Toronto Film Festival Reviews: “His Three Daughters,” “Backspot” & “Lee”

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HIS THREE DAUGHTERS (no distrib):  The premise of Azazel Jacobs’ film is simple enough to be staged as a play:  as their father Vincent (Jay O. Sanders) lies dying in an unseen room of his Bronx apartment, Katie (Carrie Coon), Christina (Elizabeth Olsen) and Rachel (Natasha Lyonne) get in each others’ ways as they wait for the inevitable.  Watching the women, it’s clear that each has held a distinct position in the family, with Katie as the overtly neurotic type-A obsessive planner, Rachel as the oft-stoned slacker and rebel, and Christina as the seemingly serene peacemaker between her siblings.  A further cause of tension is the fact that while Katie and Christina are Vincent’s biological daughters (to different mothers), Rachel is his stepdaughter by his second wife, yet she’s the one who’s been closest to him in recent years, not just sharing the rent-controlled apartment with him but with her name on the lease.  Until a climactic, very theatrical turn, His Three Daughters holds on its protagonists, with brief visits by a hospice worker, Vincent’s nurse and Rachel’s boyfriend.  Jacobs is expert at depicting the petty resentments and annoyances that stack up in a family until someone explodes, as well as the moments of grace that can emerge between the combatants just moments later.  Coon, Olsen and Lyonne give gorgeous performances, shading the women with humor and compassion, eschewing any vanity in those passages where their characters are selfish or intolerant.  His Three Daughters is a very small film, with most of the action confined to the apartment and the courtyard below, but it creates a full, loving portrait of daughterhood and sisterhood, charting a family as it collapses and then comes back together.

BACKSPOT (no distrib):  A promising first feature by D.W. Waterson, whose story was scripted by Joanne Sarazen.  Backspot depicts cheerleading much as The Novice (too-little seen) did rowing, as a pressure cooker sport that can be elating and destructive for a young female athlete.  In this case, that’s Riley (Devery Jacobs, from Reservation Dogs), who is thrilled when she and her girlfriend Amanda (Kudakwashe Rutendo) are both chosen for the varsity competition team, and more delighted still when she discovers that her new, supremely exacting coach Eileen (Evan Rachel Wood) is also gay, and thus even more of a role model.  Riley is intense to the point of compulsiveness, and while success on the team floods her with accomplishment, the need to constantly do more, be better and satisfy her coach threatens her relationships and her health.  Backspot is unsparing about showing the sweat and pain behind the forced smiles and heavy make-up of cheerleading, and the kinetic editing (by Remy Huberdeau) and cinematography (by James Poremba) put the viewer both in the heat of the action and into Riley’s head.  Backspot can lean on familiar drama when it turns to Riley and her more balanced girlfriend, or her hostile attitude to her mother (played briefly by Shannyn Sossamon) and her developing bond with the team’s assistant coach (James Antony Olajide).  Towards the end, it feels like crucial scenes are missing, or elided in montages.  Still, Jacobs’ uncompromising performance and Waterson’s command of the milieu make the film a showcase for emerging talent.

LEE (no distrib):  Lee Miller lived a very big life.  She spent the 1920s and 30s as a fashion model and then as a photographer who was part of the art circles of Picasso, Cocteau and Man Ray.  In her 30s, after World War II began, she became the combat photojournalist for Vogue, with assignments that included the liberations of Paris and Nazi concentration camps.  When US troops reached Adolf Hitler’s apartment, she took an iconic photo of herself bathing in his tub.  With material like this to work from, it’s disappointing that Ellen Kuras’ Lee is such a prosaic movie biography.  Kuras is the acclaimed cinematographer of films like Eternal Summer Of the Spotless Mind and Summer of Sam, and it made sense on paper for her feature directing debut to be the story of another visual artist.  But the script, credited to Liz Hannah, Marion Hume and John Collee (from a story by Hume, Collee and Lem Dobbs), is for the most part a routine “and then this happened” Hollywood bio, and the one time it attempts a stylistic stretch, it’s for a completely superfluous double-twist ending.  Kate Winslet is one of the world’s great actors, but she may not be ideally cast here, at least not with this script, as she mostly delivers repeated beats of grittiness, defiance and somberness, unable to get much of a character arc going.  Around her, Kuras has assembled an ensemble of big names with little to do, including Alexander Skarsgard as Miller’s husband, Marion Cotillard as one of her Paris friends, Andrea Riseborough as her London Vogue editor, and Andy Samberg as the Life Magazine reporter who became her professional partner during the war.  as well as Josh O’Connor as a writer interviewing the older Miller in the film’s awkward framing device.  Although the cinematography is credited to Pawel Edelman, Kuras was surely a key figure in the look of the film, which makes heavy use of desaturation to make the color footage appear almost as black and white.  Lee is an OK Hollywood bio as far as that goes, but it feels like a substantially missed opportunity.