So much going on here at the Telluride Film Festival, it is hard to keep up with all the films! There are so many yet to see and only two more days to do it! Here is a roundup of some of the pictures that have been talked about a lot here:
Large crowds showing up for the new Channing Tatum and Steve Carell film Foxcatcher, suggesting that the box-office appeal of the headlining stars has yet to wane. The film is directed by Bennet Miller (who brought us Capote and Moneyball respectively) and co-written by Max Frye and Dan Futterman (remember him as the selfish son in The Birdcage?), and tells of the aspirations and ruination of John (Carell), a Dupont family heir who wants desperately to play more than benefactor to the world of wrestling (and latches on to Olympic champion wrestler Mark Schultz (Tatum), a move that will spell disaster for all involved. Mark Ruffalo’s performance has garnered the most universal praise of the film in a supporting role as Schultz’s brother/trainer Dave (also an Olympic champion in the same 1984 Los Angeles games that Mark would win his gold medal, and whose fate is actually the more prescient in this drama) but the film as a whole does not seem to be inspiring raves from around town so much as the excitement to catch a new film before it hits theatres.
The Argentinian film Wild Tales by Damián Szifrón has gotten a lot of great response from audiences so far, even forcing the volume to be turned up in smaller theatres because the laughter was so raucous it was hard to hear everything in the film. The program describes it as Buñuelian black comedy with unexpected twists, and that description holds up. There are a group of different vengeful plots that develop as animosity arises between each tales’ characters, e.g. a pair of road ragers, a bride at her wedding, etc. The opening, about a man that everyone on the plane seems to know and have bad memories of, clearly won everyone over, and it looks like when this hits theatres future viewers will have plenty to enjoy.
We got a look at the new Disney Animation short Feast, about the relationship between a dog and his human male companion as seen through the meals the dog feasts on through the different phases of the grown man’s life. It’s a LOT more entertaining than last year’s Pixar short (the listless and uninvolving Blue Umbrella, which had nothing going for it other than the physical verisimilitude of the animation). Feast is charming, clever, and sure to melt the heart of dog lovers everywhere. Of course it takes little to emotionally manipulate an audience when your story is about a cute dog, but it had a sincere narrative and the laughs are big and well-earned (especially when the dog’s owner is watching a football game on TV).
Francis Ford Coppola and gang showed up for a special appreciation of Apocalypse Now, including sound-editor Walter Murch (whom I met at UC Berkeley in a guest lecture during a class taught by his fellow Oscar-winner for the sound in Apocalypse Now, Mark Berger), writer John Milius appearing more jovial than expected (having came even though he’s recovering from a recent stroke), as well as the famed cinematographer Vittorio Storarro. Coppola (when not fiddling with his smartphone during the screening of clips) told of not really having to direct Marlon Brando, but he would just leave him props that he wanted him to use, knowing that Brando would instinctively know what to do with them, and know when to find the light in just the right way. One interesting tidbit he shared was how Brando would arrive on set and hold his hand at a different level of his chest, stomach or neck, asking wordlessly where the frameline was, so he’d know which part of his body he would need to act with, and use only those parts while the rest did nothing. FFC also mentioned that he intentionally hired a 14-year old Laurence Fishburne because he thinks young actors look older on camera and he needed someone younger than 17 to have him look 17 in the film (right after the casting director said he didn’t know Fishburne was 14 at the time). Each person in the group picked a series of clips to demonstrate their particular contributions to the film, Walter Murch’s being the best (he chose the opening scene). Murch talked about the arduous task of searching for specific recordings of “Ride of the Valkyries” and analyzing them for use in the film, Jim Morrison being at his “fuckiest” when recording the master tapes of “The End,” and noting that when the film was seen on TV, all Morrison’s “fucks” somehow made it into the broadcast. He also spoke of his design for the soundtrack in the opening, and that the choppers (rhyming with the visual of the ceiling fan blades) and the jungle sounds delicately layered into the mix are cues that mentally the protagonist is not all there in the hotel in Saigon, but still in the jungle. Also, Coppola plugged his wine business again, but despite that this was a fascinating close up on the film.
