As the Chicago International Film Festival moves into its second week, there are still a lot of interesting and exciting movies to be seen. I feel compelled to note that none of the 16 features on this week’s program that I’m familiar with are as beautiful or as potent as Jean-Luc Godard’s Nouvelle vague–one of the 39 films shown in Toronto last month that Chicago festival director Michael Kutza boasted to the press about having rejected. (Among the other 38 “rejected” titles are a charming minimalist comedy, A Little Stiff, shown at the Film Center last month, and a fascinating documentary, Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker’s Apocalypse, which premiered on cable last weekend.) So though, as always, Kutza’s selection is a mixed bag, there are nonetheless several titles included that are worth anyone’s time.
I especially recommend Krzysztof Kieslowski’s The Double Life of Veronique, Jocelyn Moorhouse’s Proof, Jan Oxenberg’s Thank You and Goodnight, George Cukor’s 1960 Let’s Make Love (mainly for Marilyn Monroe’s performance), Otto Preminger’s 1954 River of No Return (mainly for Preminger’s direction), Barbara Kopple’s American Dream, and Victor Erice’s The South (1982) on the basis of my own experience, and Jean-Pierre Jeunet and Marc Caro’s Delicatessen and Raul Ruiz’s Treasure Island on the basis of what I’ve heard. Read more
Mala Noche and Drugstore Cowboy we’re both certainly good, but this third feature from Gus Van Sant–who’s working for the first time with his own original material–is even better: a simultaneously heartbreaking and exhilarating road movie about two male hustlers (River Phoenix and Keanu Reeves) in the Pacific northwest. The first is a narcoleptic from a broken home, while the second is the son of the mayor of Portland; the one without a family is essentially looking for one while the one with a family is mainly in flight from it. The stylistic eclecticism is so far-ranging that it may take some getting used to, but Van Sant’s poetic imagination and feeling for his characters are so lyrically focused that almost everything works, and even the parts that show some strain–such as an extended hommage to Orson Welles’s Chimes at Midnight that’s stitched into the plot like crazy-quilt patchwork–may excite you nonetheless for their audacity. Phoenix has certainly never been better, and Reeves does his best with a part that suffers from consisting largely of Shakespeare’s Hal as filtered through Welles. One of the movie’s smallest accomplishments is providing the best metaphor for sexual orgasm to come along in years; one of its biggest is justifying an arsenal of road-movie conceits that until now seemed exhausted. Read more
Jodie Foster’s highly distinctive directorial debut, scripted by Scott Frank (Dead Again), gives us the year in the life of a boy genius (Adam Hann-Byrd) between his seventh and eighth birthdays. Foster herself plays his devoted working-class mother, and Dianne Wiest plays a child psychologist and former gifted child who fights for control of the little boy. This is largely played for comedy, and is often quite funny, but Foster also shows a great deal of sensitivity depicting the young hero’s social isolation and weighing the respective strengths and limitations of the two women as parental figures. (There’s virtually no father figure in sight, and part of what makes this movie so provocative is its discreet suggestion that one isn’t necessary.) Visually bold and imaginative and wonderfully acted (Foster and Hann-Byrd in particular give fine, expansive performances without a trace of sentimentality), this movie is also graced by a very effective jazz score by Mark Isham that helps counterbalance an overschematic script. Not a total success, but strongly recommended; with Harry Connick Jr., David Pierce, Debi Mazar, and P.J. Ochlan. (Old Orchard, Webster Place, Bricktown Square, Water Tower) Read more
