culture
Rep Cinema This Week: Selma, The Grand Budapest Hotel, and Finding Vivian Maier
The best repertory and art-house screenings, special presentations, lectures, and limited engagements in Toronto.
Still from Selma.
At rep cinemas this week: a trio of Oscar contenders, including Ava DuVernay’s profile of Martin Luther King’s role in the historic march from Selma to Montgomery, Wes Anderson’s ode to pre-World War II Europe, and a documentary about a nanny turned street photographer.
Selma
Directed by Ava DuVernay
Fox Theatre (2236 Queen Street East)
When the Academy Award nominations were announced last month, few results raised as much Internet ire as Ava DuVernay’s Selma, which only picked up a Best Original Song nod to go with its Best Picture nomination. In addition to being one of the best-reviewed prestige pictures of the year, Selma is inarguably topical, as it coincides with the energy in the Black Lives Matter movement to provide a timely portrait of civil rights activism in the 1960s.
Though Selma’s value as a conversation piece about protesting an actively hostile state is unassailable, its merits as a film are more mixed. David Oyelowo gives a rich, star-making performance as Martin Luther King Jr., portraying the civil-rights leader as a pensive man who has to reconcile his privacy with his public importance and the demands that come with it. DuVernay transitions with ease from a minimalist, finely textured independent work into a large-scale historical drama, showing real directorial chops.
But the film suffers from a patchy script, ostensibly DuVernay’s uncredited page-one rewrite of first-timer Paul Webb’s draft. (Credit for King’s powerful oratory also goes to DuVernay, since his actual speeches were apparently licensed to Steven Spielberg and thus off-limits.) Eager to respect the major figure at the movement’s centre without losing sight of the ground-level organizing that made it happen, the film shifts uneasily at times between a King-centred drama and a hazy 1965 class photo, at one point awkwardly superimposing explanatory captions over closeups of activists who otherwise don’t register in their screen time. The film’s much-discussed depiction of the relationship between King and Lyndon Johnson (Tom Wilkinson)—slammed as unfair to the president in a rambling Washington Post editorial from one of his former aides—is also a problem, to be sure. The weakness of that conceit, though, lies not in any historical fibbing but in the unshakeable feeling that it’s a spectre from an earlier draft of the film, structured not as a procedural about a black activist movement rooted in the streets, which is mostly how DuVernay plays it, but as a Frost/Nixon-inspired two-hander about a pair of powerful men shaping civil rights in America right from the Oval Office.
In spite of these rough patches, Selma is an important, frequently powerful film that’s landed at the right time. If it can’t seem to decide whether it’s about a movement or the figureheads who represent it, it’s also an indispensable portrait of what it means to organize.
The Grand Budapest Hotel
Directed by Wes Anderson
Revue Cinema (400 Roncesvalles Avenue)
When Wes Anderson briefly fell out of critical favour in the last decade (before his renaissance with Fantastic Mr. Fox and Moonrise Kingdom), it became a standard critical line to harp on his tendency to build dioramas rather than movies. With The Grand Budapest Hotel, as manicured and art-directed a thing as anything Anderson has ever produced, we see the Texan-turned-pan-Europeanist giving the finger to his old critics while burrowing deeper into his own alternate world.
Ralph Fiennes gives a buoyant, wonderfully modulated performance as Gustave—the titular hotel’s concierge—who, like Anderson himself, is a devotee of all things beautiful and old. While Anderson’s tastes run to the Baroque and turn-of-the-century storytelling traditions, Gustave’s are directed toward the hotel’s aging clientele, including the elaborately named Madame Céline Villeneuve Desgoffe-und-Taxis (played briefly by Tilda Swinton, and referred to as “Madame D.”), who dies and leaves Gustave the heir to her precious painting, much to her aristocratic family’s consternation.
There’s a melancholy aura to the efforts of Gustave and his faithful lobby boy Zero (Tony Revolori as a teen, and F. Murray Abraham in his old age) to hold onto their precious art, and the world it represents, on the verge of the Second World War. Even more than in Anderson’s earlier films, which tend to be about moments of generational upheaval, one senses here that Gustave’s (and the filmmaker’s) retreat into the past comes from a deep knowledge of the fact that what’s coming isn’t going to be good for anyone. The film is a bit frostier than his usual work—the emotional line buried in an overly complicated nested narrative schema that makes the too-obvious point that every story is a re-telling of a memory rather than the real thing—but in some ways it’s richer for it: it’s unencumbered by whimsy, despite the preciousness of the conceit.
Finding Vivian Maier
Directed by John Maloof and Charlie Siskel
Bloor Hot Docs Cinema (506 Bloor Street West)
A virtual unknown until amateur historian and collector John Maloof began mounting posthumous retrospectives of her work around 2009, Vivian Maier has in recent years become a cause célèbre in photography circles for her staggering collection of more than 100,000 photographs—mostly street portraits taken in her adoptive home of Chicago. Those disparate strands come together a bit uneasily in Finding Vivian Maier, a documentary co-directed by Charlie Siskel and Maloof, who doubles as our narrator and frequent onscreen interlocutor.
Maloof sets the stage early on, wondering why the life’s work of such an apparently accomplished photographer would end up consigned to the auction bins in which he found it in 2007, at which point Maier was still alive but was by most accounts homeless and penniless. The film follows his line of inquiry, suggesting that Maier’s unsettled childhood in France and subsequent 40-year career as a nanny in Chicago—where she lived as a perpetually single eccentric sort, confronting strangers on the street about their politics while disclosing little of her own—shaped her into a fringe artist destined to be unknown until after her death.
There’s certainly a picaresque life behind Maier’s portraits, but Maloof and Siskel lean too hard on their initial angle, which is that there is something inherently inspiring about the idea that a nanny should also be a photographer. Though there are some nice shadings to their developing psychological profile of their subject, and some fascinating tentative suggestions about her method of snapping photos from low angles to catch her own subjects unawares, there’s altogether too much of Maloof and not enough of Maier in the approach. It reads as a novice curator’s suppositions about an artist, rather than as an informed survey by an expert, who might more profitably have given context to Maier’s work within any number of frameworks—from the genre of street photography to the history of Chicago to social expectations placed on single women in 1960s North America. Lacking these contexts and insights, Finding Vivian Maier is little more than a good excuse to see the artist’s photographs on a big screen—not that that’s necessarily something to complain about.