Notes From Tribeca: The Adderall Diaries (2015)

Another of the films I liked at Tribeca FF, was a contemporary drama:   The Adderall Diaries, based on a  best-selling  memoir of the same name by Stephen Elliott, starring James Franco as the author, a young man battling his demons. 

Stephen is a bright, talented, narcissistic guy who takes too many drugs, engages in risky, masochistic sex, and blames his father Neil (Scott Glenn) and  everyone else but himself for his cascading personal and professional troubles. He is on a steep downward spiral. Elliott had made a name for himself by writing a confessional about his wild, strung out, screwed up life – all of which stemmed from the death of his mother and subsequent abandonment and emotional abuse by his cruel father, now deceased. Except it turns out that Dad isn’t deceased, and when he turns up, he’s got a different story to tell.   

Elliott has a new problem now: he’s got writer’s block. So, like Mailer and Capote before him, he turns to a splashy murder trial in the hope that writing about it may open the creative floodgates. It’s the notorious trial of Hans Reiser for the murder of his missing wife. Reiser (convincingly portrayed by a shorn Christian Slater), like Elliott, is a great finger pointer: at first he loudly proclaims his innocence, proclaiming that his wife simply abandoned the family, but once convicted he reverses course and acknowledges killing her but because he had to “protect the children” from their horrible mom. (The Reiser case arose in Oakland, CA, but it and the milieu of the entire story are transferred to New York City.)

The screenwriters – Elliott and first-time director Pamela Romanowsky – also add a fictional love interest for the movie, a pretty reporter (Amber Heard ) who happens to be covering the Reiser trial for the NY Times. Her relationship with Elliott is not totally believable, but does help us care for his mostly insufferable character – nothing like getting a little romance to get the empathy flowing. We also care because the Stephen Elliot character, however flawed, is charismatic, and because Franco is a terrific dramatic actor. So is Scott Glenn, who brings a wild intensity to his role as the maybe or maybe-not abusive parent.

Through the character of Stephen Elliott, this film raises interesting questions about subjective experience versus objective reality, about how we edit and conjure memories to fit the narrative we want or need to believe and express, how those self-justifying memories can in turn alter our perspectives and our understanding of  “truth”, and so how blaming and victim-hood can so easily become a barrier to understanding and responsibility.

I found The Adderall Diaries to be a very well made movie, and expect it will be successful. No idea when it will be released but keep an eye out.

Notes From Tribeca: The Cut (2014)

The Cut, an internationally financed feature released in Europe late last year, was on my list based on my admiration for it’s star Tahar Rahim (A Prophet [2009] and The Past [2013]) and the reputation of writer director Fatih Akin.

The Cut is a drama, bordering on melodrama, depicting the Armenian genocide of 1915, a horrific crime against humanity that resulted in the deaths of more than 1.5 million Armenian Christians at the hands of the Ottoman Turks during the Great War, through the story of a blacksmith named Nazaret Manoogian (Rahim), who gets caught up in it.  This a modest, hard working young family man going about his life; until there's a knock on the door in the night, and in a moment, he loses everything. Nazaret is torn from his family, is forced into slave labor, and endures incredible physical and psychic  hardships. He miraculously survives the throat-slashing massacre of his work group (the Turks wanting to save bullets), but loses the ability to speak as a result of his injury. Through all this, he is sustained by the hope of reuniting with his beloved wife and daughters until, when he eventually learns his town has been destroyed, his wife dead and presumably his daughters as well, hope and faith die too. Still, he hangs on, what choice is there?

When Nazaret later gets news that his daughters may be alive, saved by a Bedouin family, he forms a steely determination to find them, no matter what.  The second part of The Cut is about Nazaret's quest, one that takes him to Lebanon, then to  Cuba, and eventually to the far reaches of the U.S.  Despite his handicaps – homeless, mute, no money – Nazaret perseveres. Through his journey he (and we) see another side of humanity, as strangers offer kindness, support and material assistance to help him. Eventually, there is a bittersweet resolution.

My admiration for Tahir Rahim was not misplaced. His character spends much of the movie unable to speak, yet his gestures and his eyes communicate effectively and touchingly. As in his other movies, you can't take your eyes off him.

This film is beautifully photographed by German cinematographer, Rainer Klausmann (Downfall [2004]). The Monoogian home is warmly, glowingly domestic; a vast refugee camp is a picture of hellish hopelessness; The terrain, ranging from the desolate Syrian desert to the stark, empty plains of North Dakota, are foreboding but gorgeous.

This movie has been criticized by some for inadequately conveying the enormity of the Armenian holocaust, but to me, those critics are missing the point. This is not a documentary, it is a narrative film, the story of this particular man, through which the  breadth and barbarity of the extermination campaign becomes obvious; we do not need some voice-over, much less a documentary style overview to understand what happened.   Another criticism that I've heard is a bit more valid: the second half of the movie, i.e. the international travel section, is a bit less believable, less well written.  All true, and the movie loses a few points as a result, in my estimation.

