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      Brendan Fraser Mounts a Transformational Comeback With ‘The Whale’

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      In Darren Aronofsky’s “The Whale,” the onetime leading hunk is earning Oscar chatter for his role as a 600-pound recluse, though the emotional actor is wary.VENICE — For someone who became famous for playing the titular lunkheads in 1990s movies like “Encino Man” and “George of the Jungle,” Brendan Fraser speaks with a surprising delicacy.At the Venice Film Festival on Sunday to discuss his new film “The Whale,” the 53-year-old actor answered news-conference questions with a quaver in his voice and the director Darren Aronofsky’s steadying hand on his shoulder. And whenever the clearly emotional Fraser managed to make it to the end of a statement without his eyes filling with tears, the room full of journalists burst into encouraging applause.“Thank you for the warm reception,” Fraser said. “I’m looking forward to how this film makes a deep impression on everyone as much as it has on me.”Though his career faltered in the years after “The Mummy” (1999) made him a bankable leading man, “The Whale” offers Fraser a showy comeback role unlike anything he’s ever played. In Aronofsky’s film, adapted from the play by Samuel D. Hunter, Fraser dons a prosthetic bodysuit to play Charlie, a 600-pound gay man who lives in unhappy isolation following the death of his lover. Whether he’s grabbing a bucket of Kentucky Fried Chicken or two double-stacked slices of pizza piled with American cheese, Charlie eats so self-destructively that he doesn’t even bother to chew his food; he inhales each piece, as if hoping to choke on it.His caregiver (Hong Chau) warns Charlie that his blood pressure is so severe that if he doesn’t change his ways or go to a hospital, he’ll almost certainly die. But in the meantime, Charlie tries to draw his estranged daughter (Sadie Sink) back into his orbit, attempting to make things right with her before the ending he appears to be hurtling headlong toward.Aronofsky wanted to mount the movie for years but could never land on the right lead. “I considered everyone — all different types of actors, every single movie star on the planet — but none of it really ever clicked,” the director said. “It just didn’t move me, it didn’t feel right.”A light bulb went off when he chanced upon a trailer for “Journey to the End of the Night,” a low-budget 2006 film starring Fraser: Perhaps, like Mickey Rourke in Aronofsky’s “The Wrestler,” Fraser was ripe for reclamation.And, for that matter, transformation. Fraser wears prosthetic appliances to play Charlie that sometimes weighed up to 300 extra pounds. “I needed to learn to move in a new way,” Fraser said. “I developed muscles that I did not know that I had. I even felt a sense of vertigo at the end of the day when all the appliances were removed, just as you would feel stepping off the boat onto the dock here in Venice.”Oscar voters love a contender who undergoes a physical transformation, but not everybody is pleased about his movie metamorphosis: In the last year alone, actors like Sarah Paulson, Colin Farrell, Jared Leto, Emma Thompson and Renée Zellweger have all donned fat suits to play overweight characters, a practice some argue is fatphobic and exploitative.For his part, Fraser said that spending time in Charlie’s skin gave me “an appreciation for those whose bodies are similar because I learned that you need to be an incredibly strong person physically, mentally, to inhabit that physical being. And I think that is Charlie.”Many of Fraser’s early roles banked on his physical beauty and muscular frame, and one journalist recalled watching “George of the Jungle” with her children, noting, “Being very beautiful can isolate you, because people don’t see you.” Fraser, who is long past his loincloth era, nodded.“I looked different in those days,” he said. “My journey to where I am now has been to explore as many characters as I can, and this presented the biggest challenge to me.”Will that challenge lead to Fraser’s first Oscar nomination? It was clear from the supportive applause at the news conference that people were rooting for the actor, and that personal narrative of a career comeback combined with a showy role could take Fraser to the front of the pack. But when he was asked about that buzz and what it meant for the future of his career, Fraser said softly that it remained to be seen.“My crystal ball is broken,” Fraser told the journalist. “I don’t know if yours works, but meet me after the show, and we’ll take a peek together.” More

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      Venice: A Creepy ‘Call Me by Your Name’ Reunion in ‘Bones and All’

