Ignatiy Vishnevetsky
Mascots (Grade: C), Christopher Guest’s first mockumentary since A Mighty Wind (and first feature as a director in over a decade), offers up an unwieldy cast of familiar Guest-ian caricatures, but little sympathy. There’s another problem: The wacky sports mascot competition in which this particular set of over-sharing oddballs is participating is one of Guest’s lamer ideas, and whether you’ll find yourself snickering at the climax or occasionally fidgeting out of boredom depends on whether you find sports mascots inherently hilarious. One can’t help but suspect that longtime Guest co-writer and company player Eugene Levy might have been a grounding presence, as his characters are some of the most affectionately drawn (and saddest, in the case of A Mighty Wind) in Guest’s body of work. He sits this one out, as does the invaluable Catherine O’Hara.
Guest’s previous mockumentary projects all followed an identical formula that is laid bare here because of a lack of counterpoint. The play in Waiting For Guffman is staged for what’s recognizably a small-town Midwestern audience, the dog show in Best In Show could pass for the real thing, and the musicianship in A Mighty Wind is legitimately good—but in Mascots, everything is bizarre. (For instance, instead of hoping to impress a big city theater critic as in Guffman, the organizers are trying to land a TV deal with the Gluten Free Channel.) With no measure of reality to bounce off of, Guest’s regular ensemble of experienced improvisers (plus a few newcomers, including Zach Woods, tasked with filling the Levy role) come across like they’re suffering from Quirk Tourette’s, blurting out whatever weird traits come to mind: micropenis, raised in a cult based around Highway To Heaven, etc.
These characters aren’t that much weirder than earlier Guest creations; they’re just less funny and likable. He and his ensemble can still put together the occasional good throwaway gag (see: a memoir titled A Moose-ing Grace: A Mascot’s Journey To God… And Success In Real Estate), but Mascots strains for comic set-pieces. A visiting soccer mascot from England getting pulled over for driving on the side of the road is what passes for conflict here. It’s been 20 years (almost to the day) since Waiting For Guffman had its international premiere at TIFF, and Guest’s return to the genre he popularized feels like an undercooked rehash, right down to pointless inclusion of his Guffman character, Corky St. Clair.
Fulfilling my patriotic duty, I headed into TIFF’s press screening of The Duelist (Grade: C+), an expensive-ish (by Russian standards) piece of humorless camp that finds the midway point between Tom Hooper and Zack Snyder. Worst of all, it’s actually kind of diverting: a soap opera about a disgraced nobleman who returns to mid-19th century Saint Petersburg under a stolen identity to become a sharpshooter (his signature trick is blowing a shot glass off his own head with a ricocheted bullet) and contract killer. The premise of a Tsarist conspiracy that offs its enemies by luring them into duels with a professional dead shot is irresistible, but director Aleksei Mizgirev’s script is a mess of backstories and contradictory ideas about the myth of the Russian aristocracy.
Mizgirev has also somehow figured out how to make a visually incoherent movie without resorting to quick cuts; every shot is framed for oomph (The Duelist will be distributed in IMAX in the U.S.), leaving all questions related to eye lines and continuity up to the interpretation of the audience. Yet this prodigally over-serious collection of fetish-wear-esque period costumes, rain machine effects, crumbling textures, and disorienting low angles is rarely boring. With fitful success, it attempts to twist the intrigues of the Tolstoy-era nobility into overwrought pulp, complete with a self-loathing sex scene, while Pyotr Fyodorov—looking even more like a cut-rate Colin Farrell than usual—broods and glowers his way through every scene as the anti-hero who keeps reminding everyone that he’s an anti-hero.
Pulp and disappointment turned out to the major motifs of my final days at TIFF, best exemplified by Walter Hill’s prurient transploitation flick (Re)Assignment (Grade: C+). A pulp fairy tale in the mode of Hill’s earlier (and much, much better) Johnny Handsome, (Re)Assignment casts Michelle Rodriguez as Frank Kitchen, a hit man given a forced sex change by a vengeful plastic surgeon (Sigourney Weaver). I’m guessing that zero trans people were consulted on the script (originally titled Tomboy), which comes across as outdated but isn’t wrongheaded. Frank’s new feminine body doesn’t turn him into a woman any more than having “male” on your birth certificate makes one a man, and, despite looking like Michelle Rodriguez, his few attempts at passing as female fail. (A nice touch: He puts on a wig, despite having his own shoulder-length hair.) Basically, Re(Assignment)’s unwillingness to do much of anything with its premise gives it a modicum of integrity.
But at the same time, Hill—one of the essential American genre directors, responsible for the likes of The Driver, The Warriors, and 48 Hrs.—seems to have no clue what this movie is supposed to be about, other than pulp for pulp’s sake. There’s ample nudity, plenty of lurid touches, and music by Giorgio Moroder, creating a level of heightened sleaze. But there are also competing framing devices (the Weaver character‘s scenery-chewing narration from a mental hospital, Frank’s video-taped confession, comic-book panel transitions) and more dropped ideas than plot. I’m of two minds on the unsituated Vancouver shooting locations (doubling very poorly for San Francisco): Having Canada’s default urban “nowhere in particular” stand in for one of America’s most distinctive cities adds to the air of cheapness, but also mirrors the central gambit of making a character defined by his intractable gender. Frank is always a man, but he is always played by a woman.
In another instance of suggestive casting, Nocturnal Animals (Grade: B-) plays off of the fact that Amy Adams and Isla Fisher kind of look alike by having one play a fictional character that the other suspects might be modeled on her. There’s no quick way to describe the plot of fashion designer Tom Ford’s second feature, an adaption of Austin Wright’s novel Tony And Susan that takes substantial liberties in interpreting a text that is already about how we interpret texts (including our own lives, insofar as they qualify as texts), pushing it further into stylization and reference. Confused yet? Here goes: Susan (Adams) receives a manuscript for a novel by her long estranged ex-husband, Tony (Jake Gyllenhaal), a violent tale about evil and self-destruction that she interprets as a coded attack.
Ford uses casting to imply what Susan is thinking: Gyllenhaal also plays the protagonist of the novel, whom she sees as a transparent self-portrait; Fisher plays his wife, because she might be Susan; and India Menuez and Ellie Bamber (who also look a lot a like) play, respectively, Susan’s real-life daughter and the daughter in the novel. Trickier still, the most ambiguous and fascinating role goes to a completely fictional character, a lawman (Michael Shannon, excellent) who helps the protagonist seek revenge against a trio of murderous hillbillies. But wait, there’s more: the Cormac McCarthy-esque Texas setting is Ford’s idea, and so is the decision to make Susan (middle-class in Wright’s novel) into an art dealer in a chic and soul-sucking Los Angeles.