Still from The Edge of Seventeen. (Image courtesy of TIFF.)
TIFF 2016: Day Nine
Sep 18, 2016
We’ve reached the finish line. There are screenings beyond the final Friday, and I’m sure I’ve missed some excellent pieces of cinema – it’s unavoidable with a slate as varied and massive as TIFF’s. All in all, it was a fantastic festival. And even if my final day didn’t reach the heights of other days, there wasn’t a poor film in the bunch, which is encouraging. I go into every screening hoping I’ll see my favorite movie of all time. I take no delight in disliking a film and I always try to see movies through the lens of a fan who does might enjoy it. This is occasionally difficult, and I’m not always successful, but I’m almost never surprised when I hear a film I dismissed has supporters. Ideally, writing about film – and I’m paraphrasing from Greg Kot and Jim DeRogatis talking about music criticism – is the beginning of a conversation or shared set of ideas and not the end. It’s all about perspective, not being an arbiter of taste.
Onto the final recap:
Waking bright and early following the midnight screening of The Autopsy of Jane Doe, I wandered into a daylight screening of another Midnight Madness selection in The Belko Experiment. An office building in Colombia, filled with ex-pat workers from the United States, is suddenly thrust into lockdown with a foreign metal covering the inside and outside. A disembodied voice rumbles over the loudspeakers saying that the first command is for everyone to kill the closest person within a certain timeframe or there will be consequences. No one bites as workers try to find the source and to find means of escape. The time limit runs out and people’s heads start exploding because of a tracking chip inserted upon their hiring date a year earlier. More commands follow and friends turn on each other as chaos and anarchy reign.
It’s a fine idea, and like many high-concept films the set-up is aces but the follow through is clumsy and repetitive. There are a ton of familiar actors from John C. McGinley to Michael Rooker and others whose faces are recognizable even if their names aren’t coming directly to mind. There is some kind of savage pleasure watching a pinnacle of bureaucracy crumble under the savagery of humanity at its basest. There remain the idealists and the meek, but even some of the warmest characters bend to the pressures by the end. That, or…death. The Belko Experiment is like a heightened Stanford Prison Experiment if the simulation in that one just wasn’t extreme enough and this becomes the next logical conclusion. Written by James Gunn, it is imbued with bits of comedy, but it’s almost always more satisfying in the building tension than the release of it.
I followed this by immediately entering a screening for The Age of Shadows, the second Korean film set during the Japanese occupation I’d seen at festival after the exquisite The Handmaiden – it also marked the third of four films to feature at least one severed tongue following Brimstone and The Autopsy of Jane Doe – and it couldn’t be much different. Where The Handmaiden focused more on a small story of select individuals, The Age of Shadows is more directly about the occupation and the Korean freedom fighters trying to achieve independence. It’s a spy movie rife with betrayal, torture and paranoia. It is also home to some incredible set-pieces: notably the opening chase and everything on, and immediately following, an intense train ride. It’s also mercifully punctuated with a few moments of levity and hope so it’s not simply a slog of human misery, though it very easily could have been that.
Song Kang-Ho (The Host, Thirst) plays Lee Cheong-chool, a Korean who defected from the freedom fighters to become a police officer in the Japanese police force, and much of his job is connected with suppressing the uprising. He is, obviously, conflicted and much of the film deals with his personal struggle. There isn’t some stirring or emotional realization of his mistakes leading to a rousing and inspiring change of heart, either. It’s a constant struggle. Does he return to the uncertainty and likely painful death of fighting against the system or work to preserve it even though it’s destroying his heritage? This is largely effective. The Age of Shadows is occasionally needlessly convoluted, even for a spy movie, but that’s pretty much the nature of things. It might be a bit long, too, but it’s a fine piece of filmmaking with genre trappings and historical leanings.
Jeff Nichols’ second film of 2016, Loving, is a nice and simple story of love and fighting for what is right. Richard and Mildred Loving are married in Washington, D.C. in the late 1960s and return home to Virginia. They are thrown into jail for living together as Richard is white and Mildred is black. According to Virginia State law at the time, this was illegal. As ridiculous as this sounds, and seeing it unfold onscreen seems Twilight Zone-ish, it’s an embarrassing truth in the history books and one that hasn’t disappeared.
Deciding to keep the scope of the film intimate and small is a good choice. What can happen when developing a message film based on a movement, in this case it’s the civil rights cause, it can get unwieldy and vague. By telling the story of the Lovings and their specific struggle, the film more easily puts faces to the crisis and by extension makes it feel more tangible. It’s easy to agree in the abstract, but it’s even easier to attach to an issue if the plight is depicted more specifically. Nichols is a curious filmmaker, alternating between high concept genre films and tales ingrained in the South with some overlap bleeding through, as well. Loving is his most straightforward piece of narrative storytelling yet and it’s what makes it both very watchable but also less definitive of his style. It’s the first of his movies where a signature stamp feels absent. It’s a much more anonymous film than Midnight Special, even…which was roundly accused of aping Spielberg and Carpenter both as a form of praise (by me) and derision.
While I praised The Autopsy of Jane Doe as being one of the best surprises, I guess I saved the best for last. While The Edge of Seventeen is not my favorite film from TIFF, it surprised me more than any other. Here, Hailee Steinfeld plays Nadine, a high school junior with severe social problems. While socialization comes so naturally to her brother Darian and her best friend Krista, she just can’t seem to relate to others. When Darian and Krista become an item, Nadine goes off the deep end and can’t control her caustic reaction, effectively terminating her friendship.
What I appreciate about The Edge of Seventeen is how it doesn’t hesitate to paint Nadine in a negative light, but it also highlights the parts of her personality – her quick wit, general silliness and astute intelligence – that will be part of what will allure people later even if she is unaware of it in the present. It would also be easy to label Darian and Krista as being out of line, but that’s not remotely the case. That doesn’t mean Nadine’s confusion and revulsion is out of nowhere. It’s understandable. It’s one of those situations where everyone needs breathing room, especially in high school. Woody Harrelson, naturally, helps steal the show as Nadine’s disinterested and checked out history teacher. Every bit of banter between the two is so well delivered.
I hope it finds a large audience, because many of the themes of self-discovery and worry that your faults will forever be amplified are universal even if they are familiar. Kelly Fremon Craig’s script is funny, touching and it gets heavy without feeling at all manipulative. It will be released wide this fall and I encourage you to go to the multiplex to check it out.
That’s it! I’ll probably catch screenings of Ana Lily Amirpour’s The Bad Batch and Steve James’ documentary ABACUS, but that’s the end of my daily recaps. I write capsule reviews of most movies I watch on my Letterboxd page at http://letterboxd.com/Ratedargh/. There is also a tentative list of my favorite TIFF films in order this year, which was especially difficult as it was a very solid year. I still maintain that the best film I saw at TIFF this year was the very first one, Kenneth Lonergan’s Manchester by the Sea, but there were plenty others that rivaled it.
The top ten:
1) Manchester by the Sea
2) Paterson
3) The Handmaiden
4) La La Land
5) Free Fire
6) Moonlight
7) The Edge of Seventeen
8) The Unknown Girl
9) The Autopsy of Jane Doe
10) Barry
Hope you enjoyed following along.
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