Lauren Shantall Movie of the week
In an apathy-addled, dislocated age, Michael di Jiacomo’s latest offering, Animals – screened together with his short film The Tollkeeper – measures out an imaginatively potent dose of heartfelt living.
Screened first, the highly visual The Tollkeeper is an unexpected cinematic treat. It opens, in the grainy black and white cinematography of Alik Sakharov, amid the stark mesas and expanses of desert Utah in the 1930s.
Three French documentary ethnographers have spent three years combing America in search of a gloriously eccentric tuba player (a wonderful portrayal by Mickey Rooney, and strangely apt considering his vaudevillian beginnings) who, for decades, has faithfully manned a tollgate that no one has ever passed through.
Shot in vignettes, interlaced with melancholy notes from the tuba, and with moments of exquisite beauty, the short is perfectly pitched.
When it draws to its poignant, simple close, one cannot imagine how it could be bettered. Well able to stand on its own as a delightful piece of film- making, The Tollkeeper illustrates the kind of talent that has previously won Di Jiacomo an Academy Award, a Mobil Award and numerous NYU film festival awards for another short, The Lost Treasure of Captain Cornlius “Dead Eye” Tuckett.
An independent film-maker, NYU graduate and former resident artist at the Sundance Film Institute, Di Jiacomo has produced and directed several critically acclaimed shorts, establishing himself as a rising star in the satellite-cluttered heavens of American cinema.
While The Tollkeeper remains within the writer and director’s more practised genre, it is followed by his first feature, Animals, which rockets us approximately 50 years forward into full-colour and the aggressive bustle of downtown New York.
Here we see a gun-toting, tuxedo-clad John Turturro rip off an unsurprised cab driver, only to disappear from the plot – in yet another delicious, although fleeting cameo after his flamboyant Jesus in the Coen brothers’s The Big Lebowski.
It is Henry Berst (Tim Roth), the decidedly world-weary, disillusioned cabbie, who drives the action after this initial confrontation.
Roth, after garnering mainstream recognition for Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction and Reservoir Dogs, returns to the slightly offbeat role that cast him as a Shakespearean bungler in Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead and in the decidedly dark The Cook, the Thief, the Wife and Her Lover.
When Berst is beset by three ancient yet familiar Frenchmen who ask to be driven into the country for their last adventure, the dialogue between the short and the feature begins its exchange.
The cabbie is roused from the numb emptiness of his life by the compelling, infectious presence of these remarkable old men, whose intervention seems more divine contrivance than outlandish coincidence.
They inspire him to go on a decidedly bizarre quest into an isolated American South populated by strange characters, where he must find his destiny and his true love (Mili Avital). Both of which he pursues, amid increasingly frequent visions of ghosts and less than angelic cherubs, with a singular determination echoing that of the three self-admitted “crusaders of the heart” and the errant tuba player.
Di Jiacomo’s screenplay for Animals blurs the levels of accepted reality and the magical, and while this may reveal a fascination with magical realism that is now becoming popular in films, its use here makes for an imaginatively coloured, whimsical story that even manages to pack a startling ending.
Together with The TollKeeper, Animals becomes a gently challenging, thought- provoking exploration of joie de vivre versus apathy, and of finding what it is that one really needs. This interconnected tale somehow manages to get right to the root of one’s ennui.