Blue Moon Directed by Richard Linklater, the first of his two films at TIFF this year with Nouvelle Vague coming up, and written by Robert Kaplow, this is a lovely, pain-drenched night in the life of Lorenz Hart (Ethan Hawke, the production working hard to diminish his height and looks for the role).
According to the movie he was a lover of beauty, pansexual, and according to history one of the most talented lyricists of the Great American Songbook. There’s a lot in this movie that I generally don’t like — the staginess of a single location, an excessively wordy script that eschews anything approaching realism, with its themes repeatedly hammered like a fist on the bar. But this is also one of those cases where you can’t help but wish people actually spoke like this — the certainly, the poetry, and the wit in the screenplay.
It’s really about Hart’s alcoholism and bruised ego on the night his longtime friend and collaborator Richard Rodgers’ (Andrew Scott) big hit Oklahoma! opened on Broadway in 1943, with new collaborator Oscar Hammerstein (Simon Delaney) having written the lyrics. Nice supporting parts for the star of the moment, Margaret Qualley, as Hart’s protege and the object of his unrequited passion, and Bobby Cannavale as his faithful bartender, Eddie. Terrific choice to score the film with a diagetic solo piano. A sad, gorgeous film.
A Private Life features Jodie Foster in her first fully French-language role since A Very Long Engagement, the bilingual Oscar-winner shining as Lilian Steiner, a deeply troubled psychiatrist living in Paris.
As Lilian investigates the death of a patient, she starts to believe her patient’s daughter and husband (Luàna Bajrami and Mathieu Amalric) may be murderers, this while she tries to connect with her own estranged son and ex-husband (Vincent Lacoste and Daniel Auteuil). An undercurrent of ironic humour runs contrary to the darkness in the mystery, as does a peculiar subplot involving a hypnotist who seems to have a lot more success with clients than Lilian does. The film’s concerns feel very particular to French cinema, but it’s hard to go wrong with this stellar French supporting cast, and especially Foster front and centre, who manages to create a character we’ve never seen from her before. She’s rarely been so pursed, the lines around her mouth deep and parenthetical.
Motor City drops us back in Detroit 1977 — actually shot in Camden, New Jersey — where everyone drives a massive muscle machine and smokes. The entire picture is told with about six lines of dialogue.
That’s a hell of a flex, and credit to the filmmakers and actors that they get close to pulling it off. At under 90 minutes they might’ve, but this beast is more than an hour 40, and parts of it simply can’t sustain its silent conceit. When it works, though, it purrs with a combination of fine editing and terrific needle drops from the hits of the era (curated by Jack White) including Al Jarreau, Fleetwood Mac, David Bowie and Donna Summer.
The story is a fundamental one, which it would need to be for this to work, something we’ve seen a hundred times. Alan Richson (forever Reacher) is himself a massive muscle machine (sporting a few of the worst wigs in cinema history) who woos a moll (Shailene Woodley) from a gangster (Ben Foster, the MVP) who, thanks to a dirty cop (Pablo Schreiber) frames Richson with drug-dealing and gets him 25-to-life. If that wasn’t enough to make Reacher, sorry, Richson mad, the gangster woos back the moll, then gets her hooked on smack.
Here’s where Motor City goes sour and sexist, as Woodley’s character has next to no agency. She’s just an object for these two dudes to fight over and is eventually fridged, leading to a hugely bloody finale and an incredibly silly coda that forces the remaining cast to wear terrible old-people make-up. Too bad about all of that, because a lot of what goes before is pretty inventive.
The cast and director, Potsy Ponciroli, of Motor City
