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Watching some of the movies featured in the St. Louis International Film Festival seems to have brought out my inner-Roger Ebert. I promise, however, not to use my thumb.
Against the Tide: A-
It’s no wonder that the documentaries are listed separately in the SLIFF program. In many ways, the documentary is closer to an investigative report than to cinematic art. A motion picture, after all, is an illusion that invites you back again and again; to take note of the rich details you may have missed the first time around; to savor a great performance, a pithy snippet of dialogue or the cinematic fingerprint of a master craftsman. It asks you to read between the lines and see between the frames. In a documentary, however, there is no room for lies (fiction, after all, is nothing but lies); no allowance for ambiguity, poetic license or layers of symbolism. Art for art’s sake can never be the basis for making a documentary. In order to present a subject thoroughly, the filmmaker patches together as much real-life happenstance as he or she needs in order to project the truth. A great documentary filmmaker could make any subject fascinating. He could turn your grandmother’s life into Citizen Kane. And certainly, the documentary has grown quite a bit as an art form since its newsreel origins; now it comprises everything from animation to re-envisioned stock footage and self-mocking satire.
Against the Tide uses the tried-and-true method of telling a story by showing vintage photographs and pinning old newspaper clips to the big screen. Director Richard Trank imparts the quiet, little-known saga of powerful American Jews during the beginning, middle and end of Hitler’s reign. Some demanded immediate and fine-tuned action to rescue their European brethren; others – the ones with the ultimate power, argues the film –warned against doing so, turning a blind eye, allegedly for fear that it might create a backlash against the Jews in America. In fact, this painfully enlightening movie could cause a backlash (via flashback) against President Franklin D. Roosevelt. Could the atrocities have been curtailed earlier? At the very least, Against the Tide is a masterful documentation of a sickening, still mystifying, chapter in recent world history. Not only does it dig deeper than most Holocaust documentaries, it does so right in our backyard, finding not only the bones that history would rather keep buried, but perhaps a skeleton in the White House closet.
Albino Farm: D+
The fact that this sloppy horror feature was shot in Missouri must have given it cachet in the submissions race. As a horror film it moves too quickly, piling on the clichés before it even makes sense in terms of storytelling. Many scenes that are clearly meant to be horrific elicit laughter; and perhaps the biggest disappointment is that the focus isn’t on a creepy community of albinos, but rather an outrageous assortment of inbred mutants. Some of the makeup and special effects – for instance, as seen in a frightening monster-baby – is convincing and inspired. At other times, though, it’s like The Island of Dr. Moreau on a peninsula budget. And, in being a bloody mess, the film resembles Hostel more than the pigment-free riff on Deliverance the synopsis promises. Though it does an awful lot with a trim budget, that’s precisely the problem. Whereas a good deal less might have been more, the talented filmmakers of Albino Farm carelessly overfeed the monster of their imagination. And they do it with junk food.
Stolen Lives: B
The local draw for this highly competent drama is actor John Hamm, who’s gone from Mad Men to a man who’s going mad. He certainly delivers the goods as a police officer whose son has gone missing. Unfortunately, the ambitious screenplay has delusions of Godfather II (or, more recently, Hollywoodland) grandeur, trying to weave together two parallel but somehow head-butting stories – one taking place in the present; the other occurring in the late‘50s. It feels like two different movies. Instead of intertwining organically, there’s too much stylistic space separating them. The storyline with Hamm plays like an unusually good TV movie. Better yet, the ‘50s storyline evokes – at least at certain points – a sparkly slice of Bogdanovich. The financial pressures endured by the ‘50s dad add a layer of poignancy lacking in the present-day ordeal. As the fallen-on-hard-times father, Josh Lucas is somehow more memorable – more colorful even in a black & white world – than Hamm. To use an expression most often applied to literature, the pastoral recreation of the ‘50s setting jumps right off the page. By contrast, the latter-day plot lies down on the page and plays dead. The two journeys are finally tied together at the end, not as neatly as the filmmakers think, in a scene that is presented thriller-style, a la Silence of the Lambs. In addition to the strong (if sometimes stylistically incompatible) performances, Stolen Lives features what is quite possibly the most convincing old-man makeup I’ve ever seen. As a side-note, hearing the script-writer speak after the movie about how he got the idea for the story – and how many hurdles his screenplay had to clear in order to become a film – was an oddly optimistic mini-education for aspiring screenwriters. And a happy ending.
Jordan Oakes is a local journalist who has written for publications such as St. Louis Magazine and the Christian Science Monitor. He has strong opinions that begin to atrophy if he doesn't exercise his right to express them. Tune in every Wednesday for another installment of Mediatribe - and if you missed last week's post, click here.
