THE PRE-SEASON pilgrimage by the festival director Marco Müller around the richest studios in America has had an enormous impact on the 61st edition of the Venice Film Festival. The Lido is infested with Hollywood stars. The programme is stacked with commercial money-spinners. And the tills are singing. Müller has been duly rewarded with fanatical crowds and chaos. This must be the first festival where a press conference was called to apologise for too many people turning up. I watched it on a huge screen outside the Cinema Palace along with 500 other journalists pointlessly queuing for a Hayao Miyazaki animation that was wildly oversubscribed.
Even the stars are feeling the squeeze. The cross-eyed heroes of Marc Forster’s Finding Neverland crawled up the red carpet for their gala screening at 2.15 in the morning. It was scheduled to start at midnight. Harvey Weinstein promptly bounced on stage and said: “Welcome to the breakfast screening of Neverland. This morning Marco Müller will be serving the croissants and I’ll be teaching him the meaning of ‘timing’. Then I’ ll drown him in the lagoon with his feet encased in cement.”
That said, most films have been worth the wait. Finding Neverland is a surprisingly thoughtful Edwardian drama about J. M. Barrie’s relationship with the Llewelyn Davies family who inspired Peter Pan. Johnny Depp plays the Scottish playwright with dashing sensitivity. Crushed by a brittle, sexless marriage and stung by reviews of his last West End outing, Barrie becomes hopelessly beguiled by Kate Winslet’s family on his daily walks around Kensington Gardens. They ambush him while he’s writing; he invents potty adventures to distract them from painful home truths.
The film celebrates the transforming power of a childish imagination, but it also questions the stunted wisdom. Dustin Hoffman’s silky theatre impresario can’t afford to believe in fairies. Julie Christie’s icy grandmother is suspicious of Barrie’s interest in young boys. And Depp’s wife (Radha Mitchell) quivers with resentment. The starched atmosphere of the time is beautifully evoked. The sentiment is harder to swallow. Kate Winslet is not the world’s most convincing consumptive, and it’s hard to suspend your disbelief at the triumphant first night of Barrie’s most famous play.
If celebrity is the defining theme of this festival, one wonders what on earth Hollywood’s leading men have to say to each other on the terrace bars. Tim Robbins seems to be running his own festival a taxi ride away from the cinema that officially opened his anti-war, thump-Bush satire, Embedded: Live. It’s neither fish nor fowl. It’s basically a film of his scathing stage play, currently at the Riverside Studios in London.
Tom Hanks (Republican) paddled into Venice with Spielberg to promote the virtues of hanging around airport departure lounges in The Terminal. And no one can think of a single sensible reason why Denzel Washington pitched up for the opening of the execrable thriller, Man on Fire, when most of us wished he was on the Moon by the second reel.
Tom Cruise is currently leading this battle of the egos, courtesy of Michael Mann’s sizzling thriller, Collateral.
A Love Song for Bobby Long features another Hollywood icon, but it’s quite clear that style and John Travolta haven’t mixed for some time. He plays a chronic alcoholic and the title role in Shainee Gabel’s low-budget movie, and though most of the critics hated it, I was oddly seduced by the complete lack of airs and graces. Bobby is a shambling drunk and disgraced academic, but he’s the only “family” Scarlett Johansson’s trailer-park waif has got left in the world. When her mother dies, they both inherit her rambling shack in New Orleans and spend the rest of the film booting each other out into the street. Ultimately, it’s a soap opera about wasted lives, tough love and bittersweet redemption. But I like the moody patience of the film and its bluesy philosophising.
Reese Witherspoon is equally effective in Mira Nair’s sumptuous production of Vanity Fair. Most adaptations bungle Thackeray’s feminist satire on a society that structures the class system on the spoils of its colonies. But this is spot on. Witherspoon’s Becky Sharp is a sublime piece of casting: she is effortlessly witty and scandalously out-of-synch with the powdery cleavages and pinched faces who thwart her rise in society.
The four suitors in the governess’s life are as doomy as old clichés. They smoulder and shunt like disgruntled steam trains every time she enters a room, be it a military ball in Brussels in 1815 or a seedy gambling house 12 years later. This is comfort food for the ladies, and a politically acute period piece for the Monsoon Wedding director’s growing number of fans.
Despite the endless supply of iconic beefcake, it is actresses who are making the deepest impression on Venice audiences. Imelda Staunton is not a name to launch a thousand posters, but her performance as a middle-aged mother in Mike Leigh’s Vera Drake is something I’ll wear to the grave. There are moments in this movie, set in the 1950s, that should be framed and hung in every courtroom in the country.
Staunton plays the jaunty title heroine with indecent amounts of energy. Vera cleans houses, tends to her mother and drinks alarming quantities of tea. She is the pride and joy of her working-class family, but her secret sideline — namely helping young women terminate unwanted pregnancies — has appalling consequences when a needy waif is shipped to hospital.
Leigh has a natural gift for turning meagre ingredients into gripping tragedy, and it’s rarely been put to better use. Who, or what, one wonders, is being put on trial? Staunton delivers the performance of her career as the hapless Vera. The camera-shot of her face when the police come knocking on Christmas Eve is a genuinely traumatic piece of cinema.
Thankfully, there is no shortage of clowns on the Lido, notably the female prankster who handcuffed herself to Quentin Tarantino during the press launch of the Italian B-movie sidebar, and the frogmen dispatched to an impenetrable canal to defuse a phantom bomb behind the Casino.
The American maverick Todd Solondz has spiked the festival in his own inimitable fashion. Palindromes is an absurd fantasy about a disgruntled 13-year-old girl who is desperate to become a mum. The script is a slice of genius. The performances are terrific. Half a dozen young actors (all shapes, colours and sizes) play the part of Aviva as she embarks on a picaresque road trip to ghastly motels and apple-pie Jesus Freaks. Needless to say, her yuppie parents (Ellen Barkin and Richard Masur) are scared and horrified.They are also fabulously inept. What’s remarkable is the ever-changing chemistry between Aviva and her prospective mates as her identity slides between the young actresses. It’s an unholy blend of deadpan jokes, kitsch morals and wobbly acting. Yet it feels original to the point of inspired.
