell phone, Roman calls daddy’s security detail with false leads to get the grown ups out of the house so that he and Maru can crawl downstairs and collect provisions. It’s only when the pair decide to finally really leave home that their saga starts to hew to the traditional tropes of love-on-the-run.
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You can’t say that Steven Soderbergh’s Che isn’t beautifully shot and scored. You can’t say that Benicio Del Toro doesn’t give himself completely to the title role. You can’t say that it’s not an extremely daring piece of cinema –– in fact, it takes incredible balls to make a film this long, this wonky, while giving the audience this little to actually care about. In four-plus hours, across which Del Toro transforms from mild-mannered 20-something physician to dutiful soldier to full-on disciplinarian bad ass, then pops up in Bolivia after Intermission as a crazed, wheezing optimist who leads a doomed mission fueled purely by his unshakable faith that past glories are repeatable, Soderbergh manages to show an almost complete lack of concern for the inner life of his protagonist. If the traditional biopic is felled by forced emotional touchpoints that exaggerate or misrepresent their real-life equivalents, Che has the opposite problem: in producing a versimilar portrait of two temporally disconnected chunks of Che’s public life, Soderbergh has made a movie called Che that tells us nothing about Che, which largely relies on that lovely cinematography and dynamic score to fill in the emotional beats that the director hasn’t brought out of the material.
Soderbergh, who showed up to today’s post-NYFF screening press conference wearing a scruffy Che-reminiscent beard, admitted that he began working on the film (he and Del Toro started discussing the project in 2000) long before he managed to define his attraction to his subject. “Sometimes you say yes, and you’re not sure why you said yes,” the director said. “I went in with more of an idea of what I didn’t want to do than what I did want to do.”
“It wasn’t until the films were finished, right around Cannes, that I realized…it was about engagement versus disengagement. Every day in our lives, we’re making decisions. Do we want to participate, or do we want to observe? And I realized that what was compelling to me about Che was that when he decided to engage, he engaged fully.”
If only the same could be said of the filmmaker. …Read more
If the New York Film Festival marks the beginning of fall for local press and industry like a grown-up back to school, the Festival’s annual black tie opening night party at Tavern on the Green (and the ritual afterparty in the West Village) is like the prom. With indie film legends walking around amongst us cinephile nerds. That, of course, is John Waters above. More photos on Flickr.
If I was Nikki Finke, I’d start this headline with a “TOLDJA!”, but I’m too obsessed with search engine optimization for that.
So as I predicted, Steven Soderbergh’s Che, which has gone MIA since controversially premiering in a two-part, 4.5 hour cut at Cannes, has made the lineup for the Lincoln Center event. Also of note, Darren Aronsofsky’s The Wrestler, which will close the festival.
Otherwise, it’s basically Cannes Redux–giving lie to the whispers that this year’s installment of the French festival was sub par, I guess. Clint Eastwood’s The Changeling will serve as its Centerpiece, and will join a whole ton of Cannes cherry picks, including Gomorrah, Tony Manero, Waltz With Bashir, Serbis, A Headless Woman, A Christmas Tale, 24 City…I could go on for awhile. There’s really only a handful of films which didn’t premiere at Cannes (one of which, I’m Going to Explode, was directed by the star of Azazel Jacobs’ The GoodTimesKid, and also Mike Leigh’s Berlin fave Happy-Go-Lucky). I’ve pasted their titles and synopses after the jump. I guess, refreshingly, there are few slots filled by star-studded indie-arm Oscar bait…but then, there are few indie arms left to fill slots. indieWIRE has the full schedule.
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What’s going on with Steven Soderbergh’s Che? Heard anything recently? I haven’t seen any hard news published in any half-way reputable outlet since Cannes (aside from this report from IndianTelevision.com that Che will soon premiere on––wait for it––Indian television, but the film’s international release has never been in doubt). But that hasn’t put an end to the speculation.
On June 14, Jeff Wells did a post based on a conversation a friend of his had with some other guy who’s “familiar with the comings and goings of” Wild Bunch, the sales agency who funded Che and have been looking for a buyer for it since Berlin. The gist, as Wells passes it along through the various degrees of distance, is that Wild Bunch has given up trying to sell the current cut to a U.S. distributor, and Soderbergh’s too busy shooting his next movie to worry about refining his cut, and everyone’s just sort of shrugging their shoulders and cutting their losses.
I didn’t come across this story until today, when I finally decided to do some digging on a rumor I heard about the film last month when I was in Las Vegas. …Read more
