CS Weekly Archive > The Big Picture > 11/13/09

Masturbation, Moral Decay, and Matricide:
Tales of inspiration from AFI Fest 2009

by Adam Stovall

As someone who sees many, many movies every year (and especially this one), I can say with my whole heart that the AFI Fest 2009 was an incredible experience.
 
A trap many of us fall into when we see so many movies a year is that we lose perspective on what films can do to us. For instance, a lot of buzz is surrounding An Education this year, but for my money you won't get a better British-girl-coming-of-age tale than Fish Tank, a film I mentioned in the first part of my AFI coverage. Most people won't get to see that movie, as it's small and inexpensive and unapologetically British. IFC will release it to the top 20 markets and put it On Demand, and from there it'll be on its own. Despite the fact that it leads the British Independent Film Awards with eight nominations, the film is seemingly destined not to make a dent over here—while An Education seems a sure bet for several Oscar nominations. I believe there's a saying, and if there isn't then there damn well should be, that injustice only exists for those who know that justice exists. Thankfully, for people like me who like to become impassioned about arbitrary things like insisting that one artistic endeavor is superior to another artistic endeavor, festivals such as AFI Fest exist to show me the injustice in the world.
 
None of this would be, of course, without the tireless efforts of their programming staff. Five people pore through all the general submissions and travel to all the major festivals, as well as some of the minor ones. What are they looking for? In a word: originality. "There are many factors that go into why a film may or may not be selected, but I often use originality as a jumping-off point," explains Lane Kneedler, Senior Programmer for the AFI Fest. "Either a story that hasn't been told before, or someone telling a story in a new and interesting way."
 
And in the humble opinion of this journalist, Mission Accomplished. After the festival, I felt inspired, not just for my own writing, but for the state of film in general. They will always open Transformers 18: The Cyclical Banality in your neighborhood next to the 14 fast food joints, but with a little effort, you, too, can find inspiration. The following films are a pretty good place to start.
 
Let's start with something obvious: The White Ribbon (pictured above), winner of the Palme D'or at Cannes and Germany's entry in the Foreign Language Oscar race. Written and directed by Michael Haneke (Cache, The Piano Teacher), it tells the story of a small town in pre-WWI Germany that suddenly finds itself dealing with an evil that seems to come from within. As with Haneke's other works, there are no easy answers to be found here, just hard moral dilemmas that you may find harder to answer than you'd like. Evoking early Bergman, Haneke creates a world built on a tightrope—the smallest misstep by anyone involved and the whole film falls apart. That it doesn't is a testament to his vision and to the collaborative process that is filmmaking.
 
Another film being offered up to the Academy as a Foreign Language Nominee, this one from Canada, is I Killed My Mother by Xavier Dolan. Dolan has long worked as an actor in Canada, and used most of his own money to produce this film, which he wrote at the age of 17. It tells the story of a single mother, Chantale (Anne Dorval), and her highly intelligent, highly articulate, highly frustrating son, Hubert (Dolan). Told from the son's very frank perspective, the film never stoops to forsaking Chantale's humanity. Despite his numerous rants about her lack of culture and generally tacky personality, he still loves her and spends long passages trying to reconcile these two emotions. It is an incredibly tricky emotional story to tell, and Dolan does it with confidence and maturity. It is not a flawless film, but it is a striking debut.
 
On the other end of the spectrum, Youth In Revolt also follows a young man who is trying to reconcile emotions, though not ones you would have for your Mother. Nick Twisp (Michael Cera) is fairly adrift in life. He knows he's attracted to girls, but hasn't felt a real Attraction! to any of them. Then, as his family prepares to leave town to avoid a bunch of angry sailors, he meets a girl named Sheeni (Portia Doubleday) who lives with her crazy religious parents in a trailer park. Of course, he's a good guy, and not French, so she shines him on. That is, until he burns down half of Berkeley and develops an alter ego—suddenly, look who's Mr. Interesting. It's a fun movie, and both the dialogue and characters strike a good balance of being pretentious without anything really holding it up. These characters are facades in search of depth, even the adults, as this is ostensibly being told as Nick's journal. You may not be bowled over by the plot twists, but there's certainly fun to be had on the way.

