Jeffrey Wells

So the mob is going apeshit over Warrior, and I think it’s just a rousing, brother-against-brother, forgiving-and-healing, emotionally manipulative MMA movie. Rank-and-file festivalgoers are creaming over The Artist…every Telluride viewer I’ve spoken to loves it…and I think it’s just a clever, assured, highly diverting curio — a tribute to the lore of black-and-white silent cinema and the divergent-Hollywood-career plot used by Singin’ in the Rain and A Star Is Born. And women of all shapes and sizes and social classes love The Help, and we all know the name of that tune.

So what am I to do? Do a flip-flop and say I was wrong but now I’ve seen the light? Twist my neck 180 degrees like Linda Blair in The Exorcist and say, “You know what I did? I saw three Best Picture contenders and failed to recognize them as such”?

I don’t think so. I know precisely how good these three films are, and they’re all con jobs. They aren’t Illuminating Truth-Tellers. They aren’t addressing the deep bedrock stuff. They’re all highly accomplished entertainments, but don’t tell me they’re serious Best Picture contenders. None of them dramatize or illuminate some aspect of our common experience all that primally or skillfully or meaningfully. They’re all about their own realms and realities — the racist South of the early ’60s, the movie business in the late 1920s, the secular world of Mixed Martial Arts. You come out the theatre saying, “Well, that was good but it wasn’t about any place I live in…later.”

If they all become Best Picture nominees, fine. If Hollywood Elsewhere gets to run ads supporting these films, great. And if one of them wins….forget it, won’t happen. Or at the very least it shouldn’t.

Here, thanks to Awards Daily‘s Sasha Stone for sharing a video of the q & a that followed yesterday afternoon’s screening of The Descendants at the Chuck Jones theatre. Hollywood Reporter critic Todd McCarthy moderated the stand-up chat session with George Clooney, Shailene Woodley and director-writer Alexander Payne.

And by the way, Sasha’s chuckling improves the video — it makes it feel more natural and technically unpretentious and real-timey.

Glenn Close gives a classic minimalist performance in Albert Nobbs. One defined by a restricted palette and limited moves, but no less expressive for that. The great Kristin Scott Thomas went to this well, of course, in I Loved You For So Long, and the legendary Steve McQueen (the dead one, not the director of Shame) was surely one of the reigning minimalist actors of the 20th Century. So there’s a tradition here, a realm, and Close knows exactly how to operate within it.

Albert Nobbs star Glenn Close — Saturday, 9.3, 9:45 am inside Telluride Mountain Village’s Chuck Jones theatre.

Awards Daily‘s Sasha Stone and I did a tag-team interview with Close about an hour ago inside the Chuck Jones theatre lobby, and I wish I had the time to describe it in some detail.

I noted the giving-less, showing-more tone of her performance, and asked what the difference was between playing Albert Nobbs on stage in the early ’80s and in the film. Stage acting is always a bit more expressive, but the central current in Nobbs’ character is trauma and repression — a woman who was brutally raped as a youth, who has hidden her identity, who’s constantly fearful of being discovered. So Close played it that way in both formats.

I recorded the chat and will elaborate upon the topics we covered later today or tonight, but you have to bang it out fast and move on when you’re covering a festival. No lounging around and sipping green tea as you carefully sculpt sentences and paragraphs.

I have to catch Werner Herzog‘s Into The Abyss doc at 12 noon…outta here.

Glenn Close and Rodrigo Garcia‘s Albert Nobbs screened last night at Telluride’s Galaxy theatre to, it must be said, a somewhat muted reaction. With the exception, I should add, of Janet McTeer‘s brilliant supporting performance as Hubert, a woman pretending to be a man.

Nobbs came to Telluride with the advance buzz being that Close might be delivering an Oscar-calibre performance. Close is striking, no question — she’s playing a sad, curious inhabitant of a long-ago era in a granular, highly concentrated way — but McTeer’s performance has the dignity, heart and heat.

Close’s Nobbs, a 19th Century Dublin waiter living her life as a male for both economic and emotional reasons, is a very odd bird. Porcelain, cautious, corseted and buttoned-down to a fare-thee-well. And flagrantly asexual. For Nobbs the gender facade is all — hiding who she is an absolute. This obviously renders her as a metaphor for repression, but Nobbs is so primly Victorian that she hasn’t the first clue about anything remotely emotional and/or sensual. She sees marriage as an opportunity for companionship and mutual economic endeavor.

