Independent filmmaker Todd Solondz is leaning toward the mainstream in his latest film “Dark Horse,” but the irony and insight into dysfunctional families which fans loved in his earlier work remain common place.
Solondz, in a news conference Monday at the Venice Film festival, compared his latest film, starring Mia Farrow and Christopher Walken, to American comedies like “Knocked Up” and “The 40-Year-Old Virgin.”
But with the comparison came a warning.
In the movie business “the manchild has been an overused genre,” he said. “Frankly if Dark Horse was the end of those movies I would feel I could go to sleep a happy man,” he said.
He describes “Dark Horse,” about a college dropout mama’s boy called Abe — portrayed by Jordan Gelber — as being imbued with a “kind of melancholy.”
The film — much of which is reminiscent of other work “Happiness” and “Life During Wartime” — charts the story of a boy who doesn’t totally want to grow up. “As much as it’s comedy of sorts, I never really laugh,” Solondz said of the film.
“It’s sorrowful and there is a kind of melancholy … the main character has so many troubles and serious misfortunes that befall him I feel a kind of tenderness for Abe,” he said.
Abe, in his 30s, lives at home and works listlessly at the real estate company of his father, played by Walken. His life is the opposite of his successful brother, a doctor, played by “The Hangover” star Justin Bartha. Farrow plays Abe’s mother.
Abe’s situation is “very symptomatic of a consumerist society where ‘infantilization’ is encouraged,” ventured Solondz.
“Dark Horse” is in the running for the festival’s top honor — the Golden Lion — to be awarded on Sept. 10 at the close of the festival on Venice’s Lido island.
Review: Director Pablo Larrain’s “Maria” Starring Angelina Jolie
Angelina Jolie glides through the final days of Maria Callas' short life in Pablo Larraín's "Maria," a dramatic, evocative elegy to the famed soprano. It's an affair that's at turns melancholy, biting and grandly theatrical, an aria for a once in a generation star.
Reality is of little consequence on the stage and in "Maria." It's all about the raw feeling, which serves the movie well, more dream than history lesson about La Callas. Early on, she pops some Mandrax and tells her devoted butler Ferruccio (a simply wonderful Pierfrancesco Favino) that a television crew is on the way. Are they real, he wonders.
"As of this morning, what is real and what is not real is my business," she says calmly and definitively, making a feast out of Steven Knight's sharp script. It's one of many great lines and moments for Jolie, whose intensity and resolve belie her fragile appearance. And it's a signal to the audience as well: Don't fret about dull facts or that Jolie doesn't really resemble Callas all that much. This is a biopic as opera — an emotional journey fitting of the great diva, full of flair, beauty, betrayal, revelations and sorrow.
In "Maria," we are the companion to a protagonist with an ever-loosening grip on reality, walking with her through Paris, and her life, for one week in September 1977.
The images from cinematographer Ed Lachman, playfully shifting in form and style, take us on a scattershot journey through her triumphs on stage, her scandalous romance with Aristotle Onassis (Haluk Bilginer) and her traumatic youth. In the present, at age 53, she sleeps till midday, drinks the minimal calories she ingests, goes to restaurants where the waiters know her name looking for adulation and has visions of performances staged just for... Read More