PLAYGROUND (B+) - One of the most harrowing, emotionally wrenching movies you can watch involves a brother and sister hanging out on a playground. There, bullies welcome them to surrender their innocence forever.
Little Maya Vanderbeque is a revelation as Nora, who can't be more than 7, but who anchors the core of this movie, appearing in just about every scene as she worries over older brother Abel (Gunter Duret) as he is relentlessly (at times violently) picked on by other students. Abel tells Nora not to blab to their single dad, and the overwhelmed teachers are mostly useless to address just one of the many dumpster fires occurring each day.
Nora is stern-faced and resolute, determined to be a proper student and sister, and you can practically see the scales falling from her eyes in real time. Writer-director Laura Wandel, in her feature debut, dives in to the melee guerrilla-style, shooting from Nora's eye level, often over her shoulder a la the Dardennes. The camera crowds the two siblings, and adults are mostly out of frame, even when they speak (a bit of a nod to Peanuts cartoons). There is an urgency here that can be captivating but also exhausting. We get very little resolution of any sort, in favor of a parade of assaults to Abel's body and dignity.
Nora also must process some moral issues, not only dealing with her father's apparent helplessness but also with Abel's own indiscretions. It's a lot to take in. Little Nora is an underdog to root for but even over the course of just 72 minutes here, you wonder if anyone has the stamina to get through this semester, let alone the rest of this kid's school career. And the rest of her life.
THE CATHEDRAL (D) - Well, someone got a participation trophy in film school! This apparently biographical study of a Long Island family over 20 years is about as amateurish as a major release can get. It looks cheap; it is arty in all the tritest ways; and the kids at the center of it all (an avatar for debut writer-director Ricky D'Ambrose) is a whiny little drip.
The story (needlessly convoluted from the start) revolves around little Jesse and his drab horror of having to deal with divorced parents -- and a lot of dull adults. His father is kind of a jerk who is always broke, and his mom is a nice enough woman with not much of a personality sketched out for her. D'Ambrose covers 20 years in 87 minutes, and while he is meticulous in casting four similar-looking dweebs to play Jesse from toddlerhood to 20s, he barely bothers to age (or de-age) the father or any other characters in any appreciable way.
Nearly everything here is a misstep. A monotone narrator vomits information from the start in a manner that is too hard to follow. D'Ambrose takes chin-stroking pauses, training his camera on inanimate objects for long stretches -- he is particularly fond of rugs and plates of half-eaten meals. A lot of the dialogue is incidental, often drowned out by the narration, as if entire scenes were place-holders for when the real movie would start shooting. The movie is cluttered with clips of obscure TV commercials and random news events (gee, who can ever forget where they were on 9/11 or the day they heard Gary Condit was boinking an intern who later ended up dead?).
"The Cathedral" (I don't get the title) reminded me of the mind-numbingly tedious Matthew Porterfield wank "Hamilton" from 2006, in which we literally got to sit and watch someone mow their lawn for about five minutes. (And also, at the other end of the spectrum, "Tarnation," with footage self-curated by someone who truly had an absolutely fucked-up childhood.) Here, D'Ambrose is smitten with the detritus of his childhood, whether it is a race-car set or the day his dad came home and buried his head in his hands out of frustration. But, believe me, all of this stuff is beyond mundane to the rest of us. Just because, as a cherished little boy, you once got a video-camera for your birthday doesn't mean you were destined to grow up to be a minimally competent filmmaker.
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