Telluride ’13 Wrap-Up
by Walter Chaw The drive home always feels faster. I
didn't think it would this time, but it did.
Telluride ’13: FFC Interviews “Under the Skin” Director Jonathan Glazer
On my way up the side of the mountain to the Chuck Jones Theater in the unlit gondola that serves as Telluride’s free public transportation, I watched a small cluster of lights recede beneath me, reminding me that Telluride is a tiny bubble in the middle of nowhere, really. Riding at night, all you hear is the whirr of the gondola’s gears and the whisk of wind whipping through the wires and trees. I was on my way to meet a good friend I only see once every two or three years, if that–she having just arrived after a day of delays and missed connections, me still acclimating to being back in the saddle, actively covering a festival I’d last attended in 2002. It was a hurried reunion: a quick hello, and then we were seated for what was, for me, the one film I felt I could not miss at this festival. Truly, I can’t imagine a better way to have seen Under the Skin for the first time.
Telluride ’13: “On Death Row” – Conversation with James Barnes + Portrait of Robert Fratta
"On Death Row" Conversation with James Barnes
***/****
directed by Werner Herzog
"On Death Row" Portrait of Robert Fratta
**/****
directed by Werner Herzog
by Walter Chaw Two
shot-for-television documentaries, running about 50 minutes apiece, serve as
Werner Herzog's epilogue to 2011's Into the Abyss, each profiling a
single inmate in the inimitable Herzog style that has evolved over the years into something that doesn't punish its subjects (as it once did) so
much as it punishes the audience. Looking back to the way he shot coroner Franc G.
Fallico in Grizzly Man, allowing him to twist a few beats
too long, reveals that Fallico was perhaps a little too eager for the camera. That
strategy–delightful then–is a bludgeon now, as the extra beats have become
interminable and, I'm afraid, useless. Of the two docs screened at this year's
Telluride Film Festival, the first, "Conversation with James Barnes", is
the better, as Herzog gives time to one of Barnes's cousins, who declares The
Exorcist to be a documentary because, among other things, anyone who twisted her head around like Linda Blair does in that movie would have died. No,
it's true, the logic doesn't work. It's less Herzog finding the
equivalent of his bingo-playing chicken in these inbred huckleberries than it is Herzog getting the money shot by telling the poor, dumb thing that no,
he's never seen The Exorcist. It's brilliant. And it's cruel. "Portrait
of Robert Fratta", on the other hand, profiles narcissistic Death Row
pretty boy Fratta in a way that reveals almost nothing except what it looks
like when Herzog riffs too long on the same theme. In the post-film Q&A,
moderated by an obsequious Ken Burns, Herzog promised that he's done now with
these Death Row interviews–it's almost like he understands that he might have
picked at this one 'til it bled, and his consistent disclaimer that he wants to
humanize these interview subjects because, as a German, he's seen the evil of capital
punishment carried out by a monolithic State, has become brittle and, fatally,
ironic.
Telluride ’13: The Invisible Woman
***/****
directed by Ralph Fiennes
by Walter Chaw It opens with an
almost literal invocation to the muse, segues into a stage play like the
prologue to Olivier's Henry V, and bookends itself with a stage production that, again almost literally, drops the curtain on the
proceedings. Ralph Fiennes's The Invisible Woman is every inch the
literary production, a classical presentation that avoids the stuffiness that
often attends these things, replacing it with intimations of doom in foley and script. Based on Claire Tomalin's book, which tells of
the affair between an older Charles Dickens (Fiennes) and 18-year-old actress
Nelly Ternan (Felicity Jones), it has about it a delicious gravity, a weight of
inevitability driven by long shots of Nelly pounding across a beach as waves
crash behind, the crunch of her footfalls foretelling a coming storm. With his
second feature, Fiennes establishes himself as midway between the
traditionalism of Merchant/Ivory and the carnality of Kenneth Branagh–the
marriage of the two styles in bright relief during a climactic train-crash
sequence that, initially muted, pulls out into something wilder. Though it
arguably breaks no new ground save successfully portraying Dickens as the
asshat he was, credit is due for a very fine, studiously-detailed performance
from Jones that allows Nelly to avoid the clichés attendant to the young
mistress role. Hers is a completely rounded, imminently human journey through
childhood to self-actualization, joining the growing list of strong roles for
women this year despite the film seeming doomed to be shunted to the side. It
deserves more than that. If short of great, The Invisible Woman is
strong enough (note all the rumblings on the soundtrack, the lines warning of
storms rhyming with minor apocalypses in the picture proper) to establish
Fiennes as perhaps the same kind of director as he is an actor: alive somewhere
between the meat and the mind.
