Two weeks before TIFF I wrote a preview piece for Rotten Tomatoes that listed the 11 Toronto premieres with the biggest buzz, and I ranked The Fabelmans, Glass Onion, and The Woman King as the top three. The TIFF schedule hadn’t been released yet when I wrote that, but I ended up seeing all three of these on the same day (Saturday, September 10), in reverse order of how I ranked them in that Rotty Tees piece, and all three were absolutely wonderful. For The Woman King it was the second public screening (it premiered the night before), and then I attended the world premieres of both Glass Onion and The Fabelmans, back to back in the same theater (the beautiful Princess of Wales). It was a dreamy, wonderful day at the cinema, with three movies that I know I’ll watch many more times throughout my life. I’m still in a daze at how great all three were, but let’s see how coherent I can be about them.
There was a prevailing thought I had about midway through The Woman King, and it was “I can’t wait to own this movie on blu-ray.” That’s a specific kind of praise that combines a few things, but mainly we’re talking about the intersection of greatness and rewatchability. Make no mistake, The Woman King has both. Director Gina Prince-Bythewood emphatically proved with The Old Guard two years ago that she could make a killer action film, and we’ve known for decades that she was a natural at subtle and moving character work. But I still wasn’t prepared (perhaps because I’m a dumdum) for just how great The Woman King is.
As the old guard of Hollywood critics and pundits like to say, this movie plays. The crowd loved it. We were roused, we were moved, we were excited, we cheered, and we felt “fuck yeah!” deep in our bones. Even though it’s obvious and reductive, Gladiator really is the best comp—it captures the crowd-pleasing nature, the brilliantly filmed action, and the gut feeling that you’re engaging with a timeless story of mythic stature.
Two things that especially struck me were the filming of the action sequences and the execution of the period design. For the former, I actually whispered to myself at one point while watching, “Kurosawa would be proud.” That’s how naturally Prince-Bythewood takes to the skill of capturing these women in action; you feel like you’re watching the work of someone who made epic period battles the bread and butter of their work. That Prince-Bythewood is doing this for the first time is really quite an achievement.
And then there’s how the film looks. If Black Panther set a new bar for visualizing Afrofuturism, The Woman King should do the same for African period design. The costumes are especially beautiful, and they manage to somehow evoke both awe-inspiring regality as well as an elegant, effortless fierceness. Costume Designer Gersha Phillips has never been nominated for any major industry awards, but that should change this year.
The visual design in Glass Onion wowed me just as much. Following up a wonderful, creative, twisty crowd-pleaser like Knives Out is a challenge, because you need a film that keeps enough of what made the original work, while also, somehow, not really evoking the original too much. But Rian Johnson nailed it, and that success starts with the production design.
When you think of Knives Out, you likely conjure images of that stunning New England mansion and the office that Harlan Thrombey died in, with its naughty floor-to-ceiling bookshelf porn and the deep reds and dark woods that defined its color scheme. The settings of Glass Onion are just as uniquely defining and memorable, while being totally different. The film leaves the New England setting of its predecessor for a private island off the coast of Greece, and Thrombey’s traditional Victorian-style mansion is swapped out for a massive, ultra modern complex defined by granite, marble, and open spaces, and decorated with the deep, saturated colors and jarring tonal shifts of modern art.
That complex is owned by Edward Norton’s character, an Elon Musk–like tech billionaire named Miles Bron. The plot of Glass Onion is set in motion when Miles invites his five closest college friends—all people of extraordinary success and influence themselves—to his private island for an elaborate murder mystery party. Daniel Craig’s Benoit Blanc also mysteriously turns up, and then an actual murder happens, and I will say no more about that.
The ensemble cast, which includes Kathryn Hahn, Dave Bautista, Kate Hudson, Leslie Odom Jr., and Ethan Hawke, are all uniformly excellent, but the film is really stolen by Janelle Monáe as the secretive Cassandra Bland. When Bland first appears the other characters are all jarred by her presence, and unpacking the truth of who she is and why the others are surprised to see her is one of the central mysteries of the film.
Like Knives Out, Glass Onion delights in its biting commentary on the wealthy and the privileged, but the execution here is very different, and the film plays with time in fascinating ways as it crafts a clearly defined three-act structure. I’ll keep this spoiler free and stop there, except for one more thing: for those who loved the savage justice of the Knives Out denouement—you remember Ana de Armas, on the balcony, with the coffee mug, right?—Glass Onion delivers a final image that’s arguably even more delicious in its schadenfreude.
In 13 of the past 15 years, the eventual Best Picture winner played at TIFF on its way to Oscar glory (the only two exceptions were 2014’s Birdman and last year’s CODA. So the odds suggest the 2022 Best Picture winner is lurking somewhere in TIFF’s lineup, and I’ve now seen every major, widely lauded film at the fest. So what’s our likely winner? I’ve only seen two films that fit the bill for something that I can reasonably imagine winning Best Picture: Women Talking and The Fabelmans. I’ll be writing about the former in my next TIFF dispatch, so for now, let’s talk Spielberg.
For whatever reason, the last five years have become extremely heavy on memoir films about the formative years of their directors. Lady Bird, Roma, and Belfast all became major Best Picture contenders, while Empire of Light, Bardo, and The Fabelmans hope to repeat that trend this year. But thinking of these films as all pseudo-clones of one another is not just painfully reductive, it’s also factually wrong. The Fabelmans, in particular, is markedly different from the other films in this oeuvre. While Roma, Belfast, and Lady Bird were all about the childhoods (or teenage years) of someone who eventually became a filmmaker, The Fabelmans is about the teenage years of a filmmaker. That may seem like semantics, but in reality it makes all the difference.
There’s nothing in Lady Bird, Roma, or Belfast that suggests someone is on their way to becoming a filmmaker. In all three films, the eventual career path of the director’s younger self is completely irrelevant to the story being told. In The Fabelmans, it’s the opposite; the director’s eventual career path is the entire story being told. Everything about The Fabelmans is in service of two larger points: (1) How and why young Spielberg (under the pseudonym of Sammy Fabelman) became a filmmaker, and (2) How and why young Spielberg became the specific filmmaker he became.
How the film goes about this is a singularly beautiful and emotional viewing experience. Speilberg’s parents are played by Paul Dano and Michelle Williams (she steals the show), and Seth Rogan also plays a very formative figure. I’ll keep things a bit vague for those who don’t know the details of Spielberg’s childhood, but in many ways The Fabelmans is a divorce film, and it portrays a divorce that molded the specific sensibilities of one of America’s greatest ever storytellers.
The juggling act of the two major elements of The Fabelmans—divorce and filmmaking—is brilliantly handled by co-screenwriter Tony Kushner (who also wrote the Spielberg films Munich, Lincoln, and last year’s West Side Story), and the film doesn’t merely shuffle between these themes, but rather shows how they really are one story. The lingering effect of the events of this film can be seen all over Spielberg’s filmography, but most obviously in E.T. and Catch Me If You Can, which remain two of his most enduring classics.
Numerous sequences of The Fabelmans feel destined to become permanently etched in the consciousness of cinephiles everywhere, but there are three that really stand out for me. The first two are scenes of movies filmed by Sammy Fabelman, and what they reveal as they’re watched, both by him and others. And then there’s the ending, where Sammy finally makes it onto the lot of a Hollywood movie studio, and he has a chance encounter with one of his cinematic idols. I won’t say who he meets or what happens (and I especially won’t say what actor portrays this legendary figure), but I will say this: with the conclusion of this scene, The Fabelmans finds a perfect little ending that will make you fall in love with cinema all over again.
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