Window to the world

The 4th Annual Maine International Film Festival celebrates those from here and afar

By Mike Miliard

LAKEBOAT: with George Wendt and a superb Robert Forster.

This year’s program is an enormous, sprawling, magnificent mess. Ten days. Sixty-plus films. Almost 100 screenings. More than 12 countries represented. At least one famous actress. There seems to be little rhyme or reason to the body of work represented here, which encompasses the old, the new, the well-known, the obscure, the big-budget, the independent, the American, the foreign, the live-action, the animated, the long, and the short. And there’s not a thing wrong with that.

Although only a handful of the selections could be previewed (and most of these were American), many of the major works have been shown before at other festivals or in limited release. The opening night feature, for example, Kathryn Bigelow’s The Weight of Water, in which Sean Penn and Elizabeth Hurley investigate the real-life 1873 Smuttynose Island slayings (and each other), has received tempered plaudits at events like the Toronto Film Festival. Featured Filmmaker David Gordon Green’s George Washington, a relaxed and diaphanous limning of a Southern childhood, had critics rhapsodizing last fall. And Daughters of the Sun, directed by Mariam Shahriar (also one of the festival’s Featured Filmmakers), is yet another in a series of powerful films to come forth recently from Iran’s burgeoning industry.

Lakeboat is one work that, happily, was available for review. Adapted from of one of David Mamet’s first plays and directed by Mamet mainstay Joe Mantegna, it’s a quirky piece of semi-autobiography that goes far toward explaining the genesis of the playwright’s famous ear for the rhythmic thrust and parry of masculine speech patterns.

We follow Dale (played by Mamet’s half-brother, Tony), a student from a school “near Boston,” as he spends a summer trolling lake Michigan in a towering freighter. What follows is not so much a plot, but a string of encounters with the ship’s crew: a ragtag bunch of misfits and manly men. It’s full of quirky, macho sentences (“I once knew a guy who ate a chair, just because no one stopped him.”) and comical disquisitions on the many sides of booze or the virility of a certain ponytailed action hero. It also features one revelatory performance. Yes, Charles Durning and George Wendt are fine in their roles as kind-hearted heavy-set men, and Denis Leary is well-suited to his turn as the ship’s grime-caked boiler man. But Robert Forster, bringing to mind the world-weary bail bondsman he played in Jackie Brown, is magnificent here as the taciturn, good-hearted Joe. His soliloquy about a decidedly un-manly childhood dream and the despair to which he was driven when that dream went unfulfilled is stirring. The epiphanic scene is representative of the film: a series of small moments that look beneath the crusty, foul-mouthed bravado of these men to find a more tender humanity.

For the vastness of this year’s selection, it’s heartening to see how many films of and about Maine stack up so admirably. Shadow Glories, for instance, is Ziad Hamzeh’s skillful but ultimately problematic indie film about ambition, redemption, and kickboxing. Set in Lewiston — the city where, we’re needlessly reminded, “Muhammed Ali threw the phantom punch” in his infamous 1965 Sonny Liston match (hey, it’s also the home of Joey Gamache!) — the film concerns beaten-down ex-contender Simon (Marc Sandler), who’s hung up his gloves and devoted himself to teaching at a martial arts school he’s established in the Bates Mill. This affords him the opportunity to spout glib profundities like “one learns to fight so one never has to.” As he tries to reconcile with the wife he left to follow his kickboxing dreams, he also mentors to a fiery young woman fighter, C.J. (Sara Rachel Isenberg) who’s convinced she can beat current heavyweight champ “Killer” Kuzinski. Problem: “Killer” is a) male, b) enormous, c) unapologetically murderous. The two do eventually get in the ring. What happens after that endgame is incomprehensible.

SHADOW CALORIES: showing at the Maine International Film Festival.

Hamzeh is a skillful director, evoking a run-down Lewiston inhabited by equally run-down people with a severe palette of blues and greys and an adroit eye for composition. The fight scenes are visceral and blood-soaked, even if they do recycle every boxing flick cliché (cutting in and out of slo-mo, the garbled, molasses-slow roar of the crowd, even a gratuitous “yo, Adrian!”). But this “thinking man’s Bloodsport” (my roommate’s term) is in the end too ponderous. A simple fable about life choices and the ineluctably destructive nature of combat would have sufficed without the literally demented turn the film finally takes.

