Venice Film Festival: War, a chubby Matt Damon, and a Tom Ford original

By Sarah Sluis
FJI critic Jon Frosch offers his final post from the 66th annual Venice Film Festival.

Things are winding down here in sun-soaked Venice, with official prizes scheduled to be announced tomorrow evening. In what is considered a fairly strong competition, one of the frontrunners for the top Golden Lion award is thought to be a first film from Israel: Samuel Maoz's gripping combat drama Lebanon. Maoz himself was a soldier in the 1982 invasion of Lebanon portrayed in the film, and what unfolds on screen has the charge and intensity of feeling of personal experience. The story is told almost entirely from the point of view of four rookie soldiers inside a tank who, on the war's first day, are handed the grim task of wiping an already-bombed village clean of remaining enemies.

Of course, things don't go as planned, and the film traces their mission's descent into chaos with visceral, terrifying realism. Maoz brings a powerful physicality and a precise sense of place to the tank setting: It may be safe compared to the violence outside, but it's its own hell�a dank, bloody, disorienting and claustrophobic trap, where the four soldiers suffocate under the pressure of clanking metal, confusing radio orders, and their own growing doubts about the purpose of their assignment.

The soldiers' dilemmas are standard�they essentially struggle to accept the fact of taking human lives�and some of the characterizations edge toward sentimentality (one of the four is the mama's boy, another the loudmouth, a third the bleeding heart, and last but not least is the brash commander). But Maoz portrays their utter navet in the face of the violence that surrounds them�and in the face of their own role in it�with an urgency and empathy that get under your skin. At a focused, compact 90 minutes, Lebanon is not a sweepingly ambitious or overtly political film with any big or new statements about the Middle East, and it's all the stronger for it; Maoz lets the horrors of war speak for themselves.

A considerably more cheerful, though less riveting, viewing experience was Steven Soderbergh's out-of-competition crowd-pleaser The Informant!. Based on a true story, the film stars Matt Damon (packing a few dozen extra pounds) as Mark Whitacre, a Midwestern food-industry whistleblower who was also a multi-million-dollar embezzler. It's briskly paced and directed with Soderbergh's usual verve, and Damon is one of the great onscreen liars, able to make even the slipperiest and most disingenuous of characters affable and engaging. Here, Whitacre's cheating is grounded in a kind of sweaty, desperate class insecurity; Whitacre came from a modest background and was always trying to prove himself, even if that required pathologically justifying some very outlandish behavior.

Soderbergh brings what feels like an effortlessly light touch to some dark stuff here, and it's all good fun, but the film's pull is limited from the get-go. It's a familiar story, and the jaunty approach�appealing and well-controlled as it is�doesn't find anything particularly new. Spielberg's Catch Me if You Can was both more substantial and a better time�though the shape-shifting, globetrotting nature of that film's con artist offered entertainment value that the tacky corporate world of The Informant! can't muster.

A pleasant late-game surprise was American fashion designer Tom Ford's first outing behind the camera: A Single Man, a flawed but mostly nimble and touching comic melodrama about a day in the life of George, an elegant British professor (very well-played by Colin Firth) mourning the loss of his younger, longtime lover in 1960s L.A. The set-up of the movie seems ripe for mishandling: George's goal for the day is to commit suicide, but every time he sticks the gun in his mouth he's interrupted�by his pesky white-bread neighbors, a James Dean-like Spanish hustler, a needy friend and fellow British expat (a wonderful Julianne Moore), and a pretty-boy student who seems to be nursing a serious crush.

But the competition film, gracefully adapted from Christopher Isherwood's novel, is lushly shot, quiet and unassumingly witty, pulling you gradually into a vivid, lived-in portrait of loneliness and grief. Ford's designer's eye is evident in his attention to the theme of deceptive physical appearances; makeup, perfectly coiffed hair, and crisp, form-fitting suits are seen as characters' attempts to make the best of unhappy existences. He also stages moments of vibrant beauty in which George connects with the world around him: a midnight ocean swim with the infatuated student, a boozy slow dance with Moore's character, a flashback showing George first flirtation�in a rowdy bar filled with marines�with the man who would become the love of his life.

The director also makes some typically rookie errors, relying too frequently on a somewhat pushy score, clumsily flaunting a stylistic technique in which he adjusts color to reflect George's shifting mood, and indulging in some flowery flourishes�particularly near the end�that threaten to drag the movie into gloppy Stephen Daldry territory. But A Single Man ultimately works. Imperfections and all, Ford invests an essentially sentimental story with an authentic-feeling sadness that lingers with you after the closing credits.