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TIFF 2025: Mare’s Nest, Blue Moon (Songs about Decline and Obsolescence)
Moon Guo Barker in Mare's Nest Narratives of decline and obsolescence, frequently as a consequence of unforced errors made by the wealthy and unaccountable (the latter adjective redundant when paired with the former), are going to be a big theme this fall. The global political situation is self-evident; zooming down to the media tier, rumors of imminent firings and general bloodletting are swirling. (Wait for those quarterly reports to come in at the top of October and let the pain begin.) Zooming way down to the relatively parochial level of “one specific film festival,” TIFF was once a global powerhouse and automatic stop for the year’s major films. Not so much anymore; lots to unpack here, but among items to discuss is their ticketing website, which functions with the speed and functionality of a late ’80s queue in gerontocratic Romania; a festival that (in partnership with Ticketmaster!) allows scalpers to buy up every single seat as fast as possible and resell them for hundreds of (devalued Canadian) dollars exudes both desperation and “you get what you deserve” karma. This year, there’s been a bonus side drama about a documentary, Barry Avrich’s The Road Between Us: The Ultimate Rescue, whose subject considers himself a “left-leaning” Zionist, however that works. It was first pulled from the lineup ostensibly because clearance wasn’t properly done on the clips, then restored, along with multiple apologetic statements from TIFF; that the film was made by a former board member was presumably one of those things TIFF hoped would be overlooked. The film has no press screenings and will only screen for the public once, on the day that much of the press corps begins leaving. The relations being serviced are all too clear and it’s very uninspiring.
This gloomy macro picture structured my day one of TIFF, starting at 9:10 am sharp with Ben Rivers’s Mare’s Nest, which takes place in a world entirely populated by children; the proverbial “adults in the room” who got us into the forthcoming post-anthropocene mess have disappeared, unmissed by all. Rivers is one of the most widely-shown and admired experimental filmmakers of the last two decades and has made a lot of shorts I like along the way, but I haven’t enjoyed a feature of his in a decade. While Mare’s Nest isn’t exactly a comeback for my purposes, its eight chapters make it closer to a short film anthology than a feature all in one note; I liked two of those chapters a lot and the first one pretty well. That opening segment begins with a close-up of a turtle, then of nine-year-old Moon (Moon Guo Barker); a very cute edit has the turtle ducking its head inward as if timed to the car-crash bringing her into the picture, implying a cause-and-effect that doesn’t exist (turtles don’t act!) while cheating the staging of a crash with its offscreen-foley-suggestion that cuts to the pre-wrecked, already smoking vehicle. Moon picks up the turtle and gets to walking, reciting a monologue to the animal as the Steadicam trails in front of her. The very long shot must have been held until the 16mm mag ran out, making for the kind of low-key Gerry jaunt of the kind I always find pleasurable.
The second stand-out segment is the film’s big talking point, a textually faithful filming of Don DeLillo’s one-act play The Word for Snow with parts previously enacted by adults recited by Moon and two other adolescents. Anyone who’s spent a little too much time with DeLillo’s work will instantly recognize the cadence and concerns: apocalypses invoked, crises of faith juxtaposed with wistful materialism (“I miss my personal trainer”), gnomic proclamations responded to with “Did I know that?” DeLillo’s anti-naturalistic dialogue is a challenge for actors on the rare occasions they get to tackle it; having uncomprehending but nonetheless very earnest children reciting it at a diligent clip is, weirdly, just right, removing the stentorian quality and leaving us to contemplate precisely sculpted language in relief. At this point I experienced a TIFF first: walkouts normally begin at art-leaning movies that are severely wordless and remain so, but here they really started when the DeLillo hit.
The chapters that immediately follow are largely ignorable, but then Rivers pulls out one of his most impressive setpieces to date as Moon enters a cave bearing a torch. The film toggles between color and black-and-white to no particular aim save here, where the latter is a perfect choice. As Moon wanders through, flame flickers reflect off the walls and back onto the lens, while the hand-processed film’s artifacts render a secondary set of lights at the edge of frame. This is a lot of stimulation already, but as Moon rounds each corner she comes across a series of Pompeian still lives, humans intertwined and motionlessly trapped—but the bodies are all real, trying to not move or breathe and more-or-less succeeding to an extraordinary degree, their faces under Brueghelian bonnets or hands clawed in final-moments-alive rictus, a walkthrough through a warped version of Western Art I, division of agony. A lot of the film is unexceptional, but for the two sequences I’ve just described I’m willing to sit through a lot.
