My next report from Sundance 2019 finds the festival really hitting its stride. An artsy slasher satire, a meticulous political procedural, and a sweaty psychological thriller are all worth your time.
Velvet Buzzsaw (Dan Gilroy)
Poets and romantics believe that artists should be willing to die for their art. Thanks to writer-director Dan Gilroy, we get to see the grizzly aftermath. His latest, the intoxicatingly weird Velvet Buzzsaw, is part art world satire, part slasher flick. Audacious, quirky, and beautifully violent, Gilroy gives us a pitch black take on the darker side of artistic pretention.
“I went from anarchist to purveyor of good taste,” explains art gallery director Rhodora Haze (Rene Russo). Back in the day, she fronted a punk rock band. Now she spends her time exchanging quips and ripping inferior artists with her favorite art critic, the Warhol-esque Morf Vandewalt (Jake Gyllenhaal). On the rare occasion that Morf sleeps with a woman, it’s usually Josephina (Zawe Ashton), Rhodora’s ambitious flunky. When Josephina discovers that a dead tenant in her apartment building was a closeted artist, she, Morf, and Rhodora move quickly to exploit this untapped artistic goldmine.
There’s only one problem; the artist – who comes to be known as Dease – was a complete lunatic. Morf explains that Dease’s life was an “epic saga of violence and madness.” So mad, in fact, that he left explicit instructions to destroy all of his paintings upon his death. Soon, everyone in the Los Angeles art community will regret ever owning one of Dease’s cursed paintings.
Gilroy (Nightcrawler (2014)) has carved out a pretty exclusive niche for himself with this arthouse slasher. What Altman did for the Hollywood film machine, Gilroy does for the L.A. art scene; ducking, weaving, and eavesdropping through the lives of various erudite collectors. Whether audiences will kindle to this very specific target for mockery won’t remain a mystery for long, as Velvet Buzzsaw is set to premiere on Netflix on February 1, 2019.
The challenge with Velvet Buzzsaw is surviving the first 15 minutes. As one vapid character after another glides through frame, you quickly realize there’s no one with whom you can identify. Exaggerated beyond all recognition, these characters might as well be from Mars, spouting artsy fartsy jargon and selling their souls to the highest bidder. The only thing that makes these opening scenes tolerable is Gilroy’s wicked sense of humor.
Once the true menace of Dease’s paintings emerges, however, Gilroy throws an unrelenting barrage of blood and buffoonery at the screen. Each murder is an elaborate combination of the beautiful and the grotesque. Where else can you find a dead body incorporated into an art exhibit, only to have a troupe of visiting school children gleefully tramping through the blood? It’s the sort of spectacle that makes you cringe even as you’re laughing.
Velvet Buzzsaw is a punch to the mouth of pretentiousness. While it’s too uneven to be considered a classic satire, it bears all the markings of a quotable cult classic, and anyone who loves slasher films will certainly appreciate Gilroy’s inventive take on that genre. “All art is dangerous,” Rhodora observes. Thanks to the demented mind of Dan Gilroy, she has no idea how right she is.
The Report (Scott Z. Burns)
How far is too far when it comes to national security? After September 11, 2001, ‘too far’ became somewhat blurry. Writer-director Scott Z. Burns ultra-wonky The Report shows just how far the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) went to interrogate ‘enemy combatants’ and just how far one dedicated Senate staffer went to expose their tactics. Thorough, compelling, and important, The Report argues that the moral high ground isn’t just an ideal, it’s a national security imperative.
When Senator Dianne Feinstein (Annette Bening) sent her staffer, Daniel Jones (Adam Driver), to investigate suspected improprieties with CIA interrogation techniques, she had no idea it would take six years and six million documents to uncover their misdeeds. We’ve all seen the pictures by now; suspected terrorists chained to the floor, tormented by dogs, or subjected to waterboarding. Jones and his tiny research team (totaling three people) lived with those pictures for years, constantly forestalling CIA interference and political gamesmanship to complete their mission. In the end, Feinstein and Jones fought until a summary of the report was finally released to the public in 2014.