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      In this cannibal romance, the director Luca Guadagnino reunites Timothée Chalamet with Michael Stuhlbarg under very different circumstances.VENICE — There is a message that social scientists and environmental watchdogs have been trying to convey in this newspaper for a while. But maybe you haven’t really been listening. Maybe it will take a different messenger to catch your attention.“I think societal collapse is in the air,” Timothée Chalamet said on Friday at the Venice Film Festival.Though you might expect Chalamet to issue a doomy quote like that while promoting “Dune,” in which his character presides over the destruction of an empire, the 26-year-old actor tossed it out during a news conference for “Bones and All,” a new film that reunites him with Luca Guadagnino, the director of Chalamet’s breakout vehicle “Call Me by Your Name.”But then again, discussing “Bones and All” can put a person in a more contemplative frame of mind: Though it’s a romance — Chalamet plays one of two drifters, traveling together across the Midwest in search of belonging — the movie is stark, lonely and more than a bit gory because our two lovers happen to be cannibals.(Maybe now you understand why this meaty film is coming out Thanksgiving week.)Adapted from the novel by Camille DeAngelis, “Bones and All” tracks Maren (“Waves” star Taylor Russell), an 18-year-old who has just transferred to a new high school where she tentatively befriends a classmate and then, somewhat less tentatively, bites down hard on the girl’s finger. Maren’s dad (André Holland) has been dreading this sort of thing, as she’s shown an inclination toward consuming human flesh ever since she was a child. So when her father speeds her out of town and abandons her in the middle of nowhere, Maren must finally seek guidance from her own kind.Fortunately, she can smell fellow cannibals, including Chalamet’s Lee, who she forges a tender romance with, and Mark Rylance, who plays a veteran cannibal with unnerving Harry Dean Stanton energy. There’s even a scene where Maren and Lee run into a cannibal drifter played by Michael Stuhlbarg, who was so sweet in “Call Me by Your Name” and here is something else entirely.“It was a delight, the idea that we could kind of summon Michael to be the perverted father after having been the loving father in ‘Call Me by Your Name,’” Guadagnino said at the news conference. But if people on social media are tempted to draw a link from “Bones and All” to another “Call Me by Your Name” actor — Armie Hammer, whose career fell apart when the star’s cannibalistic fantasies came to light and sexual assault allegations followed — Guadagnino would rather you didn’t.“The relationship between this kind of digital muckraking and our wish to make this movie is nonexistent, and it should be met with a shrug,” Guadagnino told Deadline last week. “I would prefer to talk about what the film has to say, rather than things that have nothing to do with it.”Social media was a hot topic at the film’s news conference: Though the film is set in the 1980s, one journalist felt that the outcast characters in “Bones and All” suffer society’s judgment in a way that could be likened to a modern-day pile-on.“To be young now, or to be young whenever — I can only speak for my generation — is to be intensely judged,” Chalamet said. “It was a relief to play characters that are wrestling with an internal dilemma absent the ability to go on Reddit or Twitter, Instagram or TikTok and figure out where they fit in.”Added his co-star Russell, “The hope is really that you can find your own compass within all of [social media], and that seems like a difficult task now.”Chalamet concurred. “I think it’s tough to be alive now,” he said before issuing his prediction of societal collapse. What made him so certain? “It smells like it,” he said, as Lee or Maren might.But Chalamet wasn’t totally without hope. He said “Bones and All” portrayed that disenfranchisement and tribelessness in a way that could prove helpful now.“Without being pretentious, that’s why hopefully these movies matter,” Chalamet said. “The role of the artist is to shine a light on what’s going on.” More

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      Paul W.S. Anderson and Milla Jovovich: A Marriage Built on Monsters

