Autumn comes nice and early on the Lido, where perfect temperatures have a way of accompanying the Venice Film Festival every year. Masks are still recommended for screenings, but the vibe is more relaxed than last year when COVID-19 was still on many minds and lips.
Meanwhile, onscreen, a kind of malaise drifted through a number of the bigger American films — an unease with the country’s beliefs, recent history, and current zeitgeist. The anxiety started with the opening night gala, White Noise, adapted from the 1985 Don DeLillo novel to which time seems to have caught up. Directed by Noah Baumbach and starring Adam Driver and Greta Gerwig, it’s a dry, dark comedy about the fear of death and the way we consume word and idea salads to keep that fear at bay. If that doesn’t say 2022, I don’t know what does.
The novel stands as a peak of postmodernism, or at least a trenchant criticism thereof, and the film follows suit. Jack Gladney (Driver) is the head of Hitler studies at the bucolic College on the Hill, where he enjoys a cultlike following; in his dark shades and robe, he looks like a Jim Jones knockoff. His best friend, Murray Siskind (a crafty Don Cheadle), opens the film with a lecture on the optimistic nature of car crashes, but what he really wants to do is blow the doors off Elvis studies — or as he puts it to Jack, “Elvis is my Hitler.” Jack’s wife, Babette (a permed Gerwig), is surreptitiously popping a mysterious experimental drug. Their teenage son (Sam Nivola) compulsively accumulates data and theories.
They’re all at least one step removed from reality, which soon comes wafting in over their defenses. Enter the airborne toxic event, a hazardous waste plume that takes flight after a nasty truck-train collision (filmed by Baumbach in blowout fashion that recalls his mumblecore roots less than big-budget Spielberg). The event creates mass evacuation, quarantine, and panic in the streets. The crisis is real, a fact that seems to inspire more terror than anything else. It may elicit conspiracy theories, but it requires no leap of imagination.
DeLillo’s novel, which the Library of America will republish in November together with two more of the author’s ‘80s works (The Names and the sublime JFK assassination novel Libra), has a gift for making abstract ideas gloriously concrete. This presents trouble for filmmakers, who, by definition, trade in images. Parts of White Noise the film feel awkwardly literal, especially down the stretch, when even the book seems to run out of places to go. At other times and places, however, those ideas leap thrillingly to life. One of those places, oddly enough, is the grocery store, shot like a sacred space of bright color, Doritos, and Hi-C, arranged with the visual care and depth of an Andreas Gursky photograph. It’s all worth revisiting away from the frenzy of festival fever and jet lag.
A different kind of anxiety is at play in Tar. It’s the story of a stratospherically successful classical conductor (a towering Cate Blanchett) whose ability and prestige have helped her mask poisoned personal relationships and a demeaning approach toward those on a lower plane (which means just about everyone she encounters). On a surface level, it’s about an artist’s indiscretions coming back to haunt her in the age of #MeToo. But Tar demands that you look beneath the surface. Written and directed by Todd Field, who last graced the big screen with Little Children in 2006, Tar has a Kubrick-like intensity of image, patience, and acerbic wit. It completely envelopes the viewer in a feverish daze. The two hours and 40 minutes slip by.
This is a tightly controlled film about the limits of control, so exacting in its detail that I had to check and make sure it wasn’t based on a true story I had somehow missed. (It isn’t.) It opens with two brazenly long dialogue scenes, carried by Blanchett in a flurry of verbal dexterity. The star is at the center of nearly every scene in the film, through the character’s high-riding triumphs, her gradual coming apart, and, ultimately, her spectacular collapse. This is heroic acting that will certainly be remembered in the coming months as lists are tallied and awards are handed out.
Tar is a thorny parable of contemporary life, in which hubris, public plaudits, and a deceptively edited video on social media can create an echo chamber of self-immolation. It’s all the more incisive for being unforgiving. The film makes nothing resembling an excuse for its falling star. But good luck taking your eyes off of her.
Bones and All locates its societal funk in another era, even if it resonates perfectly well with today. It’s the age of Reagan, and youngsters Maren (Taylor Russell with a breakout performance) and Lee (Timothee Chalamet) are adrift in a world indifferent to their plight. They’re also cannibals, literally feeding off strangers who cross their path, much as their surroundings drain their life away. It is definitely not morning in America.
Directed by Luca Guadagnino (Call Me by Your Name), Bones and All offers a panorama of interpretive lenses, including that of addiction in the country’s badlands. You’ve heard of dopesickness? This is a story of bloodsickness, the fiending for that next hit (or bite) to tide the feeders over until they reach the next nondescript Midwestern town. To borrow the name of an ‘80s vampire movie, Maren and Lee are guided by the hunger. Through deft writing, directing, and, especially, acting, we come to see the young lovers not as monsters but as lost children in a country struggling to find its moral compass.
The protagonists in all of these films are feeders, desperate for sustenance to make life possible, or at least tolerable. At stake is nothing less than authentic identity, a solid place to stand in a world that seems to have gone mad. They’re all experiencing a sort of death in Venice, and we’ll all be richer for it as these films waft into the outside world.
Chris Vognar is a culture writer living in Houston.
