culture
Rep Cinema This Week: Manufactured Landscapes, Stories We Tell, and The Social Network
The best repertory and art-house screenings, special presentations, lectures, and limited engagements in Toronto.
Still from Manufactured Landscapes.
At rep cinemas this week: a gorgeous and disturbing look at industrial wastelands, Sarah Polley’s moving family history, and the story of the birth of Facebook.
Manufactured Landscapes
Directed by Jennifer Baichwal
(300 City Centre Drive)
Though Canadian filmmakers like Denis Villeneuve and Atom Egoyan have earned international renown and Oscar nominations over the years, you’d be hard-pressed to think of a more consistent (and consistently underrated) homegrown talent than Jennifer Baichwal. A probing, politically conscious, and intellectually rigorous documentarian with formal chops and a knack for eye-popping tableau—assisted by longtime cinematographer and partner Nick de Pencier—Baichwal delivered what might be her masterpiece in Manufactured Landscapes, a powerful tribute to and recreation of the work of industrial photographer Edward Burtynsky.
Baichwal’s work has long been preoccupied with artists in other forms—including cross-media artists like Paul Bowles and Margaret Atwood—and in Burtynsky she finds an especially like-minded collaborator, who would go on to co-direct Watermark. The photographer’s interest in tracking humanity’s vast and often devastating eco-footprint through large-scale photos of landscapes that have been irrevocably transformed by human activity is captured and at times bested by Baichwal and de Pencier’s gorgeous, haunting images of environments as disparate as a Chinese clothes iron factory and an infernal slag heap in Sudbury, Ontario. Baichwal does double duty here, at once recreating her subject’s process and seeing the same gnarly beauty he sees through the idiosyncratic medium of film. The result is as visually indelible a film as Canada has ever produced.
Manufactured Landscapes screens for free as part of the TIFF in Your Park series.
Stories We Tell
Directed by Sarah Polley
TIFF Bell Lightbox (350 King Street West)
Prior to its North American premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival, Sarah Polley’s third feature was shrouded in secrecy, described in the vaguest of terms as a genre-bending look at a family of storytellers. No wonder: as Polley soon revealed in a candid blog post, her first documentary hits close to home, returning to the moment she learned the long-hidden identity of her biological father.
While Polley’s admission might seem like a full disclosure, what makes Stories We Tell such a fascinating film is its rich ambiguity. Polley refuses to pin down the most ephemeral subject, her vibrant and enigmatic mother Diane, who passed away in 1990 and left a void that her family could only fill with a host of moving, often contradictory, stories.
Those biographical vignettes form the backbone of this uncommon family drama that’s more interested in disagreements than in group hugs. Nothing is sacred: not the home movie aesthetic we typically associate with reality—complicated here by Polley’s choice to cast an actress as Diane in Super 8 recreations of her youth—and not even the filmmaker’s project of reaching out to disparate family members for information about her mother, which is criticized outright by one of her subjects.
That the film can accommodate this contrarian opinion as well as the director’s own position, and still make room for her father Michael’s touching version of events, is no small feat. If one occasionally wishes there was less onscreen editorializing about the value of sharing this family story, that democratic gesture to her own family critic is nevertheless a testament to Polley’s humane vision of storytelling as an imprecise art, a deeply personal way of staking a claim to loved ones who may otherwise be irretrievably lost.
Stories We Tell screens for free as part of TIFF’s Canadian Open Vault series, which is currently profiling the top 10 Canadian films of all time as selected by the festival’s fourth national poll of critics and filmmakers.
The Social Network
Directed by David Fincher
Revue Cinema (400 Roncesvalles Avenue)
The standard line on The Social Network, David Fincher’s droll and uncharacteristically tender look at the birth of social media, is that it’s the defining film of a generation—not just a sliver of mid-2000s life among twentysomethings with fast PowerBooks and cheap beer, but the definitive slice. That’s a decent claim, certainly supported by the way Aaron Sorkin’s whip-smart screenplay pitches its hero, Facebook inventor Mark Zuckerberg (Jesse Eisenberg), as someone who both embodies the zeitgeist and brings it forth. It isn’t the whole story, though.
What’s arguably more interesting is the film’s actual position on zeitgeists. Take its central conflict, between Zuckerberg and partner and co-founder Eduardo Saverin (Andrew Garfield), who in the film’s version formed the start-up from their dorm and nursed it more or less in unison until Palo Alto came calling for Zuckerberg. Eduardo is an affable, smart guy, as likely as any to become a Harvard success story and Forbes cover boy. (Forget the real-world upshot, a Forbes article entitled “The Folly of Eduardo Saverin” about his unseemly tax evasion.) But he’s the wrong face for Facebook, more at home in the outmoded financing structures of the old-boys network that the more socially reticent but forward-thinking Zuckerberg shirks. If there’s an argument here, it isn’t that we’ve become a bunch of technophile turtles, our heads retracted into our shells, but that it takes a little gaudy courage to forge our way nowadays, connections or not.
Sorkin clearly figures Zuckerberg for a present-day Gatsby, and he and Fincher wring surprisingly deep pathos from that connection. Haunting Zuckerberg throughout the film is the charge that he’s an asshole, first from his ex-girlfriend (Rooney Mara), later from an imperious set of Ivy League twins (beautifully played by Armie Hammer and body double Josh Pence, with a CG assist), and finally from a young legal aid played by Rashida Jones. In his other work, Sorkin betrays a basic incompetence about technology, but here he gets something fundamentally right: the idea that the internet isn’t written in pencil but in ink, and that youthful indiscretions have a far longer shelf life now than they ever have. If Gatsby were around today, the Oscar-winning script suggests, he’d be done in by his Google cache.