Ahead of the 2018 Middleburg Film Festival\u2019s closing screening of Green Book<\/em>, that film\u2019s director, Peter Farrelly, told a packed house that Middleburg had become recognized \u201covernight\u201d as one of the world\u2019s premier film festivals. The audience, which applauded appreciatively, boisterously repaid the filmmaker\u2019s compliment later by leaping to its feet at the closing credits, eager to affirm their affection for a film that had just solidified its place, early in the film-awards season, as the Best Picture frontrunner.<\/p>\n The festival, born in 2013 by Sheila Johnson, has quickly established itself as an East Coast Sundance (Robert Redford, who founded the Sundance Film Festival in Colorado, inspired the idea of a festival built around Johnson\u2019s Salamander Resort and Spa in Middleburg). From its founding, Middleburg has attracted major awards contenders and talent, including performers last year from The Darkest Hour<\/em> and Lady Bird<\/em>, and Green Book<\/em>\u2019s Viggo Mortensen this year. But it\u2019s not only North American releases that are showcased in Middleburg; festival programmers have consistently found a place for official Oscar submissions from countries across the globe, while making space for a few offbeat mindbenders among the high-toned prestige dramas.<\/p>\n My Middleburg slate this year comprised nine films (you can read my previous wrap-ups of the festival from 2017<\/a>, 2016<\/a> and 2015<\/a>) across those categories, starting with a Melissa McCarthy comedy\/drama and ending with a black-and-white Polish film from the director of Ida<\/em>\u2014one of the 21st<\/sup> century\u2019s great spiritual films.<\/p>\n While religious themes weren\u2019t overt among the films I screened this year, several Middleburg titles focused on the toll exacted by the fracturing of families and marriages. Here\u2019s a recap of each film, in the order I saw them.<\/p>\n Can You Ever Forgive Me?<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n Melissa McCarthy stars as writer Lee Israel, a best-selling biographer who, fallen on hard times in the early 1990s, begins forging letters from prominent writers of an earlier era (Dorothy Parker and Noel Coward among them) and selling the fake epistles to memorabilia collectors. Her friend Jack Hock (Richard E. Grant) becomes her accomplice in the fraud.<\/p>\n McCarthy is getting awards traction for her first dramatic performance, but Can You Ever Forgive Me?<\/em> is far from a straight drama or standard biopic. Touching at times\u2014and intriguing not only as a study of financial desperation but of loneliness and, to some extent, the costs of isolation\u2014the film includes more laughter than many films billed as comedies, particularly when Grant is on-screen. Indeed, the attention McCarthy is receiving for playing against type, while deserved, is secondary to the scene-stealing Grant. Rounding out a strong ensemble is Dolly Wells as Anna, a bookstore owner whose interest in Israel isn\u2019t strictly platonic. The story\u2019s matter-of-fact treatment of the adjustment of Israel, a loner\u2014\u201cI always need a drinking buddy,\u201d Lee tells Anna as they\u2019re getting to know each other\u2014to the interest from Wells, as well as her care for Jack, a gay man, could signal an agenda-driven film, but Can You Ever Forgive Me?<\/em> never feels like a message-driven drama. Instead, it\u2019s a well performed story about the human capacity for deception (self- and otherwise).<\/p>\n Shoplifters<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n From the great Japanese director Hirokazu Kore-eda, the winner of this year\u2019s Palme d\u2019Or at the Cannes Film Festival is the story of a family pieced together in a most unusual way.<\/p>\n Three generations live together, drawing on grandmom\u2019s pension and dad\u2019s job as a construction worker. A daughter performs erotic acts at a gentlemen\u2019s club, while the younger kids shoplift from the grocery store and steal from local merchants. When the father suffers a workplace injury, the group becomes even more reliant on the children\u2019s thievery.<\/p>\n But what seems on the surface like a struggling family is something different, as tipped in the opening scenes, when the youngest member of the clan is found hiding outside by the father and son. Clearly a victim of emotional abuse (we hear her guardians arguing over who her biological father might be), they take her in, convincing themselves that they aren\u2019t kidnapping her. Gradually we learn that other family members aren\u2019t blood relatives, and the story shifts from the sort of subtle observational drama Kore-eda is best known for to a crime procedural in which character relationships are explained. The change in story emphasis here\u2014more reminiscent of Kore-eda\u2019s recent, less appreciated The Third Murder<\/em>\u2014is surprisingly satisfying, providing resolution and tension to a film that has been leisurely paced even as its mysterious elements mount. Shoplifters<\/em> is both a summation of the filmmaker\u2019s dominant themes across a body of work, and a sign that he could be moving in a new, but still effective, direction.<\/p>\n Ruben Brandt, Collector<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n \u201cIn my dreams I was two cats and I was playing with each other,\u201d reads opening text over the animated Ruben Brandt, Collector<\/em>. The riddle conjures an image both playful and cerebral. Unfortunately, it\u2019s all downhill from there. Easily the least effective of the films I saw at Middleburg, this Hungarian animated patchwork of references to great artists and some of their well-known work is an exhausting, repetitive head trip.