empties considerably on Labor Day Monday, even though the screenings continue,
and the festival’s final event –The Labor Day Picnic- takes place then. Many
film industry people (and to my surprise, many regular festival goers) take off
and head back to the real world outside of this surreal-looking mountain town.
But Monday is actually a perfect day to play catch-up with some of the films
you have heard people talk about throughout the festival, but not had a chance
to fit in your schedule until then.
Navigating the Telluride program is incredibly tricky. As you get closer to the end point, the number of TBAs noted in the festival booklet grows, and Monday ends up being a day that is entirely made up of TBAs. That said, you can’t plan in advance and determine what you’re seeing each day and trust that you’ll have checked off all your priorities from your list of must-sees when the festival comes to a close. The festival announces all the TBAs the night before. Therefore, you pretty much have to wait until the last minute on any given day to decide on an optimal screening schedule for the next day. Complaining about how many of your “must-sees” are clashing or omitted (e.g., if I had only known they were/weren’t going to screen such and such) is a big part of the fun, as I quickly discovered. And I chipped in with my fair share of complaining.
As soon as Monday’s TBAs were announced late Sunday night, I knew what my schedule was going to be. The 9am sneak screening of Shane Salerno’s Salinger, despite the fact that it’s hitting theatres in just a few days on September 6 via Weinstein Co distribution, was a must-see in its first-ever public screening. John Curran’s Tracks, which screened in Venice and Telluride earlier in the week and got acquired by The Weinstein Co, was also going to be a priority. And the final film was going to be J.C. Chandor’s All Is Lost, simply because that was the only film (among the ones I hadn’t yet seen) that logically fit my schedule. It’s worth mentioning here that some exceptions aside, I consciously tried to distance myself from many Cannes-hailers that are headed to the 51st New York Film Festival, thinking, if one traveled all that distance, one should try to make a schedule unique to Telluride as much as possible. That said, I purposefully skipped the Coen Brothers’ Inside Llewyn Davis, Alexander Payne’s Nebraska and Abdellatif Kechiche’s Blue Is The Warmest Color (which won the Palme D’or) and saved them for New York.
Salinger did not disappoint as a documentary. Based on the titular book by Shane Salerno and David Shields, which is derived from nearly 200 interviews (and being cross-promoted alongside the film), Salinger meticulously chronicles the life of this legendary, mysterious, larger-than-life and personally unlikeable writer. Witnessing his struggles as a writer who constantly got rejected by The New Yorker in his early career, his relationships with very young and bright women, and his eventual choice to isolate himself from the public, I couldn’t help but think of Howard Hughes (who is also mentioned as a frame of reference in the film), but mostly, Citizen Kane’s unlikeable but ultimately vulnerable Charles Foster Kane. By the end of it, I thought –just for a hot second- that I had just been handed out a piece of the Rosebud sled that ought to have been burnt, and that only I knew about it. In reality, however (and trust me, this is not a spoiler – the news is all over the Internet), the reveal ended up being an announcement of Salinger’s completed but unpublished works, slated to be published between 2015-2020. Some appear very striking. Many will be looking forward to owning all of them. It is useful to put the reveals aside for a second, and think about Salinger purely from a filmmaking standpoint. A perfect blend of archival footage and landmark interviews, Salinger has a convincing and immersive structure that makes you believe in and respect the amount of labor put into the project. It is largely engaging and entertaining. The only hiccup (and a big reason why I can’t give full points to it) is the musical bombast in the end that is completely overbearing and unnecessary (think of the music in Christopher Nolan movies –like Inception and The Dark Knight Rises, and imagine how self-important that would come across in a documentary.) Once the film ended, Sasha and I exchanged thoughts while also tweeting about the film and taking notes during the post-screening Q&A (moderated by Ken Burns). Then she pointed out a woman in the second row who looked like the writer Joyce Maynard (whose relationship with Salinger is one of the long subjects of the film). I briefly thought to myself how ironic it was that Maynard somehow bookended this year’s festival: Reitman’s Labor Day (which I saw on the first day of the festival) is adapted from her book of the same title, and there we were, on Labor Day, discussing a story which she was a big part of. Sasha was quick to notice that Maynard (who saw the film for the first time that day) left the theatre in tears before the Q&A even ended. When we stepped outside, we spotted Anne Thompson –being the great journalist she is- doing an impromptu interview with Maynard, who is apparently “angry that the film does not come down hard enough on Salinger as a serial predator of young girls.” I strongly urge you to read Anne Thompson’s piece here.
Following Salinger, I decided to head to my condo to catch up on some writing, and consequently, I skipped the Labor Day Picnic. Then I caught John Curran’s Tracks as I planned, with Curran and the star Mia Wasikowska in attendance. Adapted from the true story of Robyn Davidson's 1977 journey through the Australian desert towards the Indian Ocean, the existentialist Tracks failed to impress by not reaching its full emotional potential. It’s slow-moving, somewhat cold, and makes you wish it somehow realized the true power of the real story it is adapted from. Made watchable mostly by Mia Wasikowska’s elegant performance, Tracks deserves some attention by being a rare film about an empowered and independent female character who is not defined by her romantic attachments, yet it unfortunately doesn’t go much further than that.
Thankfully, there were still some friends in town to help ease my gloomy mood. On my final night at the Rockies, I met with my friends Kris Tapley (of HitFix/In Contention) and his lovely wife April. We grabbed drinks, discussed our favorites/disappointments of the festival, and then decided to take the gondola to the top of the mountain one final time in order to do some stargazing. And what a great idea that was.
Too bad the festival directors are adamant about going back to their usual four days in 2014. As a first-timer, it’s impossible for me to imagine this festival a day shorter. With many experiences I couldn’t have fit in even with the extra day (such as the filmmaker tributes and free screenings in the park), what would I subtract? I guess I will find out what one less day means next year. Until then, “To Hell You Ride."
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