The Death & Life of John. F Donovan (Xavier Dolan) [Archive]

Henry Gale

09-20-2018, 02:37 AM

Pretty much a disaster.

As much as I largely want to give up on thinking about the movie, I'm just so fascinated by how it clearly did not come together in the editing. The movie feels like a TV limited series edited down to a just couple of hours, where so many ideas are crammed to the point of suffocation, actors like Kathy Bates and Natalie Portman play seemingly major characters in the story but only end up getting two or three scenes each, and the whole thing feels like a sprint to a big finish line of a statement it never really makes.

The movie is mostly carried, creakily, by Harington (who I only realized about 20 minutes in was actually attempting an American accent), while most of the dramatic work that does work largely comes from Tremblay and others in the supporting cast, and because of that I began to wonder how much more interesting the central conceit of the film, with the two perspectives of the story's events connected through letters between the title character and Tremblay's, would've been much more compellingly enigmatic if Harington's character was largely minimized.

And I'm sure you'll hear about this or realize this before you're seeing the movie anyway, but the fact that between filming in mid-2016 and the poster above (where her name still appears), Jessica Chastain was meant to be a key character in the film, and she's now not in it whatsoever (Dolan announced in February that he had cut her role). And the fact that her character was apparently meant to be a reporter chasing after the adult version of Tremblay's Rupert, who in the final cut is entirely seen in the context doing an interview conducted by reporter played by Thandie Newton from its opening sequence to its very end? My mind is overwhelmed to imagine what this movie could've even been structured like to include Chastain
at a previous time. This is not a movie strong enough to be able to shed a presence like Chastain's, but I can't be sure it ever even had the potential to deserve her.

There is one thread of the film that actually worked for me and seems to tap more directly into the sexual themes that Dolan seems to consistently returns to in his work, but ultimately feels largely sidelined here amongst everything else here. It involves an affair between Harington's Donovan and Chris Zylka's character Will. Aside from Zylka's performance being one of the film's better ones, it's a storyline that's also especially notable because amongst a deluge of insane, cringey mainstream music choices (a lot of them not even period-accurate), it actually includes its one memorably inspired one. It's of a song that I've always wanted to hear in a cinematic context, "Sulk" by TR/ST (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8tc1xj7Nblc) (fka Trust), and it's initially used in a busy, lackadaisical club scene where he meets the Zylka character, and is then later called back on in another sequence where he returns there to find him, that second time even more effectively employed with a slower remix of that song I had never heard before (which I'm only now discovering is known as the "Eight and a Half Remix" (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iPpo6L8XC04). That slower, dreamier mix perfectly punctuates a more focused connection between the two in the same club, realizing their attraction with new motivation. The same desires and music, now locked in at a different tempo.

If only the rest of the movie was as cleverly realized as that. As it is, it's a very bad Theatrical Cut waiting for a redemptive Director's Cut down the line.