Telluride ’13: Under the Skin
****/****
starring Scarlett Johansson, Paul Brannigan, Krystof Hádek, Jessica Mance
screenplay by Walter Campbell and Jonathan Glazer, based on the novel by Michel Faber
directed by Jonathan Glazer
by Walter Chaw Trouble Every Day and The Man Who Fell to Earth as directed by Stanley Kubrick, Jonathan Glazer’s astonishing Under the Skin marks his return to feature filmmaking after a nine-year hiatus. The loosest of adaptations, cherry-picking from Michel Faber’s strong novel of the same name, Under the Skin is home to a trio (at least) of indelible images and a style and presentation that function as shunts into a thicket of thorny existential questions; it’s the best film I’ve seen this year and among the best films I’ve ever seen. Stripped to the bone, as capable of viciousness as it is tenderness, it achieves what seems impossible by creating a sense of the mysterium tremens in the body of a human-looking alien. When it works, it’s a stunner worthy of mention in the same breath as Blade Runner, but more significant than its immediate impact is its lingering afterimage. I liked it initially. In the six days since I saw it, scarcely an hour’s gone by that I haven’t thought about it. Under the Skin, not to be flip, burrows exactly there, and nests.
Telluride ’13: Nebraska
***½/****
starring Bruce Dern, Will Forte, June Squibb, Stacy Keach
screenplay by Bob Nelson
directed by Alexander Payne
by Walter Chaw Alexander Payne returns to form after
the disappointing The Descendants with the muted, often hilarious, and
sentimental-without-being-schmaltzy filial road trip Nebraska. It's
easily his most tender work, despite the mordant, sometimes bitter humour
Payne has become known for in his best work (Election remains his
crowning achievement; About Schmidt is no slouch, either), and it makes
a brilliant move in offering a showcase opportunity for national treasure Bruce
Dern. Shot in black-and-white, with a spare, minimal production design making
it an expressionist piece projecting the barren interiors of its broken
characters, Nebraska, though not the adaptation of the identically-named
collection of Ron Hansen short stories I initially hoped it was, at least
possesses the same wintry, intellectual mien.
Telluride ’13: Gravity
**½/****
starring Sandra Bullock, George Clooney
screenplay by Alfonso Cuarón & Jonás Cuarón
directed by Alfonso Cuarón
by Walter Chaw Alfonso Cuarón's eagerly-anticipated,
already-buzzy follow-up to the tremendous Children of Men is Gravity–a title that doesn't reference the Ray
Bradbury story "Kaleidoscope," to which the film owes at least a little
credit (in addition to the premise and theme, Gravity also lifts the character name "Stone"), or any real meat at the heart of the story.
It's not for lack of trying, as Cuarón and son/co-writer Jonás attempt,
after the emotional tissue connecting the protags of Children of Men,
to graft another lost-child drama onto a larger science-fiction conceit. What
results is probably the most venue-dependant release of a year that includes Pacific
Rim–if you can see it in IMAX 3D, you ought to: the biggest screen with
the best sound. It's possibly the first film since Avatar that
actually works with the extra dimension, despite having been converted in
post-production; at times while screening Gravity at the Werner Herzog Theater
in Telluride, I felt a bit vertiginous. It's an effect that no doubt had
everything to do with the dual-projection and the custom-designed
sound system by Meyers Sound. I talked to several techs from the company
running around before the show,
tweaking, testing, making sure that organs physically shifted during
the presentation. My favourite story of the festival is how Cuarón, from the
auditorium, instructed the booth to turn up the audio to just less than twice
the "acceptable" volume.
Telluride ’13: 12 Years a Slave
**½/****
starring Chiwetel Ejiofor, Michael Fassbender, Benedict Cumberbatch, Paul Dano
screenplay by John Ridley, based on the book by Solomon Northrup
directed by Steve McQueen
by Walter Chaw With performances this good, with a director this astonishing, the only thing that could make it less than transcendent, I’m afraid, is source material so well-respected, so revered truth be known, that it limits the places the cast and director might otherwise go. What I’m saying is that the prospect of Steve McQueen making a slave narrative is one to savour, celebrate, induce chills in the hearts of every serious scholar of cinema as experiential philosophy–and the prospect of Steve McQueen adapting Solomon Northrup’s (as related to white lawyer David Wilson) 12 Years a Slave is one to inspire some level of inevitable disappointment. What I expected was to be blown away by Michael Fassbender and Chiwetel Ejiofor’s performances–and I was. What I didn’t expect was to be disturbed by a few instances of manipulation of the document that seem driven by something other than good faith. Why, for instance, would one portray the death of a black conspirator on a slaver ship bound for Louisiana at the hand of a white crewman about to rape a sympathetic figure, when the document reveals this conspirator was taken by smallpox? For the sake of drama? Were the roles reversed, this kind of narrative manipulation would take on a decidedly different hue.