So there’s really nothing in the character to relate to from a 2011 perspective other than the sad fact that she’s some kind of ultimate closet case. It’s not enough to pull and hold you in. Nobbs wants a female wife, but is so uninvested in the universal human longing for love and laughter and whatever else makes your day. She’s interested primarily — only — in security and saving her money and perhaps one day owning a tobacconist shop. More on this later– have to dash up to an interview.

Albert Nobbs is slated for a limited release sometime in December.

A friend writes: “The Butter script was number three on the Black List and was one of the funniest scripts I’ve read in years. If the movie comes even close to the script, it will be this year’s Little Miss Sunshine.

“Plot is the story of a young black girl who doesn’t like white people (hilarious reverse politically incorrect racism), is adopted (for the one hundredth time — she never unpacks her bags) by a very, very whitebread Midwestern family

On the other side of town, the guy who wins the butter carving competition (regarded as the local Academy Awards) is asked to drop out this year because he always wins and there’s no contest. His wife, a social climbing wing nut, sees her status as Wife of First Prize Winner dropping so she decides to enter instead

The contestants sculpt butter like high art — the Pieta, the Thinker, etc. — and take

it a little too seriously, like the stage moms in Sunshine. So the big-haired wife/bitch takes on the very talented and newly discovered butter artist black orphan

“And the games begin.”

Pics from this morning’s Telluride Film Festival Patron’s Brunch, which was held on a scenic elevated pasture some 20 minutes out of town, slightly to the west of the Telluride airport. Splendid food, killer scenery, great company, gang’s all here, etc.

This guy never stops quipping, charming, posing for pictures, etc. Indefatigable smoothie. And a likely Best Actor contender, trust me, after this morning’s screening of The Descendants.

N.Y. Times critic A.O. Scott, his son Ezra.

Pina director Wim Wenders, Into The Abyss helmer Werner Herzog.

(l. to r.) N.Y. Film Festival honcho Scott Foundas, Allan Arkush, publicist Jessica Uzzan.

Albert Nobbs director Rodrigo Garcia, Glenn Close.

Here are six or seven tweets about Alexander Payne‘s The Descendants from late this afternoon:

#1: “The Descendants, a Hawaiian family drama about death and letting go and waking up, is deep and real and true to life.”

#2: “George Clooney‘s performance as a beleagured, soon-to-be-widowed dad is touching, real, honest. He’s immediately in Best Actor contention.”

#3: “The first Telluride showing if The Descendants just broke, and I KNOW when I’ve seen a drama that doesn’t try too hard but sinks right the fuck in.”

#4: “I for one love the abrupt, subtle tonal shifts between straight drama and whaddaya-gonna-do, throw-up-your-hands, low-key comedy. Perfect.”

#5: “I read a draft of The Descendants in which George Clooney’s comatose wife comes back from time to time and hashes things out with him.”

6:: “That’s not what happens in the film, I should immediately point out. The way the film plays the emotional cards seems just right to me.”

#7: “So Best Picture contention, Payne for Best Director, Clooney for Best Actor and Shailene Woodley, as Clooney’s older teenage daughter, really delivers also, so maybe some action for her.”

Constant Telluride activity since daybreak, but no time to write about it (except for tweets). The Patron Picnic ran from 9:30 to noon (got good photos of George Clooney and everyone else, didn’t have time to post). Then a press schmooze-confab at the Sheridan, and then a 2:30 pm of The Descendants (which deserves a solid A) at the Chuck Jones theatre. And then came a 6pm screening of George Harrison: Living in the Material World, which I was half-and-half on and decided to bail on after 90 minutes (I can see the rest at the NYFF). And I’m now waiting to see a 9 pm showing of Rodrigo Garcia‘s Albert Nobbs and typing this.

“The take-off and landing are a bit bumpy,” writes The Playlist‘s Oliver Lyttleton from Venice, “but most of David Cronenberg‘s A Dangerous Method is fearsomely smart. It’s a grown-up, absorbing film that doesn’t forget to move you even as it fires up the synapses, and one of real substance (certainly more so than the enjoyable, but somewhat hollow Eastern Promises). It examines the creative and destructive elements of sexuality in a way that very few filmmakers would dare

“If anything keeps it from quite hitting the heights that it could, it’s Christopher Hampton‘s scripting.

