What Is the New Standard for American Cinema?

The movies in competition at the 2024 Venice Film Festival told a story of a porous U.S. film world, a washed up scene, or something in between. Photo-Illustration: Vulture; Photos: Warner Bros., Niko Tavernise/A24, Focus Features, Universal Pictures

Exhausted from jetlag and with stomachs full of way too much pasta, Vulture’s correspondents have finally returned from the Venice Film Festival. Both of us were on the Lido for the very first time. Besides the thrill of seeing stars in their natural habitat, and the joy of devoting multiple hours a day to experiencing the cream of global cinema, what did we make of the experience?

Nate Jones: This was the first Venice to take place since last year’s SAG-AFTRA and WGA strikes. On one hand: The stars were back! On the other: American film production was shut down for a significant chunk of 2023, which is when many movies in this year’s festival would have been trying to shoot. Did you notice any effect on the quality of the films in competition?

Alison Willmore: Maybe I’m loopy from having spent an unplanned night in the Charles de Gaulle Holiday Inn Express on my way home, but it’s hard for me to tell what’s normal anymore. 2023 was the strike, but before that was the pandemic, which makes it years of business as not-usual, and at this point I feel like the real question is what the standard is going to look like going forward. There certainly wasn’t a shortage of starry U.S. productions, though I think it says less about the strike than the state of the industry in general that the big studio contributions were sequels — Tim Burton’s Beetlejuice Beetlejuice (which I liked!) and Todd Phillips’ Joker: Folie à Deux (which I did not).

Meanwhile, the feature that actively sets out to be a Great American Movie of the old school, Brady Corbet’s The Brutalist, is set in Pennsylvania and New York but shot in Hungary and Italy, and a lot of the other American movies also had an international tilt. Queer (directed by the Italian Luca Guadagnino) is about American expats in Mexico City and South America, while Maria (directed by the Chilean Pablo Larraín) is about the Greek-American opera star Maria Callas living out her last days in Paris. Babygirl and The Room Next Door, both set in New York, are the work of Dutch filmmaker Halina Reijn and Spanish legend Pedro Almodóvar. I don’t know what to make of this, so I’ll turn the question to you: Is this a sign of greater porousness in American filmmaking, or a sign of how washed our homegrown scene is at the moment that we need to look abroad for ambitious visions?

Jones: I have a hard time condemning the lack of bold visions in American cinema at a festival that featured The Brutalist, which — whatever else you want to say about it — is undoubtedly ambitious: a three-and-a-half-hour movie about a Hungarian Holocaust survivor trying to put his stamp on the New World. Despite the silent T in his last name, Brady Corbet is as American as golf courses and shopping malls (each of which are prevalent in his hometown of Scottsdale, AZ). That he had to go abroad to make this film is less a condemnation of American filmmaking, and more of American financing. The Brutalist was funded by eight separate production companies, and you’d probably have to be an accounting savant to untangle the European film-board benefits that made it possible. The oft-rapturous reviews that greeted its premiere were, I think, a reflection of the fact that its mere existence felt like a minor miracle.

Still, Corbet was one of only two American directors in competition this year. (The other was Phillips LOL.) Stateside filmmakers were better represented in the wider festival. Besides Beetlejuice Beetlejuice, the out-of-competition lineup saw Jon Watts’s Wolfs, Harmony Korine’s Baby Invasion, and Kevin Costner’s Horizon: An American Saga – Chapter 2, while Alex Ross Perry’s Pavements played in a sidebar. That feels like a fitting snapshot of where the industry’s at right now, for good and for ill: You’ve got a legacy-quel that’s going to make zillions of dollars; a big starry project that a streamer has insanely decided not to give a wide-release to; a self-funded auteur epic; and a winky metafictional music doc — plus whatever the hell Baby Invasion is.

But your remark about the international bent of films like Queer and Babygirl reminded me of a late-night conversation I had with some fellow journalists who were complaining that our own directors were too online to make great films. Too self-conscious about pissing off their followers, their film’s politics often felt pre-digested. That, to me, was the fun of a film like Babygirl: Reijn was willing to follow her own strange muse wherever it took her, angry commenters be damned. What do you make of this?