One of this year’s Silver Medallion honorees, the less spoken-of titan of the New German Cinema Volker Schlondorff, has a whole collection of films, including his adaptation of Bertoldt Brecht’s Baal, a film he made over 40 years ago and could not release until now due to rights issues with Brecht’s estate (the most forbidding organization for an artist to negotiate with, Schlondorff said in the Q&A). The film gives us a fascinating look at Rainer Werner Fassbinder, the actor, playing the titular monster of a human being/brilliant poet, before he would blaze his own ubiquitous directorial trail through the New German Cinema. The Q&A with Werner Herzog afterward felt like a little NGC reunion. The stories they shared were priceless, about the “greasy, sweaty, pimply” Fassbinder whose artistic personality was partially a cover for a sweet and kind artist who was thankful to his friends even as he ordered them to watch his early films when he started out. Herzog remembered a touching story about Fassbinder, who once gave him a tender hug just for showing his films at a college in Peru (and according to Herzog, making all the other gay guys eye him with jealous anger, as if WH was moving in on their territory). It was definitely a jovial atmosphere in the Sheridan Opera House for this long-delayed premiere of Baal.
Also here for the fest is Jon Stewart (seen happily taking pictures with fans around town) with his film Rosewater, about the detention of Iranian-born Newsweek journalist Maziar Bahari (played with that perfect mixture of gravitas, comedy and human frailty particular to Gael García Bernal) when he captured and released footage of police brutality and murder of civilians in the midst of the unrest following the sham re-election of Ahmadinejad in his home country. Stewart’s film, based on Bahari’s memoir, is a bit clunky at times, (some simplistic dialogue , some scenes clumsily condense information into what feel like 6 o’clock news clips/graphics), but the rest of the film compensates amply for the freshman roughness. Stewart puts his keen perspective and knowledge to good use, just as one of the opposition men Bahari meets chastises him: “you have the strongest weapon and you don’t use it!” referring to Bahari’s camera.
He also clearly grasps the many facets of Bahari’s experience well enough to not recreate it without the aid of people who lived it. He shows Bahari’s sense of responsibility as a journalist to those who are putting their lives on the line to avail themselves of their rights as human beings in the face of a dictatorial political culture. Specifically to the memory of his father and sister who were both imprisoned for their rebellion against first the Shah, and then Ayatollah Khomeini (they also appear to him in hallucinations during his confinement to remind him of what they endured and that he can beat his captors), as well as his long-suffering and wisened feisty mother (the always incredible Shohreh Aghdashloo, who steals her every scene). Stewart almost lulls us into his TV-comedy as the intellectual in him pokes fun at the Iranian government’s minions (including his interrogator played by Kim Bodnia) as they rifle through his belongings. Every cinephile chuckled when Bodnia’s interrogator declares a DVD of Pasolini’s Teorema (and then a Sopranos box set) “porno.” Yet Stewart keeps his characters human, allowing for moments of humor and revelation in even the perpetrators of the violence, whom the film encourages us to pity as sad, unimaginative puppets rather than simply despise as heartless villains. We never lose sight of how awful their goals are, but we are more aware of the horror of their actions because of the variety of human behavior on display. It’s a richer sense of character than we might have expected from a man who admits to “making ephemeral comedy for people who smoke pot” (in the brief Q&A following the film).
I find it heartening to see an educated outspoken person such as Stewart deciding to use his clout and influence to do more than just remain in the bubble of a safe studio setting to report on the world’s atrocities through the humorous guise of a broadcast news personality. He even self-reflexively criticizes his own show when a comic Daily Show-style interview about spies and terrorism lands Bahari in hotter water than he first thought. Stewart really put his money where his mouth was, and made a high-stakes film that will most likely appeal directly to his core audience, but he is not just preaching to the choir. He’s making a bold statement about the present state of affairs that he cannot take back even if he wanted too, and one to which his name will always be connected. Like Michael Keaton’s character in Birdman, Stewart wants to show the world he has more to offer, and to create something that would last, a film instead of another episode of the Daily Show. And overall, he succeeded, offering hope that the rest of us can do more than just talk about what we want to change in the world. A world without cinema and music and art, as Bahari’s sister instills in him before she is cruelly murdered by her government, is a world bereft of ideas, light and beauty that inspire us to see and do great things. So I sincerely hope Stewart continues to develop as a filmmaker and remind us of this again in the future. With the right marketing and buzz, this too could be an awards season contender and keep the Telluride streak of Oscar winners alive.
