Excuse the delay, TIFF is an incredibly
overwhelming film festival, where so much clashes, it's much harder
than it is at the big European festivals to create any kind of
meaningful schedule. This means that I saw Silver Linings Playbook at
a private screening before most of the US critics, who immediately
cleared a space for it on the 2012 awards table. I have to say, it
mystified me, and I have no idea what the film's chances are in the
UK, since the title is a riff on a very well-known American football
term (I kept waiting for an explanation but none came). It's also,
like many of the indies on offer here, somewhat rooted in the
American culture of self-medication, with characters that owe more to
Benny and Joon – not to mention Romy and Michelle – than Harry
and Sally.
Bradley Cooper stars as Pat Solitano, a former teacher who is released from a mental institute, into the care of his parents, after spending eight months there for the savage beating of his wife's lover. The film doesn’t really use the word savage, but we see in the flashback that Pat nearly killed the guy, and we're also told that his wife has a restraining order out against him. Neither of these things make Pat a particularly cool or especially misunderstood guy in my book, but Silver Linings proceeds as if he is, putting in his way the sexually promiscuous Tiffany (Jennifer Lawrence), whose cop husband has recently died. Together they form an odd alliance; Tiffany tries to seduce him but Pat stays oddly loyal to his wife, believing she will return to him in the long run.
The delusional aspect of this comedy-drama is what, to my mind, holds it back, and with so many dysfunctions on display (Robert De Niro, as Pat's father, is seen to be OCD), it's hard not to want to keep these characters at arm's length. The performances are pretty good nevertheless, especially Cooper and Lawrence, but the film remains a somewhat unconvincing adaptation of a novel (by Matthew Quick) that clearly contains a lot more interior monologue, which means Cooper has a hard time selling us Pat. Curiously, so does director David O Russell, who flogged us a whole cast of misfits in The Fighter, and yet that light touch seems to have deserted him here. There are some obvious non-professionals, who give the film texture, but, climaxing as it does in a ridiculous dance scene (hence the Romy and Michelle reference), this seems more like a grainy, grungey cover of a feelgood romcom rather than a genuinely new and unorthodox replacement.
Another adaptation of a post-Prozac Nation book screening at TIFF was Stephen Chbosky’s take on his own novel, The Perks Of Being A Wallflower, which I liked very much, albeit with a few misgivings. Like Silver Linings Playbook, it uses the framing device of someone going through therapy, in this case Charlie (Logan Lerman), who is grieving for the death of his favourite aunt. After a year in hospital, Charlie returns to school, where the pain of his outsider status is somewhat ameliorated when he comes into contact with the bohemian Patrick (Ezra Miller) and his group of friends. This section of the film works really well, and Chbosky creates a very plausible social circle, in which Charlie falls for the elfin Sam (Emma Watson). The ending becomes Very Serious Indeed, with an unexpected twist on a typical American indie movie plot device, but the three leads – Miller, Watson and especially Lerman, a star in the making – are all engaging and very human.
A book I haven't read and may yet have to is David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas, since the film didn't make an iota of sense to me. This is not Empire's official verdict, and is in no way a review, but I found this collaboration by the Wachowski brothers and Tom Tykwer to be utterly confounding, bracketed by a tattooed Tom Hanks speaking in a funny language and taking in such myriad stories as a drama on a slave ship, a cyborg rebellion in futuristic South Korea, a China Syndrome-style investigation into a 70s nuclear power conspiracy, a gay composer (whose work gives the film its not very satisfactorily explained title), and an old man being imprisoned in a retirement home. The gimmick here is that certain faces recur, usually smothered in thick prosthetics, which means that its core cast – Hanks, Halle Berry, Hugh Grant, Jim Sturgess, Jim Broadbent – pop up again and again in various guises. All I will say is that 163 minutes is a long time to be left in the dark.
Derek Cianfrance's The Place Beyond The Pines (pictured) is, for me, one of the films of the festival, a great, gripping drama that is best approached cold, since there is a major twist an hour in that makes it very hard to write about. The lead is Ryan Gosling, star of Cianfrance's Blue Valentine, and the opening scenes have a lot of fun with Gosling's recent appropriation as a screen hunk: his character is called Handsome Luke, he has the word “heartthrob” tattooed on his neck, and his first words to on-off girlfriend Jennifer (Eva Mendes) is “Hey...”, likely a nod to the “Hey girl” viral of last year. This is not a comedy, though, and Cianfrance goes on to create a very long and unusual drama that takes some unexpected but nevertheless very interesting turns within a well-worn genre.
