Heartland International Film Festival 2022: WOMEN TALKING, SHE SAID, THE BANSHEES OF INISHERIN & GOOD NIGHT OPPY

The 2022 Heartland International Film Festival has come to an end, but in its final days it crammed in some of the biggest releases of awards season. Here’s my last roundup, all of which you will be hearing a lot more about in the coming months.

Women Talking (Sarah Polley)

Sarah Polley’s Women Talking knows precisely what it is, and it puts it in the box. It’s about women talking, not as they ordinarily do but within a fantasy world that gives them the space and time to sort through the systemic violence they face.

Even with this, it’s not a pleasant fantasy. The film is clinical in its swiftness, taking mere minutes to establish that you’re in the middle of a religious community where the women, uneducated and cut off from the outside world, are being further oppressed by sexual predation. They’ve been told by the elders (men, of course) that they’re imagining it or it’s demons or it’s anything but what’s really going on, which kept them docile until one of the men was caught in the act. The accused were formally arrested, and the rest of the men set off to post bail. The women are expected to forgive while they’re away. What they do instead is debate the way forward.

The setup doesn’t need a longer explanation, nor do the horrors they’ve endured need more specifics than you get. Clinical is a blessing here, allowing the film to launch into the kind of high-minded conversations that occur in this scenario’s real world avatar without the need for month-long breaks and lots of therapy. After all, this is not reality. It’s an exercise, a stark glimpse at what goes down for those who haven’t had these conversations and a cathartic airing of what you hide behind closed doors for those who have.

Polley, who directed the film and adapted the screenplay from the book of the same name, takes such strong measures to make the film feel unreal that some may find the style off-putting. All images are heavily desaturated, ensuring that the potentially idyllic environment doesn’t appeal and you feel the constant, dulling sense of depression that the women are experiencing. The long, flowing conversation between them is staged without flourishes, and the women themselves are more stand-ins for philosophical ideas and trauma reactions than full-fledged characters. Some rage like Claire Foy’s Salome. Rooney Mara’s Ona has an intellectual but hopeful remove. Others bring scripture into consideration. Each actor makes their point of view felt, and in their summation is the tenor of people everywhere who live under this threat.

Whether this appeals to your aesthetics or not, it’s undoubtedly a marvelous concept, but one that’s hampered by its structural endpoint. In this fantasy, the women have three options: forgive, stay and fight, or leave. In reality, none of these options are possible, but the fantasy of a solution isn’t what puts a damper on the film. It’s that the solutions aren’t even realistic within the fantasy, and the limits this puts on their conversation makes it into a shadow of what people really grapple with.

For instance, their conversation inevitably veers into the underlying cause of this violence: power. The men have it and wield it with a such brutal totality that the women hardly know what it is. They wonder aloud whether they desire it and conclude that, yes, they do. As Hannah Gadsby put it, men don’t have a monopoly on the human condition, and as she expanded, that means women are as likely to go after power and wield it dangerously as men. But there’s no room for that expansion in Women Talking because seriously contending with the fact that, even in their fantasy, leaving to establish a community of women and children would still lead to power imbalances and violence can’t exist within the story’s limitations. Even darker musings, like whether there’s a way to tame something as fundamentally human as the desire for power, is so far outside the realm of this fantasy that the conversation at the core of Women Talking can only include partial truths, and so it can only provide partial catharsis. There’s still great worth in that, especially considering how rarely film and art in general take on these realities in an intellectual way, but it leaves much more to be exposed.

She Said (Maria Schrader)

Kaiya McCullough spoke to the Washington Post. Rachael Denhollander spoke to the Indianapolis Star. Zelda Perkins, Rowena Chiu, Laura Madden, Rose McGowan, Ashley Judd, and Gwyneth Paltrow spoke to the New York Times. Each admission resulted in bombshell reporting that brought abusive institutions to their knees, accomplishing what the most powerful women in their respective fields couldn’t. That’s the power of journalism. That’s the power of speaking up.

Anyone bothering to read a movie review will be aware of the NYT report on Harvey Weinstein, which detailed his pattern of faking business meetings to lure women into hotel rooms where he abused and assaulted them. She Said follows the two female reporters who put the story together, Jodi Kantor (Zoe Kazan) and Megan Twohey (Carey Mulligan), adapted from the book of the same name written by the same reporters.

The alarm bells that sound about all of this proves largely, but thankfully not deadly, correct. It is a puff piece about the power of journalism, with lots of middle of the night phone calls, sweating out whether sources will go on record, and probing lunch meetings. The puzzle-solving nature of investigative journalism provides easy propulsion, but its scope is limited by the blinders put up by its own sources, the two journalists whose story is being told. Do you think they’re going to allow true negativity to creep in? Of course not. The glimpses you get of their lives and work is always framed as heroic, even when the story reveals they slipped up more than they’re willing to reckon with.

This is reflective of a generally lackluster script, which follows the tried-and-true outline of a journalism film without care for the details. One-on-one conversations in diners and restaurants are repeated ad nauseam and clunker dialogue makes its way into the movie’s final version. Kazan is weighted with the more repetitive scenes, and she proves adept at quietly reacting to the parade of wonderful character actors spitting out revelations. She struggles with the on-the-nose dialogue, though, which even gets Mulligan out of sorts at times.

But what it really doesn’t reflect on, and what proves to be its biggest detriment, is the true scope and effect of their work. They took Weinstein down, which was a massive win. The once revered producer is now the poster child for the #MeToo movement, Hollywood’s biggest excision, and possibly a sacrifice that allowed the abusive mechanisms to survive. It’s the latter bit, the question of whether Weinstein was enough, whether an industry that had allowed his behavior to thrive had been struck down or simply stumbled, that inevitably hangs over any back-patting Hollywood rendition of the story. The Harvey Weinstein win was massive, and this movie rightly relishes the hard work of Kantor and Twohey and the bravery of the women who spoke up. None of it was easy, but it may not be time to clap yet.