Still, The Cut is an important movie about an oft overlooked topic, Tahar Rahim is consistently watchable throughout, and the bittersweet ending is just right.

Recommended

Notes from Tribeca: The Wannabe (2015)

I saw this upcoming feature film at Tribeca FF on Friday April 17. I'm not sure when it will be released, but it's worth looking for. Keep an eye out.

The Wannabe takes place in 1992 at the time of the federal trial of John “Dapper Don” Gotti - the previously teflon-coated godfather of the Gambini crime family. Gotti, notwithstanding his vicious history and profession, was something of a folk hero in his Queens neighborhood, and the movie starts with a block party in his honor taking place during the early days of the trial. Thomas (Vincent Piazza) isn’t from the neighborhood, and is certainly no mobster, but he is a huge Gotti fan and a nut for gangster movies like the Cagney classics from the thirties and the Coppola Godfather series  – so much so that he has  modeled his whole persona on those characters: he walks, talks, and acts as though he’s one of those guys. He’s a nobody, but wants to be a somebody. His fondest wish is to ingratiate himself with Gotti; and he has a plan .

So he shows up at the block party in a white suit, silk tie, pocket hankie, hair slicked back, tough guy leer on his face, in the hope of making an impression. While there, he catches the eye of Rose (Patricia Arquette), a neighborhood girl at least ten years his senior. Rose is on the make too, for some excitement and for some one to take her out of her humdrum life. They hook up. Though not as crazy as Thomas, Rose is intoxicated by his bravado and soon is sucked into his wacky fantasies.

Arquette channels Faye Dunaway’s Bonnie Parker, gangster moll and a cross between mommy and Lady MacBeth to her man. Piazza’s Thomas is sort of cinephile in the mold of Belmondo's character Michel in Breathless, crossed with De Niro's obsessive celebrity wannabe Rupert Pupkin in The King of Comedy, a guy who has so immersed himself in Hollywood's tough guy mobster archetype, that he forgets these guys are fictional. Michael Corleone and John Gotti are equally real to him, and somehow noble in his mind.
                                                                                                                                                                    The Wannabe  is loosely based on a true story. Writer/director Nick Sandow, best known for playing Officer Capputo on Orange Is The New Black,  clearly has a strong affection for this material and the milieu.   Piazza is dazzling as Thomas, the rest of the cast is strong, the story – by turns funny and tragic – works, and the result is a pretty terrific movie.

Notes From Tribeca: The Survivalist (2015)

This is the first in what I hope will be a series of mini-posts from my five days at the 2015 Tribeca Film Festival.

Although my first movie, Bleeding Heart, starring Jessica Biel and Zosia Mamet, was pretty much a dud, my second, The Survivalist, was something else entirely: a revelation.  I have no idea when or how widely it will be released, but write this down and put it on your list of movies to look out for.

The Survivalist is a small independent movie from Northern Ireland about a not too distant dystopian future, where society has collapsed and much of the world's population has died off.  As the title implies, this story concerns a guy trying to hold on and survive after the apocalypse, but unlike most pictures of this genre, the environment is rural and rustic, rather than tumbled-down urban. It has more in common with Cormac McCarthy’s The Road than it does with Mad Max, Blade Runner, or Hunger Games.

The setting is a small wooden cabin hidden in a deep wood, with a postage stamp garden, and a mood of overwhelming paranoia. That’s not quite the right word, though, because the unnamed survivalist (Martin McCann) is not delusional, just appropriately hyper-alert and fearful, much like a rabbit or a sparrow,  wary of possible predators. In this case, the potential predators are other survivors. He always carries his weapon with him; he bars the door and shutters his windows at night. He has lived alone for seven years now. Then two women, a mother and daughter (Olwen Fouere and Mia Goth) approach, asking for food and shelter, although there’s not really enough to feed three.

The Survivalist is bleak yet lush, visually and emotionally. The conversation, such as it is, between the three main characters is spare, and their interaction is mostly non-verbal, but very intense and very real – distrust, desire, cautious connections, shifting loyalties. There is male and female nudity, and it is stark, deeply human and not at all lascivious.  The film develops slowly and is at times painful to watch, but it is unflaggingly spellbinding, with a feeling of stunning immediacy throughout. The story, the pace, the mood, and especially the acting all are just superb. Kudos to writer/director Stephan Fingleton, and to the amazing cinematography of Damien Alliot.

Despite the grim scenario, I left (at 11:30 p.m.) thrilled.

104 riveting minutes. Not yet released.

2017 update: The Survivalist is widely available on most streaming services including iTunes, Amazon, GooglePlay, etc. Although not currently streaming on Netflix it is available on disc from dvd.netflix.com.