Variety‘s Justin Chang also admires Cronenberg’s film, but with reservations.

“Cronenberg’s career-long fascination with matters of the mind manifests itself in compelling but determinedly non-mind-bending fashion in A Dangerous Method. An elegant, coolly restrained account of the friendship between Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung, and its ultimate undoing by a brilliant female patient-student who came between them, this complex story from the early days of psychoanalysis engrosses and even amuses as it unfolds through a series of conversations, treatment sessions and exchanged letters.

“Still, the absence of gut-level impact and talky approach to rarefied material mark it as one of Cronenberg’s more specialized entries, destined for a small but appreciative audience. ”

Last night Telluride Film Festival p.r. director Shannon Mitchell declared that “no photography [will be] allowed inside the theaters at any of the George Clooney events — i.e., the Tribute and screenings, intros and q & a’s of The Descendants.” But that’s over now. Photos are okay, sez the Clooney camp. All is cool. Snap away.

Mitchell later wrote, apparently in response to joshing complaints, that “I’m getting a lot of funny comments about this but do want to be clear that this is not a request made by Clooney or his publicists. It’s a decision by festival organizers to try and keep

things sane inside the theaters and focused on the event. Clooney is still very much, as one journalist put it, a ‘man of the people!’

11:05 am update: Clooney’s publicist Stan Rosenfield just called to reiterate that he and Clooney knew nothing about this, that this isn’t how they roll, and that they’re asking the festival to “rescind” the no-indoor-photos request.

Previously: Telluride is not Cannes or Toronto. It’s low-key and artist-friendly and about the art of it. I totally respect and admire that. But at the same time Mitchell is essentially saying no shots of Clooney at any event whatsoever unless you happen to run into him on the street or in a store or on a hiking path in the hills. She’s basically saying, “Please treat his presence here as a non-physical, non-tangible thing, and focus only on his inner aspirational qualities.”

If I was Mitchell I would rephrase the edict as follows:

“During the 2011 Telluride Film Festival we are insisting upon photographic boundaries regarding George Clooney, specifically that he be treated and in fact regarded as The Un-Clooney, as a non-physical being, as The Man Who Isn’t Really There. An entity of spirit and longing and power and creative satisfaction but not molecular composition, as a kind of ghost or spectral presence…an idea in the mind of God. Thanks for your understanding and cooperation.”

Check.

Last night was just about cool mountain air and kicking back and breathing a little heavy as we walked up hills. It’s not Mount Everest, but the oxygen levels are lighter up here. I prefer to think of the Telluride air as select, rarified. I’d been told to drink only a single glass of wine, but I threw down two glasses of Pinot Grigio like I was Ernest Hemingway, like it was nothing at all.

With George Clooney (The Descendants) and Tilda Swinton (We Need To Talk About Kevin) being tributed by the 2011 Telluride Film Festival, it was fitting that Tony Gilroy‘s Michael Clayton — in which they both star — was screened last night at the outdoor Abel Gance theatre. Swinton was standing on Colorado Ave. and posing for photos as the closing credits rolled around 10 pm.

A couple of hours earlier at 221 a few of us — Pete and Madelyn Hammond, In Contention‘s Kris Tapley, Awards Daily‘s Sasha Stone, Wall Street Journal critic Joe Morgenstern, two friends/associates and myself — attended a birthday dinner for Santa Barbara Film Festival director Roger Durling. The Fox Searchlight gang (The Descendants) was sitting nearby; ditto the Sundance Film Festival team (John Cooper, et. al.).

There’s a big party tonight at Frank Marshall and Kathleen Kennedy‘s sprawling ranch, not too many miles from here. Hammond has been invited but not me. If I was Kennedy/Marshall I wouldn’t want to many journalists there, scrounging around and mucking up the vibe.

Today’s schedule again: Patron Brunch from 10:30 to 12 noon, The Descendants at 2 pm, George Harrison: Living In The Material World at 6 pm, and finally Albert Nobbs at 9 pm or thereabouts.

Last night at 221 Oak Street (l. to r.): Santa Barbara Film Festival honcho Roger Durling, Dan Launspach, Pete Hammond.

World’s worst photo of Tilda Swinton (We Need To Talk About Kevin), taken last night around 10 pm on Telluride’s Main Street. (Photo by Sasha Stone.)