Film Critic Notebook: Random Screenings: A Modified Preview of 2007 , Woodstock Film Festival
by Jay Blotcher

As much a true sign of autumn as leaves on the wind or weekenders snatching up pumpkins, the Woodstock Film Festival has become, with little fanfare, a local tradition. For five days in October, the MidHudson Valley becomes a cineaste’s playground, descended upon by film makers and art house acting legends alike, all mixing it up on Tinker Street and in various venues across the region. There is a reassuring consistency to the Festival, now in its 7th year: you can expect films that explore the counterculture spirit which, despite rising real estate prices, still seems to pervade Woodstock. You can catch films about musical artists. And you can savor films enfolded in progressive politics that will rip Bush a new one without blinking.

Another aspect of WFF is the roster of films with local ties: encompassing films shot in the area, directed or produced by locals, or starring actors who have second homes here. Already immersed in piles of WFF screeners by mid-August, your faithful film critic has slogged through some well-meaning work as well as some revelations that looked as if the director didn’t break a sweat but still produced a small classic. Seeking out films with local ties, I gathered together these three works that will screen in October.

CHICAGO 10 (Director: Brett Morgen) THE PITCH: In our current political crisis, past is more than prologue; it’s an effin’ flashback. Chicago 10 revisits the cataclysmic Democratic Convention which took place in August 1968 and the riots that ensued. Morgen’s film combines actual footage of the protests and head-breaking with animated recreations of the trials of protest organizers (Yippies Abbie Hoffman, Tom Hayden, Jerry Rubin, et al) accused of conspiracy in a landmark case that pitted the WWII generation against the Viet Nam-era teens.

LOCAL ANGLE: Director Brett Morgen, who also directed the ball-busting, perceptive, entertaining and laugh-tragic The Kid Stays in the Picture about Paramount wunderkind Robert Evans, had a second home in Rhinebeck from 2001 to 2006. Asked whether the locale had an effect on his work, Morgen responds via e-mail that he edited The Kid Stays…in Rhinebeck, and wrote the script for Chicago 10 there during the summer of 2005. “Rhinebeck is an amazing place to work, particularly for a writer.”

BACKSTORY: Chicago 10 posits that as soon as Mayor Daley’s cops began busting heads in Lincoln Park, the 60s were officially over. The ensuing court trial, where Black Panther Bobby Seale was bound and gagged in his chair, was the last nail in the coffin of the counterculture’s dreams for a new world. Nixon’s election was mere insult added to mortal injury.

But Morgen does his best to delve into the grey areas of this landmark political fiasco. The establishment is pilloried for its use of excessive force, but the organizers are far from deified: the Yippies come off as both visionaries and undisciplined clowns who did their best to exasperate the already-constipated Judge Hoffman who presided over the trial with an undisguised sneer for the hippies in his midst.Morgen says that this evenhanded dissection was intended.

“By the end of the film, it’s clear that no one triumphed in Chicago,” he writes. “Everyone lost. It was the end of innocence for many Americans. At the end of the riot that closes the film, I searched out shots of both the cops and demonstrators that showed the strain and confusion of the week.” I pointed out that Morgen managed to scare up film images of the cops that showed them not as fascist robots but as frightened men thrown into a situation for which they were unprepared.

“The few shots that you reference of the cops are two of my favorite shots of the film,” he adds. “You can interpret their look as either postcoital, or completely ashamed, which I think sums it up pretty well.”

Chicago 10 has been playing at film festivals across the world, and people with either long memories or a disdain for Bush’s current America have applauded the film. At the European premiere in early August in Locarno, 6500 people watched the film al fresco. “The reaction was tremendous,” Morgen wrote. “At a pre-screening press conference, a number of journalists asked me questions like ‘Were you thinking about Tiananmen Square when you made the film,’ or ‘Were you thinking about Geneva or Seattle?’” I realized that audiences were able to view the film as an epic struggle between an oppressive government and a public that is demanding to be heard, to exercise their constitutional rights. When I made the film, I didn’t want it to be a film about 1968, I wanted it to
be a fable for all times.”

BOTTOM LINE: While the computer-generated animation that recreates the court trial is distracting and the resemblances of the real-life men dicey at best, Morgen corralled top-shelf actors to supply the voices: Hank Azaria, Mark Ruffalo, Dylan Baker, Liev Schreiber, Nick Nolte, Jeffrey Wright and Roy Scheider. This powerhouse dream cast surmounts the rickety court sequences. But the compilation of real footage that dominates the film is both sublime and gut-wrenching. Morgen wrangles the unwieldy, epic story and lets it unspool at a breathtaking pace while avoiding mawkishness or histrionics. Required viewing for the next generation of Americans.

CAHIERS DE WOODSTOCK SCORE (UNAPOLOGETIC FILM SNOB RATING): 9 out of 10 THE CAKE EATERS (Director: Mary Stuart Masterson) THE PITCH: In a sleepy upstate town (that looks remarkably like Catskill in Greene County); a failed rock singer comes home to mourn his mother’s death. He must also make his peace with his father and his younger brother whom he abandoned. We ultimately learn that everybody has their secrets, their clumsy gropings at happily-ever-after, and the need to forgive themselves for trespasses real and imagined.

