In our last set of reviews we looked at some of the most notable Venice premieres that also played TIFF, so today let’s do the same for Telluride. Although Telluride seemed to have fewer major world premieres this year than they usually do, they still debuted two of the most anticipated films of the season—Sarah Polley’s Women Talking and Sam Mendes’s Empire of Light—as well as one of the presumptive frontrunners for the Best Documentary Feature Oscar. And two of those three were worth the hype.
The outlier is, unfortunately, Empire of Light, which is a true conundrum that my tastes are having a difficult time making any sense of. This film somehow features a wonderful starring performance from my favorite actress in the world right now (Olivia Colman), it’s beautifully shot by the world’s greatest cinematographer (Roger Deakins), and it has a moving and emotional score from two of the world’s most interesting film composers (Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross). And yet, despite this overflow of talent at the top of their game, I did not like this film.
Trying to describe the plot of Empire of Light goes a long way toward diagnosing the problem. Sam Mendes’s homage to early ‘80s Britain (the era he fell in love with cinema) tries to shove four or five significantly different—and not at all minor—themes into the film, and every one of them ends up feeling short-changed and ancillary.
At first the film seems to be about a beautiful old but slightly decaying movie palace in a British seaside town, and how the people who work there preserve the legacy of cinema and deeply love the art form. The staff includes Olivia Colman as the manager, Toby Jones as the projector, Colin Firth as the owner, and Michael Ward as the young new tickettaker. But the film quickly shifts from being about the theater to being about the burgeoning relationship between Colman and Ward, which attempts to comment on no less than three different taboo (for the time) tropes: a May-December romance, an interracial romance, and a manager-subordinate romance.
And the film isn’t nearly done shunting in weighty themes. Still to come are the issues of racism in Thatcher-era Britain, and the debilitative schizophrenia that Colman’s character is revealed to be suffering from. I’m not convinced even the best of prestige TV miniseries could successfully toggle all of these story elements, and at just under two hours, Empire of Light isn’t even a particularly long film. To be sure, the film has some beautiful sequences, and the aforementioned acting/imagery/music are all so wonderful that the film never fully crosses into outright bad territory. But Empire of Light emphatically does not work.
When Sam Mendes introduced the film at its TIFF premiere, he said that we live in cynical times, and he tried to make a deeply uncynical film. And although by then I knew the film had been divisive at Telluride, I still expected to love it, because I’m often a complete sucker for deeply uncynical films. I loved Belfast, Hugo, and La La Land. Films like this often win me over very easily, and I expected Empire of Light to be one of those films where I was completely aware of all of the flaws but I adored it anyway. Sadly, that did not happen.
I’m generally much higher on Sam Mendes as a filmmaker than most critics seem to be. But Sam Mendes as a screenwriter is a different story. Empire of Light is the first film he’s ever taken a solo screenplay credit on—and it’s only his second screenplay credit at all, after 1917 (which he co-wrote with Krysty Wilson-Cairns)—and I would be perfectly fine if it’s also the only film Mendes ever writes by himself.
———————
On the opposite end of the spectrum is Good Night Oppy, a documentary about the Mars rover Opportunity, and how, despite initially being expected to work for only around 90 days, it continued to operate for 57 times that duration, exploring and studying Mars for over 14 years. Like Empire of Light, Good Night Oppy is a deeply uncynical movie that asks you to fall for it. And in this case, I did.
We have to start with the most obvious aspect of my affliction: Opportunity (called Oppy by his NASA operating staff), visually looks a whole lot like WALL-E, and WALL-E is one of my all-time favorite films. So I was beyond primed to be a complete sucker for this one, but it remains to be seen what kind of critical minority that may put me in. Look, the people who hated My Octopus Teacher (another film I was a sucker for) for the way it anthropomorphized the octopus will likely have a field day with the way Good Night Oppy treats its robot protagonist.
But what’s so contagious with Good Night Oppy isn’t simply the way the film views Opportunity, but rather the way his NASA operating staff does. Over 14 years of operating Oppy’s daily activities and programming, and never quite knowing how long he’d continue to function, these NASA scientists fell in love with this little robot that could. One of the most beautiful aspects of the film is the way Oppy’s staff would begin every day by playing him a Good Morning song, and the film’s soundtrack features Oppy roving around the Red Planet to many of these inspired selections, like “Roam” by The B-52’s, and “Walking on Sunshine” by Katrina and the Waves.
It’s no secret going into the film that Oppy eventually stops functioning, and his mission comes to an end. But the way his staff emotionally reacts to the end of Oppy’s life was, to me, deeply emotional and really quite beautiful.
Director Ryan White (who also made The Case Against 8 and Ask Dr. Ruth) crafts an immensely watchable and entertaining film, which succeeds on several levels. It’s about the love of science, space, and exploration, and our fundamental questions of the universe, but it’s also about the way we find and create meaning in our lives through our work, and the way we can cultivate meaningful relationships in, perhaps, the strangest of places.
————————
A few weeks before TIFF I revisited one of my favorite films from the early 2010s, Sarah Polley’s excellent and criminally underseen Take This Waltz, and I decided then and there that one of my biggest hopes for this awards season is for Polley’s new film, Women Talking, to become so acclaimed and so ubiquitous that it inspires people to discover her earlier work. Whether or not this will happen still remains to be seen, but I’m happy to report that Step One has been achieved: Women Talking is excellent, and it should be a major factor in the awards conversation over the next six months.
The plot of Women Talking is as simple as it is horrifying. For an extended length of time, the women of a Mennonite colony have occasionally been waking up bruised, bleeding, and in pain, and they eventually find out that some of the men in the colony have been using animal tranquilizers on them and raping them in the middle of the night. So the women in the community gather to discuss what they should do, and they come up with three options: stay and do nothing, stay and fight, or leave the colony. Women Talking portrays the two days that the women in the colony gather in secret and hold these discussions.
The result is a film that’s almost entirely made up of conversations in a dark barn, but despite that seemingly unassuming setting, Women Talking is a riveting work with some of the best dialogue in years. Although the film has a large ensemble, the main protagonists are three women with very different personalities and different views of how they should approach their circumstances. Jessie Buckley, Claire Foy, and Rooney Mara are the three stars, and each is outstanding in their own way. Also turning in great work is Ben Whishaw as the man chosen to take minutes at the meetings, recording the proceedings for women who were never taught to read or write.
Despite the interiority and talkiness of the film, Sarah Polley crafts a deeply cinematic work, and the approach to structure she deploys works beautifully, breaking up the story when needed, and using affecting cutaway imagery of the colony and the cruel men who populate it. But the script, which Polley adapted from the 2018 novel by Miriam Toews, is the true standout, and multiple lines and exchanges have been etched in my head ever since the screening.
My one complaint about the film is the extremely desaturated colors Polley opted to use for the visual style, and many sequences seem to nearly be in black and white. I found this stylistic flourish to be distracting, and at times I was focusing so much on what colors were or weren’t there that I was probably missing other elements of the work. Would the film have worked better if it were just fully shot in black and white? I wonder. Regardless, Women Talking is sure to be among the best and most discussed films of the year, and it arrives at a cultural moment primed to receive it, and all that it has to say. Other than Steven Spielberg’s The Fabelmans, Women Talking is the film I saw at TIFF that I’m most confident will be in the Best Picture race.
