One of the unexpected bonuses in the lingering aftermath of covid-19 is the proliferation of virtual film festivals -- enabling you to catch a battery of debut features in your living room, without having to contend with all the usual, pesky travel details. In turn, this makes it possible for critics to add new festivals into their usual rotation (such as SXSW in March).
The festival of the American Film Institute, much like True/False (April), focuses entirely on the documentary form, albeit without the latter's additional thematic mantra. This year, they've culled some 29 features amid a bevy of shorts, many of which are making their festival rounds as local premieres. Here are some of the rest of the standouts from the rest of the festival.
"Roadrunner: A Film About Anthony Bourdain": Maybe it was just that his blessing was also somehow his curse.
This skinny, restless kid out of Jersey was exceptionally good at almost everything he tried. He took a dishwashing job in a restaurant in New York and became a head chef; he wrote letters from Tokyo to a buddy of his and became a New York Times bestselling author out of it; he was asked to write a second book and in the course of traveling for it became a certified TV star.
In his own words -- and in Morgan Neville's fascinating doc, the late Bourdain's mellifluous baritone is very often narrating his own life story -- his success happened almost literally overnight and changed his fortunes forever. Soon, he was traveling 250 days out of the year and reinventing himself on the fly. He divorced his wife of 20 years, got remarried, shockingly had a child, then got divorced a second time in favor of Asia Argento, the Italian director (and daughter of the legendary Italian horror auteur Dario Argento), with whom he placed all his obsessive care and trust only to get burned to the ground when she moved on from him.
Neville's film is a tragedy, of course, one that we all know is coming (Bourdain famously hanged himself while on location for yet another shoot back in 2018), but the film is also an almost textbook depiction of the twisted alienating effect of fame and material success. In one telling moment, shortly after the success of his first travelogue series, Bourdain talks of "burning my previous life to the ground," as if that sort of reinvention wouldn't lead to further emotional dissociation. The film becomes a cautionary tale for anyone whose wildest dreams are somehow, almost magically, granted, and all at once.
To many people, Bourdain had the best job imaginable -- travel to exotic locations, eat everything, and try everything available, and get paid richly for the privilege -- but when you attain such lofty heights and still ultimately feel no better about yourself, or less existentially mournful, you seemingly have nowhere else to go. Perhaps it's a tremendous mercy that the vast majority of us never achieve such grandeur, then, and can still assume our depression and anxiety comes from that lack of achievement.
"Courtroom 3H": The tumult of family court is well represented in Antonio Mendez Esparza's doc, which covers a period of time in one of Tallahassee's courtrooms, where the presiding judge, an affable, gentle-speaking man, listens intently as case after case is unspooled before him.
The film is divided into two parts. The first, dubbed "Hearings," is a cavalcade of confusing cases with petitions for foster care or parental rights terminations among a steady stream of unfortunate individuals, many of whom are minority or lower-income, caught up in negative cycles of abuse, violence and irresponsibility; they attempt to gain some modicum of control back in their lives with respect to their children -- many of whom have been taken in by well-meaning foster parents -- and work with the parents to provide the best possible situation for these children, who are locked into unhappy stasis between caregivers and their own blood relatives.
Esparza shoots from a static camera base, occasionally swinging the single lens from one party to another, and doesn't separate these cases via edit points such that it feels like a steady stream of complication and disharmony.
In the second section, dubbed "Trials," Esparza focuses in on two separate cases. The first, "Elias," concerns a father from Venezuela, who is attempting to gain custody rights to his young son after the boy's biological mother, apparently abusive, already had her parental rights terminated. After being dragged around by the State Department -- his original petition for a Visa had been denied -- the father was finally allowed to enter the U.S. but, in court, faces skepticism from the state's lawyers that his bid for connection with his young son should supersede the boy's foster family. In the second, an even more confusing jumble, an aggressive-prone mother petitions the court to preserve her parental rights, even after a series of incidents with the case manager.