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      In 20 years and several “Resident Evil” films, the couple has found their love language in action — and a lot of blood and dust.The filmmaker Paul W. S. Anderson has directed Milla Jovovich in no less than four films in the apocalyptic “Resident Evil” franchise, and written two more she starred in. That’s in addition to directing her in “Monster Hunter” (2020) and a 2011 version of “The Three Musketeers.”But what might sound like a series of genre nightmares is in fact a dream arrangement: Anderson and Jovovich are married, with three children. A shared love of visual storytelling — often in the form of Jovovich destroying monsters in Anderson’s postindustrial wastelands — has energized them during a 20-odd-year collaboration, which began with “Resident Evil” (2002), an adaptation of a video game that both had played. (A separate “Resident Evil” series is now on Netflix.)Jovovich in the Anderson-directed “Monster Hunter,” one of many films the couple has collaborated on. Screen Gems/Sony PicturesOn a recent video call, I spoke with the cheery couple about their partnership: Jovovich, 46, from Los Angeles, having recently wrapped “Breathe,” a dystopian thriller; Anderson, 57, from Krakow, Poland, where he is in preproduction on their next project, “In the Lost Lands,” based on a short story by George R. R. Martin. The family business continues with their daughter Ever Anderson, who stars as Wendy in David Lowery’s forthcoming “Peter Pan & Wendy.” This interview has been condensed and edited.How did you first meet?PAUL W.S. ANDERSON We were going into Pinewood Studios [outside London] to start production on “Event Horizon,” and they were tearing down these really cool-looking sets for “The Fifth Element” [starring Jovovich] that had just finished shooting. Our paths almost crossed there. And then we were at a premiere together, separately.MILLA JOVOVICH A premiere?ANDERSON Yeah! A Drew Barrymore movie. “Never Been Kissed.”JOVOVICH I can never imagine you watching a rom-com like that! That’s hilarious.ANDERSON I was obviously drawn for another reason, because you were there. Then I finally met Milla officially for the first time in 2000, right before we did “Resident Evil.” She was sitting on the steps outside my office. I thought she was the coolest-looking woman in the world. And I had just seen this really cool truck parked on the street outside — and it was her truck.What was it like giving notes on your first movie together?JOVOVICH Oh, my God, it was a disaster. I had read for a certain version of the movie, and I got the new rewrite the night before I had to go to Berlin [to shoot]. Paul had pretty much written me out of the movie. I was the damsel in distress that Michelle Rodriguez was saving constantly — the “Look out! Behind you!” girl. So by the time I got to the hotel, Paul’s very sweet producing partner was there with flowers, and I grabbed the flowers and said, “I want to see Paul in my room within the hour. There won’t be any script readings in the morning!” Then I quickly changed, did my makeup, put on a really low-cut top and met for some script revisions. [Laughs] He said, “What’s the problem?” I said, “OK, let’s start: Page 1!”Do you work together at all on writing the stories now?JOVOVICH Paul is the writer, I just ask questions, trying to understand where my character fits in. He does the heavy lifting, and I come in and put a kink in the works occasionally.ANDERSON But that’s a hugely important part of the process, and Milla’s really good on script. I remember on “Resident Evil: Afterlife” [2010], I’d written the script, and Milla was like, “It’s just missing something. It needs some signature action scene where I do something, some kind of aerial combat. And I had a dream last night: I was jumping down an elevator shaft.” And I thought, oh, my God, that’s a great idea. I went away and did a big rewrite. And “Resident Evil: Afterlife” opens with this needle-dive sequence, where it’s in this underground skyscraper. She was right!The couple working on “Resident Evil: Afterlife.” She said, “Paul is the writer, I just ask questions.” He added, “But that’s a hugely important part of the process, and Milla’s really good on script.”Rafy/Screen Gems, via Everett CollectionWhat do you feel are each other’s strengths in terms of filming action?JOVOVICH Paul is the action master. It made a lot of sense when I found out that he was the Dungeon Master [as a kid] because you have to have that imagination to direct five nerds playing Dungeons & Dragons for 18 hours at a time. And he still does it with our kids now. It’s so much fun. I’ve always been fascinated by the way Paul’s mind works, because you’re the nicest guy, but in your head you’ve got these horrifying, disgusting visions and fantasies.ANDERSON Monsters from the id!JOVOVICH Who knows what would have happened if you couldn’t take it out in your movies? You’d be having this conversation from prison.Milla, your mother was an actor. Was that an influence for you?JOVOVICH My mother was a movie star in the former Soviet Union. We defected in 1981 or something to America, my parents literally starting from zero. My mom tried to teach me what she knew to help us get a leg up in a new country. So for me, acting was not really a choice. It was more of a necessity. I feel like maybe part of the reason it’s so hard for me to watch myself onscreen is because I never truly had that belief in myself that I could be as good as her. But I don’t resent my mom for it; now I’m really grateful for it, because with my own daughter [Ever Anderson], I feel like I really nurtured her talent.Paul, were there filmmakers that have inspired you?ANDERSON The Scott brothers were a huge inspiration, because Ridley and Tony came from the north of England as well. It used to be shipbuilding and coal mining, and by the time I was a kid, it was all industrial decay and unemployment.Is the industrial decay a key to all the postapocalyptic landscapes in these movies?JOVOVICH Paul is the king of industrial decay. My mom always complains. [Russian accent] “Why you never put her in evening gown and make beautiful, glamorous hair. Always dirty. Always filthy. Always blood. Always horrible locations. Disgusting.” [Anderson laughs]ANDERSON I remember going into the makeup trailer of “Resident Evil: Extinction” in the desert in Mexico [on a visit to the set of the 2007 film directed by Russell Mulcahy]. Milla’s in there and the makeup artist was just putting on so much dirt. I’m like, that’s enough dirt! And you could see Milla was a little disgruntled. I see her outside a minute later, she’s chasing a truck around, because it’s kicking up all this dust. And she’s just trying to get extra dirty!JOVOVICH I’m telling you, nothing suits me better than blood and dust. More

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      The Many Lives of Martine Syms