The genre this time is the heist drama. Discovering that he has fathered a child, Luke tries to wake up to his responsibilities, quitting his job as a stunt rider and looking for work as a mechanic. He meets the avuncular Robin (Ben Mendelsohn), who takes him under his wing and suggests a brief career as a bank robber. Robin insists that this should be a short term thing only, but Luke gets a taste for it, not just getting greedy for the cash but getting high on the act itself. To say more would stray into spoiler territory, but Cianfrance has created something really quite special here, reinventing the portmanteau-story format in a very stylish and often breathlessly exciting way.
Bradley Cooper stars as Pat Solitano, a former teacher who is released from a mental institute, into the care of his parents, after spending eight months there for the savage beating of his wife's lover. The film doesn’t really use the word savage, but we see in the flashback that Pat nearly killed the guy, and we're also told that his wife has a restraining order out against him. Neither of these things make Pat a particularly cool or especially misunderstood guy in my book, but Silver Linings proceeds as if he is, putting in his way the sexually promiscuous Tiffany (Jennifer Lawrence), whose cop husband has recently died. Together they form an odd alliance; Tiffany tries to seduce him but Pat stays oddly loyal to his wife, believing she will return to him in the long run.
The delusional aspect of this comedy-drama is what, to my mind, holds it back, and with so many dysfunctions on display (Robert De Niro, as Pat's father, is seen to be OCD), it's hard not to want to keep these characters at arm's length. The performances are pretty good nevertheless, especially Cooper and Lawrence, but the film remains a somewhat unconvincing adaptation of a novel (by Matthew Quick) that clearly contains a lot more interior monologue, which means Cooper has a hard time selling us Pat. Curiously, so does director David O Russell, who flogged us a whole cast of misfits in The Fighter, and yet that light touch seems to have deserted him here. There are some obvious non-professionals, who give the film texture, but, climaxing as it does in a ridiculous dance scene (hence the Romy and Michelle reference), this seems more like a grainy, grungey cover of a feelgood romcom rather than a genuinely new and unorthodox replacement.
Another adaptation of a post-Prozac Nation book screening at TIFF was Stephen Chbosky’s take on his own novel, The Perks Of Being A Wallflower, which I liked very much, albeit with a few misgivings. Like Silver Linings Playbook, it uses the framing device of someone going through therapy, in this case Charlie (Logan Lerman), who is grieving for the death of his favourite aunt. After a year in hospital, Charlie returns to school, where the pain of his outsider status is somewhat ameliorated when he comes into contact with the bohemian Patrick (Ezra Miller) and his group of friends. This section of the film works really well, and Chbosky creates a very plausible social circle, in which Charlie falls for the elfin Sam (Emma Watson). The ending becomes Very Serious Indeed, with an unexpected twist on a typical American indie movie plot device, but the three leads – Miller, Watson and especially Lerman, a star in the making – are all engaging and very human.
A book I haven't read and may yet have to is David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas, since the film didn't make an iota of sense to me. This is not Empire's official verdict, and is in no way a review, but I found this collaboration by the Wachowski brothers and Tom Tykwer to be utterly confounding, bracketed by a tattooed Tom Hanks speaking in a funny language and taking in such myriad stories as a drama on a slave ship, a cyborg rebellion in futuristic South Korea, a China Syndrome-style investigation into a 70s nuclear power conspiracy, a gay composer (whose work gives the film its not very satisfactorily explained title), and an old man being imprisoned in a retirement home. The gimmick here is that certain faces recur, usually smothered in thick prosthetics, which means that its core cast – Hanks, Halle Berry, Hugh Grant, Jim Sturgess, Jim Broadbent – pop up again and again in various guises. All I will say is that 163 minutes is a long time to be left in the dark.
Derek Cianfrance's The Place Beyond The Pines (pictured) is, for me, one of the films of the festival, a great, gripping drama that is best approached cold, since there is a major twist an hour in that makes it very hard to write about. The lead is Ryan Gosling, star of Cianfrance's Blue Valentine, and the opening scenes have a lot of fun with Gosling's recent appropriation as a screen hunk: his character is called Handsome Luke, he has the word “heartthrob” tattooed on his neck, and his first words to on-off girlfriend Jennifer (Eva Mendes) is “Hey...”, likely a nod to the “Hey girl” viral of last year. This is not a comedy, though, and Cianfrance goes on to create a very long and unusual drama that takes some unexpected but nevertheless very interesting turns within a well-worn genre.
The genre this time is the heist drama. Discovering that he has fathered a child, Luke tries to wake up to his responsibilities, quitting his job as a stunt rider and looking for work as a mechanic. He meets the avuncular Robin (Ben Mendelsohn), who takes him under his wing and suggests a brief career as a bank robber. Robin insists that this should be a short term thing only, but Luke gets a taste for it, not just getting greedy for the cash but getting high on the act itself. To say more would stray into spoiler territory, but Cianfrance has created something really quite special here, reinventing the portmanteau-story format in a very stylish and often breathlessly exciting way.
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