Tribeca Festival coverage. Here's Joe Reid, who you know and love from the podcast...
The Adderall Diaries
We sometimes joke around about James Franco's insane output over the last five years -- he's been in WELL OVER 30 movies since 127 Hours, with a whopping 21 of them playing film festivals. That's an average of five films a year playing in some festival or another.
For a lesser-known actor, this kind of heavy indie output might be a better idea. Throw yourself into as many projects as possible, increasing your odds that one of them will hit. Franco's already established, though. He's had his hits. What starring in so many festival indies does for him it's the opposite: it ups his odds that he'll end up in at least a few total stinkers, every year. It's gotten to the point where Franco's presence in an indie feels like the promise of disappointment.
New Franco and new Adam Driver after the jump...
And so we come to The Adderall Diaries. Based on the memoir by Stephen Elliott, the film (and, one assumes, the memoir; I confess I haven't read it) plays like an amalgamation of any number of tortured-writer memoirs, swirled together with a fairly typical true-crime story. Franco, as the Elliott characters, is drawn to the trial of an accussed wife-killer (Christian Slater), while at the same time his promising literary career is being deep-sixed by the revelation that the abusive father he wrote about extensively (Ed Harris) is in fact not dead, as he'd written. I'm all for a satisfyingly complex story, but the true-crime elements are so standard and feel so tacked-on that they add nothing, and I would have been much more interested in a whole story about what happens to a James Frey-like memoirist whose stories turn out to have been fictionalized. Instead, we just walk through the motions with Franco as the drug-addicted, sex-addicted scumbag.
There is, of course, a love story. It's a limp little affair with the typically wooden Amber Heard playing a woman who's incredibly convenient on all fronts. Worse, Franco is asked to play some S&M story beats that are among the least convincing characterizations of his career. If James Franco really does enjoy women clipping clothespins to his torso, you'd never know it.
Hungry Hearts
I was seriously not prepared for this movie to be about what it ended up being about. In my defense, the film begins with a very funny but kind of gross scene where Jude (Adam Driver) and Mina (Alba Rohrwacher) meet cute while locked inside a public restroom that he's just ... well, befouled. The offbeat rhythms of their love story, which are delivered in choppy jumps forward in time, take the story away from romantic comedy and towards something else entirely by the time Jude and Mina are expecting their first child. What once felt silly becomes intermittently foreboding. What were once Mina's cute little European quirks soon darken, as does her character. There's more than a little Rosemary's Baby in any story where pregnancy and motherhood become acts of battle.
My guess is that Hungry Hearts will draw some ire for filtering this kind of maternal terror through the Jude character, the father. As Mina becomes more paranoid, more closed off, she starts feeding their child less and less. What seemed for a moment like it would become a story about how intimidating the pregnancy/birth/infancy cycle can be for parents quickly becomes a kind of mumbly thriller about Driver's character trying to keep his baby safe from his unhinged mother. There's a compelling, well-acted (Driver especially) story in there, but I wonder if people will find it too rousingly opposed to the mother. By the end, I was ready to chase after her with a pitchfork too, so maybe those criticisms are not so off base.