TIFF 2019: Day 5 (Patreon)

Marriage Story (Noah Baumbach, USA): 66

Like The Squid and the Whale, perhaps a bit too emotionally straightforward to really rattle me—I tend to prefer Baumbach when he’s hiding behind brittle humor (though not when he pushes that into outright sourness). Consequently, the big knock-down drag-out toward the end, though beautifully acted by both Johansson and Driver, left a shallower wound than did, say, the awkward dance regarding precisely when and how Nicole should serve Charlie with divorce papers, which winds up playing out as neither party imagined or would have preferred. At once wrenching and overly neat (circling back to Nicole’s unread list of things she loves about Charlie; the tenderness of her final gesture), full of moments that ring true but also inclined to spell things out. If the goal was to make me (even more) glad that I’ve never gotten married or had kids, so that my breakups have been limited to “mere” anguish rather than also freighted with legal nightmares and child-custody battles and attendant financial ruin, mission the fuck accomplished.

Bad Education (Cory Finley, USA): 62

Doesn’t really answer my big question, which was Hey is this Finley dude for real? He’s a director-for-hire here, doing a creditable but unexciting job; had he made this prior to Thoroughbreds, I wouldn’t have been particularly curious to see what came next. True story’s a doozy, though, and screenwriter Mike Makowsky fashions it into a fairly incisive portrait of self-justification, taking care to note how all of the embezzlers—but especially Jackman’s vain superintendent—think of themselves as fundamentally decent despite knowing perfectly well that they’ve done wrong. Hasty research suggests that the film exaggerates the degree to which Tassone inadvertently served as the instrument of his own downfall, but having the school reporter’s investigation be inspired by his own sincere desire to push students toward higher achievement adds nice thematic zing. Smoothly satisfying, but jury’s still out on Finley as auteur.

State Funeral (Sergei Loznitsa, Lithuania/Netherlands): 52

Couldn’t get a public ticket for La Belle Époque, so opted to watch this early. (It was scheduled for my final day.) As I expected, it’s conceptually similar to The Trial, an archival doc that Loznitsa brought here last year (alongside the more interesting Donbass); this one consists entirely of footage shot during the several days that Stalin’s embalmed corpse lay on display in Moscow, leading up to his temporary burial in that dumb-joke staple, Lenin’s Tomb. Hard to know exactly how Loznitsa shaped this, i.e. to what degree (if any) it differs from what the USSR compiled; closing text reminds us that the man we see thousands mourning was not a nice guy, but that’s not exactly breaking news at this point. Two hours and change of heartbroken Soviets was a lot more than I needed, frankly, but we see many, many faces up close, and they do tell a story of sorts (as opposed to the truly tedious milling-around-from-a-distance that makes up Loznitsa’s soporific Victory Day). Might work better as an installation that one could watch for as long or little as one likes.

[Random likely W/O from the Discovery section ditched because I needed to write my A.V. Club review of Freaks (Not the Browning).]

Letter to the Editor (Alan Berliner, USA): 58

Half a dozen different films get thrown together here beneath the tattered umbrella of Berliner’s obsession with the New York Times, from which he’s been clipping photos since 1980. His gift for rapid-fire montage remains awe-inspiring (though there’s less dazzling free association here than in First Cousin Once Removed—one of the decade’s most overlooked films), and individual sections on everything from sports to orchestra conductors make a strong case for him as one of the doc world’s greatest formalists. But he also wants to mourn the impending loss of physical newsprint, and chide Trump for calling the free press “the enemy of the people,” and reminisce about his personal experience at Ground Zero on 9/11, and discuss the way that smartphones have made photojournalists of us all, and it starts to feel undisciplined and incoherent and overlong (at only 89 minutes). But did I mention that literally every image in the film—over 7000 of ’em total—is a NYT photo? Worth seeing for that alone, and especially for the woman who wrote the word ENOUGH across both of her palms but held her hands too far apart so that it looks like she just hates Brian Eno.