Nathaniel's adventures at TIFF. Day 1
Technically speaking day 2 has just ended and it was an incredible day with consistently great films and memorable offscreen moments. But one day at a time. Day 1's highlight was the Cannes holdover Mommy from Xavier Dolan.
It's attention-grabbing from its first frames with an unusual aspect ratio. Technically speaking it's a 1:1 but if that means nothing to you (I'm not an aspect ratio geek either) know that it's square. Since square is not our beloved and horizontally familiar widescreen, the image feels alarming vertical, more akin to a cel phone shape. This description helps convey the movie's undeniable modernity but it doesn't convey it's lush beauty. (I've heard Mommy knocked as 'the first instagram movie' but, hey, Emmanuel Lubeszki is on instagram so let's not knock it as a Beauty Delivery System.)
Technical film geekery aside, know this: the screen can barely contain the movie's explosive feelings. Hell, the aspect ratio can't even contain this movie's explosive feelings in one of its own best and most atypically tender jokes.
Mommy isn't a plot movie, though the onscreen text detailing some particulars about the fictional future Canada this takes places in leads one to believe otherwise. Suffice it to say that this movie is about "Die" (the brilliant Anne Dorval) a sexy vulgar 40 something widow whose only son "Stevie" (Antoine-Olivier Pilon) has just been released from some sort of juvenile home where they refuse to deal with his erratic and violent behavior any longer. Die is erratic enough all on her own without her ticking time-bomb son to throw her off track. They love each other but love isn't always enough. Almost immediately after he moves back in they're physically fighting in a completely unnerving scene that stains even the most innocuous and happy moments that follow with a sense of dread. The actors brilliantly conjure 15 years of troubled conjoined history. For his part Dolan pushes the key sequences to such heightened extremes that you can practically see the psychic umblical cord still connecting this "Mommy" to her Bad Seed son; it's made from barbed wire.
Die and Stevie aren't without their rebel charms but they're hard to take in large doses so one of Mommy's best moves is to complicate this already complex relationship with a third party. Their neighbor Kyla (Suzanne Clement), a school teacher on sabbatical, befriends them both to everyone's surprise. Suddenly the loud dischordant duet is a trio, a harmonious trio even... for a time at least.
There are frequent moments when Mommy is TOO MUCH but Dolan and his actors earn the extremes by exposing rich depths where these oversized emotions have long-since taken root. Dolan's own showmanship and bravado as a young filmmaker can even look like a funhouse mirror of his enfant-terrible subject. Tom at the Farm was a promising detour into genre fimmaking last year that suggested more range than most assumed Dolan had. He comes to Mommy an even better filmmaker for it. At nearly two and half hours, you'd think Mommy's abrasiveness would overstay its welcome, or the repetitive behavioral problems would drag the movie down but it flies by. There are so many dazzling details to enjoy like the movie's playful (even trite) but still emotionally expressive use of music. I love this one shot of Stevie skateboarding where you can hear the very loud scoring but, underneath it, rap music from Stevie's headphones. The brief wordless scene feels offhand, like it's meant to merely give texture to Stevie's life outside his mother, but the music choice is an almost subliminal echo of an earlier scene where Die and Stevie are blasting their own separate radios, and fighting about the resulting cacophony.
All movies end up on small screens very quickly these days. In fact, that's almost the only place anyone in the US has seen Xavier Dolan movies (Netflix Instant, thank you) thanks to the sorry state of foreign language film distribution in the States. But I refuse to believe that Mommy will or could play on computers, phones or TV. It will defy all natural laws of digital imagery and refuse to shrink. Mommy's emotions are just too huge and raw to fit anywhere but on the biggest of screens. He should've filmed it in IMAX.
Grade: A/A-
Oscar Chances: Canada submitted I Killed My Mother, Xavier's debut, for Oscar's foreign film race in its year though it was not nominated. They haven't submitted Dolan since but I'm hoping that Mommy wins that honor this year and the Oscar nod it deserves after that.