The best moment of the whole festival was clearly the moment Joshua Oppenheimer presented The Look of Silence, his companion film to his Oscar-nominated The Act of Killing (which somehow lost the award to the vastly inferior and totally forgettable 20 Feet From Stardom). Speaking of high stakes filmmaking, Oppenheimer spent several years living in Indonesia to make these two films. “Killing” was an attempt to examine the genocide that took over a million innocent lives through films he helped the murderers make about their crimes, a genocide engineered when the army seized the government and pummeled the populace with deliberate lies and propaganda to brainwash them into believing that the “communists” needed to be exterminated because they were not religious, incestuous and a direct threat to everyone. The extent to which people not only are proud of their crimes, but boast about the gory details of what they did, is still in full effect here in Look of Silence. Only here we have a relative of one of the victims, an optometrist named “Adi,” seeking acknowledgment of these acts, and that these acts were immoral and wrong.
Oppenheimer has built rapport with many of the families of the murderers and the victims, which enables Adi to confront the criminals who are not only free, but still in power. The victims families must now coexist daily with the people who brutally killed their loved ones. The title is again a brilliant, multivalent play on words. It speaks not only of the silence engendered by fear of a violent oppressive government, and the silence that exists between members of a community comprised of the survivors and the criminals whose acts they survived. It speaks also to the silence that greets denials of culpability by the murderers when faced with the immorality of what they were just bragging about minutes earlier, the silence of family members who never knew their parents had done such unspeakable things (such as castrating and vivisecting Adi’s brother, or severing the heads of Chinese women and drinking their blood because the army has told them they will go crazy if they don’t), the silence of Adi and his mother as they are faced with willful ignorance of what really happened by the people who did it.
Adi speaks to many subjects through his optometry visits, seeking to see for himself what those whom he is helping to see better can can illuminate through their memories. Many do not want to remember, but cling to the rationalizations and false justifications offered by the army government to absolve themselves of guilt. As one old man complains: “You are asking deep questions.” But Adi persists, even as one of the former proud murderers who think of their current comforts and wealth as rewards for having done good work, tries to play some of his old tricks and subtly interrogate/threaten Adi. As Oppenheimer said in the powerful Q&A after the film, and it is not self-aggrandizement, that there are very few, if any, films such as this, where Adi stands to lose everything including his life by telling the unpunished genocide perpetrators to their face that they are responsible, calling them out on their lies and demanding answers. There are so many overlapping and heart wrenching, thoughtful ideas brought to fruition that it is impossible to explain them all here. How does one address this now- Adi doesn’t really ask for much in the film, and still comes up short most of the time due to the selfish denials of the murderers and their supporters. Some lie and pretend that nothing happened until pressed; no one wants to remember and don’t seem to care that the families that they all implicitly murdered have no choice but to remember and cannot heal until the guilt is claimed by the guilty and decried as atrocious.
In the Q&A, it was a remarkable honor to have Adi himself in person, but understandably he could not bear to watch the film, leaving before it began and returning only once it was over to try to speak to the audience. Oppenheimer translated for him, and Adi tried to remain stoic amidst this very painful reminiscence and asked if he could return to his seat, where he spent the rest of the evening hands clasped in prayer to his forehead. Oppenheimer reminded the audience that this is not one of those films about an event that has since been rectified, with an ending that reassures the problem has been taken care of, because the guilty are still in power and are willing to eliminate dissenting voices with force. Adi willingly wanted to watch as much footage as Oppenheimer had of the killers reliving their crimes in interviews, because he wanted to see clearly what really happened that destroyed his family (even one of his uncles was responsible as a prison guard for the people who would be slaughtered). In an old video clip, an Indonesian village leader tells an American news reporter that the communists willingly showed up to the army to report for their own murders, and actually asked to be killed because they knew they were a threat to the country. Before we can think “that was a long time ago” we see children in modern-day schools being fed the same old propaganda. This is the kind of resistance against which The Look of Silence is fighting. Oppenheimer told us that Adi and his family had to leave their village for their own safety, and have since moved to a location several thousand kilometers away that will permanently remain undisclosed to protect themselves from reprisal. Oppenheimer also told of how they had to take security measures with everything during filming, not saving any phone numbers and erasing their computer and cellular histories and messages every day in case they were stopped by authorities; Adi deliberately traveling without his ID so that he could not be detained before an Embassy could step in. They lived in a constant state of fear themselves to bring us this story, and it would be a true shame if people did not see their courageous efforts.
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