Willmore: I can definitely see that argument, though, funnily, I thought Reijn’s previous film, the horror comedy Bodies Bodies Bodies, suffered from not being online enough. But, related to that, one of the things that’s compelling about Babygirl and The Room Next Door, which is Almodóvar first feature in English, is that they both feel off-kilter — set in versions of the U.S. that are clearly being conjured up by someone outside of it. The warehouse automation company presented by Reijn in Babygirl feels more like a low-grade corporate fever dream than an attempt at a realistic place, and its ideas about American workplace culture and sexual mores are all openly drawn from the ‘90s erotic thrillers that Reijn set out to subvert. Meanwhile, The Room Next Door layers Almodóvar’s exquisitely dressed and decorated style over a New York setting in a way that reminded me of Sex and the City in that the writer characters live in fabulous places they shouldn’t be able to afford. But it’s also a film about grappling with mortality that takes an abrupt turn toward the legal issues surrounding assisted suicide toward the end — an odd final development that, again, felt born out of an outside viewpoint on puritanical American morality.

I’d like to hope, in general, that we’re relinquishing the surface-level, Twitter-applause-line style of politics that has plagued American pop culture for years now. God knows, Korine’s Baby Invasion wasn’t beholden to anything except his own nihilistic vision (and a mystifying continuing attachment to feature length runtimes). His latest venture into post-cinema is a first-person shooter inspired expedition around a Florida that’s simultaneously the center and the ends of the earth — whether you love it or hate it, you could never say that it’s playing safe. And in its own way, I’d say the same for Familiar Touch, Sarah Friendland’s lovely little drama about a woman with dementia that’s proof there’s hope for American independent filmmaking even when it’s not about being a Great Artist (though, coincidentally, H. Jon Benjamin shows up in a supporting role playing, like Adrien Brody, an architect). What I loved about Familiar Touch is that it feels genuinely guided by its main character, who’s as prickly as she is personable, and it never condescends to her by trying to fit her journey into a neat message.

But that’s enough high-falutin’ talk for now. Let’s get to the crass American conversation we’ve been waiting on, which is to say: Nate, which of these folks is ending up in the Oscar race?

Jones: I thought you’d never ask! Unlike Cannes, which takes pleasure in holding Hollywood at arm’s length, Venice embraces its status as the kickoff to unofficial awards season. However all the fall festivals are at a weird moment, Oscar-wise. Not since Nomadland in 2020 has the eventual Best Picture winner bowed at Venice, Telluride, or Toronto. That season comes with a considerable asterisk, of course. If you write it off, Venice hasn’t premiered the Best Picture winner since 2017, when The Shape of Water took the Golden Lion ahead of its triumphant campaign of monster-fucking.

I don’t know if we saw any future Best Picture winners at the Lido this year. The closest was probably The Brutalist. There’s a world where it gets nominated for Picture, Director, and Actor; there’s another where it doesn’t even come out in 2024. (Plus, the year after Oppenheimer, will voters really reward another three-hour mid-century epic, with a fraction of the commercial prospects?)

If I had to plant a flag for a nomination that’s definitely going to happen, it’s Angelina Jolie for Maria. Both of Larrain’s previous off-kilter biopics, 2016’s Jackie and 2021’s Spencer, earned Best Actress noms for their stars, and this one too has a thrilling interplay between the legend of La Callas and Jolie’s own imperious star image. You were not alone in finding Maria underwhelming, but all the reasons critics disliked it — the unbroken hauteur of Jolie’s performance, the film’s stately refusal to go Full Camp — only makes me think Oscar voters will fall hard for it. Plus, Maria just got bought by Netflix, who have never been shy about throwing money around in awards season. (They got Ana de Armas a nom for Blonde, for goodness’ sake.) Jolie feels like a lock, and might even be the early frontrunner.

I’m a little less confident in predicting nods for Queer’s Daniel Craig and Babygirl’s Nicole Kidman, both of whom are repping sexually explicit dramas that fall further outside the Oscar sweet spot. (Both films will be released by A24.) But each turn in surprisingly vulnerable performances worthy of consideration: Craig for molding himself into a lonely, lovelorn loser, Kidman for her raw portrayal of female desire. Forget the film’s copious sex scenes; given her history of tabloid scrutiny, the scene where she’s seen getting Botox injections may be Babygirl’s most naked reveal.

When it comes to awards that won’t happen, I’m skeptical Joker: Folie a Deux will be able to follow in the footsteps of its predecessor, which earned double-digit noms and a Best Actor trophy for Joaquin Phoenix. Not only was the sequel savaged by critics, its star now comes into the season dogged by the mystery of why he abandoned the new Todd Haynes project shortly before production — a question Phoenix dodged at the film’s official press conference. Plus, Lady Gaga, who everyone agrees is the best part of the movie, is in it less than you’d expect. This time, the only music Joker will be dancing to is a sad trombone.