September 2005

The Squid And The Whale

by James McNally on September 14, 2005

in Film Festivals,TIFF

The Squid And The Whale

The Squid And The Whale (USA, dir­ector Noah Baumbach): This film con­tained the best ensemble acting I’ve seen this year. Based on the auto­bi­o­graph­ical exper­i­ences of writer and dir­ector Baumbach (co-writer of Wes Anderson’s The Life Aquatic — Anderson serves as pro­ducer on this film), The Squid And The Whale is about the family dynamics of a family of four going through a divorce in the mid-eighties. Father (Jeff Daniels) is a writer whose best days are behind him, yet he remains an unre­pentant snob. Mother (Laura Linney) is also a writer, about to have her first novel pub­lished. When her mul­tiple infi­del­ities emerge, the par­ents decide to divorce. Their sons Walt and Frank are thrown into tur­moil. This is not ori­ginal stuff. But the writing is of such high quality, and the per­form­ances so genuine, that I found myself drawn right in.

The film is obvi­ously told from the sons’ per­spective. Walt seems to be like his father, snobby and self-righteous, while younger Frank seems more sens­itive, though also more self-destructive. Kevin Kline and Phoebe Cates’ son Owen Kline is a rev­el­a­tion in this role. His sister Greta also appears briefly in the film. You might remember these two from The Anniversary Party, but this is really a breakout role for Owen, and I hope he’ll con­tinue acting.

The film makes it pain­fully aware how people hurt each other when they can’t talk dir­ectly about their feel­ings. Daniels is excel­lent as a man whose intel­lec­tual pride and snob­bery hide his deep insec­ur­ities and the pain of rejec­tion by his wife. And Laura Linney is able to make even an unsym­path­etic char­acter a little less blame­worthy. The only issues I had the film are prob­ably related to its min­is­cule budget. The hand­held cam­er­a­work is often a little bumpy, and the film feels a little unpol­ished. But after hearing how Baumbach had a 23-day shooting schedule, and took five years to obtain the funding for the film, I have to give him credit for pro­du­cing a smart and moving piece of cinema.

Just as an aside, I was pleas­antly sur­prised when the end credits rolled that the beau­tiful titles I’d been noti­cing were designed by Torontonian Leanne Shapton, who was art dir­ector at Saturday Night magazine for a few of its most visu­ally exciting years (circa 2000–2001). I’m glad to see she’s finding new places to bring her great eye for design.

9/10(9/10)

Tagged as: adolescence, adultery, family, fathers-and-sons, TIFF

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Everything Is Illuminated

by James McNally on September 13, 2005 · 1 comment

in Film Festivals,TIFF

Everything Is Illuminated

Everything Is Illuminated (USA, dir­ector Liev Schreiber): Based upon the acclaimed novel by Jonathan Safron Foer, Everything Is Illuminated is the dir­ect­orial debut of actor Liev Schreiber. An auda­cious choice, since the novel is multi-layered and very “meta”, but Schreiber, who also wrote the screen­play, handles the material with ease, for the most part.

Elijah Wood (looking as doll-like as ever, and wearing glasses that mag­nify his already-huge eyes to make the not-so-subtle point that he is an observer) plays Jonathan, a man obsessed with col­lecting things from his family’s his­tory. When his grand­mother hands him a pho­to­graph from 1940 saying, “Your grand­father wanted you to have this,” it sends Jonathan off on a voyage of dis­covery. The pic­ture is of his grand­father in Ukraine, standing with an unknown woman who, according to his grand­mother, saved him from the Nazis, allowing him to escape to America.

Jonathan duly turns up in Ukraine, where he hopes to unravel the mys­tery of the woman in the pho­to­graph. His tour guides turn out to be a little unnerving to the fussy and obsessive veget­arian. His trans­lator Alex is like a Ukrainian ver­sion of Sasha Baron-Cohen’s Ali G and Borat char­ac­ters rolled into one, and is played by new­comer Eugene Hutz, the frontman for the “gypsy punk” band Gogol Bordello, who con­tribute sev­eral songs to the soundtrack. While I thought his accent in the film was just an out­rageous parody, during the Q & A, I real­ized it was actu­ally his real voice (or maybe not. It could be part of the shtick.). Alex’s grand­father, the driver, thinks he is blind and is accom­panied every­where by Sammy Davis Jr. Jr., his “seeing-eye bitch.” Alex’s mangled English leads to many laughs, and the middle sec­tion of this road movie is easily the most enjoyable.