Having decidedly less fun are those who travel on The Road. A major awards contender that has sat on a shelf for a year while people tried to figure out how to tell a post-apocalyptic tale that never tells you what sort of apocalypse happened, The Road is based on Cormac McCarthy's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel of the same name. The characters don't have names, because in a wasteland of death and destruction, do you really need any? All you really need is to keep moving, keep aware, and keep enough bullets handy for you and your kin. In accordance with the book, the film never takes its eyes off the Father (Viggo Mortensen) and his Son (Kodi Smit-McPhee) as they make their way to the coast, though neither harbors any hope that things will be better there. Every scene is fraught with tension, and that's due to the synergy between writer Joe Penhall, director John Hillcoat, and the very talented cast who all signed for months of suffering for the chance to tell something new: the day-to-day human cost of the apocalypse. Even where the film diverges from the book, it does so to expand character and show another side to that cost. As the man said, "The true measure of a man is how he treats those who can do him no good."
 
The rebuilding has begun, but the wasteland that was post-Katrina New Orleans still remains in some areas—and when shooting his latest film, Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans, Werner Herzog didn't think twice about shooting in precisely those areas. Working with William Finkelstein on the script, the film shows exactly the wide cross-section of a town that the police see. From the highest penthouses to the grittiest slums, Terrence McDonagh (Nicolas Cage) walks them all, and they're all slowly killing him. Once a good man, whose valor during Katrina resulted in his commendation and promotion to Lieutenant, McDonagh begins the slow slide into addiction to pain medication and the general overwhelming existential angst that a man can feel after staring into the abyss of a genuine catastrophe. Again, a remarkable synergy exists between filmmaker and star, as both men explore the idea of a good man whose soul has been claimed by a city, and the bitter fight to get it back that he isn't even always aware he's fighting. This film has a voice and a vision, clear and true, that you may not like but you can't deny: it makes some good points.
 
And now for something completely different! Ken Loach and Paul Laverty have collaborated again on Looking For Eric, their 10th film together. However, instead of the overt political messages found in their other films, this one offers a simple story of family and futbol. Eric Bishop (Steve Evets, a palindrome!) has drawn a rotten lot in life, though he's hardly innocent in the matter. He trudges through his day working for the post office, only to go home to two teenage sons who, at best, ignore him. His only escape comes from watching his beloved Manchester United play, and remembering when Eric Cantona used to run the pitch for them. A massive, life-size poster of Cantona hangs in his bedroom, and if that's not striking you as a little creepy, how about that Cantona seems to be visiting him in his bedroom now? Loach and Laverty walk a fascinating line in never quite acknowledging or dismissing that Cantona is an imaginary friend of Bishop's. Probably because this friendship is exactly what Bishop needs. Cantona's "never say die" attitude, his advice to repair the damage done to his relationships, all this inspires in Bishop the confidence to make the changes he so desperately needed. Loach and Laverty expertly convey a truth well-known to those of us fortunate enough to call ourselves Sports Fans: sometimes all it takes is seeing someone perform the impossible (like catching a ball against your helmet while wrapped up by a defender in the last minute of the Super Bowl) to know that you, too, might be capable of performing your impossible task.
 
Speaking of impossible tasks, try being a wild animal and having everyone around you demand that you suppress the "wild" part of your nature. In Fantastic Mr. Fox, Wes Anderson and Noah Baumbach apply self-awareness to a children's tale, and thusly produce a work that is both completely new and completely at home in the rest of their oeuvre. I will curtail my comments here, as a full review of this film can be found elsewhere in this edition of CS Weekly.
 
Lastly, we come to Easier With Practice, adapted for the screen by Kyle Patrick Alvarez and based on a story by Davy Rothbart. It tells the story of Davy Mitchell (Brian Geraghty), a young writer on the road promoting his self-published collection of short stories. One night his phone rings, and one the other end of the line is a girl, Nicole, who's looking for someone with whom to mess around. This continues throughout the rest of his tour, and then a little beyond. So many movies show someone running towards a good relationship and the changes they undergo to earn it, it's comforting to see one that shows how it can be just as good to have something to run from.
 

Adam Stovall spends his time watching the movies that are in theaters, and writing the ones he wishes were.

The White Ribbon courtesy Sony Classics
The Road courtesy Dimension Films

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