Gossip Central

Viola Davis Honored at Film at Lincoln Center’s Chaplin Awards

The newly minted EGOT, Viola Davis, is having a moment. More than one speaker at this week’s Film at Lincoln Center’s gala noted what distinguishes Davis in the awards world. Now she can add the Chaplin Award, presented to a film artist for film career achievement. By all measure, Viola Davis has had an astonishing career. Clip after clip, in big and small movies, she melts into character, never looking the same, whether she’s the mother Mrs. Miller looking respectable in hat and gloves in Doubt, the housewife Rose giving Denzel Washington the what for, or festooned in war gear as in The Woman King, in housemaid apron as in The Help, or the grieving wife in Widows, or gaudily made-up and hefty as Ma Rainey. When words come, she delivers every speech as if it were Shakespearean, with Oscar worthy gravitas.

I said as much, reviewing her most recent movie, AIR. Playing Michael Jordan’s mother, a woman so fierce in her demands for her son, she elevates a business negotiation with Nike, making it a speech about knowing one’s worth. Scripted or not in Ben Affleck’s movie, this recognition of self-worth was precisely how the Chaplin Award tributes—from Jayme Lawson, Meryl Streep, Gina Prince-Bythewood, George C. Wolfe, and Jessica Chastain—might be summed up.

My favorite speech of the night came from Meryl Streep, not only because she’s naturally funny, but because she actually went through a scene from Doubt telling precisely how Davis works—not told in Davis’ memoir, Finding Me. Playwright/ director John Patrick Shanley was putting them through their paces on the scene when Streep as a nun confronts Davis as Mrs. Miller about the priest who is taking liberties with her son. As scenes go, this one is through the roof emotional as Davis tries to explain how her abused son needs male guidance, no matter what. Take after take, Davis was giving her all and Shanley wanted to keep going. Seeing Davis go to a heart wrenching place each time, Streep asked Shanley, what are you doing? He did not like the way a leaf in the background was blowing. Davis nailed it every time she was asked.

On the Road with Jeremy Thomas

The glorious conceit of Mark Cousins’ documentary about British producer Jeremy Thomas is filming him from the passenger seat of a posh car on the way from London to Cannes, for the yearly film festival of festivals. A man of routines, Thomas followed the family business of filmmaking, always having a film to promote, but more, to schmooze with directors and distributors from a balcony overlooking the sea. The festival is after all, a work place. This is his 45^th year, seeing beautiful countryside as it whizzes by on the highway, and discussing life and filmmaker along the route. Some of his films, The Last Emperor, Only Lover Left Alive, Sexy Beast among them, are screening at the Quad Cinema for a retrospective, as is Cousins’ documentary, The Storms of Jeremy Thomas, a glimpse of the man behind the wheel.

This week, a special viewing of Cousins’ documentary drew many guests from his distinctive career including Debra Winger, who starred as Kit in Bernardo Bertolucci’s The Sheltering Sky. Interviewed in the documentary, she speaks about Thomas’ humor and taste. A clip from the film shows her emerging in North Africa with John Malkovich and dozens of suitcases as they are travelers, not tourists, taking everything with them as if they will never return, in author Paul Bowles’ defining distinction. Interviewed in person by Sony Picture Classics’ Michael Barker, Thomas spoke about filming in the desert, taking liberties in the vast expanse of sand that makes this film so unique. Another clip shows Winger as Kit returning to a crowded café, just short of the author’s cameo, as he asks, how many times do we return to the same place in one’s life. It’s a question that works well pondering Thomas’ career as production auteur.

Laura Linney in The Miracle Club at Tribeca: On the Road with Women of a Certain Age

During the pandemic, Ozark was celebrating its latest season at the Plaza Hotel’s Oak Room. Laura Linney, one of its stars, dropped by the masked but crowded party—“on her way to Ireland to make a movie with Maggie Smith,” she said. Now that film, The Miracle Club, having just had its world premiere at the recent Tribeca Festival, opens in American theaters in July.

