Karina on SpoutBlog

Under discussion:

Casablanca  (1943)

You Must Remember This: The Warner Bros. Story  (2008)

This may qualify as hyperbole, but Richard Schickel’s You Must Remember This––which premiered at Cannes in May, screened here at Telluride as part of a tribute to Schickel and will debut on PBS in slightly different form this fall––is maybe the most appropriately titled made-for-TV Classical Hollywood documentary directed by a working film critic I’ve seen this year.

“You must remember this,” is, of course, a lyric from “As Time Goes By,” the signature song from Warner Brothers’ Casablanca. From the opening montage of a tour through the WB backlot, set to a soundtrack of memorable lines from maybe a dozen and a half classic productions from that studio, Schickel’s film is devoted to anecdotal recall of Warner Brothers’ various signatures, from experts and witnesses who are dishy and not uncritical, but still often as sentimemtal as the song that Rick commands Sam to play again.  From silent doggie star Rin Tin Tin (who, snarked writer and eventual head of production Daryl Zanuck,  had the biggest brain on the lot) to the Busby Berkeley musicals that not so subtly told the viewer that “Dick Powell and Ruby Keeler are gonna get laid, and we’re all part of it,” to the social issue films of the 30s which carried “a vision of the world that was darker, more cynical, and more problematic than any other studio’s,” Schickel finds a surprisingly rich balance between behind-the-scenes trivia and multi-layered criticism. Access to talking heads including Molly Haskell, Neal Gabler, Jeaninne Basinger and former WB contract player Ronald Reagan certainly helps with the gravitas.

Also surprising was the slightly salty candor that ran through Schickel’s Special Medallion acceptance chat, which both the honoree and the audience seemed to find too brief. Still, Schickel managed to get out som zingers involving Manny Farber, Pauline Kael, the youth of America and John McCain. Some highlights after the jump.

On “the late, great Manny Farber”: “Talk about curmudgeons…he was very influential, he had this nifty, jazzy style. If you want to know the truth, that’s where Pauline [Kael] got her style.”

On Warner Brothers New Deal-aligned productions of the 1930s: “It was the Depression, and Daryl Zanuck made a very conscious decision that the films of the era would appeal to the American consciousness. There was an energy in the country that was healthy at that time. It was not Bushian or McCainian.”

On the next generation of cinephiles: “Young people come up to me and say, ‘You know, I’ve never seen a black and white movie.” Are you out of your fucking mind? It’s not something to be proud of.

Under discussion:

Helen  (2009)

Christine Molloy and Joe Lawlor, who screened short films at Telluride in 2005 and 2006, brought their debut full-length work to the festival this morning. The 74-minute Helen was preceded by Joy, a 9-minute short featuring some of the same actors, settings and situations, which Lawlor described before the screening as “a slightly more philosophical primer” for the feature. The filmmaking duo place both works within the context of their Civic Life series, “community-based” films cast with local non-performers, in which the socio-economic issues relevant to modern England and Ireland are improbably but successfully folded into a pure cinema marked by long traveling takes, atmosphere in place of action, and a notable economy of speech.

In Joy, a female police officer faces the camera and explains that we’re watching a staged re-enactment of the disappearance of an 18 year old girl that will appear on local television, in the hopes of jogging the memory of anyone who might have seen a clue. As we watch Joy’s stand-in Helen (Annie Townsend) retrace steps through a park before disappearing into the woods, the cop’s voice-over explains how she calms the parents of a missing teenager by encouraging them to look at best case scenarios. Joy, she says, “might have been one of those young people who wanted to get lost.”

The feature focuses on how and why Helen came to “play” Joy, and how the other girl’s absence left a gap amongst her friends and family waiting to be filled. Joy––who we never see, but are told Helen bears a striking physical resemblance to––came from a loving, upper middle-class home, played in a band and dated an attractive yuppie real estate agent. Helen has been living in the custody of the state since she was a child, spends her after school hours working as a maid in a hotel, and has never had close friends, let alone a boyfriend. Though their film is comprised mainly of long, contemplative shots of Helen transversing the landscapes of the city, her school, and the woods where Joy disappeared/the reenactment takes place, much of it set to the sound of Helen’s internal dialog with Joy, Molloy and Lawlor use these languid poetics to the service of a story about class passing. Helen clearly wants to emulate, if not out-and-out replace Joy in the lives of Joy’s parents and boyfriend, to suck up both the privilege and love that the lost girl left behind.

But it’s not as Vertigo-esque as it might seem; as conveyed by her imagined messages to Joy, Helen is not a cynical opportunist, but a pragmatic (if semi-delusional) optimist. She convinces herself that the police officer is on to something, that Joy got lost on her own. She does move in on the other girl’s absence as the opportunity she’s been waiting for to correct her dreary lot, but does it as if pretending that she and Joy had a silent pact to help one another remake their lives.

