Earlier today I heard a girl use the word TIFFing as a verb.
She said she made an excuse to get off work so that she could go TIFFing all
day long. I thought it was thoroughly ridiculous, so I’m going to use the word
here. TIFFing is harder work than you might think it’s going to be at first.
When you first see the film schedule you figure that you’ll be able to watch
like 5 films a day, really pack them in there, no big deal. I mean, all you’re
doing is sitting in comfy chairs and watching movies all day, what is more
relaxing than that? I could keep this up forever.
There are a lot of little things you have to deal with that
don’t get factored into your initial schedule though. There’s walking to and
from theaters. Most of the theaters are grouped together in two little areas of
downtown Toronto, one around the Yonge/Dundas area and the other in the
entertainment district; but depending on how your films get scheduled you can
have a 25 minute or so walk from theater to theater. There are trolley cars, taxis,
and a subway, but that’s for wimps. The other thing that you don’t factor in is
all the little extras that come along with a screening. There are
introductions, reading of sponsor acknowledgments, the same four ads that you
have to sit through before every movie, Q&As after the screening; once you
add them all up they can add a significant amount of time to the film’s runtime
and cram your schedule.
But probably the biggest time waster that comes along with
TIFFing is time that you spend standing in the lines. If you want to get a
decent seat in the theater you should probably show up an hour early; some people
show up significantly earlier than that. If you’re seeing multiple films a day,
that ends up being a lot of time standing in lines. Add to it the awesome
weather that Toronto has been giving TIFF this year, and that’s a lot of time
spent standing in lines with the sun beating down on you, sweating in the
concrete jungle.
This leads to a phenomenon I’ve discovered that I like to
call TIFF-B.O. It’s the stink that comes wafting off of someone letting you
know that they’ve been TIFFing all day long. They’ve been spending all of their
time hoofing it between theaters, standing out in the sun, and shoving hastily
bought street meat down their throats to keep the engine running. It gets so
bad that I was sitting next to a totally hot girl at a late screening last
night and she had wicked TIFF-B.O. I’ve heard a lot of hot chicks talk about
having B.O. before, it seems to be something they like to do to try and relate
to us normal people, but I had never actually smelled a hot chick’s B.O.
before. Turns out it really exists. This chick had it: trust me. I had to sniff
my pits a couple of times on the sly to make sure it wasn’t coming from me, and
it wasn’t. She must have been doing some serious TIFFing that day. I commend
her for finally ending my lifelong search for a smelly hot chick.
What’s the moral of all this? The moral is that you can’t
watch as many movies in a day as you think you can and still be a functioning
human being. You want to schedule a break to freshen up a bit. You want to
actually sit down somewhere and eat a real meal at least once a day. I’ve found
that watching three movies a day is probably the best schedule to stick to; it
generally fills up your day with filmy goodness, but it doesn’t take over your
life so much that you become a stinky, hot dog eating TIFF zombie. Space these
things out, give yourself some wiggle room, and enjoy. Today I took on Oren
Moverman’s The Messenger follow-up Rampart, a French film about young artsy
types and France’s harsh immigration policy called Low Life, and Sean Durkin’s stunning feature directorial debut Martha Marcy May Marlene; a film whose
ridiculous title I will be typing out every time I mention it.
Rampart
The last time Woody Harrelson teamed up with director Oren
Moverman, he was playing a gruff recruitment officer in The Messenger. Harrelson’s character was a bit of a hard ass in
that movie, but he only played a supporting role to Ben Foster’s protagonist.
This time around sees Moverman directing Harrelson as a character that is a bit
more than just gruff, he’s downright villainous; and this time he happens to be
our protagonist.
Rampart is one of
those corrupt cop dramas, set in L.A. at the end of the 90s, back when the LAPD
was still feeling the sting of the Rodney King fiasco. Harrelson plays Dave
Brown, a Vietnam Vet tough guy turned police officer who isn’t afraid to rough
somebody up to get a confession, put a gun in someone’s hands to justify
shooting them, or shake a dealer down for his cash. When we first meet him it’s
during a pretty innocuous lunch scene, and even there he’s spouting racist
lingo and bullying a female officer into finishing all of her fries before she
is allowed to leave. Brown is a real jerk.
