Down From the Mountain

The Telluride Film Festival was a place of peril this year. The 2,500 or so film pilgrims braved blistering sun, biblical rain, a freak snowstorm that frosted the peaks ridiculously prettily, a Dumpster-diving bear that roamed the streets by night, and a crazed fan resembling Santa Claus who kicked things and abused ticket takers until he was finally nabbed. Plus, Harrison Ford was there, and considering how irritable he can be at sea level, who knew what would happen if he got a 10,000-foot altitude headache from one of those famous five-shot mojitos at Honga's Lotus Petal Restaurant?

It was all worth it. I can't remember a more consistently stimulating festival. Even movies that were practically guaranteed to be ghastly—a no-budget first film shot by a director named Nimrod in the subways of Hungary, anyone?—turned out to be a gas, and even the occasional failures were ambitious and honorable.

TELLURIDE'S MOST buzzed-aboutpicture was Sally Potter's Yes, with Joan Allen as a scientist going overeducated head over heels for a Lebanese surgeon–turned– immigrant kitchen worker (Simon Abkarian, the haunted Gorky of Atom Egoyan's Ararat). Unlike Potter's intriguing oddity Orlando, this is a stunning epic about a grand passion whose volcanic eruptions cast a lurid light on the collision of male and female, Muslim and American. And almost all of it is in rhyming couplets! At times playfully reminiscent of Vikram Seth's verse novel The Golden Gate, which Potter knows of but apparently wasn't influenced by, Yes sounds its deepest notes in heartbreaking scenes of lost connections. It's uneven, but you haven't seen anything like it.

Better still is Annette Bening's comeback smash Being Julia, about a high-strung and very actressy actress' big comeback on the London stage in the '30s. Working from a Somerset Maugham story, Istvan Szabo (Mephisto) gives us a theater period piece to match Topsy Turvy. Bening's talent has always been too stagey for her own movie-star good, and getting a bit older and a lot richer threatened to take her from us. What she needed was precisely this, a romping drama about a vain theater dame of a certain age who falls for a social climber half her age—an American!

When she gets overtaken by a nubile Eve Harrington–like rival, you think it can't get any better, until the old bat gets even by force of sheer talent and bad behavior. As her apparently (but misleadingly) sexless husband, Jeremy Irons has never been more dazzlingly the Debonair Wimp, and the bright young things are tastily nasty.

Johnny Depp does touching work as Peter Pan's creator, J.M. Barrie, in the festival's other period-theater-piece hit, Finding Neverland (due Nov. 12), abetted by Kate Winslet as the frail mother of the real-life lost boys Barrie immortalized, and by the astoundingly lovely, steely Julie Christie as Kate's crusty mother. The film is glossy, classy, handsome, intelligent, and moving; but it moves slowly, and doesn't give Depp much chance to soar. It's not stagey enough.

Telluride gave you a choice of Laura Linney flicks. In P.S. (Oct. 15), a crude yet fitfully entertaining soap-opera fantasy, she's a Columbia art-school admissions officer who admits a hunky boy artist—and not just into Columbia. That '70s Show's Topher Grace is good at pumping irony, and he's a good enough match for Linney in her tense, fidgety neurotic mode. Much of the film romps along all right, until the plot crashes into a swamp of loose ends and improbable ideas that were stupid in the first place.

Infinitely better, though flawed and clunky in places, is Kinsey (Nov. 12), Bill (Gods and Monsters) Condon's biopic about the, um, seminal sex researcher. Linney and Liam Neeson were fresh from starring as man and wife on Broadway in The Crucible, so they're wonderful at plunging into the sizzling crucible that was the Kinseys' marriage and career. It's not very groin raising, but definitely eyebrow raising, with remarkably explicit (if clinical) sex scenes for an R-rated movie, and an astounding tale to tell. Kinsey was a bland, sobersided Republican nerd biologist whose interviews with ordinary Americans blew open the Pandora's box of the sexual revolution. He was also a bisexual wife swapper who felt obligated to try out some of his interviewees' more outré practices on himself. The same intense blankness of personality that made Neeson ideal as Schindler qualifies him to be Kinsey, and Linney does the same thing Mrs. K. did: She warms and humanizes him. "It's already been called a 'Sicko Flicko' by Fox News," Condon told the audience of Kinsey. "Ironic, since it's being released by Fox Searchlight. So Rupert Murdoch covers all sides of the debate." And pockets all profits.