Three days down; one to go.
That thought has become the motivation
that will get me through the final four screenings that I
have planned tomorrow for the festival. This year, the
selections—after seeing ten of them now, I feel like I can
make this statement about the festival as a whole—have
been utterly nightmarish. The quality of films presented
might be acceptable for, say, the Mount Appalachia
Festival, but the San Diego Film Festival? A
festival programmed for one of the largest cities in the
United States? A festival that regularly is named one of
the best for networking-parties in the country? Sure, it
ain’t Sundance or Toronto, but it should be much better
than it has been this year. While I commend festival
coordinators for ensuring that most of the films have
started on time this year (which has, to say the least,
not been the case in past), the fact remains that these
have been bad films starting on time.
The first movie of my Saturday line-up
was also the best I saw all day but, given its
competition, that crown wasn’t exactly a tough one to
wear. Alfredo de Villa’s Adrift in Manhattan offers
viewers an entirely conventional story, but is convincing
and well-done enough to prove worthwhile. The film follows
the lives of three emotionally-stinted souls lost in the
shuffle of the daunting New York City-setting surrounding
them. Primary among said souls is Simon Colon (Victor
Rasuk), a twenty-year-old who still lives with his mother
(Marlene Forte). Simon pays the bills by working in a
photo-development store, where he discovers a passion for
photography. He begins to stalk and take pictures of the
beautiful Rose Phipps (Heather Graham), whose vibrant
scarf one day catches his eye. Rose is a successful
optometrist experiencing troubles at home. She has
separated with her husband (William Baldwin) after losing
their two-year-old son, which makes her highly emotionally
vulnerable. In fact, when she discovers that Simon has
been taking pictures of her, Rose soon invites him into
her home and has mournful sex with him.
The third of Adrift in Manhattan’s
interlocking stories follows Tommasso Pensaro (Dominic
Chianese), one of Rose’s patients. Tommasso is an elderly
Italian-immigrant who doesn’t have a family; he spends the
majority of his free-time painting. His embrace of this
talent makes it all the more tragic when Rose tells them
that he has an eye-disease that will cause him to go blind
in less than a year. Tommasso is stunned, not only because
he will lose a form of art that has become significant to
his life, but also because he fears that it will scare
away his newfound late-in-life love-interest (and fellow
co-worker), Isabel (Elizabeth Pena).
As reflected by that brief plot
synopsis, Adrift in Manhattan doesn’t exactly
explore any new cinematic territory. The story and
characters are rather familiar, but the film works as a
whole due to its strong performances and
production-values. Director de Villa, as he did with his
freshman-feature Washington Heights, is able to
capture a very authentic view of Manhattan and its
culture. He very naturally sets the stage for his actors
to go to work, and they do so beautifully. Rasuk is able
to wonderfully internalize the role of Simon, relying
heavily on face and eye work to craft the nuances of the
character. Graham is perhaps the best she’s ever been
here, capturing the grief of her character with stunning
fearlessness (especially during the aforementioned graphic
sex scene). And Chianese is also comfortingly excellent at
playing Tommasso. Even if Adrift in Manhattan isn’t
exactly the freshest film being released this year, it
uses its assets to craft an entirely pleasant and
occasionally poignant product.
Alex Gibney’s Taxi to the Dark Side
is also a very conventional motion-picture, but in ways
much different from those troubling Adrift in Manhattan.
This is yet another left-wing documentary that stretches
the truth to vocalize accusatory conspiracy-theories
regarding the Bush Administration. The film is slightly
more insightful than other pictures that have tried to
tackle the same subject-matter, but is even more dangerous
than its counterparts because of its slick assembly.
Gibney, like a discreet and more talented version of
Michael Moore, has cherry-picked numerous facts and strung
them together to create false political-revelations for
uninformed viewers. “I’m so glad that someone is
making this type of movie to keep me up to date with the
injustices that are taking place in the world!” a young
woman enthusiastically declared while walking out of the
auditorium. If only she was smart enough to realize that
Taxi to the Dark Side was instilling anti-Bush
views in her by utilizing numerous half-truths and a lot
of sticky editing-glue.
The film deals with the U.S.
Military’s allegedly inhumane torture of hundreds of
Islamic Terrorists. Gibney specifically zeroes in on the
case of Dilawar, an Afghan taxi-cab driver who was turned
over as a terrorist to the personnel at Bagram Air Force
Base. At Bagram, Dilawar was supposedly tortured to death
by being shackled to the ceiling of his prison-cell using
handcuffs, a practice that Gibney’s interviewees (mainly
former interrogators) say is all too common in Iraq. The
film uses this story as a means of transitioning into
explorations of similar suspected offenses taking place at
Abu Ghraib (the famous Iraqi POW-camp that was led by the
same woman as the one at Bagram), Guantanamo Bay, and
several other locations.