Helen is lovely to look at and ultimately compelling, but it does test patience, not least with its radically uneven performances. Though their casting process is usually fairly arbitrary (Molloy said before this morning’s screening that as a matter of course, “whoever turns up that day gets to be in the film”), for the first time Lawlor and Malloy held actual auditions to find a young woman to play the title role in Helen. Though Annie Townsend is no more a professional actress than any of Lawlor and Molloy’s collaborators (she’s actually a player on Newcastle United’s ladies football team), it’s her remarkably naturalistic, bizarrely seductive performance that breaks through the static of Helen’s sorely untrained cast, sleepy pacing and mildly too-futuristic premise, to really make the film something special.

A question/quibble: Lawlor noted before the screening that the decision to screen Joy and Helen together was made by the festival, and that the filmmakers had not necessarily intended for the works to be seen consecutively. Maybe two of Joy’s nine minutes are incorporated directly into Helen; one assumes that the rest stands alone because the filmmakers didn’t want the feature to depict the re-enactment literally, and the film is probably more haunting for it. But as long as that literal re-enactment exists, would it really be preferable to see the two films playing at the same festival apart?

Prodigal Sons aroused a bit of a frenzy in Telluride leading up to its first screening on Friday––with a line around the block an hour before the screening, many pass holders were turned away––and no doubt in part due to the Orson Welles factor. As per the Festival program notes, in the film director Kimberly Reed, who “once was a male named Paul,” revisits her “tumultuous relationship” with her adopted brother Marc “and chronicles Marc’s discovery: he is the grandson of Orson Welles and Rita Hayworth.”

But Sons is hardly the exploration of starry ancestry that the logline might lead you to believe, at least not in much of a direct way. Though Reed does travel with Marc to Croatia, where he appears in another documentary and bonds with Welles’ ex-girlfriend Oja Kodar, ultimately she’s less concerned with Marc’s geneology than in his unlikely status as anti-social “other” in a family in which he’s the only sibling without an LGBT identification.

We’re told that Kim and Marc have been estranged for ten years before Kim decides to head back to their Montana home town to introduce her relatively new, female self at her 20 year high school reunion. (Assuming there’d be a story in her homecoming, Reed hired producer/cinematographer  John Keitel to travel with her to Montana for the reunion, and the project just kept going.) Less than a year the former Paul’s senior, Marc insists he was “popular” in high school, but he couldn’t hold a candle to his then-brother, the co-captain of the football team and in general the classic specimen of the all-American teenage boy. Marc’s resentment has continued into near-middle age, even as his brother has become his sister and has sought to kill all vestiges of her male past. But her former, seemingly ideal masculine self won’t die so easily. As she puts it, she and her brother are “haunted by the same ghost.”

From certain angles, the all-grown-up Mark is the splitting image of his grandpa–if his grandpa was a modern day, middle-American lump in a too-tight wife beater, fanny pack and shorts, with a receding hairline no longer quite obscuring the scar of a massive head injury incurred via an accident incurred during celebration of his 21st birthday. There are intimations that Marc was difficult before his accident––that he constantly sought attention, that he felt frustrated and anxious over his inability to be like Paul––but by the time we check in, things seem to have become much worse.

Even on meds, Marc flips back and forth between irrational (and sometimes violent) rage, and self-pitying contrition. Eventually, after a number of scary incidents (most captured via quaking handheld camera, sometimes with the action just outside the frame because the person shooting is actually being threatened or assaulted), Kim gets involved in trying to get her brother medical help, but one wonders why an intervention took so long. Even if Kim wasn’t around to see her brother’s deterioration, didn’t his wife, mother or other brother ever feel the effects?

It would be fascinating if the answer to that question was the stuff of a 1930s horror movie––that something went horribly wrong when the great beauty Hayworth and the genius Welles mated, and 50 years later, their union somehow led to major dysfunction in an otherwise happy Montana family––a rising of old Hollywood’s repressed sins in the Heartland!

Unfortunately, in reality, Marc’s blood relations were/are only incidental to his problems as an adult, and Reed’s handling of his heritage in relation to his wider issues is not particularly purposeful or focused. Most frustrating, she allows Marc’s bloodline to pop up as a possible salve to his sickness, without examining how it might actually be responsible when miracles fail to take hold. Reed’s most successful when she’s allowing the Welles relation to just hang in the air as supporting evidence to her family’s structuring irony: as a high school jock and valedictorian turned extremely well-adjusted transgender lesbian, she’s moved through life with incredible ease compared to her adopted brother, whose Hollywood DNA couldn’t protect him from severe mental illness.

Prodigal Sons ultimately falls into the unfortunate trap of so many post-digital personal documentaries: it’s an Everybody Has One movie. Everyone has one tragic/triumphant story that, if shaped correctly, could make sufficient fodder for a film––but that doesn’t mean that everyone is a filmmaker. Best case scenario, Everybody Has Ones serve as calling cards for a filmmaker’s storytelling capabilities and aesthetic sensibilities. In this case, Reed’s autobiographical portrait has its fair share of meaty bits, but it suffers from both the director/producer/star’s lack of perspective on the material, and a general indifference to craft from both Reed and her cameraman/producer. It takes a certain type of personality to put one’s most painful moments on film; unfortunately this type of personality is not necessarily compatible with filmmaking acumen.