Tim Sutton explores the shadowy underbelly of America in DARK NIGHT
DARK NIGHT (Tim Sutton, 2016)
Alamo Drafthouse Downtown Brooklyn
445 Albee Square West
Opens Friday, February 3
718-513-2547
drafthouse.com/nyc
There’s an ominous cloud hanging over Tim Sutton’s deeply poetic Dark Night, a grim, gripping journey into the dark night of America’s soul. The title of Sutton’s third film, following Pavilion and Memphis, also references Christopher Nolan’s 2012 Batman movie, The Dark Knight Rises, for reasons that become apparent about halfway through. Dark Night opens with a close-up of a young woman’s disbelieving eyes, red, white, and blue lights flashing across her face; the camera then pulls back as the woman, wearing an American flag top, lowers her head, taking stock of an unrevealed tragedy. For the next eighty-five minutes, Sutton goes back to the beginning of this fateful day, following the lives of a small group of men, women, and children in a suburban Florida community as they go about their usual business. They play on computers, put on makeup, pet animals, and head over to the mall. One concerned mother and her detached son speak with an off-screen interviewer as if searching for reasons in the aftermath of a horrific event, but in this case it hasn’t happened yet. In many of the vignettes, there is little or no dialogue, as the characters, all nonprofessional actors mostly found on the streets of Sarasota, speak with their actions, particularly when several of the males, including a military vet and a teen with dazzling blue eyes, load firearms. In this Blue Velvet-like town, danger lurks just below the surface.
A cast of nonprofessional actors play realistic characters facing tragedy in DARK NIGHT
Dark Night is photographed by French cinematographer Hélène Louvart (Pina, The Beaches of Agnès) in a documentary style, with fly-on-the-wall shots occasionally broken up by stunning aerial views of perfectly trimmed green lawns and cookie-cutter rooftops that look like video-game targets, static shots of light poles as if they are living creatures, and a striking scene of a woman walking along the outdoor hallway of one of Florida’s ubiquitous motel-like apartment complexes. Canadian singer-songwriter Maica Armata’s (Caro Diaro, MaicaMia) score features five haunting songs, including “Om,” “Oh Well,” and a gloomy, reimagined version of the old standard “You Are My Sunshine,” her ethereal vocals utterly frightening. Evoking such indie works as Larry Clark’s Kids, Gus van Sant’s Elephant, Lance Hammer’s Ballast, and Harmony Korine’s Gummo, the Brooklyn-based Sutton paces the unsettling film with a delicate, disquieting subtlety, the community overwhelmed by an unspoken ennui that’s representative of the dissatisfaction and disconnection being felt all across the country. He might not offer any answers, but he asks many of the right questions, giving the riveting tale an uncomfortable, beguiling immediacy. Dark Night opens February 3 at the Alamo Drafthouse in downtown Brooklyn, with Sutton participating in Q&As following the 6:30 screenings on Friday, Saturday, and Sunday.
One of the best sports films ever made, Slap Shot is a riotously bloody look at minor-league hockey. Paul Newman — who declared this one of his favorite pictures — stars as Reggie Dunlop, an aging loser serving as player-coach of the Charlestown Chiefs and trying to keep his marriage going with Francine (Jennifer Warren). When the general manager (Strother Martin) tells him that the team is being shut down at the end of the season, Dunlop decides to send it off with a bang. Lying to his team that if the Chiefs fill the seats and start winning they will move to Florida, he incorporates a different style of play into their game, led by the brutal, vicious, and utterly hilarious Hanson brothers (real-life brothers Jeff and Steve Carlson and their Johnstown Jets teammate Dave Hanson), who never met an opponent they wouldn’t punch, trip, slash, spear, or slam face-first into the boards well after the whistle. Even Dunlop gets in on the fun, throwing his share of right hands. The only player not participating in the hijinks is Ned Braden (Michael Ontkean), who believes in sportsmanship and a more gentlemanly game of skill and beauty, not exactly what men like Ogie Oglethorpe (minor-league player Ned Dowd, whose sister, Nancy, wrote the book that the movie is based on, inspired by the real-life antics of the Johnstown Jets) and Tim “Dr. Hook” McCracken (Paul D’Amato) have in mind. You don’t have to be a hockey fan to love Slap Shot, which is really, when it comes right down to it, just a little film about the trials and tribulations of everyday life. Look for cameos by Paul Dooley, M. Emmett Walsh, Melinda Dillon, Nancy Dowd as Andrea, and actual hockey players Bruce Boudreau, Jean Tétreault, Connie Madigan, Cliff Thompson, and Joe Nolan, among others. Slap Shot is screening February 3 in the Metrograph series “Universal in the 70’s: Part One,” a tribute to the decade when the studio took advantage of the growing independent-cinema movement; the two-week, eighteen-film festival continues through February 7 with such other gems as Clint Eastwood’s awesome High Plains Drifter, Alfred Hitchcock’s Family Plot, Jeremy Kagan’s The Big Fix, and Don Siegel’s underseen Charley Varrick.
The Daughter is a taut Australian melodrama from actor, director, and writer Simon Stone, his feature directorial debut, inspired by his 2014 stage adaptation of Henrik Ibsen’s The Wild Duck for Sydney’s Belvoir St Theatre company. The film builds slowly, teasing out the tension, until it gets so wrapped up in itself that the stream of revelations unfolding near the end feels overwrought and anticlimactic, as viewers will have figured out many of the twists much earlier. Still, it’s a compelling tale, well acted by a solid cast, although one overblown character nearly brings it all tumbling down. Ne’er-do-well prodigal son Christian (Paul Schneider) has returned home for the first time in fifteen years, for the wedding of his father, Henry (Geoffrey Rush), to his much younger housekeeper, Anna (Anna Torv). The wealthy local mill owner in a rural New South Wales town, Henry has just announced that his factory is closing. Christian, an alcoholic who is having problems with his girlfriend, Grace (Ivy Mak), and has never gotten over his mother’s death, reconnects with his childhood friend, Oliver (Ewen Leslie), a millworker who is married to Charlotte (Miranda Otto); they have a lovely daughter, teenager Hedvig (Odessa Young), a smart girl who is very close to her grandfather, Walter (Sam Neill), who takes care of a forest on his property as well as a home-made sanctuary for injured animals. Long-held secrets begin to emerge, spinning both families into severe crises as the past refuses to stay hidden.