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      LOS ANGELES — As self-portraits go, the video “DED” by Martine Syms is a bit masochistic. The artist’s digital avatar strolls across a flat, featureless limbo, enduring several gruesome deaths. Seppuku with a chef’s knife. Crippling, fatal allergies. Diarrhea so explosive she rockets into the sky like a rag doll, then dies from the fall. Then, somehow, she gets up and keeps walking.Syms remembers sending an early clip of the 15-minute piece to a friend. “I still think it’s kind of funny,” she said recently, at a booth at Little Dom’s, a red-sauce, dark wood Italian restaurant in this city’s Los Feliz neighborhood. “But let me be clear that I understand how people do not. They were like, ‘What the [expletive] is this? It’s really violent. I don’t like seeing you dying.’”But that’s the thing, she told me. “There’s always a level of seriousness read into a lot of things that I’m doing that I don’t necessarily connect with.”Especially when race is involved. “I’m using a signifier, Blackness, which for some people can connote serious pain,” she acknowledged. “But I see it as a real space of joy and freedom.”Syms, 34, is the sort of “new media” artist who antiquates the term. Since her days as a film programmer at clubs like the Echo Park Film Center in Los Angeles, she has turned the various lenses of media around to interrogate what society expects of Black women, and Black artists in particular. An early video, “My Only Idol Is Reality,” from 2007, consists of a degraded VHS copy of a heated, unedited dialogue on race between two contestants on “The Real World.” Syms studied cinema at the Art Institute of Chicago, co-founded a book store called Golden Age and started an artist-book imprint called Dominica. She racked up tags: artist, writer, musician, publisher, teacher, filmmaker; D.J., influencer, brand. Throughout her art, her moving images feature avatars of herself that she endows with a vital mixture of ego and exhaustion, cupidity and love.“DED” (2021), a digital video on view in “Martine Syms: Grio College” at CCS Bard’s Hessel Museum of Art. Syms endows avatars of herself, including Teeny, seen above, with a vital mixture of ego and exhaustion, cupidity and love.Olympia Shannon/CCS BardIn the summer of 2017, Syms graduated with an M.F.A. from Bard College; that fall, she began a year as faculty at the California Institute of the Arts. In the interim, she produced a solo show at MoMA — a purple-tinged installation including photographs, furniture and a feature-length video.This fall brings her a triad of institutional coups, and a movie in theaters. Each stars dramatized, extrapolated versions of Syms. A new, open-ended video play fed by machine-learning algorithms anchors “Neural Swamp,” through Oct. 30, at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. And a gonzo sitcom called “She Mad,” 2015-2021, in which Syms often stars, appears at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago until February 2023. The most recent episode routes the artist’s real-life ups and downs through a cover of the “Life Story” TikToks posted by the rapper Lil Nas X.“DED” is the showpiece of “Grio College,” Syms’s retrospective at the CCS Bard Hessel Museum of Art, in upstate New York. Bard, the artist’s alma mater, also inspired her first foray into independent films: “The African Desperate,” which she directed and co-wrote with Rocket Caleshu, enters worldwide distribution with screenings in New York starting Sept. 16. (The artist Diamond Stingily, an old friend, plays the lead, a Black femme named Palace with a newly minted M.F.A.; Bridget Donahue, Syms’s New York dealer, and A.L. Steiner, her former teacher, have small roles as Palace’s professors.)Installation view of “Martine Syms: She Mad Season One,” a wry take on contemporary life as a Black woman, at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, through Feb. 12, 2023.Nathan Keay/MCA ChicagoSyms’s many avatars are a record of survival in a cloying media atmosphere. They’re sometimes self-indulgent — necessarily so, in the manner of psychoanalysis or self-care. The notion of “Grio College,” a place that teaches the trick of honing personal experience into modern stories, developed through the artist’s experience on the M.F.A. track. Syms writes in the press notes to “The African Desperate” that the overlapping dystopias of an advanced art college in the bucolic Hudson Valley came laced with racism. One of the last sequences of the film layers found audio of a man telling off his bigoted co-workers with shots of postcard-perfect fields and shops in Troy, N.Y.“The curriculum that she presents is larger than what a college typically covers,” said Lauren Cornell, the chief curator at the Hessel. “It encompasses one’s whole life, friends, thinkers, culture.” Her professors and gallerists become collaborators; the places she lives become sets and settings.Sitting in the booth at Little Dom’s, on the edge of Hollywood, dayglo-orange braids fell across Syms’s lilac tank top and accented a tattoo on her shoulder: the word “EVIL.” (Seen from a certain angle, it almost reads “LIVE.”) Waitstaff in the hall zapped small flies with loud pops of an electric racquet.Syms grew up in Altadena, a quiet town abutting the mountains east of Los Angeles known as a retreat for roughneck millionaires and an enclave for the Black middle class. Her mother worked as a registered nurse at the Kaiser Permanente hospital