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Archive for the ‘Cannes Film Festival’ Category

The Cannes Film Festival has yet to release the selection of films for 2011 but they have announced the president of the jury: Robert De Niro. The 67-year old veteran has already been president of the Cannes Film Festival Jury in the 1980s and has pronounced himself  “very honoured and happy to head the jury for this year’s Cannes Film Festival.”  And, as co-founder of the Tribeca Film Festival in New York, this is a man who knows from film festivals.

Not to quibble, but much as I appreciate De Niro in the public eye, I appreciate him a lot more on screen and I don’t mean in a movie with “Fockers” in the title. Why can’t we have another Scorcese-De Niro collaboration? Come on, guys.

Two strong movies at this year’s Cannes Film Festival zoomed in on the state of couplehood and singlehood. Mike Leigh’s “Another Year” featured the kind of marriage that the director himself described as “ideal”. Tom and Gerri are kind, intelligent, cultivated and supportive of each other. They garden and cook together while occasionally fretting over their son, Joe. Enter their single friends, Ken and Mary, both falling apart in ways that range from comic to poignant to pathetic. The stability of Tom and Gerri’s marriage seems only to be buttressed by their frazzled friends. At what point do you have to say “enough!” to your friend’s neuroses? Desperately confronting middle age, Mary hits on the much younger Joe and is rebuffed. When she is openly rude to Joe’s new girlfriend, Gerri finds she must distance herself from her friend.

In a stark contrast to Leigh’s contented old marrieds, “Blue Valentine” is a heartbreaking portrayal of a failed marriage. Played with soul-baring naturalism by Ryan Gosling and Michelle Williams, Dean and Cindy are pained and bewildered by their wrecked marriage. Both are “good” people, kind to the elderly, attached to their daughter and their dog. And yet it all goes so horribly wrong. The film intercuts scenes of their courtship and marriage with their current agonies encouraging the viewer to try to pinpoint the fatal flaws that punctured their love. There are no easy answers; maybe there are no answers at all. Maybe they were simply unlucky  to have found one another just as Mike Leigh’s couple had the immense good luck to meet their soul mate.

During the first 20 minutes of Xavier Beauvois’ Of Gods & Men (Des Hommes et Des Dieux) I thought “Oh no. Another boring Cannes Film Festival auteur special”. Not much happens. A half-dozen monks sing prayers in a rural monastery. They garden and cook. A doctor receives ailing villagers. A young woman wonders whether she’s in love. Ho-hum.

But the film snowballs into a shattering dramatization of the conflict between spirituality and practicality, Christianity and radical Islam and, yes good and evil. Based on a true story of a monastery trying to survive the onslaught of radical Islam as it sweeps through Algeria, the film delves deeply into the predicament of monks trying to decide whether to stay or leave. As violence and terrorism bear down on them, each monk must excavate their souls. What is a good life? How far should their commitment to serve the villagers go? What is the Christian way?

The acting is superb; each monk is highly individualized. With little exposition, we feel as though we know these men intimately and care deeply about them and their fate. Profoundly spiritual and emotionally powerful, this highly intelligent movie is bold enough to ask the big questions and trusts the audience to find their own answers.

Doug Liman’s new film, “Fair Game” continues the Cannes Film Festival‘s trend of politically-themed movies this year. Naomi Watts plays Valerie Plame and Sean Penn plays her husband, Joe Wilson, as they become entangled in the infamous lead-up to the Iraq War. Former ambassador Joe Wilson debunked a report that Iraq had purchased “yellowcake” uranium from Niger, thereby incurring the wrath of Dick Cheney’s office. In retaliation, the administration exposed his wife, Valerie Plame, as a CIA operative which effectively ended her career.

The most compelling parts of the film deal with the political pressure put upon the CIA to find that Saddam Hussein had WMD. One of the more chilling exchanges occurs when Scooter Libby bullies an analyst into backing down from his own conclusions. Helpful Iraqis were cruelly betrayed; the film hints that the leak of Plame’s identity may have killed some of her sources.

Unfortunately, the director gives at least equal emphasis to how the leak affected the Wilson household. As the film veers into “marital crisis” territory, it loses gravitas.

The casting was another unfortunate decision. Valerie Plame is clearly a complex, fascinating woman but Naomi Watts is simply too lightweight to plumb her depths. For an actress, it’s the role of a lifetime, but Watts doesn’t come up with the goods. Sean Penn also struggled to convey his character’s mixture of bluster and idealism. His performance was passionate but actorly.

Still, the film is worth seeing if only as a reminder of a shameful episode in American history.

Move over, Michael Moore. There’s another troublemaker in town and his name is Charles Ferguson. Ferguson’s powerful and infuriating new documentary, Inside Job, opened at the Cannes Film Festival yesterday just in time to remind you of who’s financing those fancy yachts parked offshore. Crooks, that’s who!

Ferguson delves into the global financial meltdown of 2008 and patiently explains the pattern of corruption, lies and double-dealing that brought the US Treasury to its knees. Cheerfully dispensing with the “he said, she said”, “on the other hand” twaddle that passes for MSM objectivity, this filmmaker embraces advocacy journalism and the result is bracing. Deregulation of the financial markets has been a disaster, Ferguson argues, allowing investment banks to amass other people’s money and gamble it away on deviously constructed financial instruments. Although his central points are familiar to any regular reader of Paul Krugman’s columns, for example, the clever graphics and disturbing interviews with economists, government officials, and financial analysts illuminate the extent to which we live of, by and for Wall Street. Goldman Sachs wins, everybody else loses.

Far from sacrificing entertainment to the cause of instruction, the film manages to keep viewers’ attention with startling tidbits such as the interview with the owner of a high-class “escort service”. Oh yes, half of her clientele was composed of Wall Street high-rollers, paying $1000/hour for their comfort women. Stealing money from retirement funds is stressful! A guy needs to relax! But sometimes a guy needs a little chemical help to work those long hours. “It amazed me how much cocaine these guys could do and still function”, remarked a therapist specializing in the angst of Wall Streeters.

The cozy relationships between financiers, government officials and ratings agencies have been amply covered elsewhere but Inside Job also draws attention to how Wall Street has corrupted academia. The same professors cheerleading the cause of deregulation in their Ivy League classrooms were also sitting on the boards of directors of major financial institutions and pulling down huge speaking fees from industry groups. Nice work if you can get it.

Ferguson sees little change under the current administration. Obama has kept the same names as previous administrations, all deeply implicated in the crash. It’s too bad that the filmmaker couldn’t get Larry Summers, Laura Tyson, Hank Paulson and Timothy Geithner to talk on camera but I’m sure their lawyers would have advised against it. He ends by calling on us, the public, to take our country back from the scoundrels who have looted the Treasury. Let’s hope we heed his call.