All Good Things

Relationship Therapy: Jarecki Leaves Viewers Hanging with Haunting Mystery that Lingers

• Distributor(s): Magnolia Pictures
• Film Genre(s): Thriller, Romantic Mystery
• Country: United States
• Director(s): Andrew Jarecki
• Actor(s): Kirsten Dunst, Ryan Gosling, Frank Langella, Jeffrey Dean Morgan, Kristen Wiig

Andrew Jarecki made his mark on the documentary scene with his 2003 film Capturing the Friedmans, an uncomfortable look at a suburban Long Island family in the 1980s, where the father and son were on trial for child molestation. The film was made up of many home videos, both happy family videos and recording their tribulations during the trial. For such a normal-seeming family, it seemed a mystery as to whether these two men could commit these horrible crimes, and these accusations tore the family apart.

Jarecki, himself having grown up in a patriarchal family of privilege with expectations of maintaining that class, continues on this theme of family dysfunction with his narrative feature debut, All Good Things, based on the on the life of Robert Durst, a real estate heir who has been the main suspect in the disappearance of his wife, Kathleen McCormack, since 1982. Their marriage was a meeting of old money and middle-class suburbia, but Durst’s growing hatred of being guilted into the family business, along with his alienation from his career-minded wife, led to tragedy and a fractured existence. The film even opens with a series of 1950s home videos portraying the seemingly happy life of young Durst (fictionalized as David Marks here), frolicking around with his mother before she later commits suicide in front of him.

David Marks (Ryan Gosling) meets his future wife Katie McCarthy (Kirsten Dunst) by chance when he is sent over to fix her sink in the early 1970s. They’re an amiable couple, but David’s father, real estate scion Sanford Marks (Frank Langella) personally lets him know that Katie will “never be one of them.” Katie comes from a happy suburban family in Long Island, where everyone jokes around and displays love and affection. David has grown up in a family of locked-away secrets, fake happy faces, and a reticence of true emotion. Katie’s joie de vivre allows him to shed his family’s conservativeness, and to break away from the pack to start a new life with her.

But, despite a brief life running a health food store together in Vermont, the security and safety of Marks’ wealthy family proves too good to give up. It also seemed positive for Katie, because his wealth would open more opportunities for her in Manhattan, than had she stayed home in Long Island. They were attracted to each other’s differences, but the marriage would only turn volatile and uneasy to escape.

The events of the film are shot with a soft-focus lens by D.P. Michael Seresin, not only mimicking the washed-out look of 1970s films, but also firmly keeping the events in the past, like bad memories. The film looks like privileged glamour with a rotten core at its center. It was a time where, given that there was less surveillance and certain issues were not spoken of (mainly abuse, eating disorders, depression, abortion),the beauty of the upper-class set only looks more like a prison, from which if you wrong the family, any chance of you developing an independent life is thwarted by their patriarchal control.

David is a danger to himself, because of his family history, yet he cannot push himself to change his future for the better. He has been raised to not talk about certain things, especially speaking to an “outsider.” Even Katie doesn’t know all about his family’s personal life, she only finds out things by accident. As David works more for his father, his once loving heart is replaced with a cold stone, and, he takes his frustration out on Katie. Katie uses her societal advantages to pursue a medical career, but David can’t stand her having kind of independence, and continually thwarts her chances.

Jarecki’s film accurately displays how an emotionally abusive marriage is not easy to break away from, and how it can be even worse if the victim tries to escape, only enraging their abuser even more. There is a sequence in the film where David forces Katie to make a critical decision that she doesn’t agree with, but, because her body is as much David’s as it is hers, she has no choice in the matter. David is to support her at the moment when this decision is made, but at the last minute bails, leaving her to face this agonizing choice alone. It’s a chilling and heartbreaking scene of control and emotional manipulation, and Dunst, breaking away from the young girl roles she has played well into her twenties, delivers this scene with anguish and a deep hatred of her husband. All Good Things details the downward spiral of a person’s dreams shattering, giving up their dreams in exchange for the safety net of money, only to resent themselves and take it out on the world. It’s a dangerous trap, and what happens when power is put in place of love. Gosling delivers a chilling performance as David Marks, a shell of a man whose emotions are kept locked inside of him, his humanity drained out of him until there is nothing left. Dunst finds a mixture of vulnerability and strength in Katie, maintaining to stay alive in an unstable marriage. Jarecki’s intimate focus truly makes All Good Things one of the more realistic depictions of domestic abuse and the corruption of power and money.