<\/p>\n A psychotherapist, plagued by nightmares, embarks on a series of thefts of great works of art, hoping to be freed of his night-time terrors. An unending litany of visual references and tiresome heists ensues, but what might have made for a bracing animated short stretches out to more than 90 excruciating minutes. A plot device key to unlocking the story\u2019s central mystery involves clues hidden within still frames on celluloid, but by the time that nugget emerges, even film buffs will have lost interest.<\/p>\n Border<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n From the worst film I saw at Middleburg to possibly the best: Border<\/em> is a genre-bending surprise that appealed to my taste for the fantastic. Tina (Eva Melandor) works as a customs agent, identifying more than just illegal items. She tells a co-worker that she can sense thing like guilt and rage\u2014an animalistic talent that pays off time and again by exposing evil intentions and criminal behavior. When Vore (Eero Milonoff), who shares similar physical characteristics to Tina, is detained, the two enter into a relationship that creates a rift between Tina and her live-in boyfriend, Roland (Jorgen Thorsson). A shared secret sends Border<\/em> into the realm of fairy tale (one with some explicit sexual content), with both moments of lightness and a darker turn that explores depravity, human nature and the possibility of goodness.<\/p>\n Happy as Lazarro<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n Alice Rohrwacher\u2019s fable about a group of Italian tobacco-plantation sharecroppers includes Lazarro (Adriano Tardiolo), a Holy Fool who befriends Tancredi (Luca Chikovani), a rascal whose treatment of the na\u00efve Lazarro may be as exploitative as the field workers\u2019 unjust situation.<\/p>\n A surprise plot development bends the story\u2019s timeline in surprising ways, leading to Lazarro reconnecting with long lost friends and shedding grace upon those in need of it. But there\u2019s frustratingly little of substance to Lazarro\u2019s tale and to its more supernatural elements. The story\u2019s spirituality is vague, and it\u2019s tied to a class-consciousness that, while never subtle, becomes unbearably heavy-handed during the film\u2019s misguided, tonally distinct finale.<\/p>\n The Favourite<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n As I told others after seeing the latest film from Yorgos Lanthimos (Dogtooth<\/em>, The Lobster<\/em>, Killing of a Secret Deer<\/em>), I don\u2019t know if I\u2019ve liked any of his films\u2014he\u2019s widely considered a misanthrope, and his earlier stories are sexually explicit and very dark\u2014but I can\u2019t take my eyes off them. My inner auteurist yields to the man\u2019s mise-en-scene and employment of the Steadicam.<\/p>\n Lanthimos has at last found a mainstream story to marry to his style\u2014a British period piece. Set during the reign of Queen Anne (Olivia Colman), The Favourite<\/em> explores wartime politics (Britain and France in the early 18th<\/sup> century) through a power struggle among three women: Anne, her longtime friend Sarah Churchill (Rachel Weisz) and Sarah\u2019s cousin, Abigail Masham (Emma Stone). As Sarah spends more time planning war strategy, Abigail wrestles away Sarah\u2019s role as the queen\u2019s main confidante. Sexual favors are key to the machinations\u2014the film doesn\u2019t shy away from depicting the erotic dimension of these relationships.<\/p>\n What could have been a stately costume drama is, instead, an energetic work of swish pans, tracking shots and crazy camera angles. The Favourite<\/em> may find Lanthimos\u2019 widest audience yet, appealing to the Downton Abbey<\/em> crowd (some of whom will be at least mildly scandalized\u2014by the dialogue as well as the characters\u2019 actions) as well as to fans of Lanthimos\u2019 earlier films. \u201cThe story is about how complicated love is, and how who you are as a person can be perverted and deformed by those complications,\u201d said screenwriter Tony McNamara in the film\u2019s press notes. You may take away a similar message from The Favourite<\/em>, perhaps for different reasons or from a different set of premises about human nature. There\u2019s little, if any, redemption here, but the exploration of the darker side of human behavior makes for Lanthimos\u2019 most accessible film yet.<\/p>\n Capernaum<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n Nadine Labaki\u2019s Lebanese drama about children\u2019s rights\u2014winner of the Jury Prize at this year\u2019s Cannes Film Festival\u2014starts on the wrong foot and never rights itself. In a tiresome framing device, we meet Zain (Zain Al Rafeea), a 12-year-old boy suing his parents because of the parade of misery depicted during the rest of the film\u2019s running time: a sister given to the family\u2019s much older landlord, a young boy Zain must care for when the boy\u2019s mother is detained, and the disregard of his mother and father for Zain\u2019s well-being.<\/p>\n As with Holy Fool characters (Happy as Lazarro<\/em>), I\u2019ve had my fill of scrappy kids triumphing against a cruel world, but I\u2019d rather sit through warm-hearted crowd pleasers like Slumdog Millionaire<\/em> and Lion<\/em> again before enduring a second viewing of Capernaum<\/em>, which is profoundly anti-parent and even anti-birth. I\u2019d be more concerned about what messages viewers might take away from Capernaum<\/em> had the film\u2019s relentless misery not smothered me early on, leaving me trying to forget about it altogether.<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/wp-media.patheos.com\/blogs\/sites\/266\/2018\/10\/the-favourite-1L1010557cc_rgb-300x200.jpg\")
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