OPINION | PHILIP MARTIN: Chastain headlines Filmland

Unless something falls through at the last minute, Jessica Chastain is coming to Little Rock.

That has to be the headline, doesn't it? That, in a little over a week, an A-list Hollywood star will be in our little town in our flyover state for a couple of days.

She's being brought here by the Arkansas Cinema Society as part of its annual Filmland event which will run from Sept. 30 through Oct. 3. The ACS is announcing the bulk of the Filmland lineup today, and Chastain will be here alive and in person to speak with ACS co-founder Jeff Nichols after a screening of her new movie, the Michael Showalter-directed "The Eyes of Tammy Faye" on Oct. 2.

She'll interact with moviegoers and aspiring filmmakers and serve as an example of what is possible.

She's the bait designed to lure the curious to Filmland, which this year will be held on the parade grounds at Little Rock's MacArthur Park as a throw-a-blanket-on-the-ground-and-watch-the-movies-under-the-stars event, as opposed to last year's drive-in event.

But back to Chastain, a remarkable artist working in an extrordinarily odd industry.

She exploded into the collective consciousness in 2011 when she appeared/starred in six films, including Nichols' "Take Shelter" and Terrence Malick's "The Tree of Life."

The next year she made "Zero Dark Thirty," then came "Interstellar," "A Most Violent Year" "X-Men: Dark Phoenix," etc. You can see her on HBO, starring in the miniseries "Scenes From a Marriage," based on the Ingmar Bergman miniseries that aired on Swedish television in 1973 (and was condensed into a theatrical version for global consumption), acting opposite her friend and Juilliard classmate Oscar Isaac.

A video of the pair on the red carpet at the Venice International Film Festival for the premiere of the series went viral earlier this month, as Isaac, seemingly intoxicated by Chastain, kissed her arm.

While Chastain and Isaac are both married to other people, the online reaction couldn't be ignored. "We're acting," Chastain explained on the "Today" show. "Let me just say, though, this is a slow-motion video, and everybody is super-sexy in slow motion."

It would be naive to suggest that generating viral videos isn't an aspect of Chastain's job as an A-list Hollywood movie star. Movie stars are more about promotion than creation; they are paid large sums because attaching their name and likeness to a project draws capital investment in the venture and the discretionary dollars of consumers.

Similarly, the ACS hopes Chastain will draw people who might not otherwise attend Filmland to buy tickets, in addition to providing some insight into the art of acting and negotiating a film career.

I imagine she might have some interesting things to say in that she has demonstrated an uncommon thoughtfulness in other interviews and in a wonderful essay about diversity in Hollywood that she wrote for Variety in 2015.

We should keep in mind that while Hollywood movies are by definition product designed to return a profit, the industry employs genuine artists in their manufacture. If a movie is art at all, it's art by committee, a work invariably compromised by the competing interests of its various contributors.

An actor's job is to perform for the camera and ultimately the audience beyond, to hit their marks and say their lines, to provide the raw material that's ultimately edited and augmented into movie form.

While you can demystify movie acting as dressing up and pretending to be someone else--Tom Selleck once said he made faces for a living--most actors are serious about their work, which Ray McKinnon once characterized as putting down one's own stuff to pick up another's.

Acting, when done well and seriously, is less an act of impersonation than of transmutation. I've yet to see "The Eyes of Tammy Faye," but in taking on the role of televangelist Tammy Faye Bakker, whose outsized presence remains borderline iconic 14 years after her death, Chastain accepted the challenge of portraying a human being who had recreated herself as a caricature. The trick is to show us the human being beneath the makeup.

The rest of the festival looks promising, though only in retrospect will we be able to able to compare it with the 2020 festival which, though hampered by the covid-19 pandemic, still managed to provide Arkansas with its first glimpse of Chloe Zhao's "Nomadland" and Regina King's "One Night in Miami . . ."

The night after "The Eyes of Tammy Faye" plays, Filmland is screening "A Hero" by Iranian filmmaker Asghar Farhadi, two of whose films, 2011's "A Separation" and 2016's "The Salesman," have won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film, and whose nuanced, ethical investigations of human particularity have made him one of the greatest writer-directors working today.

Farhadi is scheduled to participate in a virtual conversation with Nichols after the screening. Given that Nichols' films, while generally quite different in tone from Farhadi's, are similarly cognizant of moral ambiguity and how the specific speaks to the universal, we might expect quite a compelling conversation.

And on the festival's opening night, "Becoming Cousteau," the new documentary by Oscar-nominated and double Emmy-winning director Liz Garbus, will be shown, followed by a virtual Q & A with producer Evan Hayes, a ACS board member who shared a Best Documentary Oscar for producing 2018's "Free Solo."

There will be more; not everything is finalized, but it looks like the Friday night film might be one that's both seasonally appropriate and by a director with Arkansas ties.

Filmland Screenings will begin at sundown each night. Concessions and a rotation of local food trucks will be available. Tickets are available for members and sponsors beginning Thursday and will be offered to the general public beginning at 9 a.m. Friday. See arkansascinemasociety.org for more information.


Philip Martin is a columnist and critic for the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. Email him at pmartin@adgnewsroom.com and read his blog at blooddirtandangels.com.

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