Film

Tribeca Wrap-Up: The Best of the Fest ... and the Rest

By Daniel Montgomery

Tuesday, May 8, 2007

Over the next several days, I’ll undergo cinematic withdrawal. At the whirlwind Tribeca Film Festival, I screened close to three dozen titles, an eclectic mix of features and shorts, fiction and documentary, and comedy and drama from a wide range of artists, many of whom are making their first impressions on the big screen. I have reviewed many of them already, but there are others that deserve to be seen and discussed, as well as a few that I’ll discuss so you don’t have to see them.

NEW YORK STATE OF MIND

“What are they, Vic?” “They’re rat people!” That’s the best line in Mulberry Street, a horror film in which a contagion turns everyone in Manhattan into bloodthirsty rodents. The film depicts a more authentic New York — and more authentic New Yorkers — than any other Big Apple-set film that I saw, but it doesn’t have enough fun with its premise; it takes itself too seriously to enjoy it as camp, and it’s too silly to take seriously. And it’s brief attempts at social commentary are half-hearted.

West 32nd is set in the world of the Korean mob, which is like the Goodfellas mob without the richness or detail. John Cho stars as an ambitious New York attorney trying to free a fourteen-year-old boy from a murder charge, but the screenplay makes the crime more complicated than it needs to be, and the characters are just as murky.

Two films find inspiration in the New York literary world. Marc Klein (Serendipity) directs Suburban Girl, which stars Sarah Michelle Gellar in a role Kate Hudson must have turned down. She plays an associate book editor who falls for an older editing mogul named Archie Knox (Alec Baldwin). What starts as a blithe comedy turns dreary and morose, and Baldwin inspires laughs in all the wrong places during a poorly timed subplot in which he is estranged from his “spiteful daughter.”

Edward Burns fares better. He writes and directs Purple Violets, a romance about a pair of writers (Patrick Wilson and Selma Blair) who went their separate ways but reconnect years later. The characters suffer from an excess of writerly angst, and their navel-gazing can be tiresome, but they’re grounded by sharp dialogue and sensible friends played by Burns and Debra Messing, who engage in a romantic drama of their own.

CALIFORNIA LOVE

A terrific film about the other coast is In Search of a Midnight Kiss, in which a desperate man (Scoot McNairy) places an ad on Craig’s List to find a woman to kiss at midnight on New Year’s Day. He meets Vivian (Sara Simmonds), and over the course of the day they get to know each other in a manner reminiscent of Before Sunrise and Before Sunset. The dialogue and performances are sublime, and the film understands the unique intimacy of a chance encounter.

Matthew Perry gives a great performance in Numb. He plays an LA-based screenwriter struggling against depersonalization disorder, a condition where the sufferer struggles to differentiate reality from a dream. Perry makes us understand the peculiar condition, conveying its there-but-not-there haziness, and all the while he bridges the script’s pathos with its offbeat humor. The film as a whole isn’t as accomplished as its central performance, but it’s a sturdy enough platform for its star, in the best role of his post-Friends career.

Another career leap is made by actor James Franco, who co-writes, directs, and stars in Good Time Max as an intellectually gifted but drug-addled man who moves to California with his similarly gifted brother. The peril of an actor directing himself is that he’ll indulge too many of his whims, but Franco is restrained both in front of and behind the camera and demonstrates a mature understanding of the complex bond of brotherhood.

WAR — WHAT IS IT GOOD FOR?

Turmoil in the Middle East inspired numerous films at this year’s festival. In addition to I Am an American Solider, the great documentary about the Iraq war that was reviewed by Marcos Bernal-Salas, is the equally stirring documentary Jerabek, about a family in mourning. Middle son Ryan was killed in action in Ramadi, and two years later his younger brother is prepared to join the Marine Corps as well. Jerabek makes tangible the individual cost of war and is even more devastating when you consider how many stories exist that are like this one.

The documentary 9 Star Hotel is set within the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Directed by Ido Haar, an Israeli filmmaker, it follows the lives of a close-knit group of Palestinians who work illegally in Israel. They resent Israel, but they are not zealots or terrorists. They are practical, hard-working men who support their families and have dreams for their lives. They give us a human understanding of the ongoing political struggle, and the film contains meaningful echoes of the present US-Mexico border dispute.