Reviewed by Melissa Silvestri
Date Posted: 2010-12-03

Interview: Lena Dunham (Tiny Furniture)

Posted by Melissa Silvestri on Nov 08, 2010
Source: IONCINEMA.com Exclusive

Ever since Lena Dunham’s feature debut Creative Nonfiction won for Best Narrative at SXSW ’09, her career has rapidly ascended in the indiewood ranks with her break-thru year being topped by her sophomore year and comedy-drama about the pitfalls of post-graduation life. Recently nominated for a pair of Gotham Awards (Breakthrough Director and Best Ensemble Performance), Tiny Furniture went under the knife in November of 2009, and was conceived at the same Austin-set festival where she once again walked away with top honors.

Tiny Furniture tracks the misadventures of Aura (Dunham) as she comes home after graduation and is trying to figure out what to do with her life. Hanging with old friends, enduring family conflicts, working a low-paying job, trying to get her art/film career off the ground, and having trysts with the wrong kind of guys, Aura is at both sympathetic in her relatability and frustratingly self-centered and immature. It’s an introspective kind of film, with embarrassing moments as well as a darkly comic sensibility, and a blending of truth and fiction, as Dunham cast her family and friends to play their own roles.

Since Tiny Furniture, Dunham has spent a portion of her summer with Ry Russo-Young hitting the Screenwriters Lab in Sundance for Nobody Walks (Russo-Young will direct next year), inked an HBO deal with Judd Apatow, and was just named as helmer for the Scott Rudin produced Dash and Lily's Book of Dares. I sat down with the very busy Dunham this month in New York City, a week before Tiny Furniture receives it's theatrical release at the IFC Center.

Melissa Silvestri: Audiences can relate to the depiction of post-college life, coming back home and not immediately starting on their dream career, and still being financially dependent on parents, hanging out with high school friends, and working low-paying jobs while figuring out their next step. Have you found this to be a major theme with college grads?
Lena Dunham: Well, that’s certainly what I did, and it still feels really surreal for me, doing the thing that I want to be doing with my life right now, because when I first got out of college, I worked in a restaurant, I was a babysitter, and I worked in a clothing store. I had all these educational experiences, but they all felt empty to me in the world that I wanted to be inhabiting. So I think especially now, graduating in the recession era, it’s more likely that you’re not going to be doing a job that’s not necessarily in the world that you dreamed of.

Silvestri: It’s difficult when you’re trying to get into your career post-college, and your degree isn’t enough to get you in, or that your career doesn’t immediately start as a full-time, well-paying position...
Dunham: No, no, I think that’s a really crazy reality that you face when you get out of college. Like “Hey, I’ve been thinking professionally for four years, I’m perfectly up for any job,” and then you quickly realize that it’s not the case. I think for me, the film was about the disappointments of life as you imagined it versus life as it actually is.

Silvestri: How did you decide to both be a filmmaker and the lead in your films?
Dunham: For me, it’s funny. I don’t consider myself an actor, but there keep being roles that are appealing to me, so I keep constantly end up inhabiting. Like this character, she’s like me, in an inappropriate way, so I’ll just inhabit it. I kind of use that as an excuse, like “Oh, there aren’t any other actors to play!” But I’ve only recently felt that I do enjoy the acting part of it, there’s an immediacy to it that doesn’t exist as a director or writer. It just brings me a distinct kind of pleasure. So it’s been this sort of natural urge for me, like directing the same things that I write and act in, wanting to own every part of the process. But the other thing that I love about making movies is that it’s so collaborative. The other actors direct you in a certain way, you’re directed by the on-set experience, so once you’re on set, a certain amount of that responsibility is yours, and a certain amount of it suddenly becomes this amazing group thing, and I think that tells you what to do with it.

