Wide-ranging fare is a crowd-pleaser
With tear-jerkers, TV and technology, there was still room for a touch of nostalgia too.
NEW YORK — One of the great advantages of a gathering like the Tribeca Film Festival is the sheer variety of what’s on offer. Populating screens are not only a wide range of documentaries and narrative films but television and tech programming — not to mention numerous concerts, talks and retrospectives.
From one vantage, of course, that can seem like chaos. And granted, the fest’s many niches can make for an overwhelming, at times muddying affair.
Is Tribeca the festival of nostalgia, where “The Godfather” and “Reservoir Dogs” get anniversary screenings and talks (as they did this past weekend), where vintage radio programs are fondly remembered with in-person reunions?
Or is it a festival of the moment, where documentaries like “Get Me Roger Stone” and the Oregon-standoff film “No Man’s Land” — not to mention a wide selection of new VR and digital efforts — take center stage? (Heck, even Hillary Clinton turned up to support one.)
Should it be considered a more traditional place of cinematic discovery, as a series of narrative films get their world premieres and seek the distribution to help them break out in the wider world? Or is it more about the experience around the movies, with post-screening concerts from the likes of Carly Simon and Puffy and talks between Tom Hanks and Bruce Springsteen?
The jury is out. And may never, in a sense, come back. But for Tribeca, which Sunday wrapped up its 16th year under the hand of Robert De Niro and producing partner Jane Rosenthal, that’s OK. What seems like a throw-itat-the-wall exercise to some is exactly the kind of tapestry its organizers want — an event that, much like the city it inhabits, offers a little something for everyone.
Here’s a small sample of the diversity I experienced over the past 12 days:
The undeniable breakout of the festival was “Keep the Change,” winner of the jury prize for best narrative feature. Rachel Israel’s feature debut is an offbeat romantic comedy — but not the kind of offbeat romantic comedy typically associated with film festivals.
Based on an earlier short, “Change” centers on people on the autism spectrum, particularly David (Brandon Polansky) and Sarah (Samantha Elisofon). The pair meet in a group therapy setting in uptown Manhattan and proceed to navigate a range of challenges as they pursue a relationship. An authentic romance between people who are not neurotypical is rare enough; making it more distinct is that Israel shot it with non-actors who are themselves on the autism spectrum, building the script around them over an intensive, years-long development process.
On Friday, Israel sat in the offices of a New York publicity firm and described the unusual journey — and her motivation for making it in the first place.
“I was struck by the relationships of this group — their ability to have beautiful, wonderful and dysfunctional relationships — to love each other and yell at each other and take care of each other,” she said. “And I felt like I hadn’t really seen that on film before.”
Television is becoming an important part of the festival landscape, but Tribeca embraces it a bit more than others. There were screenings for National Geographic’s Albert Einstein story “Genius” and Michael Winterbottom’s “The Trip to Spain,” the third series of Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon’s food-travel adventures, shown before a raucous crowd. And Hulu’s critically acclaimed new series “The Handmaid’s Tale” gained a boost before it became available on the service last week with a muchtalked-about screening and panel discussion with a dozen from the production.
Social media dissected star Elisabeth Moss’s comment that the Margaret Atwood story is “not a feminist story. It’s a human story because women’s rights are human rights.” But there was no doubt she felt compelled to do the project, even though she wasn’t looking for looking for a new post”Mad Men” series: “I said,‘I think I should do this. I think I have to do this.’ Eventually I got to the point where I thought if I don’t decide soon, someone else would do it. And that made me so … jealous I had to do it.”
Virtual reality’s presence continued to grow at Tribeca, with world premieres of several dozen new pieces from creators who test the boundaries of the medium while making worthy and wide-ranging content in their own right. There were films from traditional film types such as Kathryn Bigelow (the endangered-elephant tale “The Protectors”) and new-era filmmakers Chris Milk (his Within company was behind experiential works such as “Hallelujah” and “Hoverboard”). There were actors like Emily Mortimer and Alessandro Nivola (the police-investigation thriller “Broken Night”) and mainstay cinematic subjects, including the Holocaust, done in potent new ways (Gabo Arora and Ari Palitz’s visit-to-Majdanek piece “The Last Goodbye”).
Documentary can be at its best when it’s about nostalgia. And nostalgia rarely feels as strong as when it focuses on radio, a medium practically designed for the feeling. A pair of movies at Tribeca capitalized on this in their own way.
In Daniel Forer’s “Mike and the Mad Dog,” the seminal, provocative partnership of Mike Francesa and Chris “Mad Dog” Russo was explored, a combustible sports-radio pairing that helped create the genre in the 1980s-’90s. The April 21 screening morphed into a kind of live call-in show as audience members began reenacting bits from before the pair broke up in 2008.
Meanwhile, a station of a different sort was celebrated in Ellen Goldfarb’s “Dare to be Different,” a tale of New York’s influential and longdefunct WLIR. In the 1980s, LIR, in defiance of popular taste and often international copyright law, became the first station to play imports like U2, Depeche Mode, A Flock of Seagulls, Joy Division, Duran Duran and other new wave bands.
Run by Denis McNamara, the station was the epitome of cool, if also a kind of, er, low-budget chic; LIR operated at a time when culture was more about discovery than corporations and technology. The film told its story and showed the personalities at its center — McNamara, the musicians, deejays with monikers like Malibu Sue and Larry the Duck. Many from that era turned out last week for what became a kind of high school reunion of new wave music too. A post-screening event, emceed by McNamara, featured performances from the Alarm, English Beat and A Flock of Seagulls.
Among the world-premiere dramas that stood out are Russell Harbaugh’s “Love After Love,” in which Andie MacDowell plays a woman who must keep the family together, in her way, after the patriarch passes.
In Nathan Silver’s “Thirst Street,” a flight attendant enters an obsessive mode after a breakup. And in Azazel Jacobs’ “The Lovers,” Tracy Letts and Debra Winger play a married couple who find reconciliation after years of affairs, in a movie that veers between farce and humanist.
Sometimes, as you move away from film, you have to remind people it’s all about film.