A road movie for ageless women, as we say, The Miracle Club is a European variation on the female travel romp made popular in this country with The Book Club, 1 & 2, 80 for Brady, etc. hugely successful entertainments featuring an older, glamorous, stellar quartet. In the Irish version, with a purposeful, religious pilgrimage that goes back to The Canterbury Tales (1400), you can add soul.

Linney plays the estranged daughter of a beloved Irish woman recently deceased. The woman’s friends—with Kathy Bates joining in with Maggie Smith—take a bus trip to Lourdes for healing. A good part of the film’s beginning goes into the kinds of emotional and physical resuscitation needed here. In lesser hands, this could be melodramatic fodder for a soap opera. Newly arrived to mourn her mother, Linney makes the trip with them, an outsider who used to be an insider; shall we say, without divulging a rich backstory, she is the movie’s miracle.

In Lourdes (filmed in Dublin), there’s a quiet moment that takes your breath away: Linney, helping Smith in a “bath” meant for spiritual cleansing places her hand on Smith’s shoulder in a gesture of generosity and forgiveness. If Americans are concerned with stolen Louis Vuitton suitcases in Rome, here, you might replace the laughs with tears of gratitude. At the SVA Beatrice theater, Linney and the film’s director Thaddeus O’Sullivan noted, this was the first time Linney and Smith performed together; Kathy Bates worked hard with a dialect coach for her fine accent, and the filming took a brisk 25 days.

John Slattery, Steve Buscemi, Michael Shannon at Tribeca: Actors Direct

Among the pleasures of Tribeca this year, actors have taken the helm of movies, working well with other actors, and finding stories that reveal their strengths as directors.

Actor John Slattery, well known for his role in Mad Men, is not just another pretty face. He premiered a film at the Tribeca Film Festival as director: Maggie Moore(s), scripted by Paul Birnbaum, could not be funnier given that two, not one, women named Maggie Moore are murdered. Slattery’s Mad Men pal Jon Hamm—let’s just say he’s not the Don Draper heart throb we knew, --leads a cast of loony characters. Hamm plays a lonely widower who works as the cop on this bizarre coincidence of a case. SNL alum Tina Fey, nutty as a peeping tom neighbor, is divorced and their relationship grounds the dramatis personae, including a pedophile, a dumb fast-food store manager, a closeted Nazi freak, and a large, scary deaf man for hire.

Sad things happen and make you laugh but no one you really know and love gets hurt in the making of this madcap movie. Well, maybe except one.

And, big reveal, Slattery does fine work making all the comedy and poignance land.

Patricia Field Inspires Happy Clothes at Tribeca

Invited to a party to celebrate designer/ costumer Patricia Field and the fine documentary about her life and career premiering at Tribeca, one ponders the question: what to wear? After the Tribeca screening of Happy Clothes: A Film About Patricia Field directed by Michael Selditch, a colorful romp through her decades-long career in the business of fashion: the 8^th Street retail shop, her genius pattern combinations (plaids with florals that work) and accessories for the cultural icons starring in Sex & the City and The Devil Wore Prada, the better question is, is my outfit happy enough?

We all accepted Sarah Jessica Parker’s Carrie Bradshaw in a tutu, making it New York street attire no less, awkwardly avoiding a splashing puddle; that image adorned the sides of buses for years, and the tasteful matching of Anne Hathaway’s dressy shirts with giant cuffs and mini-pleated skirts, curated by Stanley Tucci for the pleasure of a white haired Miranda Priestly—that is, Meryl Streep styled to look like the supermodel Carmen dell Orifice, not Vogue editor Anna Wintour. Even the detail-oriented Darren Star capitulated to Field’s eye, her unique combos and stylings—for the diva and Everywoman, trans or not.

Vadim Perelman’s Persian Lessons: How Do You Speak Holocaust?

A hit at the 2020 Berlin Film Festival, Vadim Perelman’s Persian Lessons, a fiction film of a quasi-true story of Holocaust survival might have a hard time being made today. Perelman, a Ukrainian born Canadian filmmaker has been on my radar since his 2003 feature, House of Sand and Fog which starred Ben Kingsley and Jennifer Connelly who forge an unlikely friendship. Based on 14 pages of notes for a short story by the German writer, Wolfgang Kohlhaase, Perelman’s Persian Lessons is similarly grounded in an unlikely frenemy-ship between a concentration camp inmate and the German head of the camp’s kitchen. As Perelman told me on Zoom recently, a co-production among Russia, Belarus, and Germany, would be impossible today, given the war. And yet, with antisemitism a continued issue worldwide, such stories are imperative to tell.

