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| Kit Harington and Chris Zylka in The Death and Life of John F. Donovan |
I had read some of the reviews, noted the abysmal 21% ranking on Rotten Tomatoes, and knew that The Death & Life of John F. Donovan had barely been released in the United States. But how bad could a movie that featured three best actress Oscar winners as well as such celebrated performers as Thandie Newton and Michael Gambon really be? Maybe this was a case of a film that simply went over people's heads and will be rediscovered in a few years to become a cult film. Well, no. This is not an unappreciated gem. It's a mess of a movie about the perils of celebrity, with an embarrassingly off-the-mark treatment of life in the closet, and some uncomfortable echoes of real celebrity secret lives that only add queasiness to the mix. The denouement of the film is sheer hackery: There are two Big Speeches, one by Kathy Bates and the other by Gambon (in a kind of wise old man ex machina appearance), that are supposed somehow to resolve the film's theme, but are only anti-climactic. Is it well-acted? Yes. Kit Harington hasn't quite escaped the aura of Jon Snow in the film, partly because the title role calls on him to be a hugely successful TV star, but he has a looseness and natural delivery that he was never allowed in the fantasy confines of Game of Thrones. Jacob Tremblay, as the young, starstruck fan who becomes a pen pal with Donovan, shows that he really is the capable child actor that Room (Lenny Abrahamson, 2015) suggested he was. Natalie Portman and Susan Sarandon do what they can with badly written roles. It's said that writer-director Xavier Dolan's original cut of the film was four hours long, and that the trimming to the current two-hour length involved jettisoning the work of yet another major actress, Jessica Chastain, so it's possible that some of the incoherence of the film stems from desperate editing. But nothing about the movie really makes me want to watch the director's original cut.
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