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..And we are so back. As of tonight, we’ve seen 13 movies! And with one more day of TIFF to go for us, here’s a few more thoughts and musings I had about some of the films we caught over the weekend:
Woman of the Hour (dir. Anna Kendrick)
Without question the festival’s big surprise thus far. While the majority of actor turned director efforts that have popped up at TIFF this year have come to disappoint (such as the previously discussed North Star and Michael Keaton’s largely rejected Knox Goes Away), Anna Kendrick has burst out onto the screen with knockout debut.
On premise alone, The Woman of the Hour is a bit of a head-turner. A film centered on the real-life “Dating Game Killer” Rodney Alcala who, in the midst of an incalculable murder spree, inexplicably went on The Dating Game in the late 70’s and even won. Truth is stranger than fiction, and Kendrick’s film captures this odd moment in history with a sense of momentum and a heavy dollop of suspense. She herself stars as the titular “woman of the hour” on the game show. A struggling actress who hopes to use her appearance on the show as her big break, and while the film builds to their shared appearance, it also details some of Alcala’s past slayings and how he systematically broke down their individual guards before the inevitable happens. Despite Daniel Zovatto’s turn as Alcala being an exceptionally magnetic one (and providing a dead-ringer for a young Vincent D’Onofrio), Kendrick resists the urge to make Alcala anything less than a predator and instead focuses on the stories of the individual victims and their interior lives and experiences. Such as the running time can allow anyway, but since we’re talking about a tight 90 minutes in total, a bit of brevity is all too welcome.
Kendrick has real storytelling chops, and if The Woman of the Hour is able to find its audience, it’ll serve as one of the big stunners of 2023. A perfect fix for the True Crime heads.
The Holdovers (dir. Alexander Payne)
After Downsizing, I wasn’t sure I could sit through another Payne film. A filmmaker I’m pretty ambivalent on in the first place, his The Descendants being the one time I think he elevated his work past “serviceable”. But Downsizing was a enormous miscalculation that I felt might have truly spelled the end for him with me, and maybe audiences as well. And yet, you’re only as good as you’re next project and I’m happy to say that The Holdovers is a nice bounceback for Payne.
That’s not to say it’s a film I’ll think about much after watching it, but its tale of a private school student that’s forced to stay at school over winter break under the supervision of his crotchety teacher and the head school cook makes for pleasurable “Sunday afternoon watching”. In total, it’s nothing you haven’t seen before, and even as I exited the screening room I was immediately struck by how much this bildungsroman lines up with the broader beats of Dead Poets Society. But The Holdovers is a sweet, if overlong, film about a kid in need of a father figure, a teacher in need of breaking out of his comfort zone, and a grieving mother just trying to find peace. It’s a story of three people from very different walks of life connecting and helping each other through a difficult holiday season. Despite how tropey it is, it’s an easy-going movie that you can fall under the spell of without much effort. And that so much appreciable work went into making it look and feel just like a movie made in 1971 goes a long way. Nice job Mr. Payne, you weathered the storm!
Seven Veils (dir Atom Egoyan)
I’d never seen an Atom Egoyan project before, though I had heard quite a bit over the years stretching all the way back to Ararat. It seemed like the perfect time to finally break that drought. After walking out, what I came away with was this:
Finally! A film that highlights what terrible actors opera singers are.
Another effort in the long line of Suspiria descendants, this time with the tortured artist an opera director overcoming abuses hurled at her from multiple men over the years (her father, her former mentor) and how that is shaping her own shepherding of a restaging of Salome.
Largely a good film though one that feels strained, not only by the need to toss in one too many obstacles in its lead subject’s way, but to also develop a subplot that’s ripped out of another movie altogether. There’s a highly contrived video documenting approach that keeps popping up throughout that only serves this subplot and its here where Egoyan’s writing deficiencies feel the most pronounced.
Though maybe the harshest aspect working against it is the lack of acting power rising to Seyfried’s level. I guess that’s where the acting budget went. There’s a bit of a comfort food effect, having watched a lot of Cronenberg and other Toronto based filmmakers who pull from the local repertory players in this same way. But when the gap between your star and everyone else is this wide, it cheapens the effect you’re trying to achieve.
Anyway, I’d watch another Egoyan, especially knowing he actually staged his own production of the same opera in question. Pretty neat even if the film doesn’t quite hit the mark.
The Zone of Interest (dir Jonathan Glazer)
Was this my most anticipated film of the festival? Quite possibly. Over the years, my slightly tepid initial attitude towards Under the Skin has turned into deeply-held appreciation for the big swings he takes as a filmmaker. To learn his next project was a Holocaust story lent me some trepidation. Was Glazer about to make step towards more mainstream acceptance with his tale of a Nazi officer and his family that live right next door to Auschwitz? Were we about to get a sanitized awards friendly version of his famously challenging style?
Ha, what a fool I am. It turns out Glazer decided to make his own version of Jacques Tati’s PlayTime but set it in Nazi-occupied Poland. The film’s narrative, such as it is, absolutely tells the real life story of Rudolf Hoss and his family. But what is of greatest interest isn’t so much the story, but how Glazer tells it. The film takes a literal fly on the wall approach, plopping a camera in the corner of each room in which a scene takes place and then films the general goings-on. It’s not quite as hum-drum as watching an episode of a voyeuristic reality show, but it’s focus on the ordinary moments of the Hoss family: arguing about moving, enjoying their garden, neighborhood ladies having a gossip, produces a curious effect of being dropped right in the middle of something horrific. And that’s without ever seeing anything going on in the camp except as distant screams and gunshots.
The Zone of Interest works as a remarkable technical achievement, but I found it still held me at a distance, and I don’t mean the distant angles at which the cameras were positioned. There’s a dissonance between what Glazer is aiming to do (attempting to underscore how people can so easily fall under the sway of evil) and what the film is doing (presenting a snapshot in time that actually paints out the far corners that viewers normally don’t see). The former is valuable but not particularly revelatory, as it’s been told to death over the ensuing decades of World War 2 films. But the latter, that’s something that could really open up eyes for those that actually want to have a look. And I can’t help but feel like Glazer pulled his punches just a hair there. Keeping things as isolated as he did to just the family’s home, Hoss’ office, and a couple of other locations, prevented a fuller sense of emersion and split the difference in a way that gives way to a missed opportunity. What Glazer wanted to say was already inherent in the material from the outset, but to have gotten a deeper look at his protagonists’ relationships and their interests outside of the spectre of what’s next door, would have arguably hit the mark even further and created something truly special.
And with that, I leave you. Be good to each other and see you in a couple of days for the next entry!
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