Among the most surprising
discoveries at the 2013 Toronto Film Festival were documentary portraits of two
very different but equally fascinating and complicated individuals: Vivian
Maier and John Wojtowicz. The former has only just recently become known among
devotees of photography; the latter name you may recognize as the inspiration
for the ’70s movie classic Dog Day
Afternoon.
Finding Vivian Maier is the remarkable story of the discovery of the
eponymous Maier, a Chicago nanny who became a celebrated photographer only after the film’s co-director John Maloof purchased her
cache of 150,000 negatives at auction two years before her death in 2009, was astonished by her photos,
and proceeded to post a selection online. Maloof makes it his mission to
learn
just who Maier was, and finds a very private, eccentric, troubled woman who
also happened to be a phenomenal artist. The evidence is there onscreen, in
brilliant, evocative street portraits that bear comparison to greats like
Robert Frank, Helen Levitt and Diane Arbus. But they were never made public
until Maloof’s acquisition.
So what kept Maier from
exhibiting her work? Her reasons remain a mystery, although Maloof discovers
late in the doc that she did intend to market the photos she shot in her
ancestral village in France. Otherwise, Maier was content to live a discreet
life as a nanny, an occupation which allowed her the freedom to take to the
streets with her low-slung Rolleiflex camera (sometimes bringing her young
charges with her to dicey neighborhoods).
Always an odd duck,
Maier became increasingly mentally ill as she got older; her few friends and
her former employers (including talk-show host Phil Donahue!) and their children
recall her obsessive-compulsive disorder, her out-of-control hoarding, and her
transformation from a loving nanny to an abusive one.
Although Maier’s
wonderful photographs have been exhibited in galleries around the world, the
art establishment is still resistant to welcoming her as a major photographer.
Maloof’s revelatory documentary is another step toward helping her claim her
place in 20th-century art history.
Dog Day Afternoon is one of the great “stranger than fiction”
movies of all time, but wait till you hear the full story from the subject of
Sidney Lumet’s film, John Wojtowicz. In August 1972, the New York media (and a
neighborhood in Brooklyn) went crazy once word got out that the reason behind a
bank robbery turned hostage situation was Wojtowicz’s desire to fund his
lover’s sex-reassignment surgery. For the TIFF documentary The Dog, directors
Allison Berg and Frank
Keraudren go behind the headlines and the subsequent
movie, with Wojtowicz’s full cooperation. And what a character he is!
Wojtowicz proudly admits
to being a sex addict, attracted to both men and women. (He has no other vices,
he claims.) A former Goldwater Republican and Vietnam veteran, he was
transformed by the war (where he had his first same-sex affair with “a
hillbilly from Kentucky”) and became active in the New York City gay rights
movement in the years right after the Stonewall riots. (He and his trans lover Ernest
Aron even staged a wedding ceremony in Greenwich Village in 1971.)
Wojtowicz, with his huge
ego and profane outlook, is very entertaining movie company, even if you can’t
always take his self-justifying statements at face value. (The sex-change
motivation for the robbery has been disputed, even by Aron, seen as Liz Eden in a
later TV appearance.) But his narrative of the days leading up to the robbery
(including several other failed tries) supports the movie’s portrait of him and
his partner Sal Naturale as anything but pros. And his unapologetic pansexuality
is weirdly refreshing coming from a man Liz’s good friend Jeremiah Newton calls
a “troll.” As Wojtowicz sees it, “Anybody can be straight. It takes somebody
special to be gay.”
Nearly stealing the film
is John’s lively mother Terry, who disapproves of her son’s same-sex adventures
but dotes on him all the same. And John’s most admirable moments involve his
affectionate devotion to his mentally challenged older brother Tony.
John Wojtowicz died in
2006, and The Dog (his nickname) is an admirable ten-year labor of love for the
filmmakers. For any fan of Dog Day Afternoon, the movie is catnip.
I saw 23 and one-third movies
during my six days in Toronto. (The one-third is Mandela, which was surreally
shut down due to technical problems during a scene when Nelson Mandela and his
fellow activists enter an all-white movie theatre and stop the show.) Other personal high points of this bountiful festival not already covered in previous reports include: Jason Reitman's surprisingly romantic hostage drama Labor Day; Belle, the handsomely produced, involving true story of the daughter of a white British admiral and a black Caribbean slave who is raised as an aristocrat (but not quite a full member of the family) in late 18th-century England; Ralph Fiennes directing himself as Charles Dickens in the plush romance The Invisible Woman; director Denis Villeneuve's double appearance in Toronto with the creepy kidnapping thriller Prisoners and the even creepier doppelganger tale Enemy, both starring Jake Gyllenhaal; Hong Kong director Johnnie To's entertaining mix of comedy and mystery thriller in Blind Detective; French auteur Patrice Leconte's assured English-language debut with A Promise, a tale of love deferred; the tough and compelling British prison drama Starred Up; Kevin Kline impersonating Errol Flynn quite well in The Last of Robin Hood, the story of the actor's scandalous late-life romance with an underage aspiring actress played by Dakota Fanning; Jude Law in Ben Kingsley/Sexy Beast mode as a hotheaded gangster in the crime comedy Dom Hemingway; and Scarlett Johansson as a highly seductive alien visitor in director Jonathan Glazer's abstract and eerie Under the Skin. Now it's back to New York and the real, non-movie world.
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