Dialogue-based decline comes to the fore in Blue Moon which, like Boyhood, took 12 years to make and is in part about the aging of Ethan Hawke’s face. In this case, the 12 years passed offscreen; per Hawke in the press kit, the script was ready a long time ago, but “[Linklater] told me that I wasn’t old enough and that we had to wait.” Now with enough wrinkles to embody Lorenz Hart at age 48, the 5’10” Hawke couldn’t tower over his co-stars as he often does while playing a five-foot-tall character. Throughout the course of a movie almost exclusively set on the first floor of a multi-story bar, the production cheats his height several different ways, most often by having him walk in a gutter lower than the surrounding set. This mode necessitates the bottom of Hawke’s body can’t be seen; he glides along suspiciously smoothly, as if on a Spike Lee people-mover shot. Seen in full, Hawke occupies the side of a frame for which Linklater performs a rare switch to overt anamorphic lenses, whose distorting effect at the edges squish the performer down to a more suitable height closer to those at the center. Not everything is so elaborate; at one point, I’m pretty sure Hawke just exits a shot by getting up and skulking away almost on his knees, a goonish cartoon walk that can’t be unseen. To top it all off, Hawke shaved his head and applied a greasy combover wig; with his undertaker’s haircut, he looks like mid-aughts Crispin Glover.
Hart is depicted at Sardi’s on the night of Oklahoma!’s opening, a nonstop source of conversation primarily directed at bartender and captive audience Eddie (Bobby Cannavale). Hawke is the near-whole monologue show as a logorrheic holder-of-court, as grandiose as the Orson Welles conceived earlier by screenwriter Robert Kaplow in the novel that provided the adaptation material for Me and Orson Welles. Another little-loved Linklater film, Tape, is also apposite: that 2001 experiment adapted a (bad) play with Ethan Hawke as its chaotic center as one of three people tucked into a cramped motel room. This isn’t a play but could easily be adapted from one, albeit taking place on a set many times the size of Tape’s sole location. Passing visitors, often famous, include most notably and fraughtly his ex-partner Richard Rodgers, played by Andrew Scott as the kind of guy who always knows where everyone is in the room but can’t stop the worry from reaching his face as he tries to keep up with all of them. In a classic auteur challenge-to-self, Linklater’s assignment is to serve a one-location script while proving that he can make the theoretically theatrical as cinematic as anything through sheer adeptness at widescreen mise-en-scene, and he basically succeeds over a fleet 113 minutes. At certain moments, when the frame is filled by the sheer length of the bar, Blue Moon comes close to looking like Linklater’s beloved Some Came Running.
Kaplow’s script is a curious example of the biopic, bucking convention in several ways. I’m not a musical theater guy, so only knew Hart’s name generally as part of the Great American Songbook and that he was Rodgers’s pre-Hammerstein partner. Doing some cursory reading (yes, that means Wikipedia) after my screening, I learned that the death of his mother threw him way off-kilter and may have been a contributing factor to exacerbating the alcoholism leading to his death. That’s fascinating, because the film doesn’t mention Hart’s mother or her demise once (save a line so discreet and indirect a colleague had to point it out for me), the kind of would-be Rosebud-decoder ring entire biopics are normally built around. This is not to say that Blue Moon isn’t about a character fixated on the past. Hart’s single most heart-rending and eloquent confession is so good that the press kit leads with it at the top of the synopsis: “You know how in marriage they say ‘For better or for worse’? I think, in terms of my life, I have entered the ‘for worse’ part, and it happened so quietly I didn’t even recognize it.” Ouch!
Yet much of Blue Moon examines Hart’s fear of cultural irrelevance through cheery bravado and men-razzing-men. Hypermasculine camaraderie is a staple of Linklater’s work, one he’s gotten increasingly dinged for over the last decade’s culture wars, especially with 2016’s Everybody Wants Some!! and its group of horndog baseball players. In response to queries over whether he realized that the film had homoerotic subtext, Linklater said he found it “a little funny” when people though of the film as “inadvertently gay, as if it were made by a frat boy who has no idea. I’ve been around a long time. Not inadvertent.” In that context, Blue Moon makes the subtext text, since Hart was almost certainly gay. There’s a lot of good-natured ribbing that, if recited by present-day characters, would register as intended as hostile homophobia; the script has “historical context” as an excuse, but there’s an unapologetic air to the enterprise, not that I’m complaining.
