On the sixth day of Miami Film Festival, the standouts include a documentary on the most influential American film critic of the last fifty years and a sophomore effort by a director who makes an impressive aesthetic advance.
What She Said: The Art of Pauline Kael, dir. Rob Garver.
For critics who come to their trade late in life, the example of Pauline Kael still illuminates. After several decades of stalling as a playwright during which she resorted to supporting daughter/lifelong companion Gina James as, among other things, a seamstress, City Lights offered her a chance to review Limelight, one of Charlie Chaplins odd, dreadful talking films. If this has become the prevailing judgment, credit Kael — or blame her. Rob Garver’s affectionate documentary charts the film critic’s rise from radio and McCall’s to a twenty-year berth at The New Yorker, where her review of Bonnie and Clyde acted as a defibrillator after Bosley Crowther’s dismissal had put the Warren Beatty-Arthur Penn collaboration in cardiac arrest.
Peppered with testimonials from Quentin Tarantino and David O. Russell, who can afford to be generous because Kael had retired before she could scowl at their movies, What She Said eulogizes a moment when a monoculture comprising a handful of critics could rattle a few less ill-letttered distributors and Hollywood producers. Kael was as much a part of the remarkable sexual and political openness of American movies, Garver’s documentary argues, as Robert Altman, Hal Ashby, Bernando Bertolucci, and so on. Missing from What She Said, however, is what she didn’t say about Chantal Akerman, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, and other directors less dependent on kiss-kiss bang-bang. I suspect we know.
WHEN AND WHERE: Thursday March 7, 7:15 p.m. at Silverspot Cinema
The Nightingale, dir. Jennifer Kent.
The Nightingale‘s first thirty minutes contain the most stomach-churning violence I’ve seen in a film in a couple years. I won’t add spoilers, but viewers should know what they’re in for in this adaptation of Kristin Hannah’s novel set in 1825 about Clare (a poignant, intense Aisling Franciosi), who watches her family get slaughtered by British troops in her home in Van Dieman’s Land, now Tasmania. An Irish convict like many of the island’s residents who has worked off her sentence, Clare has to endure the contempt and sexual assault from the officer in charge of those men, Lt. Hawkins (Sam Claflin, unrecognizable). Her thirst for vengeance sends her on a cross-country journey in pursuit of Hawkins before he reaches Launceston: he’s after a promotion. She joins forces with an aborigine tracker (Baykali Ganambarr).
Writer-director Jennifer Kent also made the horror film The Babadook, but The Nightingale is by some distance the more accomplished work. Every shot shows a mastery over the material. Radek Ladczuk captures the moistness of the forests; even in the sunlight he suggests a sense of danger. She understands the violence done by the colonizers over the conquered, and the striations of class among the colonizers themselves; if more universities had courses devoted to post-colonial cinema, The Nightingale would deserve prominence alongside Lucrecia Martel’s recent Zama and James Gray’s Lost City of Z, and Werner Herzog’s Aguirre, Wrath of God. There’s a sense in which, however, that The Nightingale runs out of movie; the mix of sentimentality and violence in the last third is hard to stomach. Still, Kent has made a film that’ll shake audiences.
WHEN AND WHERE: Thursday, March 7th, 9:15 p.m. at Silverspot Cinema; Saturday, March 9 at 6 p.m. at O Cinema Miami Beach
Humanizing The Vacuum 