LOVE HURTS

I wanted to be rescued from the characters in Watching the Detectives, a comedy in which video-store owner Neil (Cillian Murphy) falls in love with a prankster (Lucy Liu). They’re sadomasochists for the Punk’d generation; her practical jokes range from obnoxious to insane. No man in his right mind would put up with her, but then, Neil isn’t a man in his right mind.

Do they stay together? Do they make it work? It doesn’t matter. What’s important is that neither of them is dating you. Be grateful.

KIDS THESE DAYS

If Tribeca is any indication, we should be concerned about the youth of America. And if Descent is any indication, we should be concerned about the filmmakers also. Rosario Dawson stars in a bravura turn as Maya, a college student who spirals out of control following a rape. But the film itself undergoes a descent — from a perceptive character study to an exploitive revenge thriller so graphic and fetishistic in its sadism that co-writer/director Talia Lugacy makes the audience her victim. For character and filmmaker alike, the end does not justify the means.

In Gardener of Eden, a different character takes the law into his hands: Adam (Lukas Haas), desperate to find a place in life, becomes a vigilante. Directed by actor Kevin Connolly (HBO’s Entourage), Gardener is blatantly an homage to Taxi Driver (the film takes place in a town called Bickleton), and though it is no Taxi Driver, it is a worthy tribute. It’s thoughtful about its character, who wants to do what’s right but goes about it the wrong way.

The Cake Eaters is all about good intentions, mostly those of director Mary Stuart Masterson. Her small-town story, centered on the romance between a high school graduate (Aaron Stanford) and a student with a neuromuscular disorder (Kristen Stewart), is a lot like the rural community it depicts: sweet, polite, and a little sleepy. The romance between the leads is lovely, and Masterson’s gentle touch is put to good use, but there are subplots that feel undercooked and lack dramatic weight.

Anton Yelchin, a gifted young actor from films like Hearts in Atlantis and Alpha Dog, is a bit of an awkward fit in the Ferris Bueller-esque title role in Charlie Bartlett, a teen comedy about a magnetic rich kid who becomes counselor — and pharmacist — to the student body. The film is formulaic, and its messages are dubious, but it is notable for the performance of Robert Downey Jr. as the principal; he brings a cold splash of truth even to the most preposterous scenes.

WHEN CHARACTERS COLLIDE

In the wake of Oscar-winner ‘Crash’ and the films of Alejandro Gonzalez Iñárritu, films with intersecting narratives have risen in prominence. But The Air I Breathe encounters a problem similar to Iñárritu’s ‘Babel’: It features four good stories and four fine performances — by Forest Whitaker, Brendan Fraser, Sarah Michelle Gellar, and Kevin Bacon — held back by a filmmaker with Something To Say. Co-writer/director Jieho Lee wants to dramatize the Chinese proverb that life breaks down into four emotions: happiness, pleasure, sorrow, and love. But the stories he tells are too messy, too human, and too interesting to play along with his rigid philosophy.

If Lee had loosened the reigns, he might have come up with something as special as Enrique Begne’s Two Embraces, which won him the award for Best New Narrative Filmmaker. He also tells four stories, about lives that converge in Mexico City, but he lets his characters breathe, and in two simple acts of compassion — the embraces of the title — he says more about human interconnectedness than Lee’s entire 90-minute philosophy workshop.

‘Take’ is my favorite film of the festival and the best film I’ve seen this year. In it, a working-class mother (Minnie Driver) and a small-time crook (Jeremy Renner) collide in a moment of tragedy and must come to terms with one another. Writer-director Charles Oliver, making a remarkable feature-film debut, follows his characters over the course of two separate days. He goes back and forth in time, highlighting their emotional rather than chronological journeys. Otherwise, he stays out of the way, using a spare visual style and keeping our attention focused on the story, the characters, and the award-worthy performances of Driver and Renner.

The best of the above films deserve to be found and cherished by future audiences. As for the worst of them, it’s hard to work up much outrage. Some films work and some don’t, but they all start with the same potential to be the next film you can’t stop talking about, and the Tribeca Film Festival gave me a lot to talk about.