This year's edition of the Tribeca Film Festival featured an assortment of tantalizing possibilities, many of which, alas, I wasn't able to take in. (FYI: It is a terrible idea to have a family reunion at your place the week of Tribeca.) Still, I got to watch a decent selection of flicks, some good, some less so, and one curious documentary absolutely bewitching, so I can't complain.
Here's a cross-section of capsule reviews of some of the films I did get to squeeze in between family commitments, including the doc that proved to be wholly unnerving -- in the best kind of way.
"Rather": In an era in which white male news anchors -- think Tom Brokaw, Peter Jennings, Roger Mudd -- were indelible parts of many Americans' nightly ritual, Dan Rather, seemingly from a different era, and faintly mockable in his sweater vests and ultra-seriousness, seemed increasingly out of his cultural era.
A newsman for CBS since the early '60s, the proud Texan lived through and covered many epochs of the 20th century, including the early days of the civil rights' movement, the Kennedy assassination, Vietnam, Watergate, Iran-Contra, Tiananmen Square, the fall of the Berlin Wall, and so forth, but he never had the slick graciousness of many of his contemporaries, a failing, perhaps, in the latter days of his CBS career, but a boon to his currently resonant social media reach.
Frank Marshall's dutiful documentary, which follows the newsman's career from his earliest days on Houston radio in the mid-'50s, unto the present, where the nonagenarian makes his bones on Twitter, and independent news outlets, follows the greatest hits (and misses) format, but hopscotches around between archived news clips from different eras, contemporary interviews with Rather and some of his professional associates (along with his daughter), to produce an encapsulation of his life that feels properly vetted.
Loathed by the GOP (a fourth generation Texan, he did not take kindly to the Bush family, and their various airs), endlessly singled out by GOP mastermind Roger Ailes, working as George Bush Sr.'s adviser, for petty insults, Rather nevertheless soldiered on, undeterred by either the opinion of his various subjects, or of the public variety. A man of substance, even if his image was the very definition of stodgy, when he does show emotion (he is visibly shaken up recounting an interview he did with some white GIs in Vietnam, asking them about working alongside Black soldiers), it counts for a lot. He has survived through it all, even after being unceremoniously released from CBS for a sloppy report on George H. Bush's record in the National Guard, to own the gravitas with which he operates.
As for his current peculiar popularity among the younger generation for his blunt, scathing tweets, he seems to have successfully crossed the rubicon from vilified journalist, to unsparing truth-teller. Either way, he seems fine with it: "If you're in journalism, and you want to be loved," he intones, with his indelible delivery, "you'd better get a dog."
"One Night With Adela": In theory, the single-shot film -- that is, an entire film crafted from a lone camera that seemingly follows the characters in a continuous, unbreaking shot -- sounds intriguing enough. As a technical achievement, some of the more (in)famous shots in cinematic history -- think the opening shot in Orson Welles' excellent film noir "Touch of Evil," the opening sequence in "Boogie Nights," or the bravura attack sequence in "Children of Men" -- involve such a setup, but as an actual story-telling device, it can read as gimmicky bordering on utterly distracting, if not done properly.
In Spanish filmmaker Hugo Ruiz's hard-driving film, his heroine, Adela (Laura Galán), roams around the unnamed city at night, climbing out of her street-sweeper truck, on a mission, we can quickly surmise based on her harrowing countenance, and manic energy, toward some sort of violence. Indeed, the opening beat involves her taking care of a drunken sot who tries to steal from her, in no uncertain terms.
Over the course of the next 100 minutes of real time, she is constantly imbibing something -- an endless stream of cigarettes, lines of coke, MDMA pills, booze -- as she works to enact an elaborate scheme, whose parameters don't come clear until quite near the end. That moment, when we finally realize what she's up to and why, does come as a clear, wrenching shock (set up, it must be said, for maximum impact by Ruiz), but beyond that moment, and the technical expertise in creating such a tableau in the first place, there's not a lot here to hang onto.
Galán is fascinating, a round ball of fury and enigmatic angst that feels as if she could explode at any time, but in the end, she is much more device than character, the necessary gear for this high RPM engine to race through its paces. Creating an atmosphere of dank dread is an accomplishment, but this one won't stay with you very long.