Things get a bit more ser­ious when they find the woman in the pho­to­graph, but here, in a sec­tion of the film called “The Illumination,” I found myself still a little in the dark. Perhaps in ironing out a few of the book’s twists, some­thing was lost, but I found the “mys­tery” either con­fusing or not so mys­ter­ious, and actu­ally felt a little unsat­is­fied by the end.

However, the film is shot and edited beau­ti­fully, the acting is fine, and the dir­ecting sure-handed. Schreiber admitted that the stuff in the book that he left out of the film was the stuff that attracted him to the idea in the first place. Which is an odd thing to say, really. The book con­tains an ima­gined his­tory of the shtetl where Jonathan’s grand­father was raised, a place with hun­dreds of years of his­tory which is wiped out by the Nazis in a few hours. I think this back­ground would have given the film the weight it needed at the end of the journey. Without that bal­last, the film floats away a bit.

Nevertheless, this is an assured debut from Schreiber, and I look for­ward to seeing what he chooses for his next project.

Gogol Bordello Web Site: http://www.gogolbordello.com

8/10(8/10)

Tagged as: road-movie, TIFF

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The Heart Of The Game

by James McNally on September 13, 2005

in Documentaries,Film Festivals,TIFF

The Heart Of The Game

The Heart Of The Game (USA, dir­ector Ward Serrill): A doc­u­mentary about high-school bas­ket­ball that took seven years to make, this film will be com­pared to Steve James’s Hoop Dreams, which is a high com­pli­ment indeed. But the films are different.

Serrill began fol­lowing the girls’ bas­ket­ball team at Seattle’s Roosevelt High School when they hired a new coach, tax law pro­fessor Bill Resler. Not expected to make much of an impact, Resler pro­ceeded to build a power­house in his first year at the job. An eccentric but effective motiv­ator, he chose a dif­ferent “theme” for his team each year: Pack of Wolves, Pride of Lions, Tropical Storm, and then whipped his players into a frenzy. His motiv­a­tional skills and his ruth­less phys­ical workouts gave the team the con­fid­ence and endur­ance to beat their oppon­ents, even when they were bigger, taller, or more talented.

In his second year at the job, he noticed a young freshman by the name of Darnelia Russell. She stood out for a number of reasons. She had been an out­standing bas­ket­ball player at her middle school. And she was black. At Roosevelt, in a priv­ileged suburb of Seattle, black stu­dents were a minority, unlike at inner-city schools like arch-rival Garfield. In fact, when he tried to recruit her for his team, she rebuffed him at first, admit­ting to her friends that she wasn’t used to being around so many white people. Her pres­ence at Roosevelt was the com­bined idea of her middle school coach and her mother, who wanted to keep her out of trouble and make sure she got an excel­lent education.

Her arrival helps Resler build Roosevelt into a city dyn­asty and a threat at the state cham­pi­on­ships. But there are ups and downs. And if you wonder why the film took seven years to make, Serrill admitted that he just filmed everything and waited for the story to emerge.

Although the film touches on a few issues of race and class, Serrill says he wanted to make it more about the bas­ket­ball, and there are gen­erous clips of games, even from major net­work cov­erage. Although it give the film much of its energy, I felt myself wishing there were a few more inter­views with players, espe­cially Darnelia, who emerges as a central char­acter in the story. We never really get to know her as any­thing other than a great bas­ket­ball player.

That being said, it’s a doc­u­mentary about sports, so I’m pre­dis­posed to like it. There is real drama and excite­ment, both on and off the court, and it’s also good to see the con­tri­bu­tion of people like Bill Resler recog­nized, a good man who is instilling not just a love of win­ning, but of playing, and living. As the credits rolled, it was endearing to see that a few of the songs were actu­ally com­posed and played by Resler, on guitar and vocals, with dir­ector Serrill on har­monica. I’m giving this 8.5, even though my graphic doesn’t show half-points.

