Jason Bailey
AUSTIN, TX: It’s been nearly a decade since Joe Swanberg, once a SXSW standby, had a film at the festival; he’s spent that time acting, producing, and working in television, which felt like a letdown, since his 2017 SW feature Win It All was one of his best. He reunites with that film’s star and co-writer, Jake Johnson, for his new film The Sun Never Sets, but it’s less of a showcase for Johnson than for Dakota Fanning, who finally has a starring vehicle that shows what she can do as an adult actor.
Fanning stars as Wendy, whose life is agreeable but uneventful; she works on construction crews and has spent two years dating Jack (Johnson), a likable divorced dad. But he feels they need some time apart before taking the next big step, a decision he immediately regrets when her ex shows up. Some of the plot machinations don’t quite track, but they also have the messiness of real life, a consistent quality in Swanberg’s work, and The Sun Never Sets is essentially a chronicle of grown-ups trying their best to figure things out (and, quite often, failing miserably).
One trusted critic friend told me that The Saviors was the best movie she saw in advance of SXSW; another told me that it was, among other things, “dogwater.” With such polarized responses, I was surprised to find myself squarely in the middle on this story of a decaying relationships and political delusions; it boasts a handful of keenly observed performances, a couple that seem dropped in from another movie, and a narrative of twists and misreads that feels like it’s not playing square.
Adam Scott (proving himself, again, to be one of our best reactors) and Danielle Deadwyler (a pleasure to watch in a rare contemporary setting) star as Sean and Kim, a couple on the verge of divorce, for all the usual reasons — he lost his job, they grew apart, and neither of them seem willing to exert any more energy. Into this malaise come Amir (Theo Rossi) and Jahan (Nazanin Boniadi), a Middle Eastern brother and sister renting out their guest house via Airbnb, whose arguably questionable behavior prompts Sean to start poking around. His slowly-churning suspicion and paranoia are first another wedge between him and Kim — but then it becomes a point of common interest, and the threading of the needle within their relationship is the best quality of the script by Travis Betz and director Kevin Hamedani. But the supporting characters are poorly developed (Greg Kinnear’s private eye feels like a side character from a ‘00s Will Ferrell movie), and the final twist plays like something they cooked up early and worked towards, whether it made sense or not.
There’s a fundamental and fascinating tension powering Chasing Summer, which is written by and stars stand-up comic Iliza Shlesinger and is directed by Josephine Decker. What you watch play out are two seemingly incompatible sensibilities; Shlesinger is essentially a populist, fronting widely-streamed Netflix specials full of commentary on the battle of the sexes, and she’s written the kind of mainstream comedy Judd Apatow might have produced, while Decker works in an experimental, art-house style, making features like Madeline’s Madeline and Shirley that aren’t exactly laugh riots (or blockbusters).
And yet this seemingly unlikely match pays dividends — Decker lends Shlesinger legitimacy, Shlesinger provides Decker with a project that wears its heart on its sleeve in an audience-friendly way. It’s not entirely successful; some of the narrative beats are painfully predictable, while the transitions from comic to serious subject matter are occasionally bumpy. But this is a charming indie dramedy, and Shlesinger is a charismatic and authentic leading lady.
The inspired idea at the center of Vicky Jewson’s Pretty Lethal is that the grace and athleticism required of competitive ballet dancers will also make them straight-up killers in hand-to-hand combat. It’s a sensible connection; the best sequences in kung-fu movies and Hong Kong action flicks have a balletic intricacy to their fight choreography, so director Jewson and screenwriter Kate Freund simply take that to its logical conclusion.
The story here concerns a dysfunctional ballet troupe that gets waylaid en route to a competition in Budapest, with a detour that leads them to a sketchy bar in the middle of nowhere, populated by scuzzy criminals and owned by Devora Kasimer (Uma Thurman), who was herself a ballerina, once upon a time. There are strands of Die Hard and Hostel DNA here, with expert action beats and small nuggets of wit, even if the entire enterprise is somewhat infected by a sense of smug satisfaction. But the performers are all game — lead Maddie Ziegler, a Dance Moms alum, is particularly engaging, and Thurman fully understands the assignment — and it’s not a moment too long at 88 minutes.
A less successful female-fronted genre piece, Forbidden Fruits is an exercise in good intentions and copious attitude, all but undone by clumsy execution. The plot is essentially The Craft by way of Mean Girls, with new-girl-in-town Pumpkin (Lola Tung, from The Summer I Turned Pretty) penetrating the tight clique of popular girls who work at the upscale mall clothing store Forever Eden, only to discover that they’re a coven of witches.
The screenplay, by Lilly Houghton and director Meredith Alloway (based on a play by Houghton) has some funny lines and promising situations, but Alloway can’t quite find a consistent comic rhythm; even when the scenarios are inspired, every scene feels a half-beat off. She also has trouble finding and sustaining a workable tone — the intended archness of the enterprise is unclear, so it’s hard to take the occasional moments of poignancy seriously. There are a couple of inspired kills at the end, and some memorable performances (particularly from Tung and Lili Reinhart as the Regina George of the group), but this one mostly feels like a missed opportunity.
Elizabeth Banks is not only the star but one of the producers of Alex Prager’s DreamQuil, and it’s easy to see why she wanted to get it made — this is the kind of role most actors would kill for, a dual-acting opportunity playing both a frazzled working mother and the robot “helper” who is sent to replace her when she undergoes the relaxation and reset procedure of the title. Prager, a visual artist and filmmaker, absolutely nails the language and aesthetics of the mental wellness world, and Banks adroitly carves out the differences and similarities that make both variations of the character unique.
Prager is equally skilled at the quiet accumulation of menace and dread that make the picture’s middle section effective, but she loses her way in the home stretch, thanks to an unfortunate series of fake-outs and red herrings that makes it all more conventional (and predictable) as it goes. But Banks’s work is worth praising; same for John C. Reilly, in the kind of thankless-husband role that he does better than just about anybody.
You can’t toss a stick without hitting a boilerplate bio-documentary at a film festival, and this familiarity of form and subject may be part of why Serling feels at least moderately innovative; it’s as much a bio-doc as a free-form exploration of the views, theories, and complaints of its subject, Twilight Zone creator Rod Serling. It checks the bio-doc boxes with ease, conveying his fast rise and slow fade via copious clips, archival interviews, and reminisces of family and colleagues.
But he left so much audio behind, via interviews and his personal dictation recordings, that he’s able to essentially narrate his own story, and he somehow comes off as both an open book and an utter enigma. Director Jonah Tulis embraces that contradiction rather than attempting to crack it, and his film is better for it. It’s impeccably assembled — editor Josh Bayer’s cuts move like lightning — and without pushing into didacticism, Tulis subtly makes the important point that much of his political commentary hasn’t aged a day. By the time we reach the concluding passages, with Serling’s searching, thoughtful musings on mortality and legacy, it genuinely feels like we’ve spent a couple of hours in the company of one of the true geniuses of 20th century culture.
