I arrived in Telluride one week ago today, simultaneously dehydrated and needing to pee. The dry mountain air does strange things to a city boy, but I quickly got used to it - this is, after all, the third year that I’ve been to Telluride.

So what’s what for this year at The World’s Greatest Film Festival? Well, obviously there have been some managerial changes - Bill Pence (my former boss at Hopkins Center Film) is no longer the co-director of the festival, and Stella Pence is no longer the managing director. In Bill’s place is Gary Meyer of Landmark Theaters - would there be a radical shift in passholder policy? A new direction as far as programming?

Truth be told, it’s more of the same, which is great. In the spirit of preserving the festival’s ethos, Gary and Tom Luddy chose Edith Kramer, curator emerita of the PFA, as this year’s guest director, and Kramer ran with it, programming the most awesomely eclectic set of revivals possible (too bad I didn’t get to see most of them : ( )

But more on revivals later: you wanna hear about the big stuff, so I’m going to start with that. I’m dividing my Telluride reports up thematically this year, and this first theme is the Biopic, a form explored in quite a bit of detail in this year’s festival. Along these lines I saw five or six features, four of which I’ll talk about here:

Into the Wild (2007, Sean Penn)

Let’s start with the worst. Sean Penn’s Into the Wild is a huge mess of an adaptation of Jon Krakauer’s non-fiction account of the life of Christopher McCandless, a college graduate who abandoned all material goods to live in the wild and move to Alaska. A grab-bag of ill-chosen aesthetic devices (slow-motion shots of water falling in showers), needless directorial indulgences (characters breaking the fourth wall, stupidly), and horribly misguided musical cues (Eddie Vedder channels Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan as the camera spins around Emile Hirsch’s McCandless on a mountaintop). This is a Cinema of Stupid Tricks and simply has little business being at a festival like Telluride.

The Counterfeiters (2007, Stefan Ruzowitsky)

This Austrian Holocaust pic is based on the true story of Salomon Sorowitsch, a Jewish counterfeiter employed by the Nazis to produce counterfeit British and American bills. Ruzowitsky’s film earned some comparisons to last year’s The Lives of Others, in part because both were surprise hits at the festival. But where Lives was classical and humanist, Counterfeiters is dour and stylized, with baroque hand-held camera moves and a protagonist who doesn’t seem to possess many redeeming qualities. It’s a strong little movie, but at this point, compared to so many of the other films I saw in the festival, it seems fairly middling.

The Diving Bell and the Butterfly (2007, Julian Schnabel)

Here’s an object lesson in how to use overt stylization: compare Schnabel’s warmly life-affirming Diving Bell to Penn’s overambitious Into the Wild. The former is by far the more stylized - much is from the perspective of a paralyzed man whose fogged left eye is the only means of communication he has with the world, conjuring, as has been noted elsewhere, the work of Stan Brakhage. But at the heart of this film, unlike Penn’s, is a fully thought-out aesthetic system that doesn’t pick and choose devices at random at the director’s whim. The performances here are expert - Max von Sydow, in two relatively short scenes, seems to beg for an Oscar nomination.

I’m Not There (2007, Todd Haynes)
Certainly the most novel approach to the biopic here, and the greatest. Haynes’ film is the masterpiece of his career, a precisely orchestrated synthesis of diverse strains of address that form a complicated image of a complicated figure. His film is not about Bob Dylan precisely - it’s about six (or seven?) Dylanesque figures, ranging from a boxcar-riding troubadour (Marcus Carl Franklin) or adulterous Brando-like actor (Heath Ledger) to Billy the Kid (Richard Gere, trapped in a surreal world of Dylan’s lyrical mythology) to Arthur Rimbaud under interrogation (Ben Wishaw) to two incredible encapsulations of Dylan’s popular image at various points of his career. Both Christian Bale and Cate Blanchett are stunning in these roles, but the real star here is Haynes himself. Flitting from narrative to narrative, engaging in overt exploration of 1960s visual culture (among the many films from which Haynes borrows elements are Persona, 8 1/2, and Week End), and exploring the many minds of America’s most iconic activist/artist - this film is a masterpiece, flat out.

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