The Banshees of Inisherin (Martin McDonagh)

The In Bruges gang is back together for The Banshees of Inisherin, another existential tragicomedy that tempers the inappropriate humor of its predecessor and ups the absurdity.

This time around, writer/director Martin McDonagh strands Colin Farrell and Brendan Gleeson on a small Irish Island during the country’s civil war, and while gunfire is exchanged on the mainland, the two former friends engage in their own pointless, destructive campaign of wills. 

The parallels to the brother against brother, tearing apart your homeland nature of a civil war is only brushed against explicitly, but it suffuses everything about this parable. That’s why it feels markedly different than what McDonagh has done before, even as it dances around similar setups and ideas. It can’t have the cruel streak of In Bruges because every character cares for each other, as you do anyone you’ve seen day in and day out for your entire life, and it can’t have the fiery certainty of Three Billboards Outside Ebbing Missouri because no one is doing anything for discernible reasons. This film is mostly sad, sad in ways that would overwhelm in the hands of a lesser filmmaker, but McDonagh was smart enough to lift this almost imperceptibly out of the realm of reality, twisting every moment and character just enough to give you the comforting distance of a morality-first story.

Its simplicity is best exemplified by Farrell’s Pádraic, who is too straightforward to be a real person. A good ‘ol boy who tends to his farm and drinks merrily every day at 2pm, he would be a cliché if he wasn’t so earnest about it. He likes his life, loves his donkey, and generally thinks he’s a swell fellow. So when his longtime drinking buddy, Gleeson’s Colm, suddenly declares he doesn’t want to speak to him, Pádraic is genuinely confused. Unfortunately, he’s not smart enough to take direct instructions, so Colm escalates the situation by threatening to cut off his own fingers if Pádraic speaks to him again. With that absurd gauntlet laid, the film descends slowly, almost imperceptibly, into a Grimm’s fairy tale, complete with a crusty, ominous old witch and, yes, bodily mutilation.

McDonagh, of course, applies a sort of c*ckeyed amusement to the whole proceedings, which generates more uncomfortable chuckles than outright guffaws. Pádraic’s donkey is the unsung hero here, taking on a farcical role similar to the llama in Lucrecia Martel’s Zama, aka obstinately sharing space with the humans, always reminding them of their place. The only bastion of sanity is Pádraic’s sister, Siobhan, who actress Kerry Condon plays with perfectly unbridled exasperation.

But the movie ultimately belongs to Farrell and Gleeson, who navigate their characters who aren’t full characters with comedic grace. The latter glowers and gives scant reason for upending both their lives. The former huffs and puffs, and together they form a satisfying odd couple. The moral underpinning of their tale proves a bit too scant to reach the heights they and McDonagh achieved with In Bruges, but they’re a funny, heartbreaking pair worth spending a couple of hours with.

Good Night Oppy (Ryan White)

Once upon a time, there was a little Mars rover that could. She was designed to work for 90 days (in Mars time), but instead she tooled around for over 5,000, collecting rock samples, unlocking the mysteries of the universe, and even taking a selfie.

Opportunity (Oppy for short) and her sister rover Spirit were the results of years of work by NASA prompted by the dream of an ambitious geologist, the kind of team-up that embodies the best of what science can do. The documentary about them is an appropriate mix of awe, inspiration, and infomercial because NASA has bills to pay, too.

The rovers are the perfect subjects to sell space exploration in an age where it’s become a bit dull. We’ve gone to the moon, and for many of us this feat was accomplished before we were born. Since then we’ve been launching satellites, probes, and maintaining a small human presence on the International Space Station, but the magical sense of reaching out and touching the unknown has faded from the public consciousness. And then the rovers came along. 

They’re robots, of course, but they had cameras that look like eyes and got a series of lucky breaks that begged the public to anthropomorphize them into plucky avatars for our celestial hopes and dreams. We couldn’t go to Mars yet, but we could cobble together metal and computers in a way that tricked the face recognition in our brains into thinking we’ve sent extensions of ourselves, and if we could send extensions then we could soon follow as well.

Co-writer and director Ryan White was clearly very attuned to the sentimental side of the project, as he plays up the strange connection humans had to the rovers (the word ‘child’ gets thrown around a lot). Anthropomorphizing is a relatively simple method, though, and one that’s repeated with decreasing returns in Good Night Oppy. The more effective moments lean on the science and the scientists, many of whom spent the better part of their professional careers on this one endeavor. There’s the engineer who joyously follows every movement of his creation, the woman who “steers” the rovers (this involves mapping out and sending days worth of instructions all at once), and a scientist who watched the rovers land on Mars as a teenager and was working on the project when Oppy made its last, limping movements. They fall into anthropomorphizing as well, but they also touch on the work, scale, and application of everything the rovers did.

And that’s what’s truly moving about Opportunity and Spirit, not their face-like construction or the seamless animation that White uses to bring their journeys to life in this documentary. It’s the collective knowledge and energy put into these two hunks of metal and wire, and the combination of skill and luck that let them send back information about a planet most of humanity has only been able to stare at in wonder. When their batteries ran out it wasn’t a creature dying but a glimpse into the unknown coming to an end, and that deserves the mournful song the NASA team played (and White lifts) to tearfully say goodbye to them.

That’s it for my reports from the Heartland International Film Festival. Which of these movies are you looking forward to?