Hiding up in Telluride

The Descendants

In the local vernacular, the Telluride Film Festival is known as The Show. Each screening — of an Oscar aspirant, a restored classic, a provocative documentary, a slow and quiet piece of cinematic art — is its own show, but so is this town itself, a silver-mining outpost high in the San Juan Mountains long ago converted to an oasis of western-bohemian chic. The Show, which occurs every Labour Day weekend (this is the 38th edition), evokes the eager, collective do-it-yourself spirit of Mickey Rooney and Judy Garland musicals, as a school gymnasium, a restored opera house and a pocket-size park on the main street are converted into movie theatres. There is also plenty of the business of show, manifested in the names of sponsors read out before every screening, and in the presence of renowned filmmakers and big movie stars on the streets.

Telluride’s mix of glamour and rusticity has a special charm. The selection of films tends to be eclectic and surprising, and the small size, short duration and remote location of the festival combine to give it a relaxed, informal atmosphere. The festival headquarters is called Brigadoon, and the event has an ephemeral, miragelike quality. For four days we’re all hanging out watching movies and comparing notes on them. You, me, my teenage son, the visiting film students with wide eyes and orange badges, the nice couple from Tucson, Werner Herzog, George Clooney, Glenn Close....

Clooney & Close

Close was in attendance because of Albert Nobbs, a lovely and surprising movie directed by Rodrigo García (Mother and Child). Introducing a screening on Friday night, Close, who is a producer and writer of the film, said that for 20 years she had tried to bring the project of adapting the Irish writer George Moore’s short story to fruition. (She appeared in a stage version in 1982.) The title character, played by Close, is a woman who has spent her adult life passing as a man, and who works as a waiter in a turn-of-the-20th-century Dublin hotel. It was hard to believe that the radiant blond movie star at the microphone and the taciturn, red-haired, slightly Chaplin-esque figure in the movie were the same person, but such incredulity is part of the delight we take in great acting.

And there has been a lot of that here. Clooney arrived, via an almost inconceivable but not all that uncommon feat of logistics, from Venice, where he had shown Ides of March, a political drama he has directed. Here he was attached to The Descendants, a winning hybrid of domestic comedy and midlife melodrama directed by Alexander Payne. At a postscreening Q-and-A on Friday afternoon, director and star engaged in a genial tournament of self-deprecation. “I pay myself very few compliments as a filmmaker,” Payne said. “But one thing I think I’m good at is casting.”

Clooney, for his part, insisted that his performance owed everything to Payne’s writing and direction. When asked how he managed to cry in a particularly emotional scene, he said he recalled how Payne had turned him down for a part in Sideways “and the tears just flowed.” The actor described his character, Matt King, as a “schlub,” and while this seems a bit harsh, Matt is certainly the kind of middle-aged guy — a doughy, distracted dad — that middle-aged guys who are not George Clooney may be able to relate to.

Speaking of illusions, the tendency to find themes in film festivals probably belongs in that category, along with the notion of Clooney as a schlub. But when you see a lot of movies in a short span of time, a kind of mental word cloud starts to form. This year there seemed to be a lot of movies about parents and children, actual and symbolic.

Freud & Footnote

A Dangerous Method

This may not be surprising given that one of the most anticipated and talked-about movies here is A Dangerous Method. In it the director, David Cronenberg, and the writer, Christopher Hampton, anatomise the Oedipal drama between Carl Jung (Michael Fassbender) and his mentor Sigmund Freud (Viggo Mortensen), as triangulated through their relationship with Sabina Spielrein (Keira Knightley), a troubled young Russian woman with daddy issues of her own. In the guise of a costume drama — a very handsome one, by the way — A Dangerous Method is an intellectually vigorous, occasionally kinky term paper on the riddle of sexual desire and the dangers of scientific ambition.

Fathers, sons and the pursuit of truth: those are the terms of Cronenberg’s film and also of Joseph Cedar’s Footnote, which is my favourite movie of the festival. Instead of the still-young field of psychoanalysis, Cedar’s film takes place in the world of Hebrew philology and Talmudic scholarship, where exalted scholarly ideals coexist with venality, backstabbing and long-simmering vendettas. Cedar, aided by a brilliant cast (notably Shlomo Bar-Aba and Lior Ashkenazi as professors in furious competition who happen to be father and son), blends academic satire, classic Jewish humour and an almost Shakespearean sense of the tragic potential of the paternal bond.

We Need to Talk About Kevin

Not that all the suffering parents here have been fathers. In We Need to Talk About Kevin, Tilda Swinton plays a tormented mother facing a nightmare of almost unimaginable horror. (Swinton, like Clooney, was honoured with one of the festival’s tributes.) This film, directed by Lynne Ramsay (Morvern Callar,Ratcatcher), uses fractured chronology and haunting images to delve into the terrifying mystery of a child gone wrong. Kevin, a fussy baby and a sullen toddler, grows up into a sociopathic school shooter, and Ramsay deals with both the prehistory and the aftermath of his crime, offering clues and patterns instead of explanations.

Back to Herzog

The best movies pursue an impulse to understand the complexities of human life without settling for easy answers. Into the Abyss, Herzog’s latest extraordinary documentary, looks at first like the kind of true-crime shocker you can easily find on cable television. It explores a particularly senseless triple homicide that took place in Conroe, Tex., a decade ago, and consists almost entirely of conversations with people close to the killings, including Michael Perry, who was convicted of killing one of the victims. He is interviewed as he awaits execution, and the ethics of the death penalty, which Herzog avowedly opposes, is among the film’s concerns. But Into the Abyss — which, Herzog noted as he introduced a screening of it, “could be the title of quite a few of my films” — is less a piece of political advocacy than a sombre inquiry into familiar Herzogian themes of death, violence and time.

Albert Nobbs

It is also a story of shattered families. Herzog talks with a brother of one of the victims, the sister and daughter of the other two, and with the father of one of the killers, himself serving a long prison sentence. His confession of failure is an especially heartbreaking moment in a movie that is full of them.

We sometimes go to the movies to be confronted with painful facts of life. We also go for the pleasure of spectacle and the satisfaction in the accomplishments of craft. The sublime puzzlement I felt at the end ofTarget, an astonishing piece of visionary futurism from the Russian director Alexander Zeldovich, was complemented by the childlike delight that attends nearly every moment of The Artist, Michel Hazanavicius’s witty and touching silent film about a silent-film star. Target, with its slow pace, allegorical implications and shocking sex scenes, was one of the most polarising films of the festival while The Artist, a celebration of the legacy of popular art, was a consensus favourite. A festival with room for both — to say nothing of Sigmund Freud, battling Talmudists and George Clooney, George Harrison (in a documentary by Martin Scorsese) and Georges Méliès (thanks to a dazzling restoration of his 1902 masterpiece, Le Voyage Dans la Lune) — is a pretty good Show.