The Telluride Film Festival Features 'Mr. Turner'
TELLURIDE, Colo. - 'There is no place for cynicism in the reviewing of art.' Those words - a line of dialogue from 'Mr. Turner,' Mike Leigh's splendid, sprawling film about the life and loves of an artist in mid-19th-century England - are a fine motto at any time, but they are especially germane in the season of film festival frenzy. Looking at movies and thinking about the prizes they might win is a relatively benign and locally contagious form of cynicism. The antidote is the idealism, the sincere love of the cinema, that also flourishes here, nearly 9,000 feet above sea level and almost six months away from the Oscars.
It is entirely possible that, as the conventional wisdom of the moment has it, Benedict Cumberbatch will be nominated for his performance as the British computer pioneer Alan Turing in 'The Imitation Game,' and that he will compete against Michael Keaton in 'Birdman' and Steve Carell in 'Foxcatcher.' All those films made their North American debuts here. So did 'Wild,' starring Reese Witherspoon, and 'The Homesman,' with Hilary Swank, both films whose Academy-worthiness has been assessed and boosted here.
But let's return to 'Mr. Turner,' anchored by a grunting, shambling, perversely charismatic performance by Timothy Spall, who was rewarded for his labor with the best actor prize at Cannes this spring. It is one of my two Telluride favorites, along with another Cannes laureate, 'Leviathan,' a grave and beautiful drama, at once intimate and enormous, from the Russian director Andrey Zvyagintsev. Pictorially ravishing in the best Russian wide-screen tradition, it tells the story of an ordinary man crushed by the corrupt forces of church and state. That's much too simple, though. Mr. Zvyagintsev layers social commentary, intense emotion and spiritual allegory without ever losing the human dimension of the narrative.
Mr. Leigh's film, which chronicles the later career of the great British painter J. M. W. Turner, has a great deal to say about the relationship between artistic inspiration and worldly ambition, none of it simple or obvious. There is something bracingly cleareyed and astute about the way Mr. Leigh shows how Turner's engagement with patrons, colleagues and critics is part of the work of realizing that vision.
I happened to catch 'Mr. Turner' right after seeing another portrait of an artist, 'Seymour: An Introduction,' Ethan Hawke's affectionate and searching documentary about Seymour Bernstein, a pianist and music teacher now in his 80s. Mr. Bernstein has wise things to say about the tension between the sacred cause of artistic achievement and the lures and pressures of having a career. His own solution, radical in its way and profoundly inspiring, has been to step away from public performance and devote himself to his students, whose ranks will include everyone who sees this movie.
'Seymour,' in turn, reminded me of 'The 50-Year Argument,' another documentary about an octogenarian New Yorker whose influence exceeds his renown. That would be Robert Silvers, a co-founder and editor of The New York Review of Books, the subject of Martin Scorsese's new film. Though the movie is packed with a half-century's worth of ideas, political debates and literary personalities, it boils down to a defense of what Mr. Silvers calls 'intellectual honor' - the commitment to be truthful, thoughtful and interesting. I have a personal bias here, since Mr. Silvers gave me my first job in journalism and published some of my early criticism, but I was moved to see his life's work honored on screen.
Mr. Silvers and Mr. Bernstein are embodiments of consistency. So are the brothers Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne, whose 'Two Days, One Night,' starring Marion Cotillard, is another moving and meticulous moral fable, set amid the modern Belgian working class. But this year's Telluride Film Festival has, above all, been a showcase of well-known artists trying new things.
'Wild,' Jean-Marc Vallée's adaptation of the best-selling memoir by Cheryl Strayed, carries Ms. Witherspoon some distance from the perkiness and pluckiness that has defined her best-known roles. The Cheryl Strayed she plays on screen is a complicated character, and the movie does not rush to explain her or resolve her problems. She is both an entirely believable modern woman, defying conventional categories and expectations, and also, for that reason, an excitingly credible feminist heroine.
An even more startling transformation is achieved by Mr. Carell in Bennett Miller's 'Foxcatcher,' based on the true story of John E. du Pont, a wealthy eccentric ( to put it mildly) who set himself up, in the 1980s, as the sponsor and coach of a wrestling team that represented the United States in the Olympics and other international competitions. Mr. Carell, consistently one of the funniest men in American movies, is here one of the scariest. His du Pont is at once an aristocratic enigma, a lost and tormented prisoner of privilege and a man whose unchecked power makes him dangerous in ways the film leaves unstated until the very end.
Mr. Carell's presence in Telluride reunited him with Jon Stewart, his erstwhile 'Daily Show' boss and a first-time film director. Mr. Stewart may have been this year's most magnetic mountainside celebrity, but 'Rosewater,' his debut feature, is the opposite of a vanity project. Based on the real-life experience of Maziar Bahari, an Iranian-born Canadian journalist, it reconstructs the chaotic aftermath of Iran's 2009 presidential election, when Mr. Bahari was accused of being an American spy and imprisoned and tortured by the Iranian authorities. There is nothing satirical here, just a finely tuned political instinct and, in the way Mr. Stewart portrays the relationship between Maziar (Gael García Bernal) and his principal interrogator (Kim Bodnia), an impressive sense of psychological nuance. Mr. Stewart, the world's leading fake newscaster, turns out to be a real filmmaker.
Alejandro G. Iñárritu has always been that, but his name has rarely been associated with comedy. His four previous features ( 'Amores Perros,' '21 Grams,' 'Babel' and 'Biutiful') have explored the dark, desperate, violent corners of contemporary life. But they have done so with an exuberance - a wild, at times profligate sense of cinematic possibility - that is very much in evidence in 'Birdman,' his new film starring Mr. Keaton as a has-been action-movie star trying to rejuvenate his career by directing and starring in a Broadway play.
A knowing New York backstage comedy fused with an artist-in-crisis fantasia in the manner of '8 ½' and 'All That Jazz,' 'Birdman' has a frenetic style that has already dazzled audiences and critics here and in Venice, where it opened the festival on Wednesday. It will close the New York Film Festival in October. To say too much now would either feed the hype or throw cold water on it. And of course such cynicism has no place here.
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