When the CIA instituted their “Enhanced Interrogation Techniques” (EIT) after 9/11, they were shielded from prosecution so long as no detainee sustained long-lasting physical injury. It’s a philosophy that should make your stomach churn and your blood boil, but director Burns wisely resists the urge to moralize. An impassioned Jones exhaustively catalogs each indiscretion one detainee at a time, eliminating the need for an injection of righteous indignation. The facts speak for themselves.
To avoid chunking the copious exposition, Burns intersperses flashbacks at key intervals of Jones’s investigation. We see the early decisions to create EIT, including a nauseating presentation by two psychologists on the virtues of learned helplessness. Multiple dramatizations of unsettling torture techniques, primarily waterboarding, provide more than enough justification for Jones’s obsessive quest. For a film riddled with jargon and Sorkin-esque rapid-fire dialogue, these evocative reenactments prevent The Report from becoming strictly an intellectual exercise.
Driver’s quaking rage and Bening’s measured restraint make their characters perfect foils. Little attempt is made to aggrandize Jones, whose only interest is preserving America’s moral dignity rather than toppling a morally bankrupt government. As Feinstein, Bening compassionately escorts Jones away from the precipice of political self-destruction time and time again. They are surrounded by a talented ensemble cast, including Jon Hamm, Ted Levine, and the criminally underappreciated Maura Tierney.
While The Report might lack some of the artistic flourishes and atmospheric urgency of classic procedurals like All the President’s Men and Zodiac, it’s an enthralling account of one of America’s most shameful digressions. It also reaffirms the notion that one person can still make a difference if they’re willing to stick to their values.
The Wolf Hour (Alistair Banks Griffin)
There is no prison more inescapable than the mind. Writer-director Alistair Banks Griffin’s new psychological thriller The Wolf Hour is locked inside the tormented mind of its heroine. Naomi Watts gives a fevered performance in this one-woman show about an agoraphobic writer stuck inside of her sweltering South Bronx tenement. Watts’s sweat is tinged with desperation as the grit and crime outside threaten to consume her only remaining hiding place. The Wolf Hour is a slow burning nightmare that brilliantly blurs the lines between the real and the imagined.
It’s the summer of 1977 and New York is being terrorized by unrelenting heat and a serial killer known as the .44 Caliber Killer (later dubbed the Son of Sam). Living in a row of dilapidated apartments that resemble the cover of Led Zeppelin’s Physical Graffiti, June Leigh (Watts) hides behind a gauntlet of deadbolts on her door. Old magazines and trash bags swarming with flies clutter her floor; a consequence of June’s inability to leave her apartment… ever.
Years ago, June wrote a best-selling novel indicting the Capitalist vultures in America (including her own father). Now, convinced that her accusations led directly to her father’s fatal heart attack, June is paralyzed with fear when she even looks at a typewriter. Her estranged sister Margot (Jennifer Ehle) thinks if June re-joins the human race, her urge to write will return. Yeah, good luck convincing June of that one!
“The world only gives back what you give it,” advises Freddie (Kelvin Harrison Jr.) the grocery delivery boy, who functions as June’s cigarette connection. All she’s given the world for the last ten years is indifference, and the world has given it back tenfold. As the violence and despair escalate outside her window, June must decide whether to re-engage life or to disappear completely.
The Wolf Hour, which would make a great double feature with Rear Window, feels very much like an adapted stage play, as director Griffin confines the audience within June’s shabby apartment. The result is a suffocating, ever-intensifying paranoia. To further ratchet up the tension, someone keeps ringing the buzzer to June’s apartment and refusing to speak. Is it a harmless prankster or someone with more sinister plans?
Fueled by sweat and cigarettes, Watts delivers a bravura performance. The film takes place largely in her unhinged mind, placing its success or failure squarely in her trembling hands. She doesn’t disappoint. With her darting eyes and tightened shoulders, you fear she might physically snap at any moment. Her fragility and desperation are palpable.
Griffin chooses a deliberate pace to let the anxiety seep into every creaking floorboard. Taut, unrelenting, and achingly human, The Wolf Hour is a journey into the darkest precincts of June’s psyche. Finding her way out will be difficult when the trail of bread crumbs is covered by cigarette ashes.
Be sure to catch my first and second report from Sundance 2019!
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