Silvestri: Speaking of collaborators, I was really impressed by the cinematography work by Jody Lee Lipes, having seen his gorgeous work on NY Export: Opus Jazz, bare minimalist wide-screen shots that captured so much with a lot of simplicity.
Dunham: He’s amazing. I love the way he works because his camera work is so gorgeous, but so unobtrusive, so it really lets the characters live and breathe. But it’s also incredibly sensitively done; it keeps you feeling close to people’s experiences, but also gives them enough space to do what they need to do. So I found working with Jody, who I still work with to this day, to be a total revelatory experience.

Silvestri: What was it like having your mother [artist Laurie Simmons] and sister [Grace Dunham] play your mother and sister in the film? Were there conflicts of interest or requests for line changes?
Dunham: They were really open and game. They were really conscious of playing developing characters, which was amazing to me, because I just pulled them in to say “Do what you do when I see you around the house,” to keep it feeling natural, and they gave it this actorly consideration that was so awesome and surprising. They didn’t really request line changes in the way like a mom and sister would, like “Oh, I would never say that, that’s not me.” They only really did it the way an actor would, like “This line feels a little unnatural to me, can we work with it a little bit.” So their openness to the process is something that I’m forever grateful for.

Silvestri: Tiny Furniture can be uncomfortable to watch, as Aura can be quite self-centered and embarrass herself, such as at her sister’s party or trying to get Keith, her co-worker, to like her. Those moments are very emotionally raw, was it difficult to shoot those scenes?
Dunham: It’s not difficult to act out. As an actress you would just do what the script requires, try to make it feel honest, or just live it honestly and see what happens. As a writer and director, and in the editing room later, it’s just a high-wire act of making sure that you don’t lose people in your depiction of yourself, and you make sure that your character is sympathetic enough that they can sustain an audience. At the same time, it’s funny, I never critique films in terms of “I liked this person” or “I didn’t like this person,” I tend to think, “Did their journey feel truthful to me?” That’s the base that I judge films on, I know not everyone feels that way.

Silvestri: The character, even if they are unlikable, have to have something redeemable or interesting about them...
Dunham: If you don’t feel any connection to them, or you don’t feel any hope that they’re ever going to change or become better, then there’s a way that their story doesn’t mean anything to you, so you sort of have to become invested in the journey of someone who you think is capable coming out the other side.

Silvestri: Have you had difficulty with basing characters on real-life people or as composites of people?
Dunham: Not in difficulty writing, and even in casting, you can have this really fun cast counter to what you saw in your head or make interesting choices. You really want to make sure that you’re being sensitive in your depiction, because it’s my right to reveal myself in my films, but it’s not my right to reveal the lives of other people. But at the same time, my life intersects with that other person, so for me, I take from life, but I also do a lot of composite characters and creating characters who are amalgamations of many people who I’ve known, and people I haven’t known. But yes, there have been moments where I’ve wondered, “Is this thing I’m writing over the line in some way?” not sensitive to the feelings of somebody who I am close with or have been close with. You really have to ask yourself every time you do that, “Is this worth it, am I making something that is putting ‘good energy’ into the world versus bad energy?” So I definitely think about all of those things.

Silvestri: Ever since Creative Nonfiction won at SXSW, you have gone so far in such a short time span. Magazine features, The New York Times, HBO, and IFC... What has it been like for you?
Dunham: It’s been amazing. Tiny Furniture’s coming out in theaters and On Demand literally a year after we started shooting it. It’s been one of the most unbelievable roller coasters. I think the most incredible thing, besides getting positive attention from many people I admire, [has been] making it easier for me to do my work, which is all I ever really wanted and what the film is about in the first place. So it’s this amazing, beautiful irony that making a movie about that time of my life is sort of what got me out of that time of my life, in a certain way. Of course, I’m still 24, with bumblings and worries and all of the classic anxieties that accompany that age. But I’m getting to do something I really love on a day-to-day basis, and I think that’s the most amazing thing that this year has given me.