on Sunset Boulevard, and Syms would take the bus into Los Angeles to spend afternoons browsing Goodwill and Skylight Books or watching films at the vintage theaters. The kinetic harshness of the city comes through in her work. Her characters take the bus; they walk in Los Angeles.Diamond Stingily, in the role of Palace, stars in “The African Desperate,” which Syms co-wrote and directed, and which opens in theaters this fall.Dominica, Inc.But virtual registers are just as important for Syms and her versions. In some of her videos, characters’ texts pop up on the screen in bubbles; her 2018 piece “Mythiccbeing” is an interactive chatbot. Throughout our conversation, she mustered text messages, voice memos and notes from her phone, piecing together how ideas coalesced into art. Her style of hyperlinking in real time matches the hybrid way she works, reifying, refining and recollecting the thoughts that make a person up.Syms traces “DED” to a dream she had in early 2020, while she was sick with Covid; it is stored in an audio file that she doesn’t remember recording. The title of the 2021 show in which that work debuted, “Loot Sweets,” derives from another reverie. She pulls up her notes app: “post ap life in a weird mall. bard people and others. lauren and i are trying to escape. people are looting so we stop by pleats please on the way out. everything is gone. all the good stuff at least. lauren drops from the second floor into the ocean while i crawl down to meet her. she swims w me bc she’s stronger against the current. we finally get out and i’m immediately shot dead.”It’s heavy stuff, a nightmare fed by civil unrest incited by police killing unarmed Black Americans, against the background simmer of a global pandemic. Syms explained the chain of associations behind the phrase “Loot Sweets”: medieval lute music, Bobby McFerrin’s cover of the Beatles’ “Blackbird,” reparations. While artists and activists have called for ending the exploitation of images of Black death, Syms turned to gallows humor.Syms with her electric guitar in her studio in Los Angeles.Simone Niamani Thompson for The New York TimesBut Syms is mining the vein of absurdity, hidden in plain sight, running through freewheeling experiments in Black culture like Amiri Baraka’s poetry or Sun Ra’s jazz. In 2013, she wrote “The Mundane Afrofuturist Manifesto,” which deflates Afrofuturist esoterica and other escapism. Instead, she proposes: “The chastening but hopefully enlivening effect of imagining a world without fantasy bolt-holes: no portals to the Egyptian kingdoms, no deep dives to Drexciya, no flying Africans to whisk us off to the Promised Land.”The curator Meg Onli, who included Syms in the 2019 exhibition “Colored People Time” at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia, told me that the text underpinned the show’s take on “the confluence of temporalities, Blackness and the mundane.”“I love her ability to pivot from conversations around Black futurity that center on the fantastic and spectacular,” Onli added, “and remind us that our future may not look drastically different from our present.”Syms pointed out that Teeny, her avatar in “DED,” doesn’t really die. The back of Teeny’s white sweatshirt reads TO HELL WITH MY SUFFERING in all caps. Call it a koan to contain the ambivalence of enjoying an often-awful world.Installation view of “Martine Syms: Neural Swamp,” through Oct. 30 at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, with a script and performances constantly revised in real time.Joseph Hu/Philadelphia Museum of ArtAt the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the glowing green installation of “Neural Swamp” mounts two women’s faces on monitors, arranged around vinyl poufs. A third screen flashes with footage from rounds of vintage video game golf. The score and performances are constantly revised in real time: Digitized actors recite a script that Syms wrote but an algorithm updates constantly into an amalgamation of sitcom clichés and tongues.Formally, “Neural Swamp” resembles the Chicago install, and both recall another Syms production: her design for a Prada-sponsored supper club in Hollywood during this year’s Frieze Los Angeles art fair. Her vision for what she called “Prada Mode,” branded “HelLA World,” included “every last detail, from the lecture series to the matchbooks,” Donahue said. Her name on the restaurant’s marquee, DMs from guests crawling around long screens in the dining room, closed-circuit videos of the crowd on monitors hung from the bare studs between the restaurant, the outside bar — “It was a Martine Syms waking dream scene.”Maybe it’s a metaphor, too: There are stanchions, there are walls, but sometimes you can walk through them. Maybe it’s simply that, in a world prone to displays of despair, Syms’s fluorescent way of coping draws a crowd.I asked Syms why, given her dynamic range, she still works as a gallery artist. “I feel a great deal of freedom, you know?” Only in the art world, she said, are your most unqualified hunches met with such serious support. She told me about an event at the Zentrum Paul Klee residency in Bern, Switzerland, where, in lieu of showing slides of old work, she asked the organizers to serve a purple cocktail at the bar. Not only did they agree, a mixologist spent hours beforehand helping her perfect the drink’s taste and color.“If I told somebody I want to run Little Dom’s for a month as an art project,” said Syms, “I probably could.” More

