Telluride 2006, Day 1 (2006-09-01)
Panic sets in. United Airlines, God bless them, informs us that our flight out of Philadelphia has been pushed forward half an hour, thus jeopardizing our connection in Denver. Flights into Montrose, Colorado on this Labor Day weekend, are booked solid. Well, fuck. Not only is this trip an inevitable highlight of my year -- having to forgo it last Labor Day was excruciating -- but Telluride, not wont to give away press passes, has 680 of my dollars. What to do?
It's a bit of an anticlimactic end to the story, but we made our connection, and didn't have to do anything drastic like drive five hours from Denver. Even better: this is the first year that we are staying "in town," rather than "on the mountain" -- though the latter is usually cheaper, sometimes nicer, and just a lovely and free gondola ride away, staying in town allows fast and easy access to the venues, and lets me spend more time sleeping, writing, and watching movies on average. Also I don't have to walk around in pitch blackness while bears stalk me.
The program this year is full of promising films big and small, sure to be made better by the mountain air and the atmosphere of unadulterated cinephilia. From the more-or-less commercial -- the likes of Brad Pitt, Cate Blanchett and Nicole Kidman will show up on screen, if not in person, this weekend -- to the intriguingly obscure, it's a feast and a respite from the weak summer movie season -- and there's even a horror film on the bill!
I decided to start heavy. Todd Field's Little Children (B-) is a bit of a disaster, really: a literary adaptation that has pretty much remained a book. I am not just referring to the insistent, omniscient voiceover narration, though that certainly adds to the effect; rather, it's the aggressively schematic plot meticulously constructed for symmetry, consistency and subtextual perfection. The central themes are placed front and center, and every piece of the storyline and action by the characters serves to crystallize and develop them. On the page, this sort of writing probably comes off as virtuoso craftsmanship; on the screen, it plays like an exercise.
Which is not to say that the film is not an extraordinarily well-executed exercise, or even an enjoyable one. Chronicling an affair between a bored, unsatisfied housewife (Kate Winslet) and a househusband who is supposed to be studying for the bar exam but can't bring himself to make it to the library (Patrick Wilson), set against the backdrop of a neighborhood Megan's Law controversy, Little Children is compelling in the way it explores the notion that adults always cruelly use children for their own ends: to abate their insecurities, satisfy their obsessions, release pent-up aggression, desperately compensate for the lack of other meaningful relationships in their lives. It's beautifully shot and acted, darkly funny in the right places, ominous, sometimes even scary.
The film's ultimate downfall is its construction, which is so single-minded that it sends the story rocketing to heights of absurdity even as it becomes painfully predictable -- one late-film "shocker," in particular, is obvious fifteen minutes in advance, if you're paying attention. Though Little Children is skillful in many ways (and the Kate Winslet storyline resolves in a genuinely moving way), it's a disappointing follow-up to In the Bedroom, which found its strength in its characters.
Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu's Babel (A-) quickly alleviated the distressing arthouse fugue brought on by Little Children, giving us four interconnecting stories both thematically rich and more or less organic. Inarritu introduced the film with some variation on "though the film may seem political, it is really just a set of intimate stories about parents and children," to which my instinctive response was "then why did you make it political, assclown?" But it makes sense here: Babel is about lack of communication, per its title, and that theme resonates through Inarritu's four stories on levels both global and personal.
The upshot of the movie -- which chronicles the travails of several sets of characters across the globe whose lives are transformed by a single act of violence -- is that our moral arbiters are failing us, and that culture, politics and the law no longer have a meaningful connection to real people. In that sense, Babel is a classically liberal film, outraged at draconian, unsympathetic legal institutions and senseless political violence, pleading for people to talk and listen. But it has a realist bent, too, and Inarritu is not the campfire bleeding heart sort; as such, the movie is more of a lament than a call to action.
Inarritu and screenwriter Guillermo Arriaga traversed similar territory with 2003's 21 Grams, but Babel seems better considered, less arbitrary. The stories and connections largely make sense, and part of the film's power lies in their inexorable logic. Interweaving seemingly unrelated storylines has become a genre of its own, but rarely is the device this indispensable.
Why the minus on the "A," you ask? Almost entirely due to the Tokyo storyline, which is too literal and pretty much useless. Three would have been plenty.
More tomorrow.
--Eugene Novikov