ON FILM

Tribeca Film Festival: A busman's holiday

NEW YORK -- There is tranquility in darkness before the movie begins. At other festivals, these press and industry screenings are crowded, and there are sometimes loud conversations about movies seen and unseen. But at the Tribeca Film Festival, these morning screenings attract only a few meditative souls, nursing their Starbucks and palming screens, swiping through Twitter and Facebook, checking their email and their schedules. Maybe they tap in a few notes.

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Left to my own devices, I am no different. I enjoy these long quiet moments, but part of me wishes I'd brought my laptop rather than just my phone. (In previous years I've been able to connect with the Wi-Fi of the Conrad hotel next door and log in to the newspaper's system. Even on vacation, work is just a keystroke or two away.) But I won't type on my phone, so I just run my battery down by scrolling through various sites.

I am alone now. Karen and I generally split up at festivals in order to cover more ground. This morning she watched about 40 minutes of one Mary Steenburgen movie with me before heading across the hall to another movie (also with Mary Steenburgen). The one I watched, The Devil and the Deep Blue Sea, the first feature by a veteran television and second unit director named Bill Purple, was -- like a lot of movies that screen at film festivals -- a well-meant but ultimately failed study of grief that featured a better than passable dramatic turn by Jason Sudeikis, an actor I'm beginning to like a lot.

(It started at Tribeca last year when I saw him in Sleeping With Other People and was cemented by his turn in the otherwise forgettably downbeat Tumbledown, which I caught at the Savannah Film Festival. I mention these festivals because Sudeikis isn't exactly the sort of actor you'd expect to discover at a film festival, but that's how I relate to him.)

I don't expect Devil to be playing at a theater near you anytime soon despite a cast that also includes Maisie Williams from Game of Thrones and Jessica Biel, but it's something you might bump into on cable or have pop up as a Netflix suggestion. While it doesn't come close to achieving its meaning-of-life ambitions -- its script feels stapled together and neither Biel nor Williams ever hits on the New Orleans accents they're striving for -- it's a harmless low-impact film most notable for a certain odd literalness (a central conceit is that the street-smart 16-year-old played by Williams is determined to build a raft to sail across the Atlantic -- something that Sudeikis' character concedes is a suicide mission even as he enables it) and offhand use of its New Orleans locations.

Not that there's no local color. A pair of handymen appear as comic relief. Orlando Jones plays a character named Dumbass, which might clue you in to the level of writing. The other one, Pascal (Richard Robichaux), allegedly speaks no English, only a kind of pidgin Cajun French.

Anyway, Steenburgen is in Devil, playing a bereaved mother with some steel, the sort of part for which she seems to have become the first option. She's fine in a role you might wish were bigger, though probably not reason enough to seek this movie out.

Tribeca is full of movies like these, interesting if you know the story behind them but not so compelling as to demand even a cult audience. Devil was shot in just 20 days, and despite some obvious straining for poignancy, I imagine that everyone knows exactly what it is -- the sort of movie you make as practice for the greater work that might or might not come.

When I meet Karen later she tells me her Mary movie -- Dean, the directorial debut of comedian-writer Demetri Martin -- was pretty good, although it hasn't secured a distributor yet (it's generally getting good buzz).

The best film I saw at Tribeca this year was Joel David Moore's Youth in Oregon, and the best documentary was the PBS American Experience film Command and Control (which has special significance for Arkansans and which I'll discuss in depth before it airs on AETN). The most disappointing one I saw was Ricky Gervais' Netflix movie Special Correspondents, which -- as much as I like Gervais -- is absolute rubbish, a total waste of Eric Bana's and Vera Farmiga's time. Stream it if you must, I suppose, but don't say you weren't warned.

But most of them were like The Devil and the Deep Blue Sea, middling movies that might or might not make their way into the collective consciousness. Three or four will surface in theaters, and we'll review them (our Piers Marchant was also here at the festival -- see his thoughts elsewhere in this section).

For a critic, Tribeca is best received as a continuing professional education, a reminder of the sheer quantity of moving pictures that exist beyond the multiplex. And as a very pleasant busman's holiday.

Email:

pmartin@arkansasonline.com

www.blooddirtangels.com

MovieStyle on 05/06/2016

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