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      Amy Stechler, Documentarian Who Helped Define a Style, Dies at 67

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      She worked on early projects at Florentine Films, where Ken Burns, her husband for a time, would find fame with “The Civil War.”Amy Stechler, who was instrumental in the early years of Florentine Films, the company behind the Ken Burns series “The Civil War” and numerous other acclaimed documentaries, and who went on to make an Emmy-nominated documentary of her own on the artist Frida Kahlo, died on Aug. 26 at her home in Walpole, N.H. She was 67.Her daughters, Sarah and Lilly Burns, said the death was probably related to her declining health from primary progressive multiple sclerosis, which had been diagnosed in 2005.Ms. Stechler, who was married to Mr. Burns from 1982 to 1993, was credited as the writer and a producer on “Brooklyn Bridge,” the 1981 documentary that was Mr. Burns’s first major directing credit and the first major project of Florentine Films. The company had been formed in 1976 by Mr. Burns and two college friends, Roger Sherman and Buddy Squires, with Ms. Stechler joining soon after.The four were recent graduates of Hampshire College in Amherst, Mass., where, Mr. Burns said in a phone interview, two professors in particular, Jerome Liebling and Elaine Mayes, had influenced their thinking about storytelling and the power of still images. They plunged right into the “Brooklyn Bridge” project, learning by doing.“Everybody told us we couldn’t do it,” Mr. Burns said. “‘Why aren’t you apprenticing?’”Mr. Squires said that Ms. Stechler was a key part of that learning process.“It’s really important to understand how instrumental Amy was in developing the signature Florentine style,” he said. “We were all just sort of making it up as we went along.”“Brooklyn Bridge,” first shown at film festivals in 1981 and then broadcast on PBS in 1982, was nominated for an Oscar for best documentary feature.Mr. Burns had been inspired to tell the story of the Brooklyn Bridge by the 1972 book “The Great Bridge,” by the historian David McCullough, who provided narration for the documentary. Mr. Burns recalled a moment during a recording sessions when Mr. McCullough, who died on Aug. 7, told him and Ms. Stechler that the writing needed work, hauled them aside and gave them an impromptu three-hour tutorial.“We came back in with a much improved script,” Mr. Burns said. “It was the single greatest three hours of learning we’d ever had in our lives.”The project took several years. Mr. Burns said that in 1979 he and Ms. Stechler were living together in the Chelsea section of Manhattan when a rent increase — to $325 a month from $275 — drove them out of the city and to Walpole, N.H., and a house where Mr. Burns still lives.“Forty-three years ago last week,” he said on Wednesday, “we packed up a green van and moved up here.”They and the rest of the team finished editing the documentary there. The results were a breath of fresh air for the somewhat staid documentary genre. “Brooklyn Bridge,” first shown at film festivals in 1981 and then broadcast on PBS in 1982, was nominated for an Oscar for best documentary feature.“‘Brooklyn Bridge’ is more than just a short course in one colorful phase of American history,” Kenneth R. Clark wrote in a review for United Press International in 1982. “It is a thing of grace and beauty — one of television’s few truly golden hours.”The film put Florentine and especially Mr. Burns on the map. In 1984 he and Ms. Stechler jointly directed “The Shakers: Hands to Work, Hearts to God,” another well-received documentary, on which Ms. Stechler was also a writer and producer. She was also one of the writers of “The Statue of Liberty” (1985), directed by Mr. Burns, which was nominated for an Oscar.She and Mr. Burns had married in 1982 and by 1986 had two daughters. Ms. Stechler stepped away from filmmaking for some two decades and took up painting, although she had consulting credits on “The Civil War,” Mr. Burns’s Emmy Award-winning 1990 mini-series, which transformed the documentary landscape.Ms. Stechler returned to filmmaking in 2005 long enough to write and direct “The Life and Times of Frida Kahlo,” a documentary broadcast on PBS, about the Mexican painter known for her colorful artwork and eventful life. Robert Koehler, reviewing it in Variety, called it “uncommonly smooth, fluid and richly textured.”Mr. Squires was her cinematographer on that project. He said the choice of subject did not surprise him.“I really feel that she saw Frida as a kindred spirit,” he said, “an uncompromising woman who was trying to tell her truth as she saw it.”Ms. Stechler in an undated photo. “It’s really important,” a colleague at Florentine Films said, “to understand how instrumental Amy was in developing the signature Florentine style,”Florentine FilmsAmy Georgeanne Stechler was born on June 23, 1955, in New Haven, Conn. Her father, Gerald, was a psychologist, and her mother, Ellen (Bodner) Stechler, was a social worker.She grew up in Lexington, Mass. Mr. Squires said that as an undergraduate at Hampshire College she was outraged by the white response to efforts to desegregate Boston schools in the mid-1970s and made a student film about it, a project for which he was part of her crew. She was a year or two behind Mr. Burns in school, graduating in 1977, and was part of the crew for his senior film project.Mr. Squires said that although the young filmmakers’ education at Hampshire had grounded them in ideas and theories, it was not a traditional film curriculum and was short on practical matters. Once the group was in the real world trying to get Florentine going, it was often Ms. Stechler who figured out the nuts and bolts.“She was always innovating, always saying, ‘OK, we have a problem, how do we fix this?’” he said, adding, “It’s far harder to figure out how to do something than how to make minor improvements along the way.”He saw a through line connecting the varied subjects of the films she worked on — Kahlo, the Shakers, the visionaries behind the Brooklyn Bridge — and including her as well.“They were all people who had the courage of their convictions,” Mr. Squires said.Ms. Stechler’s second marriage, to Rod Thibeault, also ended in divorce. In addition to her daughters, she is survived by her partner, Bill Patterson; a sister, Nancy Stechler Gawle; and five grandchildren.Ms. Stechler split her time between Brooklyn and Walpole, where she lived not far from Mr. Burns. He said she was “as fiercely her own person as anybody I’ve ever met, but also kind of graceful — there was a kind of grace in who she was.”He summed up her influence on his career simply.“I don’t think you’d have ever heard of me had she not been there,” he said. More

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      Venice: Can Iñárritu Beguile Oscar Voters Again With ‘Bardo’?

