Over the weekend I saw what felt a little like watching a slow motion car crash. A little like that anyway. It wasn’t a car crash, but gave the similar feeling of “I can’t watch but I can’t stop watching”.
It all started on Saturday evening around 8pm, after finishing dinner with my brother in law and his wife near the corner of Jon and King downtown Toronto. We were on our way to see Casey Affleck’s quite controversial documentary, “I’m Still Here”, at TIFF.
Fortunately I had no preconceptions coming into the movie (which retrospectively is a little ironic). I honestly hadn’t heard an awful lot about the film before hand. In the last year, I’ve been fairly out of touch with celebrity culture and the film industry. There was a time when I spent nearly every weekend at the cinema. That hasn’t been the case over the last half dozen months and I’ve really not been taking in the news much in the last year either, which is perhaps the reason why I really had no clue what I was about to witness.
The Cineplex theatre at the Manulife Centre has comfy seats, but the low grade seating isn’t any good when someone sits in front of you and the film contains subtitles. I learned this during an Italian film earlier in the day called “Solitude of Prime Numbers” – a title which I’m sure has something to do with the film although I’m still grasping at what that could be. Fortunately with “I’m Still Here”, inability to see the subtitles doesn’t cause any loss of impact.
Shortly after sitting down, a five foot something, overweight man with a very long beard and bushy hair stood up and professed to the entire audience that he was happy about the turnout at his premiere. Although possibly a doppelganger from another dimension, he certainly wasn’t Jaoquin Phoenix. He suggested he was, but despite handing a mix tape to another random theatre patron, I’m fairly certain he was an imposter. The rest of the audience treated him as such anyway. Perhaps a little bit of a puzzle, but definitely not the real puzzle of the evening.
The lights dimmed, the audience all exclaimed “argh” in unison during the TIFF anti-piracy slide (something that grew old very quickly). Then two plus hours passed with my mouth hanging slightly open in awe at the spectacle before me.
“I’m Still Here” is a documentary about Jaoquin Phoenix – in short, a first hand account of a great actor seemingly going mad, ditching his acting career and attempting to make it as a rap artist. Nearly a cliche, I suppose. The last time I had seen Jaoquin was as Jonny Cash in “Walk the Line” – a film that was quite a bit better than it sounded. This was certainly not the same Jaoquin Phoenix. In “I’m Still Here”, Phoenix is washed up, obese and in definite need of a shave, a haircut and quite possibly a shower and a therapist.
The documentary goes through over 2 years of footage shot by Affleck, Phoenix’s brother in law. Two years of Phoenix convincing others (including himself) of the authenticity of his new career choice – to be a rap star. And authentic it is. It would take the biggest of skeptics to walk out of the theatre with the impression that the movie was a hoax – that it was all an act. Maybe it’s the sign of a good actor – to be able to delve so deeply into a role and play the character with such conviction, but there is no doubt in my mind that Jaoquin Phoenix was thoroughly committed to every fleeting moment. For better or worse, hoax or not, Affleck was filming the Phoenix truly in self-destruct mode. It may have at one point been a script, but it is very apparent that in Phoenix’s mind, it was all real.
The puke was definitely real. The drugs were probably also real. Certainly the reactions from Letterman and P. Diddy were real. The beer gut was real and so was the sense that Phoenix hadn’t bathed in some time.
After the movie, I had to wonder – if it was an act, it was brilliant. If it was real, it was still brilliant. No – I’ve never seen anything quite like it.
So to the imposter who stood up before the film started – kudos; well played. You started things off on the right foot. But the puzzle you left me with was nothing compared to the puzzle left by the Affleck and Phoenix in what is sure to be one of the biggest films of the year.
