culture
Rep Cinema This Week: Birdman, Whiplash, and Two Days, One Night
The best repertory and art-house screenings, special presentations, lectures, and limited engagements in Toronto.
Still from Birdman.
At rep cinemas this week: the high-flying Academy Award winner for Best Picture, Oscar’s favourite bad jazz teacher, and Marion Cotillard’s nominated but sadly unrewarded performance in a drama from the Dardenne brothers.
Birdman
Directed by Alejandro Gonzalez Iñárritu
Revue Cinema (400 Roncesvalles Avenue)
Proving once again that Hollywood loves nothing more than its own shimmering image, Birdman flapped and squawked its way to Oscar glory last night, joining the ranks of recent showbiz-centred winners like The Artist and Argo. Triple Oscar winner Alejandro Gonzalez Iñárritu’s film follows washed-up superstar Riggan Thomson (comeback kid Michael Keaton, emerging from his own time in the wilderness) as he takes his weathered old body and fading star power to Broadway, directing and starring in a sketchy Raymond Carver adaptation while struggling to shut down the hectoring voice of his feathered alter ego.
As shot by longtime Terrence Malick collaborator Emmanuel Lubezki and written by Iñárritu and no less than three screenwriting partners, Birdman is majestically lensed but tediously plotted, and, in the end, surprisingly vapid about the artistic process. As it winds down, the film becomes a purgatorial stage for a deep cast of good actors stranded with phoney monologues about the dregs of superhero movies and the self-sacrifices of creative people, whose suffering is elevated here to the level of sainthood. Lacking any real insight about what drives actors and directors to create, the film kicks Lubezki’s virtuosic camerawork into overdrive. His camera roams through the inner workings of the theatre in a series of long takes that grant a formal rigour and manic energy that the cocktail-napkin doodle of a script hardly deserves.
For all its accolades, then, Birdman is showy and maddeningly self-enchanted, flattering its core constituency of unappreciated actors while pretending to be tough and honest: in short, it’s an archetypal Best Picture winner.
Whiplash
Directed by Damien Chazelle
Fox Theatre (2236 Queen Street East)
Damien Chazelle’s Whiplash made waves when it debuted early last year at Sundance on its way to Oscar glory, and despite its prickliness relative to the fest’s usual sunny hits, it’s not hard to see why. Starring Miles Teller as a jazz drum prodigy enrolled in a prestigious college music program, and newly minted Academy Award winner J.K. Simmons as an obscenely cruel conductor and teacher who will either bring out his artistic genius and knock some rhythm into him or ruin him personally and professionally, the film is an unsentimental, entertaining, and unfathomably silly concoction that never quite decides whether it’s a thriller or a straight drama—mostly to its credit.
Teller and Simmons are so good in their claustrophobic scenes together that it’s a real disappointment whenever the film settles into humdrum material about the difficulties of dating while pursuing one’s artistic dream, the irritations of having a family that just doesn’t understand, and the single-mindedness of serious men. One also wonders whether Teller’s tortured artiste is as good as the film seems to want him to be, given his seemingly fatal issues with timing—the sort of thing you’d expect would be mastered by even a competent drummer. At its best, however, as in the truly strange final concert set piece that sees the two men facing off mano-a-mano as if there weren’t a full concert hall behind them, Whiplash becomes the sort of pure spectacle you let slide on brute force appeal, even if, to quote Simmons’s character, it’s not quite your tempo.
Two Days, One Night
Directed by Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne
The Royal (608 College Street)
French masters Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne perfect their neo-neo-realist style with the familiar but affecting Two Days, One Night. Foregoing their penchant for nonprofessional actors, the brothers cast a star in Marion Cotillard, who managed to snag an Academy Award nomination for her efforts despite a subdued campaign. Cotillard plays Sandra, a woman who comes back to work following a serious bout with depression to discover that her position has been eliminated. Down but not out, Sandra is given one last weekend to persuade her colleagues to vote for her job over their bonus.
In the hands of lesser filmmakers, Two Days, One Night might have ended up being either a rote labour melodrama (with shades of Norma Rae) about a suffering working-class mother on the verge of financial and psychological catastrophe, or a feel-good comedy about triumphing over adversity. But you can trust the Dardennes to find the kernel of reality in even the most heightened scenario. Sandra’s efforts to persuade her colleagues one by one is humanist drama at its finest and most delicate, and the Dardennes coax a nervy, full-bodied performance out of their star.