First Monday In May
(Andrew Rossi. 2016. USA. 91 min.)
Jane Rosenthal, Robert De Niro and Anna Wintour are more than acquaintances in the arts. They’re now neighbors: Tribeca Film’s offices on Greenwich Street are a spring stroll away from Vogue’s spanking new offices in One World Trade Center. This gives the festival’s Opening Night selection of First Monday In May a real legitimacy, kicking off New York’s largest and something-for-everyone film festival.
Jane Rosenthal, Anna Wintour and Robert DeNiro at the 15th Annual Tribeca Film Festival
Andrew Rossi’s documentary of the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s annual fundraising gala—intercut with the creation and opening of last year’s stunning China exhibition—is as viewer-friendly and accessible a gala party and exhibit as any New Yorker could desire. First Monday In May has much in common with another Tribeca fest selection two years ago, Dior and I (reviewed for The Independent here), the meticulously rendered deconstruction of Raf Simon’s inaugural show for his Paris fashion house (which he’s since left). Both features are race-against-the-clock countdowns of art being assembled under acute time pressures.
Simon’s solo journey was finding his footing, his inspiration and his staging concept in the most traditional of haute couture showplaces. By contrast, Andrew Bolton, the lanky curator of the Met’s Costume Institute and the tireless hero of this film, must swiftly navigate his way through a labyrinth of boldface names and talents, constantly juggling how to fill 50 standing galleries of Chinese art with 150 costumes representing centuries of Chinese culture.
Both Simon and Bolton find their sweet spots in flowers — Simon’s 30-foot hedgerows of flowers that frame his runway, Bolton with 250,000 roses decorating a two-story Chinese vase inside the Met entrance. Rossi’s doc has more inherent tension because it shows Bolton as a quicksilver curator who knows he has to play well with others to make his deadline.
Bolton has the patience and stamina to play well with everyone, starting with New York’s fashion powerbroker, Anna Wintour. She weighs in as editor-in-chief of American Vogue, artistic director of Conde Nast (Vogue’s publisher), Met trustee, director of the Met’s Anna Wintour Costume Collection, and Bolton’s planning partner. With her large black glasses and ever-present coffee cup, she describes herself as decisive and the key advocate of fashion’s place in a museum. No one in Rossi’s film disputes her and we bear silent witness to her decisiveness, starting with the designer of Vogue’s lobby furniture and wall murals (“get rid of it all, it makes me violently ill”). In discussions where Bolton takes a refined lead, Wintour often rewords his recommendations with an edge that subtly defies disagreement.
The documentary clearly reveals that Bolton’s dream of “China: Through A Looking Glass” was first seeded by John Galliano’s 1998 and 2003 collections for Dior, which were steeped in neo-romanticism and Hollywood-flavored mystery and danger. Bolton’s presentation of Alexander McQueen’s “Savage Beauty,” in 2011, following the designer’s suicide, intensified what Bolton describes as “deep romance fused with ugliness, beauty and terror.” McQueen’s daring cemented Bolton’s agenda of clothing-as-artwork, and he gets full backing from his mentor and curator-in-charge, Harold Koda (who Bolton will succeed).
Movies swirl around in Bolton’s mind: Raise the Red Dragon, The Last Emperor, Farewell My Concubine, most importantly Wong Kar-wai’s In The Mood for Love. The latter director will become Bolton’s culture ally in conversations with Chinese officialdom and journalists. He’ll also advise Bolton on how to properly integrate the iconic “dragon lady” actress Anna May Wong and early 40’s films noir like the Colonialism-tinged Shanghai Gesture with Gene Tierney. Three other key advisers inputting to Bolton are film director Baz Luhrmann, designer Jean Paul Goutier, and Wintour’s 30-year partner at Vogue, the effusive Andre Leon Talley. Bolton has no end of voices offering him advice and direction, which First Monday In May delights in sharing. Everyone on Wintour’s team is on the same page that high fashion plus celebrity culture can yield something bigger than both. There’s a universal belief that the China exhibit will be the defining link between costume art and museum art, and that New Yorkers will buy into both.
When the dynamic young designer Guo Pei quietly tells us her design goal is to integrate history with aesthetics “As if I am making a wedding cake for my country, with love in my heart.” You know the Bolton/Wintour vision is going to work.
And so it does. Even though the crush of down-to-the-wire installations forces the Met to briefly close off part of its public space, the opening night is a spectacular success. Pei’s opulent“Queen of the Night” dress worn by Rihanna seems to trail from the red carpet halfway up a long flight of stairs, staggering even the resplendent Mr. Talley. Rihanna kills it onstage and gets all the curvy ladies lip-syncing with her. New York’s movers and shakers look satisfied with their tables that Wintour has micro-managed every seat at, day after day. Times photographer Bill Cunningham gives the whole nine yards his blessing.