Film’s Web Site: http://www.heartofthegame.org

8.5/10(8.5/10)

Tagged as: basketball, Documentaries, sports, TIFF

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Bubble

by James McNally on September 12, 2005

in Film Festivals,TIFF

Bubble

Bubble (USA, dir­ector Steven Soderbergh): Not quite sure how to write about this one. Bubble feels like a bit of an exer­cise for Soderbergh. First of all, it was shot in HD (high-definition) digital video, and this makes the visuals incred­ibly crisp. Secondly, it was filmed on loc­a­tion in a small Ohio town with a com­pletely ama­teur cast. The script felt mostly impro­vised or situ­ational, and actual dia­logue is quite sparse.

This is a small and quiet film in which large themes play out over 90 minutes. The pace is very delib­erate, and the atmo­sphere incred­ibly claus­tro­phobic. The over­riding theme for me seemed to be isol­a­tion and it was almost phys­ic­ally painful watching some of the char­ac­ters go about their daily routines or listening to them try to con­nect with each other. These are people who seem com­pletely inar­tic­u­late and unable to express their feel­ings. There is a sort of love tri­angle, and a murder, but that’s about all I can say.

Though the mannered acting and slow pace threw me off at first, once I got used to it, I appre­ci­ated the film a lot more. This is one of Soderbergh’s more exper­i­mental films, and he admitted after the screening that it would be “polar­izing” for audi­ences. While the film is not entirely suc­cessful, I’m glad a dir­ector of his stature is still taking risks.

7/10(7/10)

Tagged as: soderbergh, TIFF

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October 17, 1961 (Nuit Noire)

by James McNally on September 11, 2005

in Film Festivals,TIFF

October 17, 1961 (Nuit Noire)

October 17, 1961 (Nuit Noire) (France, dir­ector Alain Tasma): Another gut-wrenching por­trayal of some of the shameful events per­pet­rated during the Algerian war, this film is an important doc­u­ment of the legacy of French colonialism.

On the night of October 17, 1961, more than 20,000 Algerians gathered in Paris for a peaceful demon­stra­tion against French rule of their home­land. It wasn’t entirely spon­tan­eous. In fact, the FLN (the main group advoc­ating for Algerian inde­pend­ence) required all Algerian men to par­ti­cipate. It was to be a show of solid­arity to bol­ster the ongoing nego­ti­ations between the FLN and the French gov­ern­ment. Instead, it turned into a mas­sacre. The police were already living in a cli­mate of fear and repressed anger due to the ongoing cam­paign of random assas­sin­a­tions of police officers. And the police lead­er­ship were eager for a crack­down to avoid fur­ther humi­li­ation. As the demon­strators gathered in various dis­tricts, police imme­di­ately moved in to arrest thou­sands, and after some con­fusing reports of being fired upon, them­selves fired upon and then charged the crowds. There is no offi­cial report on the number of dead, but it was some­where between 50 and 200. More than 40 years later, there has never been an offi­cial acknow­ledge­ment of the events of that night.

Noted tele­vi­sion dir­ector Alain Tasma spent two years gath­ering evid­ence and recon­structing the events leading up to the mas­sacre, and he presents a straight­for­ward account that man­ages to cap­ture the rising ten­sion keenly. The film is a sort of par­allel to the events por­trayed in the classic film The Battle of Algiers, and Tasma owes a lot to the tech­niques and pacing of that forty-year-old mas­ter­piece. With the excep­tion of that film, most “issue” films rarely rise above their sense of moral out­rage, and October 17, 1961 (more evoc­at­ively entitled “Nuit Noire” in its native France) is not a mas­ter­piece. But it does cap­ture the feeling of a time not so long ago, a feeling which is eerily present again in the rising Islamophobia of many Western democracies.

8/10(8/10)

Tagged as: algeria, france, TIFF

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