Creating a character who is a cop and also a jerk isn’t
really enough of a reason to make a movie though. There have been roughly one
million corrupt cop movies down through the ages, so in order to make another
one and have it stand out you’re going to need to have some tricks up your
sleeve. The problem with Moverman’s latest is, for the majority of its runtime,
it doesn’t have anything special going on at all. Brown is divorced, he has
kids he’s not the best father to, he’s a womanizer, he’s down on his luck, and
everything he does seems to stem from the rage and helplessness that comes from
extreme loneliness. That’s fine and all, but it’s nothing original. Most of
what we get are clichéd situations, hard boiled dialogue that sounds like it
could have come out of any number of early 90s thrillers, and scenes of
Harrelson wallowing in shadow while smoking cigarettes. I really like Harrelson
as an actor, and I was thrilled to see him getting a starring role here; but I
would have liked him to get better material to work with.
We get a running gag that Harrelson is good at weaving
tapestries of legal jargon, and thus is able to often bully higher ups into
ignoring his misdeeds with threats of litigation. I enjoyed that unusual aspect
of his character and wish it could have been explored further. Instead, the
large focus goes to angsty angry guy stuff. By the end of the film Rampart
does manage to go places that I haven’t seen many cop dramas go before; it
goes so far down the rabbit hole that we spend time watching hallucinatory
sequences as Harrelson’s character loses his mind, and we spend time in seedy,
underground sex dungeons as we watch him attempt to hit bottom. This isn’t just
a dirty cop, this is a Bad Lieutenant level
dirty cop, and in the third act he had started to get interesting, but for my
tastes the movie just took too long to get there.
There are some good things about the film though. Harrelson
is strong in the lead, despite his character being a generic archetype. Ben
Foster shows up playing a homeless man in a wheelchair, and every second that
he is on screen is just a delight. He’s at the same time authentic as a
downtrodden wacko and yet still charismatic in the role, and I wish his
short-lived relationship with Brown could have been a more important part of
the story. Robin Wright plays a sort-of love interest for Brown, a mysterious
intentioned lawyer named Linda. She had a lot of sadness going on in her eyes
in this one. We’re not sure what, but this Linda character has been through
something, and Wright let’s us know purely through facial expressions and
playing things closed off. It’s a subtle performance, yet I almost didn’t recognize
Wright looking so dour.
Moverman and cinematographer Bobby Bukowski do good work with
the camera as well. Rampart has a
documentary feel. A lot of the camera work is handheld, and often we’re peaking
at the action from behind something, getting half of the conversation obscured.
It added an element of realism and voyeurism to the story that probably
elevated things a notch. There was one conversation scene in an office where we
got a Michael Bay-style camera spinning circles around the room, and I found
that to be distracting, but other than that I would say that Rampart manages to look really good and
present its story effectively. Because of the performances and the visuals, I
would say that this one is worth giving a look if you’re in the mood for a cop
movie, but don’t go out of your way for it. Ultimately it doesn’t live up to
the potential that The Messenger showed.
Low Life
If you just watched the first act of Low Life, you would probably think that it was a French version of Twilight where the melodramatic teens
were cast in the roles of poet activists rather than vampires and werewolves;
and for a large part of the film it is exactly that disgusting. But it’s got
some other things going for it later on that are far more interesting. The closest
thing we get to a lead character here is Carmen (Camille Rutherford); a young
girl who at first is dating a stringy haired poet named Charles (Luc Chessel),
and later on moves on to an Afghan immigrant named Hussain (Arash Naimian). You
might think that this sort of setup is ripe for a love triangle, but not
really. Low Life doesn’t go there,
Carmen transitions between relationships relatively smoothly. It does go a lot
of other places though.
I caught three distinctly different things that were going on
in this film: first there was a bunch of melodramatic bits about teenage
romance, then there was a subplot about illegal immigrants cursing their
official expulsion papers from the French government with deadly voodoo curses,
and finally nearly the entire second half of the film was spent with Hussain
being ordered out of the country, defying said orders, and being hidden away by
Carmen and her roommates in a sort of Anne Frank type tale. What did these
three disparate plots have to do with each other? Your guess is as good as
mine. Low Life, to me, played as a
random mess of ideas that never came together as a coherent whole.
