Live from Cannes, Liam Lacey reviews the festival's top films as they screen. The most recent reviews (today, Mommy) are at the bottom of this list. Come back often for his quick-takes and a look at the trailers:
Grace of Monaco
Starring Nicole Kidman and Tim Roth
Directed by Olivier
Dohan
“The
idea of my life as a fairy tale is
itself a fairy tale,” reads the text
introducing Grace of Monaco, the very
well-dressed but overall very silly
account of the life of Grace Kelly’s
marriage to Prince Rainier of Monaco
(Tim Roth, chain smoking and wistfully
troubled).
Essentially a retelling of Alfred Hitchcock’s Rebecca, it stars Nicole Kidman as the breathy, wide-eyed young actor, walking away from a Hollywood set and entering the palace as Her Serene Highness, Princess of Royalty.
Jumping forward from her 1956 marriage to 1961, the film makes much of Kelly considering going back to work with Alfred Hitchcock, while struggling with an apparently treacherous assistant, Madge (Parker Posey), dealing with snooty socialites, seeking consolation from an American priest (Frank Langella), facing down a French invasion and exposing a diabolical family plot against her husband. All the while, advisers keep assuring her she’s playing “the role of your life.”
Both fictionalized and considerably sanitized (where are the affairs?), Grace of Monaco at least offers some camp value. At one point, Charles de Gaulle screams at Rainier: “You’ll accept my terms by tonight or I’ll send Monaco back to the dark ages!” Which, given the décor and the decorum, would be a very short hop.
Mr. Turner
Starring
Timothy Spall
Directed by Mike Leigh
Mike Leigh’s latest film does what he did in Topsy-Turvy, finding the human in the genius, following the last 25 years of the Romantic English painter Joseph Mallord William Turner's life (1775-1851).
At the film’s start, Turner is already a financially secure, celebrated painter, and lives with his doting father (Paul Jesson) who works as his assistant. Turner’s mother was mentally ill, a wound that seems to have unnaturally bound the two men. Their housekeeper Hannah Danby (Dorothy Atkinson) accepts her complicated role as housekeeper, cook and occasional object of Turner’s sexual urges.
Together, father and housekeeper keep Turner protected from the outside world, though not always from his angry former mistress (Ruth Sheen) with whom he produced two daughters.The second half of the film follows his father’s death, his professional controversies and relationship with a new mistress, the Margate landlady Sophia Booth (Marion Bailey).
Leigh’s own artistic vision is more about pathos and comedy than Turner’s search for the sublime, but the contrast of subject and tone works wonderfully here. Mr. Turner immerses us in a world abundant in both its natural beauty and suffering, and offers us clues to specific paintings and the cultural climate of the time.
Mostly, though, it gives us the performance of Timothy Spall playing a character as grotesque as any film hero since David Lynch’s The Elephant Man. By turns obtuse and hyper-sensitive, he’s an inarticulate storm of emotions whose inner reality spills out on the canvas.
Timbuktu
Starring:
Ibrahim Ahmed
Born in Mauritania, raised in Mali and now residing in France, director Abderrahmane Sissako brings a rare film from Sub-Saharan Africa to the Cannes competition: the poetic, heart-rending Timbuktu.
The Captive
Directed by Atom Egoyan
Starring Ryan Reynolds and Mireille Enos
Early reviews for Atom Egoyan’s The Captive have been blisteringly harsh, with critics declaring the thriller everything from crass to ludicrous. There was even a scattering of boos at Friday morning’s screening. So it doesn’t seem like a Palme d’Or is in Egoyan’s future, but is the lambasting justified? My reaction is that it’s overkill, in some ways a reflection of a sensibility shift from the nineties and its taste for complexity and ambiguity, which is now dismissed as recherche and pretentious. Egoyan, after all, is the same director who was a Grand Prize winner and double Oscar nominee for 1997’s The Sweet Hereafter, which was full of ambiguities. In fact, one jury member who may very well like it is jury head Jane Campion, whose films also pursue sexual danger zones and uncomfortable behaviour.
The plot is textbook abduction thriller: fairly familiar imperilled children and rich-folk-up-to-no-good stuff that made the recent HBO series True Detective a critical hit. Ryan Reynolds plays Matt, a struggling landscaper in Niagara Falls; his wife Tina (The Killing’s Mireille Enos) works as a hotel maid. One wintry day, on the way back from his nine-year-old daughter Cass’s skating practice, Matt stops to pick up a pie. When he returns to his truck, the girl is gone.