"Stan Lee": Unsurprisingly, with a film put together with help from Marvel Studios, David Gelb's documentary about Stan Lee, the Marvel Comics (disputed) progenitor of many of their most famous characters -- Spider-Man, the Fantastic Four, the Hulk, Thor, etc. -- can't resist the pull toward hagiography. Not unlike the titular subject, famous for his (mostly endearing) hucksterism, the film focuses primarily on the good times in the comics' company's legendary run from the early '60s to the turn of the decade, where Lee and a cohort of brilliant artists, including Jack Kirby and Steve Ditko, created the cavalcade of characters that have absolutely dominated the early decades of the 21st century.
To be sure, Lee and Marvel had caught creative fire, especially early on (from 1962-1965, Lee and company created the aforementioned heroes, along with Iron Man, Hawkeye, Daredevil, the Black Panther, and dozens more), but the question of ownership of these characters, long contested in courtrooms and public discourse, gets severely short shrift here, but for one exception: A taped interview between Lee and Kirby, recorded years after their acrimonious work breakup, in which both men seem to find a reasonable middle ground, only for Lee to interject that he wrote "all the words" in the balloons, as if to vacate the detente at which they had only just arrived.
In a later interview with Lee (it is his sonorous voice in much of the film's voiceover, only adding to the film's severely slanted bent), he expounds on the relationship he had with Ditko, concerning their most famous, spidery, creation. He says because the character was his original idea, he should have the lone credit, whereas Ditko (rightly) points out, an idea without anyone to iterate it remains nothing more than a thought.
Wherever you stand on the issue, the film at least offers an engaging history of the company, with scraps of archived interviews, TV appearances, photos, and, charmingly, a series of elaborate dioramas, depicting everything from Stan going to see "Zorro" movies as a kid on the Upper West Side, to him describing the Spider-Man character to his disapproving publisher, Martin Goodman, to Ditko and Kirby hard at work at their easels in the infamous Marvel Bullpen. Light as a feather, and deeply embedded in Lee's camp, but engaging enough (at least for comic book folk), nonetheless.
"The Gullspång Miracle" If David Lynch ever dipped his toes in the true crime arena, it would likely look something like this perplexing doc from Maria Fredriksson, a film whose twists and peculiar turns become increasingly unnerving. It doesn't solve any crimes, but it certainly offers a lot about human nature and our ability to cram the round peg of belief through the narrow square space of reality.
We first meet a pair of aging, deeply religious sisters, Kari, an enthusiastic believer of divine signs, who lives in Northern Norway, close to her sprawling family, and May, the more dour of the two, who lives some 1,000 miles to the south, in Sweden. On an extended trip to see her sister, Kari decides to buy an apartment there, in order to stay closer to her beloved sister. The pair eventually find what they believe to be the perfect place, but at the settlement, they meet the seller and have a tremendous shock: She's the spitting image of their late older sister, nicknamed "Lita," who, it was believed, had committed suicide some three decades before.
Thus begins a confusing, often confounding mystery, one in which for every solution the film arrives at, it quickly unravels to reveal a new, even more unnerving twist. It's the kind of doc, like "Tickled," or "Three Identical Strangers," that begins a certain way, and ends somewhere far more disturbing than you might have imagined in the beginning. By the end, you will likely be far more befuddled and nonplussed than when you began. It's the kind of story that haunts documentarian directors who plunge into a project without yet knowing the outcome of their subjects' stories, taking what at first feels like a brilliant narrative and turning it to dust in your fingers (a moment actually captured here, after one revelation leaves the off-camera Fredriksson so flabbergasted, she actually speaks out to her subjects, even as they cope with the new information).
To this professional nightmare, however, the director nicely recovers by pivoting the only way she can, as to produce a singular document of self-deceit that leaves many questions unanswered, while still making a powerful case for itself. In one way, it is, perhaps, the very definition of unsatisfying -- true crime mavens will not feel terribly rewarded, it must be said -- but as a cultural commentary on the moment, and, perhaps, a critique of that very genre, it's absolutely fascinating.
Sisters Kari Klo and May-Elin Storsletten come to believe a woman who sold them a house was actually their older sister, who they believed committed suicide 30 years earlier in the documentary "The Gullspång Miracle."