culture
Rep Cinema This Week: Groundhog Day, Thief, and Gone Girl
The best repertory and art-house screenings, special presentations, lectures, and limited engagements in Toronto.
Still from Groundhog Day.
At rep cinemas this week: A seasonally appropriate ’90s rom-com classic, Michael Mann’s auspicious debut about a grizzled jewel thief’s last job, and David Fincher and Gillian Flynn’s darkly comic look at a rotten marriage.
Groundhog Day
Directed by Harold Ramis
The Royal (608 College Street)
Though he’s been a global star since Ghostbusters and a comic idol since his tenure on Saturday Night Live well before that, Bill Murray’s status as an offbeat romantic lead and hipster fetish object can probably be traced to Groundhog Day. Reuniting him with Caddyshack director and Ghostbusters co-star Harold Ramis, Groundhog Day initiated Murray’s still-ongoing career phase of playing guys straddling the line between manic and melancholy. Warmly but not rapturously received when it came out in 1993, the film has since become one of the most cherished romantic comedies of the decade, as well as a showcase of the tragicomic shadings Murray would later bring to his collaborations with Sofia Coppola and Wes Anderson.
If we aren’t quite as sold on the film’s blend of whimsy and wisdom as most, we’re still pretty tickled by the premise of a callous jerk (Murray’s weatherman Phil) transformed into the world’s most patient man once a Groundhog Day assignment in Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania scrambles the space-time continuum and traps him in a time loop that has him endlessly reliving February 2. As relatively conventional, stolid genres like the rom-com go, that’s a pretty ingenious conceit, treated with the lightest touch by Ramis and nicely grounded (get it?) by Murray and an uncharacteristically spirited Andie MacDowell.
In the spirit of the film, the Royal will be showing three screenings of Groundhog Day every two hours on a loop starting at 5 p.m. Tickets to any one screening will also be honoured at any of the other two.
Thief
Directed by Michael Mann
TIFF Bell Lightbox (350 King Street West)
Before he made Don Johnson a star, got Russell Crowe and Will Smith their first Oscar nominations (for The Insider and Ali, respectively), and turned digital cinematography into something even snotty film purists could celebrate, Michael Mann made an auspicious theatrical debut with 1981’s Thief. Thief is, among other things, both a logical successor to Mann’s work on gritty TV procedurals like Police Story in the late ‘70s and an unofficial style guide for his later tenure as the showrunner for Miami Vice. It handily introduces his distinctive aesthetic sensibility—a pulsing electronic score, courtesy of the band Tangerine Dream, and a predilection for fast cars racing through big cities in gorgeous nocturnal tableaus—while offering up what might be the quintessential Mann hero in its story of a hardened ex-con (James Caan’s Frank) whose moral code is tested by the promise of one last jewel heist that probably won’t be so easy to walk away from.
Despite a relatively tepid performance at the box office, Thief’s endurance as a cult classic and a Rosetta Stone for its auteur’s later work is hard to underestimate. Beyond its reverberations across Mann’s own filmography—the dozen or so fans who saw Blackhat in its all-too-brief theatrical release can attest to how that film envisions computer hacking as a kind of metaphysical successor to Frank’s more obviously embodied work of literally drilling into structures—the film’s influence can also be felt in doppelgängers as disparate as Nicholas Winding Refn’s Drive and Christopher Nolan’s Inception. Its importance aside, Thief is also just a damn good time: the rare ‘80s crime picture that feels just as vital now as it must have then.
Gone Girl
Directed by David Fincher
Revue Cinema (400 Roncesvalles Avenue)
Early in David Fincher’s Gone Girl, surely the most rancid film about marital discord since Stanley Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut, our soon-to-be-beleaguered hero Nick (Ben Affleck) waltzes into the bar he co-owns bearing a new board game, Mastermind. His sister and business partner Go (Carrie Coon) files it away with staples such as Let’s Make a Deal and Life. You could think of that sly introduction as a moment of foreshadowing, gesturing toward what will happen to Nick once he finds himself implicated in the possible murder of the titular missing woman, his wife Amy (Rosamund Pike), famous for her intricate schemes and micromanaging skills, and possibly in the middle of her best game yet. Or you could read it as Fincher’s own none-too-subtle nod to his reputation as a puckish control freak who loves to mess with his audiences as much as his characters—a way of positioning himself as a surrogate for his missing co-lead.
To say much more about Gone Girl—working off a script skillfully and ruthlessly adapted from her own novel by author Gillian Flynn—would risk spoiling its and-another-thing page-turning charm. Suffice it to say, it’s at once one of the most effective pulp thrillers of the year and one of the most uproarious black comedies, carefully attuned to the way bad marriages often play out like sustained delusions shared by two actors working with an increasingly dodgy script.
Thursday’s screening is part of the theatre’s Book Revue series, and will be hosted by Toronto cultural critics Kiva Reardon and Steph Guthrie, who will examine the film’s gender politics in a roundtable discussion with programmer Emily Reid.