We do see the resolution of both cases, but the second section feels somewhat arbitrary -- there's nothing to those particular cases that suggests something deeper or more emblematic. Instead, there's the sense of the hopeless crush of these complex, problematic dilemmas that overwhelm the courts, and leave states struggling to provide adequate support for this generation of at-risk kids who moved from situation to situation as their struggling parents strive to better their lives in hopes of winning them back.
"No Straight Lines: The Rise of Queer Comics": The financially redemptive power of the graphic novel is given much respect in Vivian Kleiman's interesting, if somewhat unfocused, history lesson about LGBT-based comics (and comics) over the last five decades. In interviews with trailblazers such as lesbian chronicler Mary Wings, gay writer/artist/editor Howard Cruse, firebrand artist Jennifer Camper and, of course, the extraordinary Alison Bechdel, who went from helming a popular, engrossing lesbian-based comic strip ("Dykes to Watch Out For"), to a graphic novel memoir ("Fun Home") that ended up on the New York Times bestseller list, and made her one of the most beloved and popular figures in the movement.
From the form's earliest days in the '60s, as an underground rebellion against the ridiculously conservative Comics Code Authority formed in the early '50s, gay-theme comics thrived in the '70s and '80s with weekly strips appearing in alt-weeklies all over the country. By the late '90s, when the newspaper industry became "disrupted" by the rise of the internet, many such artists turned to the longer, deeper graphic novel format -- before Bechdel's breakthrough, Cruse put out "Stuck Rubber Baby," also heralded as a triumph of the fledgling form -- which allowed for, as Bechdel puts it, more of a "literary" production and, therefore, more serious consideration from big-time book critics in the process.
Kleiman also spends considerable time with other artists, such as Rupert Kinnard, a gay, Black artist whose car wreck left him a paraplegic (and whose subsequent get-well card, hand drawn by many of his contemporaries and sent on to him by Bechdel, becomes the film's emotional crescendo); along with some more contemporary transgender artists such as Dylan Edwards and Gaia WXYZ. Less a rigorous examination than a celebration of the form, Kleiman's film, if nothing else, offers a treasure-trove of options for those wishing to dig into the scene.
"The Lost Leonardo": It is somehow a nearly perfect metaphor for a society in which the obscenely wealthy operate without regard to the rest of the planet that a great many of the world's most transcendent art is possessed by these oligarchs and mercenaries and locked away in a Freeport warehouse, unable to be viewed by anybody.
Andreas Koefoed's astonishing film follows the near-farcical travails of a single painting, "Salvator Mundi," which may or may not have been rendered by Leonardo da Vinci, who most art historians consider the greatest artist of all time. Discovered by a self-proclaimed "sleeper-hunter" in, of all places, New Orleans back in 2005 and bought at the time for $1,175, the painting went on to become celebrated, venerated and (sort of) authenticated over the course of the ensuing decade to the point where it was sold at auction in 2017 for a record-obliterating price of $450 million -- naturally snapped up by Saudi Prince Mohammed bin Salman, whose regime over his country has been typified by greed, disdain, cruelty and an above-the-law mentality that also led to the assassination of journalist Jamal Kashoggi.
Along the way, the painting was displayed at the National Museum in London, decried by art critics as a fraud, hailed by Christie's (the auction house who sold the painting to the Prince) as the "male Mona Lisa" and the last opportunity to privately own one of the most rare object d'art in world history, and locked away in a vault somewhere unknown. It's a twisted, complex story of greed, corruption, financial malfeasance and incredible hubris, all of which suggest the extreme depravity of the art world and the manner in which the wealthy take hold of our earthly treasures and hoard them for themselves.
Ironically, in many of these cases, the wealthy owners of the art don't care about its sublime nature in the slightest, but only treat it, as nearly everything else, as an investment and a way to transfer enormous amounts of capital to a tax-free object that's easily transportable. Whether the painting is authentic -- and the Louvre, perhaps the most prestigious and rigorous museum in the world, seemed to suggest it was -- becomes entirely beside the point. Real or not, it is now the most expensive and treasured single piece of art in the world's history, regardless of its authenticity and provenance. Perhaps that's an even better analog.