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      The director behind award-season favorites ‘Birdman’ and ‘The Revenant’ returns with a personal new movie, but not everyone is a fan.I love a great movie debate, and on only its second day, the Venice Film Festival has kicked off a robust one. As I walked out of the press screening for Alejandro G. Iñarritu’s lengthy new film “Bardo,” I thought I had just watched Oscar catnip, the kind of movie that awards voters typically go gaga for.Then I talked to other people.“Bar-NO,” texted one critic. “Three hours? So self-indulgent,” said a film festival programmer. And in a hotel elevator later that day, an Italian woman segued smoothly from complaining about the weather (“Horrible!”) to the movie (“Also horrible! Why does he have to copy Cuarón?”).She was implying that “Bardo, False Chronicle of a Handful of Truths” (to use its full title) takes more than a few cues from Alfonso Cuarón’s “Roma,” and there are certainly some similarities: Like his friend Cuarón, Iñárritu is a Hollywood-venerated filmmaker who has returned to his native Mexico for a Netflix-financed autofiction teeming with long takes, digital tricks and stunning cinematography.The streaming service certainly hopes that “Bardo” can net the same Oscar nominations as the laureled “Roma” (which wound up taking three statuettes), and with Iñárritu at the helm, there’s reason to be bullish: Every film he’s made has received at least one Oscar nomination, and he’s coming off back-to-back best director wins for “The Revenant” (2015) and “Birdman” (2014), as well as a best picture victory for the latter film.So will award voters respond more favorably than that initial wave of Venice filmgoers would indicate? I think so. Certainly, the plot will resonate more with them: “Bardo” is Iñárritu’s riff on “8½”: it’s a surreal dramedy about Silverio Gama (Daniel Giménez Cacho), a documentarian making sense of his life story. Though he’s prone to dreamlike visions, Gama’s problems are the kind that middle-aged Hollywood types can relate to: Do I deserve my success, or am I a fraud? Have I spent too little time at home with my family? Will my children be spoiled and entitled?After Iñárritu shot “Amores Perros” in Mexico in 2000, he and his family moved to Los Angeles to pursue mainstream Hollywood success, just as the “Bardo” protagonist did. In many ways, Gama is a thinly veiled Iñárritu stand-in: He’s attired just like his creator and haunted by an old collaborator who now shuns him, which may be a reference to the rancorous professional breakup between Iñárritu and the co-writer of his early films, Guillermo Arriaga.But though the film acknowledges Gama’s flaws, it doesn’t really examine them. Characters tell Gama that he’s too self-involved, too bougie, too fake, and we have to take their word for it, since Gama just shrugs and moves on. Giménez Cacho is appealing but passive in the role, which may inhibit a robust awards run, but the film can definitely rack up several technical nominations: Darius Khondji’s cinematography is superb, and all of Gama’s visions — apartments flooded with sand, subways steeped in fish-tank water — are brought to incredible life by the production designer Eugenio Caballero (who also worked on “Roma”).Past that, we’ll see how well the film connects with the Hollywood types it’s portraying, and whether Netflix is willing to push it as hard (and as expensively) as it did “Roma.” Certainly, “Bardo” implies that streaming services have the coin for it: One of the movie’s most successful jokes is that in the world of “Bardo,” Amazon is about to complete its successful purchase not of a new awards contender but of the entire state of Baja California. Compared with that, what’s the cost of a few hundred for-your-consideration ads and some private planes? More

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      ‘Honk for Jesus. Save Your Soul.’ Review: Resurrecting a Megachurch