The biggest problem with the film was the scenes of the
young kids, just hanging out, delivering poetic monologues, and generally
acting like weird, creepy vampires. These scenes are exactly the sort of thing
that normal people who say they hate artsy films think that every art film
looks like; a bunch of abstract imagery, sad for no reason characters, and
ridiculously floral dialogue. And then there’s the relationship drama. During
one scene a couple spends out on a dance floor together they go from making
out, to violently flinging their bodies away from each other, to making out
again, and then to violently thrashing at each other, several times, all in the
span of about a minute. I guess we were supposed to be enthralled at how passionate
these 19-year-old kids were or something, but to me it was just tedious
nonsense. Huge stretches of this film’s more than lengthy runtime are spent
watching idiotic young people sit around and have meandering conversations that
have little or nothing to do with any story going on. It can get pretty
miserable.
The best bit of the film was the sudden supernatural turn it
took when African immigrants started putting curses on people in order to make
some sort of attack on the oppressively anti-immigration French government.
Unfortunately, this subplot gets the least bit of focus, never really gets
explained, and just ends up making you scratch your head and wonder what the
heck it was and what the screenwriters had planned for it. There’s a scene where
we see face painted voodoo men put the curse on the document. It was moody and cool
and it looked really visually striking. I thought it was the high point of the
film, for the first five minutes or so. Then it just kept going on forever with
the camera not pulling away from this guy with a painted face. What starts off
as impressive imagery just degenerates into indulgent nonsense.
The last half of the film, where we watch as Hussain does
everything that he can to remain hidden from the French authorities and go back
to Afghanistan; that had some potential. Finally these kids who I had been
watching lay around and pout for over an hour had a purpose, they had a story.
There was some exciting, politically relevant material here that was begging to
come out and be explored. Unfortunately, all director Nicolas Klotz was able to
do with it is give us more scenes of young people laying around bedrooms giving
speeches about how messed up the government is in the way they treat
immigrants. I hate young people.
The movie is called Low
Life, and it stems from a monologue that Hussain gives about the state
people are in when they’re sleeping. He calls it Low Life, and he says it’s the
great equalizer of men. The film supports his little speech with lots of scenes
of characters sleeping, and lots of scenes of character needing to be woken up,
but having a really hard time with it. I mean, characters would lie down for a
nap, and then when they had to get up and go to class or something people would
have to drag them around the room and slap them in the face and stuff to get
them awake. It was weird, and it didn’t get explained, and really I got nothing
from this movie other than that it was an attempt at shoehorning a bunch of
existential bull into a movie that should have just been about young immigrants
going to school in France. Not much of anything worked for me here, and Low Life was easily my least favorite thing
I saw at the festival.
Martha Marcy May Marlene
Which brings us to my favorite thing that I saw at the
festival. The bad taste of French pretension didn’t linger in my mouth long,
because then came Martha Marcy May
Marlene, a unique filmgoing experience that had me completely riveted and
in emotional turmoil from the moment it began until the moment it ended. Sean
Durkin is a first time feature director and Elizabeth Olsen is a very new presence
in Hollywood having only starred in one film before this, but with Martha Marcy May Marlene they have both
just landed on the scene like megaton bombs. Durkin and Olsen are the real
deal, and in this haunting, harrowing tale of a young girl joining and
attempting to escape a cult, they have created a film that is sure to be at the
very top of a million best-of lists come the end of the year. Martha Marcy May Marlene has serious
awards season potential for sure, but it’s also so dang creepy and scary that
it could have some potential for mainstream success as well. Forget any of the
typical horror movies that are coming out between now and Halloween, none of
those 3D gore fests will have anything on the chills provided by the sharp
direction of Durkin and the frightening menace of cult leader Patrick (John
Hawkes) in Martha Marcy May Marlene.
Add to that the press potential of tabloids talking about how Olsen is the
younger sister of uber-famous twins Mary Kate and Ashley Olsen, and she does
nudity in this film, and suddenly it has sleeper blockbuster potential.
