Chicago Film Fest, Dispatch #2: Blitz, Better Man, and a moving abortion doc
A check-in from the second half of the 60th Chicago International Film Festival
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After settling in at the Chicago International Film Festival (you can read my first dispatch here), it’s been smooth sailing the past few days. The only hiccup is that I couldn’t get into a showing of the Iranian political thriller The Seed of the Sacred Fig because it was sold out—a testament to Chicago cinephiles! But between press screenings, some less-crowded public screenings, and a few digital screeners I watched at home, I was able to check out some fascinating films, including two intense historical dramas, a musical biopic starring a CGI ape, and a searing documentary about abortion that you can stream online for free this weekend.
First, though, let’s kick things off with two films that are shaping up to be major Oscar contenders this year: Blitz, from 12 Years a Slave director Steve McQueen, and September 5, from Swiss filmmaker Tim Fehlbaum.
Blitz (a British WWII drama debuting on Apple TV+ on Nov 22)
It wasn’t until a water-related scene two-thirds of the way into Blitz that I finally realized what kind of film writer/director Steve McQueen was trying to make. This is his version of Titanic—a sweeping epic that attempts to encapsulate every single element of a massive historical event through the lens of a small-scale human story. For James Cameron, it was two lovers roaming their way through every deck of the doomed ship; for McQueen, it’s a mother and son (Saoirse Ronan and newcomer Elliott Heffernan) who wind up separated from one another and experience basically every conceivable angle of the London Blitz in a harrowing handful of days. The trouble is, while Cameron had an ironclad grasp on just what he wanted Titanic’s tone to be, McQueen is a little more, well, out to sea.
Blitz opens with a genuinely unnerving scene that couldn’t feel further from the “fun” disaster movie tone that Titanic indulges in. A fire brigade’s futile attempt to quell a raging inferno paints a grim portrait of just how helpless the people of London truly were to Germany’s relentless bombing campaign. The film’s chilling Hans Zimmer score amps up that haunting sense of foreboding tension. But just as it seems like we’re in a realist drama about the horrors of war, the characters open their mouths and suddenly we’re in a corny West End production of Oliver! full of working class kids poised to burst out into “Consider Yourself” at the drop of a hat. (I’ve always found McQueen to be an inconsistent director of actors, and that’s very much on display here.)
Of course, plenty of filmmakers have pulled off the trick of combining retro corniness with a more modern perspective (think Todd Haynes’ Far from Heaven or even J.D. Dillard’s recent war picture Devotion). But McQueen only occasionally succeeds at making the two halves of his film feel like a cohesive whole. Blitz is at its most powerful when it turns a lovingly nostalgic lens towards the sorts of British citizens who didn’t traditionally make it into Old Hollywood war films—a Nigerian-born police officer; a South Asian family; a socialist-leaning volunteer organizer with dwarfism; and, above all, its lead character, George, a biracial kid growing up in a world with very few Black role models.
Unfortunately, that effective Frank Capra stuff is too often thrown off balance by either a jarring moment of violent realism or an over-the-top plot contrivance designed to get George to experience yet another element of life during the Blitz. (Sam Mendes’ 1917 had a similar problem with wartime plot contrivances, but at least was more cohesive in its emotional manipulations.) Without a unifying tone or truly locked-in performances, Blitz is a deeply scattered two-hour adventure that probably should’ve been either longer in its runtime or simpler in its plotting. Still, you’ll certainly leave feeling like you’ve experienced a journey—and potentially learned a little more about history in the process.
Grade: B-
September 5 (a tense historical drama hitting theaters Dec 13)
At first glance, September 5 would seem to serve as a companion piece to Steven Speilberg’s Munich—two detailed historical recountings of events related to the hostage crisis at the 1972 Olympics in Germany. In practice, however, director Tim Fehlbaum’s new drama feels much more in conversation with Alex Garland’s Civil War, another ambiguous thriller about acts of violence and our impulse to capture them.
September 5 utilizes a fascinating conceit: It takes place entirely within ABC’s control room in Munich, where sports producer Geoffrey Mason (John Magaro) must suddenly pivot from figuring out how to cover a boxing match to figuring out how to cover an international crisis in which Palestinian militants held nine members of the Israeli Olympic team hostage within the Olympic Village. As September 5’s final title card explains, this was the first time an act of terrorism was broadcast live. And watching ABC’s producers figure out where (and if) to draw the line with their coverage is both fascinating and purposefully queasy.
Both the strength and the weakness of September 5 is how much it limits itself to an in-the-moment retelling of that control room experience, with virtually no broader context for the Israeli–Palestinian conflict or even the aftermath of this particular event. By zeroing in so narrowly on this one act of violence, September 5 runs the risk of feeling like pro-Israeli propaganda designed to speak to the current war in Gaza. But I don’t think that’s what Fehlbaum is trying to do here—although some viewers will certainly interpret it that way.