Movie dramas these days, largely shaped by serial television, are all cliffhangers, all explosive resolution. The Captive isn’t like that. The detectives on the case (Rosario Dawson and Scott Speedman), who specialize in child-abduction cases, initially suspect Matt, but the whole story fragments like a dropped crystal, with the time frame jumping around over eight years as the investigation crawls along. Both detectives have things in their past that push them. The couple’s trauma exposes cracks in their relationship: his irresponsibility, her anger. Reynolds is very good; Enos, broodingly intense as usual. And while I’m less happy with the cops (some hint of Speedman’s backstory would have helped), the acting isn’t a problem.
I can’t claim The Captive really works. There are some outright clunkers in the script (“We could do this here or down at the station,”), and a black-widow character in a bad wig (Christina Horne) who slips a mickey into someone’s drink, like something out of an antique melodrama. There’s even an convenient overheard conversation at an ice rink that felt like old-time stage business. But the biggest challenge here is the attempt to blend the pedestrian thriller and the larger, madder world of operatic emotions, fantasy and archetype. Given the film begins with the villain (Kevin Durand, and no, that’s not a spoiler) listening to the Queen of the Night aria from The Magic Flute (“The vengeance of Hell boils in my heart. Death and despair flame about me!) viewers should be on the alert that this is not naturalistic drama. The same could be said of Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo, which had a similar oppressively foreboding score and a far more outlandish plot, which was rated by Sight and Sound critics as the greatest film of all time.
What irritates people about The Captive, I suspect, is that it’s a film about child abuse (though it never gets graphic) that doesn’t contain any conventional catharsis. Also, a lot of it is unfashionably “meta:” There’s a recurring trope in Egoyan’s work about a Scheherazade-like character that delays punishment by storytelling. And at the plot’s hall-of-mirrors centre, there’s a cult. Not of de rigueur villain perverts, but of voyeurs who use hidden cameras to feed on the pain of the victims’ family and friends. They are stand-ins for all of us ghouls who shake our heads and thrill to these true and fictional sex crime dramas. |And who, even a critic, wants to be told that their pleasure is morally complicated?
Saint Laurent
Directed by Bertrand Bonello
Starring: Gaspard Ulliel, Lea
Seydoux, Louis Garrel, Jeremie Renier
The second French movie in the last five months about the famed
fashion designer, Yves Saint Laurent, begins with the designer
at the height of his fame in 1974, checking into a Paris hotel
under the Proust-inspired name of Swann, and conducting a
telephone interview in which he describes being put in a mental
hospital and given electric-shock treatment in his youth in
Algeria.
Apart from this brief hint into his fragile psyche, Saint Laurent is threadbare in plot and characterization, but stuffs its two-and-a-half-hour running time with lovely clothes and gilded surroundings. Gangly star Gaspard Ulliel (Hannibal Rising) maintains a faint smirk of troubled amusement throughout, either working his white atelier (resembling a medical lab) or watching passively, with a Warholian gaze through his specs, at the drug and booze shenanigans of his entourage. The implicit message here seems to be that personal creativity is best fueled by a diet consisting of pills, champagne and chocolate mouse.
Brief attention is give to his muses, models Betty Catroux (Aymeline Valade) and Loulou (Lea Seydoux) and more to his destructive relationship with Karl Lagerfeld model, Jacques de Bauscher (Louis Garrel). Saint Laurent’s brilliant business partner, Pierre Berge (Jeremie Renier), is shown conducting an interminable business meeting with American partners that lays out the YSL business strategy. The dumbest moment is a split-screen montage of student riots and Vietnam protests paralleled with Saint Laurent’s seasonal 1968-1971 collection. Despite the occasional attempts to suggest YSL’s tortured soul through dream sequences in which the designer’s bed crawling with snakes the film is at its best with the designer’s costumes, not his content.
Winter Sleep
Starring Haluk Bilginer, Melisa Sozen, Demet Akbag
Directed by Nuri Bilge Ceylan
Turkish director Nuri Bilge Ceylan confirms his status among the world’s best cinema story-tellers in Winter Sleep, a beautifully acted and shot drama about a marriage between a retired actor, Aydin (Haluk Biliginer), and his estranged younger wife, Nihal (Melisa Sozen). Together, they manage a cave house hotel for foreign travellers in Turkish Cappadocia, an area known for its natural wonders. Sharing their home is Aydin’s recently divorced, sister, Necla (Demet Abag), who shares his ownership of a string of tenant properties.
