TIFF '18: The Death and Life of John F. Donovan

**/****
starring Kit Harington, Natalie Portman, Jessica Chastain, Michael Gambon
written and directed by Xavier Dolan

by Angelo Muredda Ex-wunderkind, now regular old late-twentysomething Xavier Dolan follows up the Cannes-awarded It's Only the End of the World with his long-awaited English-language debut, The Death and Life of John F. Donovan. Though he has from the start been a confessional filmmaker who, for better or worse, pours himself into his work--revisiting fraught relationships between bratty teen boys and their high-strung mothers and peppering in idiosyncratic song cues from Céline Dion and Oasis--his newest feels even more concretely anchored in his pet interests, telling the story of Rupert Turner, a young, queer child actor (Jacob Tremblay) who strikes up a long-standing epistolary friendship with the eponymous not-out TV star (Kit Harington) that sets the former on a path to adulthood and tanks the latter's career.

Basing the story in part on his own childhood letter to Leonardo DiCaprio (likely unanswered, but we can all dream), Dolan is on his most solid ground when depicting the young Rupert's earnest and painful yearning for a queer role model while toiling in the hostile British prep school environment to which his middling actress mother (Natalie Portman) has dragged him in search of his absentee father. Although you wouldn't be right to call the film ambiguous, it's hard to tell what Dolan is after the rest of the time, given that the fan-star dichotomy, seemingly integral to the story, is barely even depicted despite the more than two-hour running time. Presumably tickled by the chance, post-Mommy, to work with some Big Deal actors in English, Dolan embraces every opportunity to digress from that thematic kernel and give the pretty but blank Harington something to play besides his infamous know-nothingness from "Game of Thrones". Instead of bringing some of that titular Life to life, Dolan is drawn like a moth to monologue after monologue from, say, Kathy Bates (wonderful with a truly nonsensical speech about sticking to your guns) or Michael Gambon (who appears to have just wandered out of a time vortex from the set of Harry Potter), or a cheap narrative frame that sees an older Rupert (Ben Schnetzer) smugly dressing down a stern interviewer (Thandie Newton, more objectified than she is on "Westworld") with a chip on her shoulder about white-people problems like his.

As per usual, Dolan indulges his basest instincts--not so much towards self-indulgence, which has in the past netted him some nice if florid set-pieces, as narrative indecision--and all but buries that reasonably interesting conceit of a tender, entirely textual relationship between a developmentally-arrested adult, unable to speak his desires out loud, and an actual boy. Even at their most tonally awkward and clumsily soundtracked, Dolan's films can't help but be watchable, the phoniness of the hopped-up style melting away in the face of his performers' commitment to going all the way. Here, too, Dolan entertains despite his bad taste, at one point yielding a mid-2000s bathtub sing-along to Lifehouse with Harington and his mother--played by Susan Sarandon, who the I'm With Her crowd will be happy to hear is mostly bad--that's just a bit more endearing than it is embarrassing. But this is mostly a pitch for a semi-autobiographical portrait of the artist as a lonely prick surrounded by a series of one-act plays in which Academy Award winners, nominees, and hopefuls listlessly scream at each other over the sounds of whatever power-pop happens to be on Dolan's Spotify playlist at the moment. Programme: Special Presentations