LOCAL ANGLE: Michele Baker was Location Manager for The Cake Eaters. She had previously worked on the lugubrious The Night Listener, starring Robin Williams and Toni Colette, also shot in this area. Director Mary Stuart Masterson (yep, former Brat Pack actress), originally wanted to shoot closer to Manhattan. Baker explains in an e-mail interview: “I was the one that led Mary Stuart to Greene County and the Village of Catskill specifically. Mary Stuart has a part-time residence in Columbia County so she was familiar with the region and was open to exploring it.” (Lead actor Jayce Bartok, who was also the screenwriter, had originally scripted the film to take place in Pennsylvania.)

BACKSTORY: Masterson cast two screen veterans who wipe up the floor with the rest of the cast. They are Bruce Dern (required viewing: Coming Home, Smile and The Cowboys, the latter in which he offs John Wayne) and Elizabeth Ashley, whose extra booze-bloat does little to mar the woman’s enduring beauty. As for how these two legendarily volatile personae behaved between takes, Baker is, maddeningly, the soul of discretion. “Dern was hilarious,” she writes. “He would tell great stories all the way to set, but unfortunately, what happens in Catskill stays in Catskill!”

BOTTOM LINE: If you’re a fan of John Sayles’ well-meaning ensemble character studies that have the simplistic resolution of a short story, then The Cake Eaters will easily charm you. Masterson’s eye is a keen and sensitive one and she manages to direct around some narrative improbabilities with finesse. At the core of this sometimes too-familiar tale, however, is a galvanizing revelation.

Kristen Stewart plays a high school student named Georgia, afflicted with a terminal nerve condition called Friedrich’s Ataxia. But instead of being a shrinking violet ennobled in her suffering, Georgia is an unruly, unapologetic and independent girl who realizes she may have only a few years left in which to cram a lifetime. Stewart’s fearless performance -- abetted nicely by the underplaying of Aaron Stamford as her unlikely suitor -- rises above the mechanics that often plague this story. Miriam Shor, Talia Balsam, Melissa Leo (an Ulster County resident) and Jesse L. Martin round out a game cast. CAHIERS DE WOODSTOCK OVERALL SCORE: 7 out of 10.

LIBERTY KID (Director: Ilya Chaiken) THE PITCH: A pair of Dominican men struggle in Brooklyn against poverty and machismo. Tico is a hustler with a thousand schemes and Derrick is more thoughtful if not equally lost. As they fight to attain meaning in their lives, their paths separate and each learns a bitter lesson about the world.

LOCAL ANGLE: Larry Fessenden, who produced Liberty Kid is a longtime friend of The Woodstock Film Festival, winning in 2001 for the mystical-horror film Wendigo, which he wrote, directed and edited. In 2006, he screened his film The Last Winter about environmental pollution and its consequences.

Fessenden has operated the Manhattan-based production company Glass Eye Pix since 1985. BACKSTORY: Fessenden had acted in Chaiken’s previous film Margarita Happy Hour. “So I’d kept up with Ilya after that, and have always admired her vision,” he writes in an email interview. “She came to me with the script of Liberty Kid because she’d heard I’d produced some films recently and I liked the script very much.”

Fessenden had great praise for Chaiken, a woman working in a field still dominated by male directors. “Ilya has several strengths as a director: she is very good with casting, she has a strong sense of what is authentic. In both films the tiniest bit parts are memorable. As a screenwriter, too, she has an ear for the real, whatever world she’s depicting. And then she’s a very good editor. These are the three essential skills in her type of neo-naturalist cinema.”

The actors in Liberty Kid never cease to amaze, not with grandstanding dazzle but with a quiet luminosity that seems to infuse every actor, especially the two leads, Al Thompson and Kareem Savinon as Derrick and Tico.

“[Ilya] worked every angle in every borough in the city: open calls, we were auditioning round the clock for a couple of months,” Fessenden writes. “She got involved with some casting professionals, and they were able to reach out to Latino theater groups. When Al Thompson got involved, he helped by auditioning with open callers, it was very organic, very vibrant. Derrick’s mother was a non-actor, and this was Kareem Savinon (Tico)’s first lead screen role.” Derrick, unable to find his way, impulsively enlists in the war in Iraq. When he returns home, he is shell-shocked and understands the world even less than before, sleeping in his car and reluctantly attending group therapy sessions with other discharged soldiers.

“Ilya wrote the script long after September 11,” Fessenden writes; “the US was already in Iraq. She knew people from the hood who would fit into this world, and I think she wanted to show how this great national tragedy affected other New York communities than the Manhattanites.”

Liberty Kid won best feature at the New York International Latino Film Festival.

BOTTOM LINE: While the tale flirts with a certain schematic form, its impressive performances, edgy handheld camerawork and a propulsive soundtrack offset any lapses. Despite a surfeit of tragedy, the bleakness remains impressively understated. By the time we limp, honestly drained, towards the ending, we have unexpectedly grown to care for these flawed lead characters Derrick and Tico. Far less violent or kinetic as 2006’s A Guide to Recognizing Your Saints, which this film recalls for its honesty, Liberty Kid is nonetheless a powerful tale. Even more so, a revelation. CAHIERS DE WOODSTOCK OVERALL SCORE: 8.5 out of 10.