Instead, like his subjects, Fehlbaum is trying to document a moment as it happened, using extensive archival footage of real-life ABC broadcasts to recreate how the story unfolded in real time. When ABC’s crew finds the whole thing weirdly fun and exciting, we do too—until the horror of what they’re actually covering comes crashing back. Fehlbaum’s love for the nuts-and-bolts of pre-digital television production is palpable, but he leaves questions about the ethics and morality of live news coverage up to the viewer to interpret, which makes the film a sort of Rorschach test in terms of how much depth you want to grant it. To me, it all comes down to one eerie line uttered by a dejected ABC crew member after the crisis is over: “We were waiting for something to happen because we wanted to take a picture of it.”
Grade: B
Better Man (a wildly out-there Robbie Williams biopic hitting theaters Jan 2025)
It’s always hard to figure out how to review a film when you loved the first half of it and struggled with the second, and that’s exactly the problem I have with Better Man—the new Robbie Williams musical biopic from The Greatest Showman director Michael Gracey. Still, if points for audacity count for something then it’s hard not to give Better Man some major props. Instead of casting a hip young actor to play the bad boy of British pop, Better Man portrays him as… a walking and talking CGI chimpanzee.
Yes, you read that right, this is a musical biopic that stars, essentially, Caesar from the new Planet of the Apes movies. And while an opening message from Gracey and Williams explained that the idea was to capture how Williams has so often felt like a “dancing monkey,” the movie itself gives no explanation or even any real acknowledgment of the fact that its protagonist is a primate. Instead, the gimmick just adds to the heightened, irreverent tone the movie is going for, while also letting Gracey go gonzo with his visuals.
Indeed, playful self-awareness is the best thing Better Man has going for it. The inherent ridiculousness of the talking ape premise makes it easier for the movie to lampshade musical biopic tropes while leaning into Williams’ signature cheekiness. (Narrating the film himself, he openly proclaims that he doesn’t really care about musical artistry, he just wants to be famous.) Plus, who cares if your Liam Gallagher stand-in looks a bit off when your leading man is literally an ape? The trouble is, after lampooning music biopic clichés in its opening half, Better Man proceeds to indulge in them so earnestly in its second that the whole thing just becomes interminable.
Before his Greatest Showman breakout, Gracey was originally supposed to direct the Elton John biopic that eventually became Rocketman, and this feels like his second chance at that project. In some ways that’s good (full-on musical fantasy sequences rather than just diegetic performances!) and in other ways it’s frustrating (lengthy dramatic scenes of Robbie’s struggles with addiction and depression that totally lose the movie’s winking tone). Eventually, the ape conceit starts to seem less like a unique commentary on Williams’ life and more like a gimmick to justify yet another clichéd musical biopic about a notably less famous figure than Elton John or Freddie Mercury. Given all its early potential, it’s too bad the movie can’t commit to just monkeying around.
Grade: C+
Zurawski v Texas (an abortion documentary streaming for free this weekend)
It’s been over two years since Roe v. Wade was overturned by the Supreme Court—setting women’s healthcare back by decades and fulfilling the worst case fears so many feminists had been scoffed at for voicing in the lead up to the 2016 presidential election. Now the new documentary Zurawski v Texas seeks to put a personal face on the fight for abortion rights by telling the stories of four women—three patients suing the state of Texas and the diligent, empathetic lawyer representing their case.
Led by original plaintiff Amanda Zurawski, the lawsuit argues that while Texas’ abortion bans technically allow for medical exemptions, those exemptions don’t really exist in practice because doctors are too scared of legal repercussions to actually provide them. Amanda went into septic shock waiting to qualify for an abortion after her water broke at just 18 weeks. Austin Dennard is an OBGYN who had to leave the state to receive her own abortion for a non-viable pregnancy. And most harrowing of all is Samantha Casiano, a mother of four whose unborn baby was deemed “incompatible with life” at 20 weeks. Because she couldn’t receive an abortion and didn’t have the means to leave Texas, however, Samantha was forced to carry the baby to term, give birth, and watch her daughter Halo die after four hours of suffering. “There was no mercy there for her,” she cries on the witness stand.
It’s infuriating to watch male politicians like Lindsey Graham literally roll their eyes at Amanda’s story or see defense lawyers try to trip up the women by asking whether Texas State Attorney Ken Paxton personally told them they couldn’t have an abortion. (“You know, I never thought to ask him,” Austin quips.) But the movie’s most radical scenes are its quiet interpersonal moments—Amanda’s life-long Republican parents swearing off the party after witnessing what happened to their daughter; the pride in Samantha’s voice as she calls Austin “a baddie” for how she handled herself on the stand.
Directed by Abbie Perrault and Maisie Crow and produced by Hillary Clinton, Chelsea Clinton, and Jennifer Lawrence, Zurawski v Texas is an unshowy documentary with a pointed political message. (It’s streaming online for free this weekend, with other special screenings taking place across the country ahead of the election.) It makes a searing case that abortion is healthcare—a long-time rallying cry for abortion-rights activists. But in taking a small-scale human approach and by focusing on women with desperately wanted pregnancies, it seems designed to speak to those on the right as much as the left. Let’s hope they’re listening.
Grade: B+
I’m really enjoying these dispatches! The inside baseball is fun and the reviews are engaging!