Aydin is a familiar type from late-nineteenth century fiction, is an erudite, vain, older man with a frustrated young wife. While Aydin writes sententious columns for the local newspaper and talks about the history of Turkish theatre he will someday write, Nihal has formed a group to try to help the impoverished community. When the son of an impoverished tenant throws a rock at Aydin’s car window, it triggers a series of incidents that reveal some painful truths. There’s a distinctly Chekhovian sense of tragic comedy, while the stunning landscapes and uncanny rock formations seem to comment on the characters’ emotional paralysis.
Maps to the Stars
Directed by David Cronenberg
Starring Julianne Moore, Mia Wasikowska, John Cusack and Evan Bird
Hollywood, it turns out, is crawling with career-driven narcissists, hooked equally on drugs and therapy babble. That much isn’t news in David Cronenberg’s new film, a mixture of satire and mock Oedipal tragedy about a Hollywood family with bad secrets, based on an archly literate script by novelist-screenwriter Bruce Wagner. Taking things one step further, though, Maps to the Stars spins a plot around a damaged family, taking that narcissism as as kind of a poison which echoes out from the Hollywood dream machine to the culture as a whole.
The Weiss family consists of adage-quoting dad, Standford (John Cusack), a glib therapist and best-selling author; his wife, Christina (Olivia Williams in a severe Kris Jenner bob), who manages the career of 13-year-old Benjie (Evan Bird), a child star with a history of addiction problems. Standford’s star client is Havana Segrand (sounds like “fantasy grand”), played by Julianne Moore, in high neurotic form as a petulant package of envy and need, suggesting what a middle-aged Lindsay Lohan might be like.
Havana’s great issue is her mother, a troubled cult movie star who died in a fire in the 1970s, who Hannah believes, probably falsely, sexually abused her. The Weiss family, by contrast, has a real dark secret: At the beginning of the film, their estranged 18-year-old daughter, Agatha (Mia Wasikowska, nervously ingratiating) who wears black gloves and her hair around her face to hide burn scars, arrives from a Florida psychiatric hospital, determined to seek out her family again.
Maps to the Stars is, per Cronenberg’s usual coolly measured and impeccably composed, though at times it feels too close to the written page. Benji, in particular sounding improbably articulate. Humour tends toward brimstone cynicism -- an actress’s joy when a death opens a part, pebbled with bits of topical name-dropping. We hear, for example, that drug recovery can boost an adult’s career, we hear, but it’s usually bad for children -- with the exception of “Drew”.
Also yanking viewers out of the film’s reality, there are two characters who see visions of dead people. While this may be a fair metaphor for pop culture’s obsessive necrophilia, unfortunately, the scenes feel more like metaphors rather than emotional experience. For some compensatory lyrical balance, throughout the film, both Benjie and his sister repeatedly quote the surrealist Paul Eluard’s poem, Liberty (“On all the white pages/Stone, blood, paper or ash/I write your name.”) Only in the film’s final sequence do we step out of sterile modernist interiors (shot mostly in Toronto) into a distinctly Los Angeles’ and, rather beautiful, landscape.
Foxcatcher
Directed by Bennett Miller
Starring: Channing Tatum, Steve Carell and Mark Ruffalo
Bennett Miller’s new film, Foxcatcher, is a modern Beauty and the Beast tale, set in the world of U.S. Olympic wrestling. Employing the same understated observational style with a well-shaped script that distinguished Miller’s previous films, Moneyball and Capote, Miller cuts through the tabloid speculation to discover how one rich man's mental illness is a symptom of larger social illness.
Though Variety has already declared an “Oscar lock” for Steve Carell’s prosthetically-enhanced, vocally-pinched performance as homicidal billionaire John E. du Pont, the film is built on three indelible performances. Channing Tatum does his best work to date as wrestler Mark Schultz, a bundle of muscle and unarticulated emotions, while Mark Ruffalo offers an immensely appealing performance as Dave, his older brother, coach and fellow Olympic gold medalist.
Stretched out over almost a decade, the story is told with an incremental sense of inevitability. Early scenes establish the unusually close bond between the Schultz brothers in intense training sessions. Just as Dave is planning to move out of state with his family, Mark gets an invitation to visit John E. du Pont, heir to his family’s chemical fortune on his Pennsylvania estate. Dave's benefactor is a pontificating kook (his resume as a “ornithologist, philatelist, philanthropist” seems destined to become a meme). But he’s also the answer to Schultz’s prayers: A salary, a home, and access to a state-of-the art gym. The offer is extended to a sprawling crew of other Olympic hopefuls, and, eventually, Mark’s brother, Dave, who moves onto the property with his family, whose existence stands for everything his wealthy benefactor can never possess.