Invoking a sense of marvel in the face of death, the unexpected and inspired addition of movie-magic is the one part of White Noise that enhances DeLillo’s text. Effectively a mini-disaster flick, it plays like 80s Spielberg pastiche.
The middle section, taking place at a disaster camp during the airborne toxic event, is partially responsible. Shedding Jack’s abysmal self-esteem, he unexpectedly comes to possess a sense of an everyman-hero, evoking, of all people, Tom Hanks. The actors playing the precocious sons and daughters are particularly effective at enlivening the dialogue, much of it preserved from the book, while Adam Driver, as the central character, heightens it with his outre persona. Baumbach, after all, is one of contemporary cinema’s foremost bards of family dysfunction, and one of the high points of White Noise is the choreographing of the Gladney family, a “cradle of misinformation.” The world of academia is short-shrifted (Don Cheadle is winning as colleague Murray Suskind), while home life is prioritized. In the past, Wiseman employed his methodical, patient scrutiny to excavate institutions such as high school, city government, and The National Gallery, and what emerges in A Couple is not only a poignant rebuke of a towering literary figure, but also a modern probing into the notions of marriage.īaumbach magnanimously truncates the story-a toxic disaster upends the lives of Jack Gladney, professor of Hitler studies, and his family in a small college town (which appears to be in Ohio)-shifting and combining elements until they fit into a neat 138 minutes. The succession of monologues is intercut with shots of the garden where Sophia strolls, the serene botanical elements providing respite from her distressing anecdotes while foregrounding the nourishing realm of the feminine.
Through these extended scenes, which may seem more fitting for a play, Wiseman establishes a rhythm cultivating drama in the quotidian.
Sophia was a known diarist, and the speeches capture her eloquent deliberation on everything from maternal sacrifice, her husband’s petty jealousies, and his harsh critiques (“There is a mistake in every person”). In this carefully composed work, French theater actress Natalie Botefeu brandishes her voice as Sophia, delivering booming diatribes or more measured, somber soliloquies detailing her marriage. Saint Omer, a nominal courtroom drama, is a multifaceted and astounding gem of a film, posing moral and political quandaries that generate a wealth of intellectual and emotional consequences for viewer and character alike. Over the past few years, French-Senegalese filmmaker Alice Diop has been steadily composing documentaries with an observational style, which she brings to her fiction debut. Here are a selection of some offerings at the festival, which runs through October 16. Those that weren’t explicitly book-based contained characters with literary vocations working through their craft, rendered in delicious ways by filmmakers as they transposed the struggle between fact and fiction. Spread out over 17 days, this year’s Main Slate lineup included a spate of adaptations, featuring films based on literary fiction, a young adult novel, 19th-century journals, and even a Russian fable. Consider the selection culled from aforementioned festivals as a gateway to the year’s finest offerings of international and auteur-driven American cinema, including documentaries, features, and more experimental fare. But what the Manhattan festival, now in its 60th edition, lacks in buzzy premieres, it makes up for in caliber. By the time the New York Film Festival begins in early fall, most of the big-ticket entries have already debuted-in Cannes, in Venice, in Toronto.
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