Martha Marcy May
Marlene is very quiet and very slow. It deliberately unfolds itself in
front of you, letting you see its layers one at a time, and every rung you go
down the ladder builds the experience of entering the secluded world created by
John Hawkes’ Patrick into a more nerve-wracking one. A lot of filmmakers
attempting to take this approach would make a boring movie, but Durkin is able
to effectively utilize a less is more approach in building unmatched tension.
You might just be watching a quiet scene of some people gardening, but because
you have no idea what might come next, the situation is enthralling. Then some
thunder cracks out in the distance and your stomach twists into a knot. Martha Marcy May Marlene makes you feel
what it must be like to live under the thumb of someone who you utterly fear.
A large part of why the film works so effectively is the
performance of virtuoso God amongst actors John Hawkes. Is there anything this
guy can’t do at this point? To glance at him you would think that he were just
a skinny, ugly weirdo; someone of no real consequence. But all he needs is a
single minute to hook you and get you paying attention to everything he does.
He can appear soulful, he can whip out a guitar and play an awesome song, and
he can somehow puff up his slight frame into something dangerous and
terrifying. The menace this man is able to project is astounding, and
everything that he does as an actor makes him a perfect candidate to be the
leader of a brainwashed cult, both in this film and probably in real life if he
wanted. I wouldn’t complain if he played every bad guy and anti-hero in every
movie from this point forward. I want to see 100 John Hawkes films a year.
And now that I’ve seen what Elizabeth Olsen has to offer, I
wouldn’t mind if she made 80 or so a year either. She’s like a young Diane Lane
if she were given acting chops beyond her years. She’s classically trained in
her craft, and it shows. Martha, or Marcy May, or Marlene, depending on what
she’s being called in which part of the film you’re watching, isn’t just a
horror movie victim. She isn’t there to whimper, shriek, and be meek. She’s a
loveable, capable character who is able to effectively show us how any normal
person, who may just be a little lost at the time, could find themselves
trapped in such a ridiculous situation as being drugged, and raped, and
committing murders as the member of a cult. Olsen plays all of her confusion
and confliction effortlessly, and whenever she is in danger you’re practically
reaching out at the screen to try and help her. She’ll probably have to field a
bunch of stupid questions about what it was like to grow up with her sisters
for a while, but it shouldn’t be long before this Olsen carves out her own
niche and isn’t thought of in relation to Full
House whatsoever. Instead she’ll be making small talk about all the awards
that she has won (okay, and maybe still slipping in bits about the time she got
to meet John Stamos).
The two different stories of the film, Marcy first being introduced
into Patrick’s cult and Martha escaping it and trying to get on with her life,
are told concurrently. The events from one bleed back and forth into another,
and I’ve never seen this tactic used so well. The visual transitions from
timeline to timeline are up there with The
Graduate as far as slick filmmaking goes, and the dreamlike way that we
keep going back and forth from past to present expertly mimics the experience
Martha is having trying to relate with normal society once again after being
inundated with so much weirdness for so long. Bits of this film can be really
disorienting, which works to just amp up the tension further. Plus, the whole
thing is so expertly structured that what happens in one timeline is always
coloring and shining light on what is happening concurrently in the other.
Really, I can’t remember the last time I’ve seen a movie that was so well
scripted. Martha Marcy May Marlene is
something special.
There was one point, very briefly, where I found the movie
losing me. Pretty far in it starts to be ridiculous that Martha is so obviously
disturbed and traumatized, and yet the sister with which she is staying refuses
to acknowledge it in a straight forward way and get her help. While Martha’s
behavior continues to be batshit crazy, her sister thinks that she’s going to
be able to keep throwing parties at her lake house and whatnot, pretending like
nothing is happening, and eventually you just want to shake her and yell, “call
a damn psychiatrist!” My frustrations didn’t last long though. I had about ten
minutes of shaking my head and then she acquiesced to all of my requests, paving
way for the film’s ending; the film’s perfect, heart swallowing ending.
Watching Martha Marcy May Marlene is
an experience that is going to stick with me for a long time. As a matter of
fact, I’m humming John Hawkes’ ‘Marcy’s Song’ as I write this. When can I
download the dang thing?
