Last week saw the conclusion of the sixtenth installment of the New York-based Tribeca Film Festival. A high profile and star-studded event that nevertheless tends to heavily showcase the work of early-career filmmakers, it flexed its usual multiplatform, cutting-edge programming muscles with particular glee this year. Debuting a television lineup that included the premiere episode of Hulu’s The Handmaid’s Tale alongside a deep selection of virtual reality programming, the curators could easily have shortchanged the actual honest-to-God movies. Thankfully, this was not the case — I saw enough good films to fill a couple months’ worth of columns.
My choice of favourite film — Michael Winterbottom’s The Trip to Spain — feels like a betrayal of the festival spirit given that it’s a near-mainstream sequel with a famous director and cast members. A followup to The Trip and The Trip to Italy, it sees British actor/comedians Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon take another drive across another European country, stopping to eat at various restaurants that feel as reality-adjacent in their inaccessibility to us plebes as the notion that a newspaper could afford to pay two celebrities to take a holiday. Given that this is the third iteration of an already tissue-thin premise, I went in skeptical about the chances of lightning being successfully bottled yet again. As it turns out, this one’s the Before Midnight of this particular trilogy, shot through with a surprisingly potent streak of melancholy.
Free of the fratboy puerility and gay panic that plagues so many films about male friendships, Coogan and Brydon flawlessly essay a complicated yet affectionate relationship between their fictionalised selves that resembles a solid marriage settled into the as-good-as-it’s-gonna-get years. There’s love and kinship there but also a buzzing undercurrent of resentment and one-upmanship, albeit of the mostly lighthearted sort. Steve’s got the Hollywood rep and Oscar nominations (as he mentions more than once) but Rob’s got the loving wife and kids. Who’s better off? They certainly don’t know. All they can be sure of is that they’re on the wrong end of 50 and that the regrets are piling up. For all that, the film isn’t too much of a downer. The aforementioned one-upmanship mostly expresses itself via the dueling zingers and celebrity impressions these movies are now famous for. The usual Michael Caine and Al Pacino imitations are dusted off — uncanny and hilarious as ever — as are newer additions like David Bowie. What makes the impersonations extra special is the fact that the duo remain in their own characters while performing them, squabbling and reminiscing in the guise of individuals more famous and successful than they are. Winterbottom surrounds the film’s core of existential unease with the incongruous glow of grade-A lifestyle porn. These two have more than the average human being could ever dream of but — particularly in Coogan’s case — don’t always seem cognizant of that privilege. Lovable or no, they’re not let off easy.
My choice of favorite film — Michael Winterbottom’s The Trip to Spain — feels like a betrayal of the festival spirit given that it’s a near-mainstream sequel with a famous director and cast members.
Another festival entry that traded in existential unease — albeit at a dramatically different register — was Sarah Adina Smith’s fascinating and confounding Buster’s Mal Heart. This is the sort of film that will force critics to deploy a lot of overused descriptors generally associated with David Lynch – dreamlike, hallucinatory, nightmarish, surreal. They all apply. The story kicks off with a bearded hermit — Mr Robot wunderkind Rami Malek — running through a forest, being pursued by cops. Eventually, he breaks into a vacation home and, via TV news clips, we discover that foraging in the area and breaking into rich people’s woodland ‘cottages’ is his usual MO, one he’s been using for a while. This particular timeline is, however, intercut with two others: one in which Malek plays a night shift hotel clerk and another in which he’s stranded on the ocean in a small rowboat. It’s all quite impenetrable and confusing, roiling with coded signifiers that answer some questions but often just raise more questions. That said, it isn’t masturbatory in the manner of many such cinematic nesting dolls. It’s all going somewhere and while I’m not entirely certain I grasped the nature of the destination, I didn’t regret the journey.
Smith has somehow transplanted one long anxiety attack (or, if you prefer, three shorter ones) to the screen and the formal control she displays in doing so is formidable. The hotel timeline, in particular, is Kubrickian in its chilly visuals and oppressive sound design. The Kubrick parallels don’t stop there as this particular manifestation of Malek — put-upon former addict Jonah — encounters a dark figure (gaunt comedian DJ Qualls, spooky as never before) at the hotel bar who starts putting ideas in his head. The man — who claims to be an itinerant IT consultant — waxes portentous about an apocalyptic event somehow tied to the Y2K bug (the film is apparently set in 1999), a theory connected to the non-Euclidean physics being flogged on a strange late-night TV program Jonah watches. Whether these timelines converge or diverge or are simply buffeted along on the currents of Donnie Darko-style temporal shifts is open to interpretation, at least for a while. The story’s emotional underpinnings, by contrast, stay rock-solid. Jonah, who is saving money to build an off-the-grid home for his wife and child, is imploding in a dozen ways. Is he one breakdown away from being the deranged hermit? Or one rip in the space-time continuum away from being the castaway? I’m not sure. What feels real through the phantasmagoria conjured by Smith is the characters’ pain, rooted in very real economic and social anxieties. Fears anchored to the death of one tumultuous millennium and the birth of another that’s shaping up to be even more eventful. Mr Robot is the perfect vessel for all this unease, all angles and bug eyes, expressing what could be too much empathy or too little. His is the impending madness of every millennial wage slave wrestling with the vicissitudes of time.