Tribeca ’18: To Dust

Albert is no Mr. Wizard. He is an embittered community college professor gone to seed, but Shmuel wouldn’t know the difference. For the Hasidic cantor, any participation in scientific inquiry is sinful, but the recent death of his wife leads to a desperate obsession with human decomposition in Shawn Snyder’s Best New Narrative Award winning To Dust, which screens during the 2018 Tribeca Film Festival.

Shmuel takes Orthodox teaching very seriously, particularly the part about “dust to dust.” In fact, he becomes consumed with anxiety, worrying his beloved wife’s soul will be in torment until her body fully returns to the earth. His concern is so troubling, he will even sin himself by seeking answers at a local community college. The initial meeting with Albert goes badly—the cantor keeps calling the professor “doctor” and the professor keeps calling the cantor “rabbi.” Nevertheless, the divorced, pot-smoking instructor tries to give Shmuel some answers using a rather graphic 1960 study of pig decomposition. Imagine his surprise when Shmuel drags him into his own practical experiments, using swine.

To Dust probably sounds like it pushes the line of good taste, given the prominence of dead pigs in the narrative. However, it is refreshingly thoughtful and sensitive it the ways it addresses Orthodox Judaism. Above all else, this is a deeply mournful film that readily forgives its characters’ foibles and excesses. There are indeed some rather grisly images, including the archival footage from 1960 and some morbid nightmare sequences, but they are always counter-balanced by the human element. It could very well appeal to the audience for Avishai’s Sivan’s Tikkun, but it is a dramatically warmer, more grounded, and more humanistic film.

Géza Röhrig (from Son of Saul) is quite remarkable as Shmuel. It is a quiet performance, but his anguish always feels very real and acutely pressing. He develops genuine chemistry with Matthew Broderick’s Albert that is hard to define or describe but is tangibly potent. Even though Broderick is playing another self-loathing man-child, he does his best work in years teasing out humanizing subtleties in the failed academic.

To Dust is an Alfred P. Sloan Foundation-supported film, which speaks volumes about the seriousness of Snyder and co-screenwriter Jason Begue’s science. Viewers could probably even recreate some of the experiments, but we would advise against trying that. Yet, it is the not-quite-buddy relationship that really lies at the core of the film. For extra added novelty, Ron Perlman served as one of the producers, so you’d better take note. Highly recommended, To Dust screens again Saturday night (4/28) and twice on Sunday (4/29), as an award-winner, at this year’s Tribeca Film Festival.

The American Side: Niagara Noir

If you think Niagara Falls is a romantic spot, you probably haven’t seen Niagara with Marilyn Monroe and Joseph Cotten. Hopefully, you are also unfamiliar with local P.I. Charlie Paczynski, who specializes in the sleaziest divorce cases possible. When the stripper-partner he employs for honey trap scams is rather inconveniently murdered, the Polish detective will blunder into a far-reaching conspiracy in Jenna Ricker’s The American Side (trailer here), which opens this Friday in New York.

Paczynski and “Kat” were basically running a blackmail operation, until one of her “dates” up and killed her. He liked her way more than Sam Spade liked Miles Archer, so he duly follows the clues to a suspicious character named Tom Soberin. When his chief suspect takes a swan dive off the Falls, Paczynski realizes there is a larger scheme at work. It turns out Soberin was once an employee of an experimental energy firm, whose co-founders have had a falling out. It is unclear which faction he ultimately chose, but he supposedly had an affair with Emily Chase, the younger, far less stable but much more alluring sister of Borden Chase, who largely won the corporate power struggle.

Sterling Whitmore, Borden Chase’s ostensible partner, serves up cryptic clues to Paczynski while he develops a high tech barrel sufficiently reinforced to provide safe passage over the American side of the Falls. Evidently, people have made the ill-advised trip on the more forgiving Canadian side, but not from New York. In fact, Paczinski will have no shortage of dubious sources, including a fishy FBI agent, a Serbian spook, and “the Eavesdropper.”

Side starts out as a nifty old school noir that fully capitalizes on the faded glory of its Buffalo and Niagara Falls locales. However, viewers better hold on to their hats when wildly speculative Nikola Tesla schematics enter the picture. Holy death rays, Mike Hammer. It is so crazy, it kind of works.