Silvestri: What are you working on now?
Dunham: Well, I’m a week and a half away from shooting a pilot for HBO, so that’s a big thing in my life right now. And aside from that, I am readying another script that I am adapting called Dash and Lilly’s Book of Dares, which is a young adult novel that I really adore. And working on taking my baby Tiny Furniture and sending it off to college [laughs]. It does feel like I’ve raised a child for a year and now it’s going off to live its independent life. So that’s what I’m doing, and just continuing to work, which is what I enjoy most.

IFC Films releases Tiny Furniture at the IFC Center this Friday, November 12th. It receives a limited release in more locations in the weeks to come.

2010 DOC NYC: Josh Freed's Five Weddings and a Felony

Posted by Melissa Silvestri on Nov 05, 2010
Source: IONCINEMA.com Festival Coverage

Josh Freed is a piece of work. The first-time filmmaker ends up making his first film a documentary where he is the unlikable star. In it, he continually dicks around women for his own selfish reasons, while thinking of himself as both the unlikely “player,” and the sweet, modest type. He freely admits to always having had issues with relationships and dangerous patterns, yet it only makes his film, Five Weddings and a Felony, frustrating to watch. His immaturity and disregard for others’ feelings is really disgusting, and it’s unclear whether his honesty about his insecurities makes it any better to take.

Freed is at both a hopeless romantic and a commitment-phobe. He has had the same pattern with romantic relationships since he was 12: he likes a girl, she doesn’t want to date him, so he dates a female friend, drawing her in and making her think he really cares for her, then he ends it abruptly by saying that he doesn’t want to be serious with her. Yet he is jealous if she goes and dates another guy. His friend Liliana, whose sister Paulina he jerks around, gives the honest truth: he doesn’t want to be with her sister, but doesn’t want her to be with anyone else. After his casual girlfriend Katja says she doesn’t want to be exclusive, Josh falls for Paulina’s beauty and sweet charm, but while he doesn’t want to be serious with her, he still keeps up correspondence and messing with her mind.

Freed’s film is an extension of his passion for filmmaking, and he freely says that he was jealous of Katja because she was having a successful screenwriting career while he couldn’t get a film started. So Paulina, being a schoolteacher and more vulnerable, is like his own revenge. What is awful is that Freed keeps a front as being shy and modest and cute, drawing in girls by being artistic and self-effacing, when in fact he is narcissistic, self-absorbed, shallow, and still playing mind games with women like when he was a kid. He is personally jealous of his friends who are getting married, yet can’t find it in himself to maintain a healthy relationship with a woman.

Five Weddings and a Felony has been called a “compelling portrait of modern love,” but it isn’t. It’s one man’s selfish intentions towards romantic relationships, where he wants to be adored and fawned over, yet cannot bring himself to get past the puppy love stage and deal with the everyday truth of maintaining a relationship like a grown man. Freed is fully aware of his habits, yet doesn’t seem able to really change them. Talk is cheap, and actions are the true test of whether one is able to grow up or not.

2010 DOC NYC: Robert Greene's Kati with an I

Posted by Melissa Silvestri on Nov 05, 2010
Source: IONCINEMA.com Festival Coverage

Kati with an I, directed by Robert Greene, is an introspective documentary about an Alabama teenage girl named Kati who is two days away from graduating high school and engaged to her high school boyfriend. Her parents live in North Carolina for work reasons, and her graduation spells the end for her years of adolescence, getting ready to enter adulthood. Kati, who is Greene’s half-sister, is a bright and lovely young woman; however, the film’s slow and meandering pace does not provide enough interest in what is a rather dull story.

