Critic’s Picks – Guest Programmer Kim Hughes

The heart wants what the heart wants… or so your progressive grandmother said when you begged for enlightenment while watching your A-student best friend melt into a puddle every time the bad-boy skateboarder flew past.

Whether or not we have agency over who we love — hell, even agency over who we hook up with in moments of desperation — is a debate only slightly less fraught than nature-versus-nurture or butter tarts with or without raisins. Certainly, filmmakers have lined up on both sides of the fence. So-called star-crossed lovers, whose passion is foiled by external forces like stupid friends and family, abound in storytelling, seconded only by lovers thwarted by that super-inconvenient foe, fate. But there is a persuasive argument to be made that those with control over their own destiny are infinitely more interesting characters, and I’m making it as I humbly submit for consideration three loosely connected films drawn from the 21^st century for Hollywood Suite’s critic’s picks night this August 26.

Indeed, purposefully fractured love, which is the working idea here, gains gravitas because the protagonists in these three movies — Take This Waltz from 2011, Unfaithful from 2002, and Brokeback Mountain from 2005, with their triptych of heavy-hitting directors — made choices that ended mostly badly but were nevertheless theirs to own, without finger-pointing or back-biting.

Set in a rarely seen Toronto — namely, a Toronto neither masquerading as another city nor coated in January snow — director Sarah Polley’s Take This Waltz is so achingly real that it does, in fact, make viewers twinge. This viewer, anyway, and I’ve seen the movie lots. Same deal every time. First, there’s hangdog envy at the playful, joyful love shared by young marrieds Margot and Lou (Michelle Williams and Seth Rogen) set against a steamy and electrifying pre-COVID-19 summertime Toronto. Later, something like anxiety takes hold as Margot, hyper-aware of what there is to lose — and with snap-crackle sister-in-law Geraldine (Sarah Silverman) hollering reminders from the sidelines — nonetheless pushes towards hunky neighbour Daniel (Luke Kirby).

Margot’s choice creates a perfect circle; something she realizes in a borderline harrowing (but only in retrospect) scene that will be downright palpable to anyone who has been in a long-term relationship and witnesses, as we invariably do, the dulling of passion’s sparkle over time. But, as your grandma also would have volunteered, that too is life.

Even those who have never seen director Adrian Lyne’s kinetic drama Unfaithful probably have at least a passing acquaintance with the mesmerizing and by-now iconic scene where Diane Lane’s character Constance, on the train home to her husband (Richard Gere), replays in her mind the insanely erotic and illicit encounter she just had with the decidedly unmarried Olivier Martinez. In flashbacks, we see it too, as Constance — so terrified she’s trembling but unable to resist because Olivier Martinez — submits to what she absolutely knows is a terrible idea but one she simply cannot, will not, refuse. At least not today.

As we watch a carnival of emotions, from desire to horror to disbelief, contort Constance’s face on that train, we see a woman intuiting everything in real life and in real time with no pixie dust in sight. It may be fiction, but it scans as fact, and very, very relatable.

Ang Lee’s superb and utterly heartbreaking Brokeback Mountain both fits and doesn’t fit with this storyline about love gone deliberately awry. The film’s almost comically simple premise — two gay cowboys in 1960s-era Wyoming who deny their love to appease a knuckle-dragging society — ensures there is no ambiguity here. We know the stakes are impossibly high for the characters of Ennis and Jack (Heath Ledger and Jake Gyllenhaal) and that openly existing as the people they truly are will likely cost them greatly. And yet their choice to pass as straight family men maybe costs them more as it ensures wives and children are complicit in living a lie, albeit unwittingly at first. Could a gay relationship have survived or thrived in 60s America? Was the choice even theirs to make? I don’t know the answer, but I can guarantee that robust discussion about it guarantees the film an eternal shelf life.

Well, that and its wholly wrenching denouement where Ennis, in Jack’s trailer, catches a glimpse of something from long ago. It’s a crushing reminder that the best days of Ennis’ life are behind him, never to be relived, and that they are marooned there by the choices he and Jack made. If that’s not gravitas, then I am only watching documentaries from here on in.

Wednesday, August 26, 2020

Hollywood Suite 2000s Movies – HS00

• 9:00 pm ET – Take This Waltz (2011) – Available all month On Demand and on Hollywood Suite GO
• 11:00 pm ET – Unfaithful (2002) – Available all month On Demand and on Hollywood Suite GO
• 1:05 am ET – Brokeback Mountain (2005) – Available all month On Demand and on Hollywood Suite GO

A writer and editor of exquisite vintage, Kim Hughes has written about film, music, books, food, and wine for countless marquee publications and websites across North America including The Toronto Star, The National Post, NOW Magazine, Report on Business, Amazon.com, TIFF, CARAS/JUNO Awards, Salon, Elevate, CBC, and Spafax, to name a few. A regular contributor with film blog Original-Cin, Kim lives in Toronto and is a proud volunteer with Annex Cat Rescue.