Austin Film Festival opening weekend
All the panels, films, and random anecdotes we can remember from the first four days
Michael Cera and Portia Doubleday in 'Youth In Revolt'
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"Television-actor-turned-first-time-feature-filmmaker" isn't usually the sort of descriptor that leads to high expectations for a movie, but working with Adrienne Shelly's final script and a gifted cast of Timothy Hutton, Meg Ryan, Kristen Bell, and Justin Long (and pretty much nobody else) gives Cheryl Hines' debut, Serious Moonlight, an uncommon edge. One audience member during the post-screening Q&A declared to Hines that she "had a little bit of Hitchcock" in her—and while even Hines acknowledged how hyperbolic that was, he had a point.
Serious Moonlight isn’t entirely satisfying, but many of the moments that, at the time, feel totally contrived are revealed in the final seconds to be perfectly executed, the same way that Hitch might have done them. Since Ryan stars as a prototypical career woman in her mid-40s who catches her spineless husband (Hutton) cheating with a much younger woman (Bell), Serious Moonlight flirts with some typically angsty empowerment clichés, but never fully embraces them. Instead, it gives us Long as a tattooed thug who would probably beat the shit out of us for owning a PC, plus a prolonged scene of feisty scrapping between Bell and Ryan that's sure to give bondage fans a special thrill. Granted, it’s overly talky and more or less confined to a single room, which makes it feel more like a play than a movie, but Hines has a decent grasp on how to emphasize some of its more ambiguous elements to increase the tension and make it more fun than it could have been.
“Starring Michael Cera” is another tagline that usually leads to premature dismissal, but those already weary of hyperliterate hoodie-clad lads mumbling into their pigeon chests may be surprised by the Cera of Youth In Revolt—or rather, the two Ceras: Everyone’s favorite emo archetype battles his own inherent wussiness, Superman III-style, with a mustachioed split personality named “Francois” that’s all Gauloises and violently realized ennui. In adapting C.D. Payne’s vulgar epistolary novel, director Miguel Arteta had the unenviable task of translating Nick Twisp’s quest to win the love of his ridiculously idealized object of affection through various outlandish instances of angry adolescent wish fulfillment into something that didn’t come off as some mash-up of American Pie and OC And Stiggs. (No doubt he also took more than a few meetings regarding some of the book’s smuttier passages—such as scenes where Nick is drugged and sodomized by his housekeeper’s son, or gets caught giving his best friend a blowjob.) To Arteta’s credit, he finds a middle ground that’s neither too soft for fans of the book nor so over-the-edge that it won’t find a mass audience—or to where Cera has to spend the next few months answering variations on, “What’s it like to suck a dick?” from snickering journos—and creates a film that’s sharp and funny on its own terms. If Cera’s not quite a revelation as the tough-talking Francois, his usual deadpan translates surprisingly well to casual misanthropy, and he more than holds his own against a stacked supporting cast that includes Zach Galifianakis, Fred Willard, Ray Liotta, Jean Smart, Justin Long (again), and Steve Buscemi. But the real revelation here is newcomer Portia Doubleday as Cera’s sweetly manipulative would-be lover: Precocious without being smug or flinty, she’s a welcome antidote to the perpetually wounded smart girl stereotype embodied most recently by Kristen Stewart and Kat Dennings.
It was a good weekend for discovering ingénues: Judging from what we’ve seen at Fantastic Fest and now AFF, the future promises fewer Lindsay Lohans and Jessica Albas and way more Emma Stones and Portia Doubledays—and definitely a lot of Carey Mulligan, star of An Education. The prevailing wisdom on Mulligan’s performance is that it’s “Audrey Hepburn-esque,” and while this is probably a knee-jerk response to the stunning up-do she sports through much of the film, it’s certainly indicative of the “star is born” aura she carries in this, her first major starring role. As a painfully wise-beyond-her-years schoolgirl who reads Camus and listens to Juliette Gréco records while dreaming of a life of Parisian refinement (in this she’s a mirror image of Doubleday’s Youth In Revolt character), “Jenny” could have been an off-putting study in adolescent pretension and upper-class whining. But Mulligan has a soft shell, an unstudied vulnerability that makes both her and the film absolutely loveable. And even though it hits similarly predictable beats on the way to unraveling Jenny’s story of first love with a thirtysomething suitor (Peter Sarsgaard, eyes twinkling as a caddish sophisticate) who’s probably too good to be true, An Education has an “isn’t life grand?” charm that renders even the age-old cliché of a romantic walk along the Seine intoxicating all over again. Some of that is probably due to Nick Hornby’s lightly droll script—which primarily benefits Alfred Molina as Mulligan’s overprotective father –but it’s also a triumph of art direction, as the unshowy way it renders every aspect of its pre-Beatles, “teddy boy” era Britain makes spending a couple of hours there a delight.
