Nearly every TIFF features one or two films directed by prominent actors, and to call them a mixed bag is almost deceitfully charitable. When something qualitatively leans 90% in one direction, the bag ain’t mixed, and film fest selections directed by actors lean heavily toward the “that’s time I’ll never get back” end of the spectrum.
For every Gone Baby Gone, which launched a major directorial career for Ben Affleck, there are countless examples like Keanu Reeves’ Man of Tai Chi, Ewan McGregor’s American Pastoral, and Chris Evans’ Before We Go. The best case scenario is usually something akin to Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s Don Jon, which was totally competent and watchable, but a movie I’ve almost never thought about again. If you never knew any of these movies even existed, well, that’s because critics are on the front lines at festivals, jumping in front of those bullets and doing god’s work.
TIFF 2023 featured an unusually large number of selections directed by actors, and the assumption was that this was TIFF’s way of getting movie stars to the fest amid the SAG-AFTRA strike. But on a recent episode of Vanity Fair’s “Little Gold Men” podcast, TIFF director Cameron Bailey debunked that, saying, essentially, that he wishes they could claim to being that strategic, but more likely this year’s surplus of actors-as-directors selections is the result of the pandemic, and actors turning their attentions to passion projects while productions were shut down. I’m inclined to take Bailey’s answer at face value, because most of these actors—including Chris Pine, Michael Keaton, Anna Kendrick, and Kristin Scott Thomas, who all star in the films they directed—didn’t attend the fest anyway, opting to stand in solidarity with their casts.
I saw most of the films at the fest directed by actors (apologies to Ethan Hawke and Finn Wolfhard), and they were, for the most part, a watchable bunch, but that doesn’t exactly mean they were good. Let’s look at the three entries I saw by male actors: Michael Keaton’s Knox Goes Away, Virgo Mortensen’s The Dead Don’t Hurt, and Chris Pine’s Poolman.
The best of these was Viggo’s film, a romantic western in which he stars opposite the great Vicky Krieps. The film operates on two timelines, frequently intercutting between them. The earlier one is about the budding romance between Vicky and Viggo, and how she gets by when he goes off to war, while the latter is about what he does following her death (and that’s no spoiler; the opening shot of the film is of Viggo burying her body).
The Dead Don’t Hurt is at its best when Krieps occupies the central narrative. She’s outstanding as always, and she brings a lovely, breezy energy to a genre that isn’t known for its femininity. But the sequences without Krieps devolve into a boilerplate western revenge story. That’s not entirely a pejorative; revenge movies are dependably sturdy entertainment, and the formula is just as reliable as it is derivative. But these sequences are undeniably disappointing in contrast with the Vicky Krieps storyline, and the film lags without her presence.
Mortensen, who also wrote the film and even composed the score, shows a genuine skill with character and imagery, and the cinematography is beautiful. But pacing was more of a mixed bag, and other critics varied between describing the film as a “slow burn” to just downright slow. But I was engaged for the entire 129 minutes, and I prefer to think of the film as measured and patient. Within the realm of actors as directors, perhaps the best praise I can give is this: The next time TIFF programs a film directed by Viggo Mortensen, I won’t hesitate to see it.
That’s a statement I’m less likely to make for Michael Keaton and Chris Pine. Knox Goes Away is the second film directed by Michael Keaton, after 2008’s The Merry Gentleman. Keaton somehow plays an old hitman with health complications in both films, so I guess good on him that he’s found his niche. The two films actually make for fascinating companion pieces, because the former is a character piece without enough of a plot to sustain it, while the newer film is a hyper detailed procedural without interesting characters.
That probably makes them sound worse than they are, and I wouldn’t hesitate to place both movies in the Don Jon realm of pleasant-enough diversions, rather than the American Pastoral realm of Please stick to your day job. As the titular Knox, Keaton plays an aging hitman with rapidly declining mental acuity (due to some dementia-adjacent disease that I just don’t care enough to check on whether it’s actually real). So he’s getting ready to cash out and settle his affairs when all of a sudden his estranged son (James Marsden) knocks at the door, asking dear old dad how to handle the dead body of his daughter’s rapist that he just killed. From there, the movie basically kicks into the Breaking Bad zone of the granular details related to getting away with crimes.
It’s all engaging enough that you never want to check out, and the wrap-up is more satisfying than most of the movie that preceded it. None of which is true of Chris Pine’s Poolman.
Every fall fest cycle ends up incurring a pile-on target for critical ire, and this year Poolman is the lucky loser. That makes it two years in a row for Chris Pine, whose Don’t Worry Darling earned this dubious honor last year. And unlike with #SpitGate, there’s no external, meme-driven fake controversy to divert from the movie’s qualitative failures.
The easiest way to describe Poolman is Chinatown by way of The Big Lebowski, and that description is accurate in the sense that it’s painfully clear that’s what the movie is going for. But there’s never a moment watching the film that genuinely evokes either of those comparisons (except for when the characters in Poolman literally name-drop Chinatown, several times). It’s like saying someone in a Johnny Cash shirt from Hot Topic reminds you of Johnny Cash. They don’t, they just paid to be covered in his face.
What Poolman actually reminded me of was a much worse version of Under the Silver Lake, a movie whose Cannes premiere went so badly that A24 quickly scrapped the film’s entire theatrical release. While I don’t think either film is unwatchable, they both have completely incoherent plots that never remotely come together. I will say one thing in Chris Pine’s favor: Poolman showed that he might be a genuinely good director of other actors. But that’s where my praise ends, and Pine’s screenplay is so bad that he’s almost lucky the TIFF narrative and attention on actor-directors has diverted attention from what might be the true nadir of Pine’s skillset.