“George!,” “Brad!” On the red carpet of the Venice International Film Festival, George Clooney and Brad Pitt moved along like toys with a long-life battery. They never stopped, with a few steps to the left, then to the right, and in turn the clamor of fans on one side or the other. This dance continued for 45 minutes at 10 pm on Sunday, September 1, before the Out of Competition screening of Wolf. The crime film by Jon Watts, director of Spider-Man’s third installment, Spider-Man: No Way Home (2021), uses self-mockery and features two lone wolves (George and Brad) who have to learn to work together.
“This is my wife!” declared a proud Clooney, waving the hand of his wife, lawyer Amal Clooney, as the actor took his seat in the Sala Grande. For his part, Pitt made official his relationship with jewelry designer Ines de Ramon – while his ex-wife Angelina Jolie, starring in Pablo Larrain’s Golden Lion biopic Mariahad already left Venice. Then the auditorium went dark and the film began.
The action in Wolf is concentrated on a single night in New York, along the lines of Michael Mann’s Collateral (2004), shot in Los Angeles, with actors in a car, then in the subway. The comparison ends there. Wolf is a pleasant diversion that struggles to find its rhythm, at least in the first few minutes, with more or less successful gags and a botched plot featuring nasty Albanians. But the performance of young American actor Austin Abrams, 28, is enjoyable, as a character who is on the run for almost two hours, with a crazy Buster Keaton-like agility – he has appeared in the series Euphoria and The Walking Deadamong others.
Read more Subscribers only The red carpet battle between the Venice Mostra and the Cannes Film Festival
Private upheaval
Wolf is one of the festival’s most eagerly awaited feature films. The kind of work that is referred to by the director’s name alone. In competition, we saw the “Pablo Larrain” (Maria) but also the “Walter Salles” (I’m Still Here), the “Mouret” (Three Friends) and the “Almodovar” (The Room Next Door). These films didn’t fall short of the mark but they didn’t achieve more than what their directors have already accomplished in the past, and so didn’t generate much enthusiasm.
In the moving I’m Still HereSalles draws on the story of Rubens Paiva (1929-1971), a member of Brazil’s parliament and victim of the dictatorship, who was kidnapped by state agents then tortured and killed. His wife, Eunice Paiva, continued to raise their children but reinvented herself and never stopped fighting, first for her husband’s release, then for a death certificate. The story focuses on the private upheaval caused by the loss of this man: While the transition from happiness – a dream of a family listening to music on a loop – to darkness is quite effective, the drama becomes a little scholastic and occasionally veers towards the tedious.
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