Venice Film Festival offers mixed bag of American films

By Sarah Sluis
FJI critic Jon Frosch is at the Venice Film Festival, where he reports on The Road and new films from Todd Solondz and Werner Herzog.

While most U.S. film industry eyes are turned toward Toronto, the Venice Film Festival has opened with typical Old World flair on the sun-baked, red-carpeted Lido. Among the buzziest and most highly attended in-competition screenings of the first few days were three American titles: The Road, an eagerly awaited adaptation of Cormac McCarthy's much-lauded novel; Todd Solondz's Life During Wartime, a sort-of sequel to his 1998 film Happiness; and Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans, Werner Herzog's sort-of remake of the Abel Ferrara cult film.

As is often the case, it's a mixed bag: one major letdown, one knockout (and early potential contender for the big Lion d'Or prize), and one mildly diverting "What were they thinking?" oddity. Any guesses?

Let's start with the bad news. The Road, from Australian John Hillcoat (The Proposition), squanders cherished source material with a lackluster telling of McCarthy's story about a father and son (Viggo Mortensen and newcomer Kodi Smit-McPhee) on the run in a charred, barren America of unspecified date. Apart from a few powerfully staged moments, the movie suffers from a serious rhythm problem: a tiresome and predictable stop-and-start pattern sets in from the get-go and never lets up, giving us a burst of violence followed by a lull full of somber post-apocalyptic handwringing, then another burst of violence followed by another lull, etc. Hillcoat hurls us right into the story with no build-up or context, so the drama of survival and tough choices, as conveyed through some rather ham-fisted dialogue, feels overwrought, silly, even banal�never transporting or terrifying as it should be.

The story begs for a director with a strong and sweeping vision, and I found myself missing Alfonso Cuarn's vastly superior Children of Men and even wondering what someone like Spielberg might have done with this material�even if his overly sentimental instincts might have gotten the better of him, the result surely would have been more awake than this halfhearted movie.

On a happier note, Todd Solondz's Life During Wartime is a splendid return to form after the uneven Storytelling and forgettable Palindromes. Revisiting the unhappy family members of Happiness, but played by different actors this time, the movie is much more than a sequel�it's an ingenious re-imagining of what these characters would be like ten years later. Focusing on the three dysfunctional sisters and their struggles to move on from the traumas of the earlier film, Life During Wartime is often as cruelly funny as Happiness; Solondz hasn't lost his uncanny ear for passive-aggressive family combat. But the wonder of the movie�and the major step forward for Solondz�is that he doesn't stop at mocking these characters or shocking us with the unimaginably dysfunctional things they say (though he does do that, brilliantly). He also takes their troubles seriously. The hilariously insufferable people of the first movie are still mostly insufferable, but they are also complex, sad and frequently endearing human beings.

The result is an incisive, moving, visually rich comedy about the ravages of the past on the present and the clumsy ways people lurch forward. Solondz scores his vicious satirical laughs, but he also stages confrontations revolving around the topic of pedophilia that are some of the most emotionally searing scenes I've ever seen in a comedy. The political subtext (see title) of a scared, distrustful post-9/11 America transitioning into a more hopeful, reconciliation-seeking Obama-era America is a gamble, but Solondz handles it with a surprisingly light touch, hinting at the ways the country's national mood and preoccupations shape how we approach personal choices. He also draws some standout performances out of his uniformly superb ensemble: Allison Janney, Ciarn Hinds, Michael Lerner, Charlotte Rampling, Chris Marquette and Dylan Riley Snyder all do astonishing work.

Totally unnecessary but at least sporadically entertaining was Werner Herzog's Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans, a tame take on Ferrara's much more hard-hitting original. This time the crooked cop is played by Nicolas Cage (sporting an unfortunate sideburn-free 'do), who, when he's not snorting coke, popping Vicodin, threatening people or collapsing into fits of raspy giggles, is investigating the drug-related murder of a Senagalese family in New Orleans. Cage gives a hammy, high-energy performance, though the character has little of the magnetic menace and revulsion of Harvey Keitel in the original�I found myself wondering what the movie would have been like with Cage's underused co-star Val Kilmer in the title role.

The film itself is high on pulpy atmosphere�booze, hookers and crocodiles�and very low on action, which would be fine if Herzog had found some hook or angle to make this stuff pulsate the way it should. His camera circles restlessly, but doesn't find much of interest or generate anything close to the dread or rawness of Ferrara's version. Every now and then there's a humorous moment, and a few scenes have real heat�one toward the beginning in which Cage toys with a couple of college-age clubbers, giving in to his basest power-abusing instincts. Otherwise the movie ambles along loopily, neither bad enough to be camp nor good enough to fully hold our attention. Word has it that Ferrara was upset about Herzog's fiddling with his legacy (to which Herzog reportedly sniffed, "Who's Abel Ferrara?"). He needn't have worried.