Toronto Film Festival Reviews: “The Burial,” “Wildcat” & “Poolman”

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THE BURIAL (MGM/Amazon – Oct. 13):  A yarn that’s also a true story.  Jeremiah O’Keefe (Tommy Lee Jones) was the owner of a family-run, regional Mississippi business that for decades had offered funeral services and burial insurance to its customers.  When Jeremiah’s finances took a turn, he made a deal with a conglomerate headed by Ray Loewen (Bill Camp) to sell off a few of his funeral homes.  But Loewen stalled the deal, holding back Jeremiah’s needed cash to force him into bankruptcy, so Loewen’s company could pick up the entire business at a deep discount.  When Jeremiah sued, the traditionalist, small-town man did something unexpected:  realizing that the company’s longtime attorney Mike Allred (Alan Ruck) wasn’t up to the challenges of big-time, big-money litigation, Jeremiah hired Willie Gary (Jamie Foxx), a flamboyant personal injury specialist with his own jet (he was featured on Lifestyles Of the Rich & Famous) and Johnnie Cochran as his idol.  Willie hadn’t lost a case in a dozen years, but he’d never tried a contract dispute, and here he was going up against a shark named Mame Downes (Jurnee Smollett, splendid), a cross-examiner from hell famous for dispassionately taking apart her opposition.  Director Maggie Betts (previously known for the very serious Novitiate), writing with the playwright Doug Wright, leans into the David and Goliath of it all, and if some of what’s depicted as taking place in the courtroom begs plausibility, they don’t let that get in the way of a good story.  Betts keeps the pace humming (the editing is by Jay Cassidy and Lee Percy), and she gets tremendous performances from her cast.  Jones is an embodiment of soft-spoken small-town decency, and this is Foxx’s best work in years, scaled expertly from courtroom histrionics to an occasional low-key admission of failure.  The two actors make us believe the unlikely bond that forms between attorney and client, even when they’re furious at each other.  As the case progresses, evidence emerges that Leowen’s company has been inflicting racist pricing policies on the grieving public, and the stakes of the litigation rise, making it even easier to root for the good guys.  The Burial is hokum of a high order.

WILDCAT (no distrib):  One of America’s greatest and most indelible writers, Flannery C’Connor wrote stories and novels that fearlessly mix naturalism, humor, religion and gothic horror.  And there’s no question that the makers of Wildcat, including director/co-writer Ethan Hawke, his writing partner Shelby Gaines, and a cast headed by Maya Hawke (as Flannery) and Laura Linney (as her mother Regina), have approached her with appreciation both for her work and the challenges of her short life, riddled with illness and finished at age 39.  Yet even with these best of intentions, Wildcat is only intermittently effective.  The concept of the film is ambitious.  The bulk of the running time concentrates on the period of O’Connor’s life when the increasing effects of the lupus that killed her father forced her to leave the bustling publishing world in New York to return to the family home in Georgia, where she lived with her mother and her aunt Duchess (Christine Dye), keeping up her writing at all costs.  Interspersed with the biographical scenes are abbreviated dramatized sequences from some of O’Connor’s stories, most of them with Maya Hawke and Linney cast as the leads.  This can be distracting and even silly (as when Hawke is outfitted as a little boy to suit a character), but more to the point it’s reductive to O’Connor’s brilliantly mysterious literature, suggesting that her stories should be viewed simply as veiled autobiography.  Add to this an attempt to encompass O’Connor’s Catholicism (including Liam Neeson in a cameo as a local priest), and it’s a lot.  Although Wildcat doesn’t entirely work, it’s far from a negligible effort.  Maya Hawke is a brightly promising young actress who embodies O’Connor’s malaises both physical and spiritual, and Linney as always is excellent, with smaller roles for Philip Ettinger, Cooper Hoffman, Steve Zahn, Rafael Casal and Willa Fitzgerald.  The handsome cinematography is by Steve Cosens, and screenwriter Shelby Gaines collaborated on the unconventional score with his brother Lathan Gaines.  Wildcat is good enough that one wishes it were better.  Meanwhile, for those seeking a dose of O’Conner with a more ferocious kick, there’s John Huston’s adaptation of O’Conner’s novel Wise Blood.

POOLMAN (no distrib):  The entertainment industry may be in the midst of generational challenges, but it seems there will always be financiers willing to put up cash to finance the ego trips of movie stars.  The star in this case, as well as director, screenwriter (with Ian Gotler) and producer is Chris Pine, a true Hollywood leading man who apparently had no one near enough to tell him just how much out of his depth he was.  The whimsically incoherent plot is Chinatown by way of The Big Lebowski, with Pine as Darren Barrenman, the titular poolman (although we never see him clean a pool beyond his own tacky apartment complex) and aspiring documentary filmmaker who writes daily confessional fan letters to Erin Brockovich.  He works on the documentaries with the older couple Jack and Diane (Danny DeVito and Annette Bening, supplying what little energy Poolman has–and the gag of their names tips off the level of the script’s wit).  The genre’s requisite gorgeous dame, June Del Rey (DaWanda Page), embroils Darren into a conspiracy that involves various shady characters (Clancy Brown, Ray Wise) and soon enough corruption and murder.  Through all of it, Darren remains a naive dummy, one (or maybe ten) steps behind whatever’s being plotted.  Pine was thoroughly indulged on this project–among other things, he and cinematographer Matthew Jensen were allowed to shoot on 35mm film–and the results provide a cautionary lesson to anyone tempted to give a celebrity a blank check.  It’s all tiresome and pointless, and even Pine’s own casting is a bad idea.  Instead of emphasizing his skill at playing sharp, witty characters, he insists on a “stretch” into an ill-suited role as a dull-witted patsy.  Not all actors need to prove themselves as filmmakers, and Chris Pine may want to rethink whether he should be one of them.