Reports out of the Venice Film Festival have mostly been around which films we can knock out of Oscar best picture contention, with “Carnage,” “Ides of March,” and “A Dangerous Method” all suffering from scratch-that notices coming out of Italy.
It’s been left up to the Telluride Film Festival to come up with one everyone could definitively place in the “in” column. That didn’t take long: Reactions to “The Descendants” ranged from near-jubilation to actual jubilation when it unspooled Friday at a secret patrons-only screening with George Clooney and director Alexander Payne on hand.
The Colorado fest had three other notable world premieres in store in its first 24 hours: Glenn Close’s three-decades-in-the-hoping passion project, the gender-bender “Albert Nobbs”; “In Darkness,” a harrowing Holocaust drama directed by Agnieska Holland that Poland put in the running for next year’s foreign-language Oscar race; and “Living in the Material World,” Martin Scorsese’s George Harrison documentary, which debuts in just a month on HBO.
Also read: Venice Fest: Roman Polanski Gets Mean, Keira Knightley Gets Hysterical
If those last three festival openers had trouble competing for attention, it was partly because “Descendants” immediately sucked up all the lovefest air in the room.
Set on the Hollywood-underutilized Hawaiian islands, Payne’s first picture since “Sideways” is a pitch-perfect meditation on grieving in paradise -- if you can even call it grieving, since the Clooney character’s comatose wife left so much bad blood in her wake that she's openly berated on her deathbed by three different characters in three different tragicomic standout scenes.
In a Q&A, Clooney admitted he was “worried about the ability to be such a schlub” -- albeit a wealthy, powerful schlub who just happens to do business meetings in Hawaiian shirts and sprint in unsensible sandals. In a departure from his character in “Up in the Air” (which premiered at Telluride two years ago), Clooney keeps the glibness off-screen this time -- but there was plenty of that in his typically one-liner-riddled post-screening remarks, where he couldn't help deriding the filmmaker's fashion sense. Asked how Payne got him to cry for a critical scene, Clooney said, “He reminded me of how he didn’t cast me in ‘Sideways’" -- a subject that came up earlier in the discussion -- "so I let it all go. I also wet my pants at the same time.”
Also read: Watch Out, Oscar: Here Come the Film Festivals
In the case of “Albert Nobbs,” post-premiere support was greater for Close’s performance as a woman posing as a man in 1890s Dublin than for the film itself, which engendered plenty of admiration and far less adoration. Close first played the title character in drag off-Broadway in 1982, and has spent the last 15 years trying to get a film transition going.
