Queer TIFF: "The Death and Life of John F. Donovan"
Wednesday, September 12, 2018 at 6:00PM by Chris Feil
The party of Xavier Dolan is petering out. Or at least for his crowd of defenders, the noble few who have been willing to see past histrionics for the queer pop opera of his cinema. But for all of the detractive claims of the young director consistently falling down his own rabbit holes, it stands to ask what people want from the cinema if not directors drunk on their own Kool-Aid.
And yet his newest effort, The Death and Life of John F. Donovan, is the toughest to defend. Despite some moments when the film really hits its stride, Dolan is mostly merely strident, crafting a trolling work that dares you to not call it as petulant as it is. His films have been called nakedly autobiographical or trite, and this film turns those whiffing dismissals into text. Is one person’s trash the next person’s honesty, in all its cringeworthiness and misguided perceptions? Does what is genuine and true about the thing we deem unworthy still have merit despite our perceptions of its limitations? These are fascinating questions that this film can’t quite elevate or answer, and the results are frequently embarrassing.
Kit Harrington is the titular actor, a C-list heartthrob not known for his talents but still appreciated by the mid-00s teen set. His biggest fan may very well be Jacob Tremblay’s Rupert Turner, a child actor transplant to the UK that begins to exchange letters with the star that detail his struggles with fame, his career, and his personal life. The film is told in flashbacks as the elder Rupert publishes a memoir about the experience in 2017, interviewed by the curmudgeoniest cliche of a reporter by Thandie Newton (whose charms can’t even be stifled by this obvious of material, it appears). Donovan’s ensuing death, timed after the letters come under public scrutiny, remains an enigma the hangs over his persona.
The unfortunate thing is that Donovan shows that while Dolan is still an ambitiously florid and evocative filmmaker, criticism through storytelling is a muscle he may not yet be ready to flex. Ben Schnetzer plays the older Rupert opposite Newton, declaring that he knows his subject is “not rebuilding Aleppo”, a distinction that is at once appropriately self-aware and an inappropriate choice for comparison. The film wants to be taken seriously, its earnestness only ever fleetingly successful at being a critique of our perception of it. But mostly, it faceplants into just becoming precisely what the director has been accused of with less ambitious films. With Tremblay spouting outlandishly precocious venom and Newton forced into grand cliche of a journalist, you feel the film making itself a target and to no substantial end.
The film is defendable in pieces, particularly when it muses on our internal relationship between identification in our idols and mere projection, and the distance between both endposts. Rupert is bullied mercilessly for his gayness while Donovan remains closeted, the idol never as self-affirmed as the idolator. Natalie Portman as Rupert’s frustrated mother is both barking jealous shrew and sacrificial angel of the minds of all gay boys. How much can you really judge Dolan’s authenticity when his point is that perception is reality?
And yet the film is unfortunately mired in gaucheness and still feels like the roughest of drafts on an ambitious larger project (even right down to the song choices that feel like temporary placeholders like the opening oddball use of “Rolling in the Deep”). Somewhere underneath its misguided attempt at understanding the Hollywood legends we build in our minds and tear down in public is something as compassionate and layered as the film’s thesis tells us it is, but resulting The Death and Life of John F. Donovan isn’t it.
Most lost among the muck? The genuine, true compassion that the film itself demands we pay its subject. And some of us still want to feel that from the filmmaker.
Grade: C-
Reader Comments (18)
Totally expected. It has been in post-production forever. That usually means endless re-edits.
I have a strange relationship with Dolan. My first one was Mommy, a movie that is quite easy to love, then I saw Laurence Anyways which I hated it, then Tom at the Farm which was good and finally that dreadful one with Cotillard.
I mean of course the movie is bad, especially knowing after they said that Chastain was cut out entirely LMAO
The acclaim for his early films will one day surely be revealed as mass hysteria.
All the talk of "can you believe a 19-year-old made this movie" back in the day...It's like "Yes, I very much believe a 19 year old made it, that's the damn problem!"
Mommy was indeed very good. Nothing else he's done remotely warrants kudos. So that's 1 out of 7 now.
I love Tom at the Farm pretty unreservedly; there's a lot to like about Mommy but I personally found it pretty exhausting. Mostly it's just been a waiting game with Dolan, wanting him to be as great as his potential - I hope he can swerve the boat back around, since he seems to have lost the narrative. He's not untalented. I'm not ready to write him off yet. He needs to direct a script somebody else writes, I think.