Wintour’s gala opening will raise $12.5 million. 800,000 visitors will walk through China’s looking glass—It becomes the 5th most successful show in Met history. If there are eight million stories in the Naked City, First Monday In May right now is the glamour winner.
Elvis & Nixon
(Liza Johnson. 2016. USA. 87 min.)
Michael Shannon and Kevin Spacey in The Oval Office
In one of Tribeca Talk’s most eagerly anticipated interviews, Ethan Hawke is in dialogue with Patti Smith in a packed School of Visual Arts auditorium on West 23rd Street. Actually Patti is lavishing praise galore on Hawke’s performance as jazzman Chet Baker in Born To Be Blue, and Hawke has never looked happier.
Smith says the movie has a rhythm like a river, and then—searching for a deeper comparison—spreads her arms wide and murmurs to a rapt audience, “it moved like methadone.” There’s a deep, knowing sigh from the crowd and several people actually gasp. Hawke is floored—you don’t hear poetry like this in everyday conversation. He concludes their chat looking exhausted, and says when he feels this way after playing Hamlet on stage for three hours, he’ll go home and watch an Elvis Presley movie. The audience likes that, too.
That afternoon at SVA comes to mind thinking about the semi-serious and weirdly fascinating Elvis & Nixon, a dramatic re-creation of the real-life 1970 conversation at the White House between President Richard Nixon and RCA recording superstar Elvis Presley. “The King,” as he was known to the world then as now, had delivered a handwritten letter to the White House gate, requesting a private audience with the president. The letter proposed that Elvis go underground as a deputized federal agent-at-large in the Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs. His mission would be to weed out drug dealers and users, thus helping the government curb the rising tide of juvenile delinquency and crime. The singer was dead serious about volunteering, and he’d picked the ultimate U.S. authoritarian to cultivate.
Presley had starred in nearly 30 Hollywood movies and had just finished 29 nights of sold-out shows in Las Vegas. He wouldn’t have had any use for the heroin-addicted Baker, and he probably won’t have cared much for Patti Smith, either, whose first live shows at the Bottom Line (with bass player John Cale, a better known performer with a following) had spread like lightning through lower Manhattan. Presley didn’t like the Beatles, and he was keenly aware (as was his RCA label, where this writer was churning out Elvis ads and promotions as creative director) that the British invasion, Baker’s West Coast cool jazz, and New York indie startups like Patti Smith were each taking popular music into uncharted waters that might not include him.
President Nixon and Elvis Presley
Presley understood the power of costume as well as anyone in the Met’s Costume Institute. He was a proud Army veteran who liked weapons and believed in licensed open carry. As embodied by one of the screen’s slyest shape-shifters, Michael Shannon, Presley is shown here as a strange amalgam of cool dude and right-wing nut. You don’t know whether to chuckle in admiration or hide under your seat, and it’s Shannon’s job to hold the movie together without singing a note for 87 minutes, which is roughly the playing time of three Elvis albums plus a stack of 45 rpm singles.
Fortunately, Shannon gets delicious support from Kevin Spacey, wagging his jowls and lumbering about as POTUS. Like Shannon — not to mention William H. Macy and Willem Dafoe — Spacey is another gifted chameleon who can play just about anyone with absolute conviction. Hunched over and foul-mouthed, he lets his awe-struck aides convince him to grant The King an audience. And of course the two men hit it off instantly.
Elvis drinks the president’s sacrosanct bottle of Dr. Pepper and munches down his private bowl of candies. Nixon orders Secret Service to deliver the confiscated gift Presley has brought the chief executive — a Colt 45 boxed with a clip of live ammunition. Whether The King will realize his dream of becoming a true-blue narc is yours to discover.
On its surface, Elvis & Nixon is little more than a novelty stunt. It’s a 20-minute short enlarged to a feature that sometimes feels like a wax museum full of animatronics, and its pacing, editing and music score are rudimentary. But in this most extreme of political seasons, it earns its place as Tribeca’s centerpiece and a critic’s choice. The picture is a vivid cautionary tale, and its timing makes it the right movie at the right moment. Elvis & Nixon warns that who you boost to the top of the Billboard charts can mirror who you elect to the highest office in the land.
Entertainers and politicians have always been an uneasy mix, and occasionally they get what they deserve — each other. One thing is certain, Elvis &Nixon doesn’t flow like methadone. Castor oil would be more like it.
More critic’s choices will be posted soon.
The post Tribeca 2016: Critic’s Choice appeared first on Independent Magazine.