Kati spends her last days before graduation living it up with her friends: having a pool party, taking long drives, and getting dressed up for a party. It’s as if they’re trying to hold onto their sisterhood before they inevitably part, possibly drifting apart while they attend college. Their sisterhood is beautifully captured by cinematographer Sean Williams (Beetle Queen of Tokyo), and despite being on the brink of 18, they seem more like cherubic young girls.

Kati’s relationship with her fiancé is fraught. James, while he wants to be a meteorologist, is still very childish and apathetic at his age. He is watched over closely by his mother, and doesn’t seem like an intellectual equal for Kati, who speaks with an astute awareness of the world around her. He hesitates to follow her to North Carolina to spend the summer with her and her parents, and for all of their talk of “I love yous,” it never rings as particularly genuine, more of what a teenage couple says to each other out of infatuation or puppy love. James doesn’t seem quite all there, and when the end of the film reveals their future, it looks like a hard road ahead of them.

Kati with an I attempts to document the coming-of-age of a young woman growing into adulthood (and even interjects scenes with home video footage of a child Kati talking about her life and emotions) and shedding her teenage skin. But it plays like a home movie mixed with a teen drama, and isn’t compelling enough of a watch. Greene obviously has personal attachment to Kati, through blood and her experience in front of his camera as well as his ex-girlfriend’s photo work. But it rambles along, and by the end of the film, there isn’t a solid, much-needed resolution.

2010 DOC NYC: Ryan Kerrison's MindFLUX

Posted by Melissa Silvestri on Nov 04, 2010
Source: IONCINEMA.com Festival Coverage

His name may not be as well-known as Stephen Sondheim, but Richard Foreman is a legendary freak of a genius. A playwright whose abstract plays defy definition, his shows of absolute madness and confusion have both turned on and weirded out audiences since the 1960s. Ryan Kerrison’s documentary mindFLUX examines the life of this strange and unusual artist, who has touched the lives of many of the most celebrated theater artists in New York City.

Richard Foreman debuted his theater the Ontological-Hysteric Theater in 1968, a venue where he could give a stage to the out-there performers who didn’t belong anywhere near Broadway. Ontology is the study of the nature of being, and Foreman’s theater is dedicated to balance the primitive with the absolute mad, taking the perplexity of life and throwing it onstage for extensional understanding. Foreman’s work is anti-commercial, hilarious in a sick way, and is not performed to please the audience, but rather to challenge them.

Foreman’s work has touched the lives of many theater professionals who have either worked with him or been influenced by his eccentricity. Amongst the interview subjects are James Cromwell, Willem Dafoe, Lili Taylor, Suzan-Lori Parks, Yoko Ono, Lou Reed, and Eric Bogosian. As actor T. Ryder Smith tells a long and strange tale of his audition for Foreman, his story is presented in an animated sequence, turning Foreman into a grizzly ogre and his apartment building a dank and smelly fortress, heightening the auditioner’s sense of insecurity and hesitation over giving themselves up for critique by this enigmatic individual.

Foreman’s work stayed underground for years, until he gets the opportunity to stage Bertolt Brecht’s The Threepenny Opera at Lincoln Center in 1976, starring Raul Julia, a gifted Shakespearean actor who got Foreman’s macabre side to deliver a stunning performance as Macheath. While Foreman himself is not an accessibly likable character, and his shows that are abstract for the sake of being that way can be frustrating to watch and verge on pretentiousness, his willingness to forgo mainstream acceptance is to be admired. Foreman himself would say of aspiring artists that he is “hungry for your uniqueness.” Anybody who shakes up audience’s expectations and opens their minds to the reawakening of life is to be commended.