Telluride ’13: Tim’s Vermeer
**½/****
directed by Teller
by Walter Chaw Teller, of magician/illusionist/debunking/bullshitting duo Penn & Teller, makes his directorial debut with a documentary that, even at
a fleet 79 minutes, feels a little long. For a while, though, Tim's Vermeer
paints a compelling picture of inventor (fellow illusionist and 3-D designer) Tim Jenison
as he indulges his peculiar obsession with proving that Dutch master Johannes
Vermeer used some kind of camera obscura optical trickery to achieve his
photo-realistic style. The case seems ironclad by the end as Jenison recreates
the entire room depicted in Vermeer's "The Music Room," sets up his
little gizmo-whatsit, then sits down, the consummate non-painter, to produce a
Xerox-accurate replica of Vermeer's masterpiece. Various talking heads
weigh in, day titles depict the passage of time, and by the end it's clear that
the topic isn't so much technology's role in art (there's a proximate reality
problem presented by the film that pushes it near to a place of
science-fiction) as it is Jenison's apparent illness, his meticulousness becoming obsessive and even, at times, frightening, possibly to the point of
self-destruction. For the experiment to work, see, Jenison must be unschooled
in every required discipline of his project: architecture, costume design, construction,
and finally painting. It makes the definitive last image suddenly ambiguous:
how do we measure success, and what price is too steep?
Telluride ’13: The Unknown Known
****/****
directed by Errol Morris
by Walter Chaw Errol Morris returns
to The Fog of War form in what could be seen as a complementary piece: a
feature-length conversation with Donald Rumsfeld called, appropriately, The
Unknown Known. It's a phrase that repeats throughout a picture that's scored
in a Philip Glass-ian way by Danny Elfman (who at one point channels Michael
Small's music for The Parallax View) and ends with a rimshot that would
be funnier if it weren't terrifying. Different from The Fog of War and
an apparently repentant Robert McNamara, The Unknown Known's Rumsfeld
comes off as not so much unrepentant as incapable of reasonable
self-reflection. There's a story I like to tell about talking with Capturing
the Friedmans director Andrew Jarecki, who revealed to me that at an
initial screening one of the subjects of his documentary, watching herself
speak, muttered, "I didn't say that." Rumsfeld appears to be like
that: he's not lying, he's having some kind of psychotic break. I don't
mean it flippantly, and Morris, whose line of questioning ranges from WMD to the
popular public misconception that Hussein was involved with 9/11, from Guantanamo to Abu Ghraib, allows Rumsfeld to clarify his non-equivocal equivocations.
When Rumsfeld laughs, it's frightening–an alien thing's attempt to simulate a human
emotion. Another highlight: a portion of the Nixon tapes where Tricky Dick
reveals his mistrust of Rumsfeld to Haldeman. The Unknown Known is as fine a film as Morris has
made, all the more timely now that the United States–under new leadership, elected
on a platform of hope and change–is on the eve of another act of war.
Telluride ’13: Tracks
*/****directed by John Curran by Walter Chaw Kind of like a dustier Eight Below, in which Mia Wasikowska walks four camels and a dog across the Australian Outback in a whimsical death march that I find, at my age (40), amazingly selfish and borderline sociopathic. Tracks is based on the true story of "camel lady" Robyn Davidson, who, in 1977, walked across a huge stretch of Australia because she really hated being around other people. Davidson says, by way of charming voiceover narration, that she didn't want to be a whiny bitch like the rest of her generation, but she replaces…
Telluride ’13: An Introduction or, The Stand
by Walter Chaw It's a six-and-a-half hour drive from my
home in Arvada, CO to Telluride on the Western Slope, and there are two ways to get
there. One way is all highway; the other way is all beauty. I took the
second route, and it made all the difference. I've been in a dark, difficult
place for a long time now, or, at least, long enough in the parlance of
near-crippling depression. I was caught in eddies; I had become inert. I had
almost completely stopped writing. Not just essays like this one, but reviews,
too, which I used to be able to pump out with I think alarming speed and ease.
Early on, someone asked my editor how I did it; at times over the last couple months, I wondered if I'd ever write like that again. Things are hard when you're dark.
Getting out of bed was a negotiation–getting out to a screening was a near act
of God. The thought of accidentally eavesdropping other people's thoughts was
agony. The times I did, of course, were good, because the guilt I would have
felt had I gone and not written on the privilege would have been untenable.
Would that the guilt of not writing on home-video releases have the same
lubricative effect.