Persian Lessons might be considered a masterfully told fable. Gilles (Nahuel Perez Biscayart), a French-speaking Jew rounded up for execution improvises a survival strategy, guaranteed to give him one more moment of life. Claiming to be Persian just as the commandant is looking for someone who can teach him Farsi—for when the war is over, so he can open a restaurant in Teheran—this commander, Koch (Lars Eidinger) proceeds to take lessons in Farsi from Gilles, to tragicomic effect. A relationship ensues, life-saving, yes, comic at times, amidst the barbarity and random cruelty of concentration camp agenda, but mutually sustaining. The conceit of the film is how Gilles creates a language that does not exist.

Sharon Stone at the NYWIFT Muse Awards: And She Did

The only one of this year’s nine muses awarded by NYWIFT to actually have been in a movie as a muse, Sharon Stone played goddess to the hilt. At a packed 700-person luncheon at Cipriani 42^nd Street, she spoke of growing up in a town so small there was no traffic light; watching Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers on television and dreaming of dancing down a spiral staircase, she punctuated her story of finally achieving that, “and I did.”  “And I did” became the punchline of several more achievements including starring as an action hero. Hers is a story of many triumphs--making it in New York being one of them. Yes, she started as an Eileen Ford model and still had to look for change in telephone booths so she could take the subway home downtown to a studio she shared with another girl and a million roaches. Recently in L.A. her pal Sarah Paulson asked her why people hate her so much. “You know why,” she said.

No other movie has followed her as Basic Instinct has. An unknown, she was paid $500,000. Michael Douglas was paid $14 million. There is of course one of the most memorable movie scenes which aside from making everyone say, did I just see what I just saw, features her speech about loving sex with a particular partner because he liked to experiment. Wow! She became the voice of female pleasure like no other woman since The Wife of Bath! Few have torn away the curtain on hypocrisy as she has. Now we have college professors fired for showing full frontal Michaelangelo’s David, she said. Prior to Basic Instinct, “I was not allowed to cross my legs, or hold my arms up. You could not show armpits. We should think about what we can do.”

Freida Pinto made it all about her journey, how motherhood helped her transcend insecurity, perhaps the most common thread among women who achieve—until now. Sandra Lee had taken the stage before, and recounted a time Stone sat with her on an airplane. Sharon Stone gave her sage advice, she said: “Make sure your hair is not perfect.” Munching on branzino and ricotta cheese cake, guests listened intently as Lee told everyone how excited she was to be in NY.

A Rendez-vous with Virginie Efira: The French Film Festival Returns

While many quibble with this year’s Oscar list for its lack of female directors, this year’s Rendez-vous with French Cinema; a yearly event hosted by Film at Lincoln Center and Unifrance, features two women with superb films. For Opening Night, Alice Winocour’s Revoir Paris, translating to Paris Memories, stars this year’s Cesar winner for Best Actress, Virginie Efira. As Mia, she is the survivor of a terrorist attack in a Parisian café where nearly everyone was murdered. Mia, understandably, cannot return to life as usual, to her apartment, her boyfriend, her job in media, a Russian translator. Rather, haunted, she revisits the scene finding healing as she bonds with other survivors. While these emotions are tenderly evoked, Winocour does not skimp on the violence, the shooters seen from Mia’s eye view as she somehow fails to be hit. These scenes are nail-bitingly intense, explosive.

Introducing her movie, Alice Winocour explained, she was not just exploring a random moment in the Zeitgeist. Who has not imagined oneself in such a terrifying circumstance? Her little brother was present at the Bataclan on November 13, 2015, when hundreds were gunned down. Interviewing many survivors, Winocour knew Mia’s trauma all too well.