2010 DOC NYC: Werner Herzog's Cave of Forgotten Dreams

Posted by Melissa Silvestri on Nov 03, 2010
Source: IONCINEMA.com Festival Coverage

It's business as usual for legendary Werner Herzog -- the prolific documentary and narrative filmmaker (My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done, The Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call - New Orleans) utilizes a technology that we would normally associate with fiction films, and applies it to the soulful and mesmerizing 3-D documentary. With the help of archeologists in the south of France, Herzog's Cave of Forgotten Dreams visits the Chauvet Cave, which is populated with not only a damp and quiet eeriness, but cave drawings of long-extinct animals and pictorial depictions of ancient mankind.

Herzog’s camera combined with stunning 3-D technology truly draws the audience into the cave, listening to the dripping off of stalagmites and practically touching the etchings of human figures and wild animals, including extinct creatures like the cave lion and the cave bear. Aside from Herzog’s narration, the film is dominated by the archaeologists’ insightful commentary on the way that man once lived, and the stories that they told through their drawings. The cave’s ground is so fragile that the people can only walk on a two-foot wide walkway, and at times, cannot get close enough to the walls to truly observe the drawings.

Herzog allows the audience to see the drawings for themselves, sans commentary or interviews, in a quiet segment near the end of the film, where the camera just pans over intricately detailed drawings like two large beasts locked in horns, their legs braced for action, or the multiple legs of a man meant to portray him walking, as if he was being animated via flipbook. The peace of the cave combined with the visual effects brings serenity into the theater, a hushed silence, as if the audience is all on this rare journey together.

Cave of Forgotten Dreams is a breathtaking film to highlight the wonders of this cave, which, due to toxic levels of radon and carbon dioxide as well as fragile ground, is not open to the general public. Herzog does a great service in bringing this natural beauty to the big screen.

NYC DOC screening times.

2010 DOC NYC: Josef Birdman Astor's Lost Bohemia

Posted by Melissa Silvestri on Nov 04, 2010
Source: IONCINEMA.com Festival Coverage

Carnegie Hall has not only been the place where great classical music is performed. It has housed 165 studios above the theaters since 1895, where artists live and work to create dance, music, art, photography, and act. The artists who live there taught students in these very studios, and many 20th century luminaries graced these illustrious halls, including Isadora Duncan, George Balanchine, Elia Kazan, Marlon Brando, and Martha Graham. But in the past few years, Carnegie Hall has decided to tear down the studios to replace them with offices and music studios, leaving many of its elderly residents out in the cold, many who were instrumental in the mid 20th century art scenes of New York City. With studios full of fifty years’ worth of their life’s work, it seems hypocritical that an institution devoted to the arts would throw out many of the people who are living works of art. Lost Bohemia, directed by photographer and longtime resident Josef “Birdman” Astor, pays tribute to these singular individuals losing their livelihood to big business.

Lost Bohemia takes the audience on a trip through time, exploring the vast studios of a select group of individuals who have been living in the studios for decades, their lives intertwined with their immense contributions to the cultural arts of New York City. Many of these people were instrumental in saving Carnegie Hall in 1960 when it was in danger of demolition. A pianist who has been recording since the 1950s is at home at his large piano. A dancer in her eighties, named Star, still stretches diligently with remarkable flexibility in the stairwells. Robert Modica, an acting teacher, has taught at the studio for nearly 50 years. Editta Sherman, at age 98, has been the public face of the fight to save the studios, a former model and muse for many designers and artists. Her home, like the others, is furnished with grand photographs of past stars like Grace Kelly and Leonard Bernstein, with an innumerable amount of books, music, and irreplaceable historical memorabilia.

When watching Lost Bohemia, you might feel like you're in mid-20th-century New York City, when artists lived on the cheap, roomed with one another, ate at local delis, and the work they put their sweat into revitalized the local arts scenes with thought-provoking youthful energy. Be it Kazan and Tennessee Williams collaborating to bring uncomfortable truths to the theater, Jerome Robbins developing the street ballet of West Side Story, or the indie film actors of the 1980s honing their craft with Modica, the Carnegie Hall studios provided an exceptional channel for the greatest artists of the 20th century.

The artists did not win their battle, but their stories and contributions to the arts of New York City will never be forgotten or be unappreciated.