One of the globe’s most significant and singular film festivals begins today, and pass-holders for the 45th Telluride Film Festival will soon be in the throes of an obsessive movie love.
Some of what they’ll stand in long queues for are sure to be in the Oscar hunt come fall.
Over the last several years, Telluride has — along with the Venice Film Festival and the Toronto International Film Festival — become a harbinger. Others are (by box office standards) as rarefied as the air in the San Juan mountains. Telluride is an oddly down-to-earth yet heady affair: deeply thoughtful and, for those new to the altitude, a little dizzying.
Guests slated to attend this year’s installment (through Sept. 3) include:
- Robert Redford, who plays a robber to Casey Affleck’s cop in “The Old Man and the Gun.” Redford, 82, has said this his final film as an actor.
- Tribute recipient Emma Stone appears alongside Rachel Weisz in “The Favourite.” The tale of cousins vying for the affections of Britain’s Queen Anne is directed by Yorgos Lanthimos, the wildly eclectic filmmaker of “The Killing of a Sacred Dear” and “The Lobster.”
- Writer-director Alfonso Cuarón — also a fest honoree — returns to Telluride with “Roma,” his black-and-white drama about a family in Mexico City in 1970. The film’s title acknowledges the district where the Oscar-winning filmmaker of “Gravity” and “Children of Men” grew up.
- “La La Land” director Damien Chazelle returns, too, with “First Man,” a drama about astronaut Neil Armstrong, who went to the moon but shied away from star treatment.
- Actor-director Ralph Fiennes arrives with “The White Crow,” about Russian dancer Rudolph Nureyev, starring Russian dancer and acting newcomer Oleg Ivenko.
Others headed to the former mining town: Nicole Kidman, nearly unrecognizable as an undercover cop in Karyn Kusama’s “Destoyer”; Matt McConaughey as the father of a law-breaking teen circa 1984 Detroit in “White Boy Rick”; Laura Dern and Jack O’Connell in “Trial by Fire,” director Ed Zwick’s drama based on David Grann’s New Yorker piece about a Texas inmate put to death after exculpatory evidence was suppressed; and Melissa McCarthy as Lee Israel, the once successful biographer turned desperate literary forger, in “Can You Ever Forgive Me?”
Still, the festival’s most unlikely star may well be a fallen Colorado political figure: Gary Hart — at least by way of Hugh Jackman. In “The Front Runner,” Jackman (Logan in a Marvel Multiverse far, far away from Telluride) portrays the U.S. senator who in 1987 appeared a shoe-in for the Democratic Party’s nomination for president and likely POTUS.
Director Jason Reitman brings journalist Matt Bai’s “All the Truth Is Out: The Week Politics Went Tabloid” — a deft cultural reckoning — to the big screen. Newspaper accounts alleging an affair between Hart and Donna Rice sunk his candidacy and bankrupted his political capital. The movie, due out in November, might seem an odd blast from scandals past if not for the fact that the nation appears ever stuck in the mud of what do we really know and when do we know it truly matters.
“Jackman is out of this world,” said Julie Huntsinger — co-director alongside fest co-founder Tom Luddy – by phone from her seasonal office in Telluride. “I feel like this could be the film, that if people give it attention and think about it, it could generate the most conversation because it hits on questions that reverberate for politicians but also for artists: What is the public’s right to know about your private life? What is a good candidate? What is a good person? Is fidelity an issue? What is hubris?
“There are so many big-ticket items we need to look at as a culture, as a country. It brought it all the way home that his life is not my business. His marriage is not my business. But questions of judgment are our business.”
In many ways, “The Front Runner” with its election scandal of a bygone era — given America’s breakneck amnesia — offers fest-goers Telluride’s version of the timely. Which tends to be more artistically resonant than it is doggedly topical.
Once a cinephile secret, Telluride has grown ever more popular: Passes are sold out within hours of going on sale in March. And Huntsinger has made peace with the ways the festival gets pulled into the awards-season blogosphere each fall. She gets it. And when the Oscar finally, famously, went to “Moonlight,” which premiered at the fest two years ago, she was there to give director Barry Jenkins, a longtime festival ringmaster, a celebratory hug.
Still, Huntsinger sounds happiest nudging the unexpected finds, the tender or tough docs, the international prize-winners that keep Telluride Telluride. This year, that means (among others):
- Sebastián Silva’s family drama “Fistful of Dirt,” shot in Puerto Rico post-Hurricane Maria. (“He does that thing that people with his skill set can do, where they give you dignity and describe unacceptable conditions at the same time,” said Huntsinger. “This movie feels magical and sincere at the same time.”)
- And Ali Abbasi’s contemporary fable about a border agent with an uncanny sense of smell and the traveler who throws her for a loop. “Border,” which won the Un Certain Regard prize at Cannes in May, is “so dang good,” said Huntsinger, who was a juror.
Even if you don’t attend the Telluride Film Festival, here are two more Cannes winners to keep a look out for as Colorado heads into its own festival season, with Aspen FIlmfest (Sept. 25-30) and the Denver Film Festival (Oct. 31-Nov. 11): Matteo Garrone’s “Dogman,” which snagged Marcello Fonte best actor honors for his portrayal of a gentle dog groomer yanked into the orbit of a neighborhood brute; and master filmmaker Hirokazu Kore-eda’s “Shoplifters.” Los Angeles Times critic Justin Chang called the drama — which took the French fest’s top prize — “one of the quietest, loveliest and most emotionally enduring films in the competition.” Just the sort of high praise you expect from a film now having its day in Telluride.
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