Co-screenwriter Greg Stuhr has the right kind of nervy presence and caustic attitude for a hardnosed antihero like Paczynski. Alicja Bachleda (so terrific in Ondine) smolders up the lens as Nikki Meeker, the Tesla expert in distress. Matthew Broderick’s Borden Chase will be nobody’s idea of a sinister heavy, but as Emily Chase, Camilla Belle is a hot mess in the grand tradition of Martha Vickers in The Big Sleep. However, nobody can out-noir Robert Forster doing his thing as Whitmore, even when Robert Vaughn and Joe Grifasi (FX the movie) pop up in cameos.

Cinematographer Frank Barrera gives it all a suitably murky, noir glow, while David Shire (whose soundtrack for the original Taking of Pelham One Two Three remains a perennial collector favorite) reinforces the mood with his insinuating score. Like The Big Sleep referenced above, The American Side is a fun film, even when it doesn’t make perfect sense. Recommended for genre fans, it opens this Friday (4/29) in New York, at the IFC Center.

The Worst Film of 2010: Wonderful World

If nothing else, at least the worst theatrical film of 2010 had the decency to stink up theaters on the first regular opening weekend of the year. As a result, for the next fifty-one weeks or so, no matter how pretentious, clichéd, or cloying a film might be, each had the merit of not being Josh Goldin’s Wonderful World.

Ben Singer had a deal many professional musicians I know would take in a heartbeat. He was a successful children’s singer, whose record label indulged him by producing an album of his snoozy acoustic guitar noodlings. However, they released it without any marketing fanfare. In response to this supposedly heinous betrayal, Singer dropped out of the music business, taking a lowly proofreading job at a law firm (ironically working more for “The Man” than he had been before). Considering how many truly talented musicians I know that must self-finance every aspect of their CD production, distribution, and marketing, Singer’s delusion is not simply problematic, it is downright offensive.

Basically, Singer spends most of his free time smoking dope, which often produces hallucinations of “The Man,” personified by the craggy-faced Philip Baker Hall (a derivative device sure to remind the audience of the infinite superiority of Woody Allen’s films). Divorced from his wife (there’s a shocker), Singer does everything humanly possible to depress and otherwise alienate his daughter Sandra during their weekends together in scenes that ring uniformly false.

The only person who can stand him is his noble Senegalese roommate Ibou, who plays chess with the miserable creep until he mercifully falls into a diabetic coma. Then the film really gets really manipulative when Ibou’s worried sister Khadi moves in with Singer as she waits and hopes for her brother’s recovery. Of course, a relationship starts to develop between them, but if that sounds too hackneyed, don’t worry, the immature Singer is sure to sabotage things before too long.

World is the sort of film in which driving an SUV is the greatest imaginable sin. Truly, every tired convention from films like The Visitor is tossed on screen, but none of them work here. Unquestionably though, the film’s greatest problem is its protagonist, Ben Singer. As the angry-at-the-world guitarist, Matthew Broderick is completely unlikable, utterly unbelievable, and stupefyingly listless. Frankly, Broderick must take a long sabbatical from film as penitence, because nobody who sat through World will want to see him again for a long time. (Yes, this film even ruins Ferris Bueller and WarGames for viewers.)

In fact, the only cast member to distinguish themselves in this dreary exercise is the young Jodelle Ferland as his long-suffering daughter Sandra. Taking into account Ferland was also saddled with the same contrived screenplay as the rest of World’s embarrassed and embarrassing ensemble, her work is rather remarkable. As a result, she deserves to have this career-killer expunged from her permanent record.

To be able to make a living in music is a rare gift. To throw it away out of some misplaced contempt for corporate commercialism is an act of nauseating self-indulgence. Unfortunately, that is basically all you get from Singer and Goldin. After my screening of World ended, I turned to someone I know with vastly different political and aesthetic sensibilities to say: “that was awful.” His response was: “I don’t understand why this is being released.” It’s a head-scratcher alright. However, for the self-loathing hoping to catch a revival screening, I imagine it plays regularly in Guantanamo as part of the interrogation process. I’d rather be water-boarded. Happy New Year.