"I was rooting for you, we were all rooting for you! How dare you! Learn something from this! When you go to bed at night, you lay there and you take responsibility for yourself - because nobody's going to take responsibility for you."
T.B.
I really love Dolan's films, they're so hypnotic, especially "Tom à la ferme" ( so captivating with its psychologically disturbed characters) and "Mommy" (one of those movies where screenplay moves fast yet the story unfolds slowly.) and he is undoubtedly a great director of actors : Anne Dorval is explosive in Mommy, Pierre-Yves Cardinal, dark, manacing fascinating bad guy in Tom; Gaspard Ulliel is brilliant and Marion Cotillard plays her part in a way that she owns the role in the uneven but full of emotional tension "Juste la fin du monde"....so I'll totally give it a try with an open mind to The Death and Life of John F. Donovan.
Sarandon and Bates are in this. You have nothing about their performances.
Meh.
Xavier Dolan has always been too self-aware to reach genuinely great heights as a director. Even the one film of his I like besides Tom at the Farm, Heartbeats (Les Amours Imaginaires), is just Canadian Almodovar vis-a-vis Wong-Kar Wai. And he doesn't even try to hide it.
He needs to separate himself from his film tastes a bit and do something with the talent he DOES have, as opposed to working it all from his tastes and then into actual filmmaking.
He's just, eh.
If anything, this review is kind to the film. If you can imagine a pre-teen whining about some overblown tragedy, then imagine a film about that pre-teen as an adult still whining about that overblown tragedy, and imagine that the film earnestly feels it was a tragedy... that is this film.
I read on Twitter that Dolan wrote a fan letter to Leonardo DiCaprio after Titanic. Suddenly, the film made so much more sense.
P.S. I maintain that Heartbeats is his best film.
For me it's been diminishing returns pretty much since day one. I Killed My Mother is IMO his best film by a HUGE margin. Even Tom at the Farm and Mommy didn't really impress me, though I certainly thought his talentedness was evident in both and the performances (especially from the ladies) were quite effective. But it's been mostly self-indulgence that I've gotten from his work.
Come on. When you will review A star is born?
Sumwhr in Hollywood, Jess Chastain is heaving a hugh sigh o relief tt all her scenes r chopped!! 😂
I’m a big fan of Mommy and Laurence Anyways, so I really hope that he can turn it around and live up to his full potential. He’s one of the most genuinely exciting directors working today.
I wonder if part of the problem might be that he’s letting all of the critical adulation get to his head. Looking at some of his recent interviews, he comes across as quite arrogant, so I wonder if this could be turning into another Shyamalan type of situation where he thinks he can do no wrong and his work suffers.
It’s also worth pointing out that usually when highly accomplished foreign-language directors venture out into making English-language films, the transition tends to not work out too well (Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck with The Tourist, Jean-Pierre Jeunet with Alien: Resurrection, Ingmar Bergman with The Serpent’s Egg, Francois Truffaut with Fahrenheit 451, Wong Kar-Wai with My Blueberry Nights, etc.) Something like Park Chan-Wook’s Stoker is an exception to the rule.
Maybe Sarandon and Bates were not worth mentioning.
I'd be ok with never hearing about Sarandon ever again to be honest.
@Tyler
I think you hit the nail on the head. I am English/French Canadian, English being my first language. If I were to write in French, and then translate to English verbatim, often the text will sound distorted, heightened, or magnified to the the extent of hyperbole. The magnification is often a misrepresentation of the original text. Nine times out of ten a director, whose first language is not English, fails when trying to expand into English territory. I was very skeptical when Dolan announced his first English movie, in fact, I was certain that he was setting himself up for failure. Especially since he would not have the comfort, collaborative spirit and familiarity of his French counterparts, such as his regular cast and crew. Without more experience (he is only 29, after all, which older, unforgiving, people who have not achieved one iota of his endeavours should keep in mind) and restraint, this disaster was a fait accompli. He writes all of his scripts, unlike most foreign directors who are almost always given scripts already written in English and, yet, still cannot make a good movie. So I think everybody should cut him some slack. He has pretty much admitted that the film was going to be a major lessoned learned for him. And is eager to turn the page. Thankfully he has returned to his Canadian roots, with his familiar crew and cast, and you can bet your mountains of disappointment and gratuitous judgment that his new film, Matthias & Maxime, will be at Cannes, May 2019.
If anything this review is kind to the movies. It is AWFUL and I consider myself a fan of his work.