The Death & Life of John F. Donovan (Xavier Dolan, 2018)

Kit Harington and Chris Zylka in The Death and Life of John F. Donovan

Cast: Kit Harington, Natalie Portman, Jacob Tremblay, Susan Sarandon, Kathy Bates, Ben Schnetzer, Thandie Newton, Jared Keeso, Chris Zylka, Amara Karan, Emily Hampshire, Michael Gambon. Screenplay: Xavier Dolan, Jacob Tierney. Cinematography: André Turpin. Production design: Anne Pritchard, Colombe Raby. Film editing: Mathieu Denis, Xavier Dolan. Music: Gabriel Yared.

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.

Atlantic City (Louis Malle, 1980)

Susan Sarandon and Burt Lancaster in Atlantic City

Cast: Burt Lancaster, Susan Sarandon, Kate Reid, Michel Piccoli, Hollis McLaren, Robert Joy, Al Waxman, Robert Goulet, Moses Znaimer, Angus MacInnes, Sean Sullivan, Wallace Shawn. Screenplay: John Guare. Cinematography: Richard Ciupka. Production design: Anne Pritchard. Film editing: Suzanne Baron. Music: Michel Legrand*.

Old gangsters, like old gunfighters, make good movie protagonists, witness the success of Martin Scorsese's The Irishman (2019). There's something about a survivor's story that draws us in, giving veteran actors good roles to play at the waning of their careers. But director Louis Malle and screenwriter John Guare give us a special twist on the survivor's story, eventually revealing their old gangster to be a bit of a fraud, a hanger-on after all the big guns have been killed off, a has-been who is really a never-was. Hence the glee of the elderly Lou Pascal when he actually guns down two thugs -- something he never had the nerve to do when he was a bit player in the mob. Atlantic City works neatly with two kind of dreamers, both with impossible dreams. Lou's dreams are impossible because they're about an illusory past in which he was a big shot, whereas the dreams of the young, like Sally Matthews's, are impossible because they don't have what it takes to fulfill them. Burt Lancaster and Susan Sarandon got Oscar nominations for playing Lou and Sally, and the film itself racked up nominations in the three other categories in the "top five": picture, director, and screenplay. It won none of them, but like so many Oscar also-rans it has become more valued over the years than most of the winners: Who today remembers Chariots of Fire, which won for best picture and for Colin Welland's screenplay, or has the endurance to sit through Reds, for which Warren Beatty won best director? I cherish Atlantic City for the many unexpected angles through which it views its sort-of-lovable losers, for its use of the crumbling old Atlantic City as a metaphor for the ravages of time, and for lines like Lou's "You should have seen the Atlantic Ocean in those days."

*A courtesy credit: Although Malle commissioned a score from Legrand, he decided not to use it. The only music in the film is diegetic, like Sally's tape recording of Bellini's "Casta Diva" and Robert Goulet' s rendition of Paul Anka's "Atlantic City, My Old Friend."