Complete Oscar bait. You have measured, langorous cinematography and editing, favoring longish-takes shot in melancholy hues. You have meticulous period piece production values. You have good, if showy, transformative acting. You have social problem angle of anti-death penalty thematics. You have plucky, independent vanity production company using culturally serious narrative about the half-misunderstood Artist as stand in for the independent production company’s relation to commercial cinema.
Besides the formula feel of it and my complaints about the cliched film style in general (please, please! someone make a film that actually moves the camera!), I thoroughly enjoyed this film. The script was deft enough to make writing a book riveting, and the period piece filmmaking didn’t gloss over the social divisions between New York literary circles and Kansas heartland, nor did it replay it as Red State-Blue State cliche that you get in so many films these days. And I wasn’t prepared for how comic the dialogue could be. Sometimes I wished it captured the camp, abstracted sensibility of In Cold Blood better, but then again, people can actually go read the book.
There seems to be a new cycle of films emerging, of meta-literary adaptation. Instead of doing a straight adaptation, the new films treat biography as extension of the literary work. It’s not all that different from the older Hollywood biopics (Life of Emile Zola) or from more recent biopics of artists and musicians (Ray), but in films like Naked Lunch, Iris, The Hours, and Capote, the lines between literary narrative and biographical narrative seem particularly blurred. Perhaps that’s worth further exploration.
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