Oscar Nominations: The Andrea Riseborough Upset

Oscar watchers did not see Andrea Riseborough coming, even though she was on the tip of Cate Blanchett’s lips as she accepted a Critics Choice award for Best Actress for her tour de force performance in Tar. In almost a whisper, the formidable Blanchett, a frontrunner who has already won a slew of awards, noted Riseborough, not even mentioning a movie she leads, To Leslie. A hugely solid actress, Riseborough is in the back story of many films, a minor character or supporting role. A British actress, she was a factory worker in Made in Dagenham. She’s played Wallis Simpson. Reaching back to the biopic about Billie Jean King, she played a sly, deceitful love interest to the tennis star with Emma Stone in the lead. She’s in David O. Russell’s most recent film Amsterdam, and when the premiere took over Alice Tully Hall, she graced the long cast line onstage. Present for a long time, in To Leslie, an indie film celebrated by a Hollywood elite, Andrea Riseborough finally leads.

Unseated is a list of fine actresses including Danielle Deadwyler, Viola Davis, as many have noted. Many ponder how this nomination will affect the Best Actress win, but for now, whatever conversation the Oscars inspire, this nod has mixed up a predictable roster that includes Michelle Yeoh, Michelle Williams, and Ana de Armas for her heartbreaking turn as Marilyn Monroe in Blonde.

Martin Scorsese to Cate Blanchett at the New York Film Critics Circle Gala: Where Are You Going with This?

Joining the party at Tao Downtown on a screen, Martin Scorsese looked genuinely bewildered as he presented the Best Picture award to the movie Tar, noting the extraordinary performance of its star Cate Blanchett. As Lydia Tar, a genius orchestra conductor, Blanchett rages and purrs, at times in impeccable German. Scorsese has indeed worked with an actor or two but seemed awed over Blanchett: given she can do anything, and is, perhaps the actress of her generation: how far is she willing to go? Tar is on many “best” lists as it turns the cliché of the toxic male around, but the question is not how far Lydia Tar can go, but, for me, how far she has come.

The standout scene is when she returns home to Staten Island, as Linda. Here was the modest provincial place she had to flee to self-invent, to flourish in her music, and, horrifically, to nurture a monstrously warped ego. Discussing the film with its director Todd Field, I mention this resonant film moment. In writing it, he said, he was exploring, how does a talented person break into the elite cultural world of orchestras. He was thinking of Billy Strayhorn and how he fixed himself up to see Duke Ellington, into his idea of the cool Manhattan jazz society, and how everyone then looked to copy his style, his idea of how to be cool.

Remembering Aline Kominsky-Crumb

The Crumb documentary is ruining my life, complained Aline Kominsky-Crumb in 1993, as Terry Zwigoff’s biopic about Robert Crumb, her husband, gained acclaim, becoming a darling on the festival circuit. “Next thing you know, we’ll be invited to the Jerusalem Film Festival.” All of this drama was played out in a comic strip that appeared in The New Yorker magazine. Festival director Leah von Leer saw an opportunity and wrote to the Crumbs. “Your nightmare has come true. You are officially invited.”

Nominated for an academy award for best documentary feature, Crumb was a revealing look not only of this famous cartooning couple but Robert’s unusual family, capturing his highly eccentric and artistic brothers just before one committed suicide. Passionate for jazz, Robert had a huge record collection. Vinyl filled a room. Fearing an atmosphere of violence in their area of California, where gun ownership was de rigeuer, the Crumbs left for the south of France and lived in a multistoried house carved out of the rock on the banks of the Vidourle.

This much I knew when I encountered Robert and Aline in the lobby of our hotel in Jerusalem; I too came with a film, a documentary about the writer/composer Paul Bowles who lived in Tangier. “Did your records make it across the Atlantic?” I asked him as a way of saying hello. The Crumbs and my family—my husband Bob Salpeter, our two daughters, and my mother aged 73 and a survivor of Auschwitz --hung out. While Aline and I gabbed away getting to know one another—we had grown up in the New York City boroughs, finding our escape to Manhattan; we had ties to the Soho Weekly News-- Robert was helping my mother navigate the streets, gentle as could be. Aline dubbed her own mother Blabette, but genuinely liked mine grasping her spirituality.