THE ACC Bank 12th Dublin Film Festival ended on a high note last night, with the world premiere of the new Pat O'Connor movie, Inventing The Abbotts, his most accomplished film to date, and it concluded the festival retrospective of his work.
Adapted by Ken Hixon from a short story by Sue Miller, the film opens in the small Illinois town of Haley in 1957 where a tent is, erected for the engagement party of Alice Abbott (Joanna Going), the eldest of three daughters in one of the wealthiest families in town.
The guests include the Holt brothers, Jacey (Billy Crudup) and Doug (Joaquin Phoenix), who live with their widowed mother (Kathy Baker) who has raised them on her income as a teacher, and Jacey believes, was swindled out of a patent by the Abbotts. Jacey becomes sexually involved with the most outgoing of the three Abbott sisters, Eleanor (Jennifer Connelly), which incurs the wrath of her father (Will Patton), while Doug falls for the youngest sister, Pam (Liv Tyler). All of their lives and relationships become more complicated as the film follows them over the next three years.
A tender, sensitive and beautifully realised picture of adolescent longing and rebellion, Inventing The Abbotts is a handsome, lovingly crafted romantic drama which establishes a firm period feel. Refreshingly, it achieves this without recourse to the cliche of turning the soundtrack into a jukebox of old hit singles - Michael Kamen's unobtrusive score makes for a much more effective option.
Pat O'Connor once again shows his skill for eliciting credible, natural performances, which was demonstrated time and again during the retrospective programme of his films; and in the exemplary cast of his new film, there are glowing performances from Kathy Baker, Billy Crudup, Liv Tyler and, in a star-making role, Joaquin Phoenix, who displays a depth and maturity not seen in his earlier work.
In her first substantial role for 25 years, Debbie Reynolds lights up the screen with a delightfully deadpan performance in Mother, a late addition to the festival programme last night. The movie is the latest exercise in middle-age angst from its writer and director Albert Brooks. He also takes a starring role as a science-fiction author who is recently divorced and has been having various problems with different women.
His relationship with another woman, his mother (Reynolds) has never been happy, and in an experiment to come to terms with her and with his past, he decides to move back in with her, much to her discouragement. His attempts at recreating his childhood extend to re-decorating his old bedroom with all the old 1960s paraphernalia which used to adorn those walls in his teens.
The repartee between Brooks and the perfectly deadpan Reynolds is sparkling in this very funny yarn which turns serious and sentimental in its later stages when the screenplay bows to Hollywood compromise.
One of the most exciting discoveries of the festival was the Danish film, The Eighteenth, another late programme addition. Set over the course of one eventful day - May 18th, 1993, when the Danes voted in their second referendum on joining the EU - it follows initially unconnected characters whose paths eventually cross in the intricately structured screenplay by the movie's very promising 26-year-old director, Anders Ronnow-Klarlund.
He employs a different lighting scheme for each of his disparate characters - among them a pushy salesman, a singer separated from her husband and daughter, and a disturbed young man who escapes from a psychiatric unit - and their fates collide while demonstrators pour onto the streets of Copenhagen and the police open fire on the crowd.
The pick of the new international short films which I caught during the festival came at the end of the US Shorts programme - Victor Fanucchi and Matt Nix's very clever Chekhov's Gun. This 20-minute movie operates from the basis of Chekhov's observation that one must not put a loaded gun on stage if no one's going to fire it, and it features three young men, a woman and a gun. The humour is knowing and wittily ironic in this precisely sustained exercise which could not have been viewed in a more apt context than a film festival.