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      Regina Hall and Sterling K. Brown star in this satire about a fallen megachurch pastor and his first lady praying and angling for a comeback.In the keen-eyed satire “Honk for Jesus. Save Your Soul,” Pastor Lee-Curtis Childs and his first lady, Trinitie, aren’t simply ready for their close-up, they’re in dire need of it. Sterling K. Brown portrays Lee-Curtis, the fallen megachurch pastor who hires a documentary filmmaker to help him mount a comeback. Regina Hall is a wonder as the woman who stands by her man for a mash-up of reasons, not least being the elevated position the title first lady confers. After all, his and hers gilded thrones sit in their church, Wander to Greater Paths.Thanks to a sex scandal, nearly everyone in the church’s congregation of thousands took its name to heart and departed — many of them for the growing rival church of their former parishioners Keon and Shakura Sumptor (played by Conphidance and Nicole Beharie).The comedy (originally a short) was written and directed by the first-timer Adamma Ebo, who produced it with her filmmaking partner and identical twin, Adanne. The Ebo sisters were raised in the Southern Baptist tradition in Atlanta, where the movie is set, and the director displays a tart and nuanced understanding of pastoral power and the wages of hypocrisy. Adamma Ebo said she was inspired by — or more aptly, she wrestled with — the real-life plummet of the megachurch pastor Eddie Long, who in 2010 was accused of sexual misconduct by young men from his congregation.Still, “Honk for Jesus.” is no straight-ahead mockumentary. The unseen fly-on-the-wall filmmaker hired by Lee-Curtis (voiced by Andrea Laing) is just one more witness to the pastor and his first lady’s unraveling. We viewers are privy to a number of telling, intimate interactions between man and wife.Brown, the former “This Is Us” star, plunges deep into his character, a damaged soul whose conflation of God’s blessings and man’s Benjamins is hardly new: The gospel of prosperity has become the rock upon which many a church is founded. Still, Brown makes it a thing to behold. And Beharie is diabolically good as a First Lady 2.0. But it’s Hall who expresses the film’s emotional complexity — and its characters’ flimsy morality. Trinitie, too, enjoys the bounties bestowed on the couple. A visit to a shopping mall to buy a hat for the comeback service includes a peek at the hefty price tag. Later, when Trinitie sits with her mother one morning to discuss her marital doubts, we learn the tangled roots of her conflict.Naturally, Lee-Curtis’s return is planned for Easter Sunday. As the date nears and a settlement agreement with his accusers teeters, his desperation escalates. Let there be street-side sign-twirling. Let there be something called “praise mime.” Roll out the Black Jesus statuette.In the end, the film doesn’t extend much compassion to the good reverend. (He has more than enough sympathy for himself.) Nor is much made of the ache that actual parishioners might experience when their mighty are fallen. Had Ebo gone in that direction, “Honk for Jesus.” might have been truer but darker, landing on heart-rending over the astutely hilarious. For this oh-so-smart comedy, that would have been tragic.Honk for Jesus. Save Your Soul.Rated R for language and some sexual content. Running time: 1 hour 42 minutes. In theaters and available to watch on Peacock. More

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      ‘Loving Highsmith’ Review: The Patricia You Didn’t Know

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      A new documentary makes the case that under her hardened exterior, the novelist Patricia Highsmith was a longing romantic.“Loving Highsmith,” a constrained documentary by the filmmaker Eva Vitija, tries to make the case that author Patricia Highsmith was prodigious in both writing and romance.When Highsmith died in 1995 at the age of 74, she left behind several lifetimes-worth of words, according to her biographer: 22 novels, including the best-sellers “Strangers on a Train,” “The Talented Mr. Ripley,” and “Carol” (originally titled “The Price of Salt”), plus over 200 unpublished manuscripts and over 8,000 pages of personal journals.Her handwritten entries, snippets read aloud here by the actress Gwendoline Christie, burn with the grievances — class, racial, familial, romantic, professional — that fed her fictional characters’ homicidal impulses and the public’s image of Highsmith as a coldblooded loner who preferred the company of her pet snail, Hortense. Even her sometime publisher called her “a mean, cruel, hard, unlovable, unloving human being.”Such comments are not included in Vitija’s tale, which is intended to be a counterpoint. “Loving Highsmith” reveals Highsmith’s squishy bits under her shell, the dalliances she tucked into her diaries during an era where queer women like her exited the subway one stop early, lest strangers suspect they were headed to a lesbian nightspot.Highsmith was something of a playgirl, Vitija finds, an assertion confirmed by several former girlfriends interviewed in the documentary who recall the novelist partying with David Bowie in Europe or outfitting herself in men’s wear and grandly buying a round for the bar. Most of her exes’ memories stop short of being psychologically insightful. Strung together, however, these tender confidences shape an outline of a woman who never trusted anyone with her heart. Again and again, Highsmith’s craving for connection is thwarted by her competing desire to be an emotionally invulnerable workaholic.The film builds its conception of Highsmith selectively from her mercurial notebooks, highlighting excerpts that support its argument that her lovelorn disappointments drove her into isolation (“I am the forever seeking”) while omitting those that conflict (“One situation — one alone, could drive me to murder: family life, togetherness”).To make her adventures feel alive, the editor Rebecca Trösch stitches clips from Highsmith’s Hollywood adaptations alongside recently shot B-roll of glitter-strewn drag shows. Slow-motion footage of a cowboy roping a baby steer is paired with Highsmith’s turn to gay conversion therapy in a failed attempt to please her conservative Texan family, particularly her mother, Mary, a figure as cruel as any character she imagined.It’s hard to imagine the author herself would have approved of the documentary’s flowery narration and sentimental acoustic score. More impactful is the realization that Highsmith’s chilliest calculation was correct: She’d inspire more acclaim — and less moral outrage — exposing her murderous hatreds than her strangled loves.Loving HighsmithNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 23 minutes. In theaters. More