Colby grad Matthew Testa’s Buffalo War is an accomplished, comprehensive documentary that looks at another kind of conflict. Testa trains his camera on the bitterly contentious face-off in Montana between cattle ranchers and an uneasy alliance of environmentalists and Native Americans. At issue is the brucellosis, a disease that can result in spontaneous abortion in certain livestock and can be spread by bison. It can also “knock a guy outta business.” Result: Montana officials slaughter many buffalo who wander far outside of Yellowstone to forage every winter (one year, more than 1000 were killed). Despite a Department of Agriculture official’s admittance that the federal government feels such purges are vast overkill, the Montana officials had always shied away from doing anything to decrease the slaughter. “Do they just not like bison?” wonders an exasperated Yellowstone ranger.

Though the film does an admirable job of withholding judgment, and gives roughly equal time to the natives, the environmentalists, and the ranchers, it’s most successful when it hones in on Rosalie Little Thunder and her tribe as she leads them on a 500-mile sacrificial trek to Yellowstone. “Our creation story says that we come from the buffalo,” she explains. “It’s as natural as . . . coming from a monkey or from Adam and Eve.” Testa’s gorgeous shots of marchers against an endless, multi-hued sky are thrown into stark relief against the hard fact that, over time, nearly 60,000,000 buffalo have been annihilated “to bring the Indians to their knees.”

A much more lighthearted documentary, one about an animal who faces much more danger than the buffalo on a daily basis, is Mark Lewis’s The Natural History of the Chicken. It’s a colorful and heartfelt apologia for what most see as not much more than a stupid, but tasty, bird. We’re given fun facts like “8 billion chickens are slaughtered each year” and “a rooster is not a beautiful songbird,” and are introduced to oddball characters like a Virginia man who does some pretty fowl imitations; “Miracle Mike,” a plucky rooster whose lust for life was not deterred by lack of head; and a Florida woman who goes swimming with her opera-loving Japanese Silky Bantam Rooster. But stealing the show is Harpswell’s own Janet Bonney who, like the Biblical good shepherd, left her flock untended to search for a single wandering chicken as a nor’easter blanketed her woods. Unfortunately, she’d headed off to that big henhouse in the sky.

Or had she? The film is full of reenactments that ape the overly-dramatized scenes from Rescue 911 and Unsolved Mysteries, and Bonney’s cartoon eyes are precious as she looks up from the frozen little corpse from which she’s just detected a faint promise of life, gazes directly into the camera and says, with mock incredulity, “IT’S ALIVE!” And her humility in the face of international media attention garnered by her miraculous mouth-to-beak resuscitation is charming. The film’s philosophy, that we should spare a thought for the humble chicken, is best embodied by the farmer who saw one of his birds lay down her life to protect a young’un from a hawk’s talons. “Chicken” is an insult that connotes lack of courage, he reminds us. “Well,” he sniffs, “I would be honored to be called ‘chicken.’ ”

A smaller but significant part of the festival is the Maine Filmmakers Showcase, which is an ideal venue for short films of all types from filmmakers statewide. This year, the showcase will be followed by a panel discussion entitled “Film & Video Production in Maine — What it Takes and How to Get There” panelists include representatives from Maine Public Television and the Maine Film Office, and Portland filmmaker Efram Potelle (his “They Came to Attack Us,” made with Kyle Rankin, will also be screened).

The two shorts that were made available for preview are exemplary of the huge diversity of works being produced in the state. The animated “El Choko,” from Sputnik Animation, is a short but funny look at a loco Mexican restaurateur. Its clean, muscular style and smooth animation would not look out of place on MTV or the Cartoon Network. Fritz Brumder’s “Prisoner of the Past” is a harrowing documentary that tells of Lewiston’s Murray Schwartz. After losing most of his unit in the horrific Battle of the Bulge, the Jewish Schwartz was taken POW by the Germans. In captivity, he made weighty choices like whether or not to throw away the dog tags which would betray his ethnicity (he did, in a decision he forever regretted — “I gave up my birthright.”) He also suffered unspeakable physical torture. As Bates College produces a play about his experiences, the film follows him back to Germany, and to Arlington National Cemetery, where he faces his past. It’s austere and wrenching filmmaking.

Finally, Sissy Spacek will be at the Waterville Opera House on Sunday, July 8th to receive the festival’s annual Mid-Life Achievement award prior to the screening of her 1980 classic Coal Miner’s Daughter. In celebration, the festival will also be screening two of her more wildly divergent films, 1976’s Carrie, and 1999’s The Straight Story, as well as a new film, whose title can’t be divulged (steering committee member Ken Eisen says they are “sworn to secrecy” by the distributor of the film), but that is “highly anticipated, locally relevant, and something indeed to look forward to in a big way.” We can’t wait.

Mike Miliard can be reached at mmiliard@phx.com.