Every year there’s some sort of scandal-driven doc at any festival. Think Party Monster, think Deep Throat, think Trumbo—something with sex usually helps, but censorship pulls in at a close second.
TIFF’s entry this year is American Swing, which is about Larry Levenson, who opened a swingers club in New York when it was still in its sleaze period in the 70s and 80s. Levenson died in 2000, but directors Matthew Kaufman and Jon Hart manage to paint a vivid portrait through archival photos, footage from The Phil Donahue Show and a cast of typically Noo Yawk regulars from the old days, most of whom are likely collecting on their social security at this point.
Levenson, originally a family man with three kids who decided he wanted more out of life, opened Plato’s Retreat in the mid-70s and invited all interested couples to pay $25 to swap partners. There were private booths “for the inhibited,” a “mattress room” aka orgy room, a Jacuzzi (“It was like germ warfare in there” scoffs one bouncer), buffet and dance floor. Everyone interviewed nostalgically recalls the lack of vanity or judgment at Plato’s—rare in the Studio 54 era—and though a handful billed just by their first names, all of them speak without shame or regret. (Apparently Abbie Hoffman came out of hiding to check out the club and struck out, dubbed the only person who couldn’t get laid at Plato’s.)
Stylish and breezy and even poignant—Larry’s partner in crime, Mary, was the queen to his King of Swing but ultimately deteriorated mentally; the club was shuttered a number of times; Larry spent years in jail for tax evasion and then AIDS killed it all—it was a fun way to start the morning, though it was a lot of nudity for 9:15am.
Unrelated: This is probably the first New York scene doc that John Waters has not made an appearance in.
After waiting a weird stretch of time I threw out a wild card and ended up in another documentary—I should tally this shit up and see because I think this is the most doc I’ve ever seen at any festival—called At the Edge of the World, about a team of anti-whaling protesters patrolling Antarctic waters trying to stop Japanese whaling ships. Aside from a few graphic post-harpoon shots, it’s a lot of sailing and talking about what to do in case of various cold-related injuries, shots of icebergs and Canadian captain Pat Watson giving interviews from the ship (named the Farley Mowat!) to world news orgs about the cause.
I will say that as with fashion, I find activism irritating, and the glimpses of dreadlocks and vegan suppers were enough to make me wish I’d left to go see Kathryn Bigelow’s war movie, but my personal prejudices aside there’s just not enough drama to sustain the 97-minute running time. Which means it should be a special on the Discovery Channel. At one point a dude falls out of a Zodiac, and a couple others get lost in the Zodiac for six hours, and they get rammed by a Japanese ship, which they then fuck up by releasing a series of ropes into its propeller, but for all the humanity a quest like this is supposed to need, the story hits blandly and blankly, like a snowball against an iceberg, I guess.
There are few young actors as good as Joseph Gordon-Levitt, even if there is a scene in Mysterious Skin that still freaks me out even though I closed my eyes for half of it. In Uncertainty he plays Bobby, a Canadian musician living in New York. His girlfriend Kate (Lynn Collins with her hair dyed black because she is supposed to be Argentinean but is very much from Texas) is pregnant and they’re standing on the Brooklyn Bridge deciding whether they should keep it. They flip a coin and each run in the opposite direction—Bobby to Brooklyn, Kate to Manhattan.
And here the movie splits in two: in Brooklyn, the couple travel to a Fourth of July barbecue at Kate’s family’s home, where her overbearing mother, dementia-afflicted uncle and aspiring actress sister (Olivia Thirlby, who I like less and less the more I see her). In Manhattan, they find a phone in a cab. Bobby calls the last number dialed and leaves his own phone number try and figure out who it belongs to, which results in a murder and the couple on the run from men who we only know are bad.
It’s an interesting premise (the press notes say it’s about “infinite possibility, the consequences of choice and the significance of pure accident”) but feels more like filmmakers Scott McGehee and David Siegel had two movies to make and only enough money for one. The Manhattan half rings the falsest because the obvious thing to do is dump the phone – they do try to take it to the police, where they are ignored, and then decide to take the $500K offer made by one of the two dudes with guns after them, and so greed ostensibly is the problem here, but you don’t get the sense that these people are either greedy or stupid, so the stupid things they do, even out of fear – leaving the phone on and wondering how they’re being tracked, using credit cards after figuring out they’re being tracked, etc—are horror-movie frustrating.
The Brooklyn half is lovely, revealing lots about character and giving Gordon-Levitt and Collins room to act (most of the dialogue was improvised, which helps with the casual, handheld shooting style; are tripod companies just tanking left and right or what?), but it’s definitely not enough for a feature and is just the right length, where the Manhattan half could’ve stood on its own if it needed to.
I admire the attempt—it wasn’t boring, the yellow and green motifs were pretty and the cast is excellent—but the execution was bungled just a touch. The directors wanted to make something “immediately filmable” after a frustrating stretch in development, and, well, the thing about immediacy is that it’s not something to be thought through. The pair’s next film could be something great.
This article appears in Sep 4-10, 2008.