I don’t presume to know who “won” the fight, except to observe that the “world premieres” nabbed by Telluride this year were largely not very good. Jon Stewart’s Rosewater was the festival’s highest-profile get, but the earnest issue film was received without much enthusiasm. Based on a memoir by an Iranian Newsweek reporter who was imprisoned and tortured by the Ahmadinejad regime for his coverage of the Green Revolution, the film is sleek and well-intentioned but lacks a compelling protagonist and starts to sag when it leaves the streets of Tehran and enters solitary confinement. But at least it moves and has history on its mind, which is more than I can say for The Imitation Game, Morten Tyldum’s leaden, dumbed-down Alan Turing biopic. Refusing even to try to explain Turing’s work and reducing absolutely everything to snappy crowd-pleasing cliche, it turns one of the most important stories of the 20th century into pure prestige-flick torpor.
I couldn’t bring myself to sit through Wild, from Dallas Buyers Club’s Jean-Marc Vallee, wherein Reese Witherspoon reportedly finds redemption and renewal on a long solo hike. Others’ reviews were mixed. I did enjoy the remaining big world premiere — Sophie Barthes’ adaptation of Madame Bovary, the first ever from a female director. While it offers few genuine surprises, it does prove willing to complicate its protagonist in thorny, intriguingly unpleasant ways, and it doesn’t flinch along its path to a genuinely grim destination.
This year’s real action, it turned out, was not in the brand new stuff, but rather in the US premieres of Cannes holdovers. My favorite film of the festival was Bennett Miller’s Foxcatcher, about which the less said the better — it caught me completely off-guard and has refused to leave my thoughts. Like many putative awards contenders, it’s “based on a true story,” but unlike most, it works its ass off to turn the true story into art. A stunning tonal high-wire act, it uses a transformed Steve Carell and the intersection of two bizarre milieus (the world of competitive wrestling and the insular universe of a mega-rich American family) to create a sustained and compelling experience of strangeness. Carnell’s performance is a wonder, using the actor’s comic chops to a genuinely unsettling scary-funny effect that approaches the uncanny valley. The entire film seems to emanate from him.
I also really dug Tommy Lee Jones’ The Homesman — an austere, gorgeous western that takes some startling left turns and portrays an uncommonly severe and unglamorous Wild West. There’s a heartbreaking lead performance from Hilary Swank, and a memorable supporting turn from Jones himself. Telluriders seem to have found the film forbidding and inaccessible, but I loved its feel-bad majesty. The Dardennes’ Two Days, One Night met with similar responses; I valued the Brothers’ typically humane depiction of a harsh reality, this time exploring the moral conundrum of having to demand from others a sacrifice one would not oneself be willing to make.
But if there was any sort of critical and popular “breakout” at this year’s fest, it was Yann Demange’s debut feature ’71, about a young soldier’s experiences in Belfast during the Troubles. The movie played Cannes but attracted little attention; at Telluride its stunning depiction of urban warfare (a long first act riot sequence may be the greatest of its kind ever filmed) and its sympathetic but unsentimental take on the toll of war on a fundamentally decent young man seemed to strike a chord. I saw shades of Gallipoli — another anti-war film about boys thrust into brutal, alien conflicts — that remain pointedly relevant today.
I also enjoyed Andrei Zvyagintsev’s Leviathan (though not as much as his Elena or The Return) and, to a lesser extent, Gabe Polsky’s Red Army, an entertaining, superficial documentary about the legendary Soviet hockey team. Escobar: Paradise Lost, a mainstream thriller about a young Canadian man who gets caught up in drug lord Pablo Escobar’s violent downfall, failed to make much of an impression (the screenplay is sloppy, sometimes bordering on silly), but did feature strong turns from Josh Hutcherson and Benicio del Toro.