Throughout the duration of Taxi to
the Dark Side, Gibney’s subjects make several points
about the mistakes made within the American Military on
the Bush Administration’s watch, many of them worthy of
thought. Certain concerns vocalized in the film about the
military’s use of torture are legitimate, particularly
those regarding the way the practice has been implemented.
In the third act of Taxi to the Dark Side, we learn
that Dilawar’s case was one of many in which Islamist
militant-forces turned over an innocent man to American
Authorities as a suspected-terrorist because of the U.S.’
policy to reward Afghan Warlords for (often false)
intelligence. To many viewers, this will come as a highly
shocking revelation, one necessary of consideration.
Another interesting truth raised by Gibney’s subjects is
the fact that the majority of American interrogators have
little-to-no experience in the field, and their lack of
qualifications provides them poor chances of “breaking”
suspected terrorists.
Despite providing viewers some worthy
food-for-thought, Taxi to the Dark Side suffers
from two central problems, both of which are typical of
standard-issue leftist documentaries. As touched on
before, one of the film’s major faults is that it tries to
chalk all of the injustices discussed up to President
Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney, and former Secretary of
Defense Donald Rumsfeld. Gibney both crisply and
troublingly traces the Dilawar-case back to what he views
as the Bush Administration’s defiance of the Geneva
Convention and suspension of habeus corpus. When
this seems like too much of a stretch, he instantly cites
the same corruption of the C.I.A., never mentioning the
fact that this organization has been plagued by far less
problems under Bush’s Presidency than it was under those
of Clinton, Bush’s father, Reagan, and Carter. Gibney
rarely considers the possibility that internal corruption
pertaining to higher-ups in the Military may be entirely
to blame for wrongly-conducted torture. This is perhaps
for the better, given it ensures that he never smears
American Soldiers, who have recently been unfairly given
conflicting ideas about torture by their superiors.
The other prominent, if slightly more
theoretical, problem with the film is that it never
provides a strong argument stating why the U.S.
government’s use of mandated-torture is wrong. While
somewhat sympathetic to Gibney’s claim that the country
has violated the Geneva Convention by torturing suspected
terrorists in the hopes of intercepting Intelligence, I
sided more with the arguments vocalized in the documentary
by Bush Administration attorney John Yoo. Yoo rationally
justifies the moderate torture that the United States
government did condone (he unfortunately never addresses
that which it did not) as a means of confronting a Radical
Islamist Enemy. The only comment that Gibney makes through
his interviewees regarding this issue is that he feels
that suspected-terrorists are more likely to confess
to/talk about crimes if provided a luxury (such as a
paid-for education for their children) rather than
tortured, a notion that I frankly do not buy. Gibney seems
all too sympathetic with the Enemy, which may prove
dangerous because, at the same time, he comes across as a
credible political observer. I would hate for Taxi to
the Dark Side to cause unknowing viewers to develop
hostilities toward a mostly-effective United States
Foreign Policy. Still, I have a moderate respect for its
ability to raise the aforementioned select, valid facts
regarding the use of torture in the War on Terror.
The final film of the day for me was
Mary Stuart Masterson’s The Cake Eaters, an overly
simplistic and obnoxiously manipulative melodrama. The
movie employs the great young talents of Kristen Stewart
and Aaron Stanford in the lead roles – and thoroughly
wastes them. Stewart plays Georgia, a teenager suffering
from Friedriech's Ataxia, a disease affecting the nervous
system. Knowing that she may not have long before her
health escapes her, Georgia finds herself desperate to
lose her virginity. Stanford’s character, twenty-something
local-boy Beagle, is the only guy that is both deluded and
compassionate enough to grant her this wish. What ensues
is a mostly creepy motion-picture that only views its
characters as ploys of a formulaic plot.
I can’t really think of much to say
about The Cake Eaters; it is the epitome of a
standard-issue flick. If it weren’t for the always-welcome
(if here taken advantage of) presences of Stewart and
Stanford, the movie would be playing on the Lifetime
Network and not in legitimate film festivals (how this was
accepted into competition at Tribecca is beyond me). The
only original element of The Cake Eaters separate
from the lead performances is the nuance that Stewart’s
character has Friedrich’s Ataxia, but this is approached
in such a gimmicky way by screenwriter Jayce Bartok that
it ends up hurting the film more than it helps it.
Self-important and just icky all around, this picture is
better left unseen.
Upward and onward with the final day
of the film festival! I’ve now come to accept the fact
that I won’t see a masterpiece here this year, as I had
previously hoped. All I ask of Nature is that my
scheduled screenings tomorrow be mostly painless.
-Danny Baldwin, Bucket Reviews
(post date: 10.4.2007)
