Genre: Thriller/Supernatural
Premise: (from IMDB) After a series of paintings by an unknown artist are discovered, a supernatural force enacts revenge on those who have allowed their greed to get in the way of art.
About: From longtime screenwriter Dan Gilroy comes Velvet Buzzsaw, his third directing effort. The film brings back the team of Gilroy, Gylenhaal and Russo (Nightcrawler) and debuted Friday on Netflix.
Writer: Dan Gilroy
Details:113 minutes
First of all, let me say that I love this practice of movies debuting at major film festivals then appearing on Netflix or Amazon days later. I’ve always hated hearing about Sundance movies then having no idea when or where I’d be able to see them. I might have to wait 8 months before I hear about the film again. More movies should do it like this where you hear the buzz (heh heh) then get the movie immediately. Call that a millennial mindset if you will, but I was so happy to see this up on Netflix Friday.
Now the way I see Dan Gilroy is that he’s 1 for 2. Nightcrawler was as close as we’re ever going to get to a modern day version of Taxi Driver. I loved that script from the opening page. Which makes it all the more perplexing that Gilroy followed it up with Roman J. Israel, Esq. That script was the opposite of Nightcrawler. It was verbose, unfocused, and lacked structure. Should’ve changed the “Esq” to “Ick.” I actually felt bad giving it a negative review because I thought maybe it was a super early draft. But nope. That’s the draft Gilroy went with. It’s hard to make Denzel Washington look bad. But that script achieved it.
This makes Velvet Buzzsaw the tiebreaker. If this is good, Roman was a misstep. If it’s bad, Nightcrawler was an anomaly. Time to place it up on the wall and see what this piece is about.
Josephina is a British art agent in the burgeoning LA art scene. She often rubs elbows with Morf, a bisexual art critic who she once had a fling with. The two are friendly with art gallery owner Rhodora, who has become so jaded by art that nothing impresses her anymore. Actually, that could be applied to everyone here.
After a long day, Josephina returns to her apartment where she sees that her neighbor, an old man named Vetril Dease (does anyone have a normal name in this movie?), has died in the stairway. In the coincidence of all coincidences, it turns out Vetril was an artist. But not just any artist. He was extremely talented, painting dozens of dark haunting paintings. Josephina immediately claims the paintings and starts selling them.
Morf is so taken by Dease’s work that his former feelings for Josephina are reignited. But as the two enter into a relationship, strange things begin happening around Dease’s paintings. A lowly intern crashes his car while transporting the paintings. A fellow gallery owner is found hung by his scarf near another.
It appears that these paintings are coming to life and killing the greedy art leeches who covet them. When Morf becomes the latest to see the paintings move, it’s only a matter of time before he ends up like everyone else. Unless he can figure out why Dease’s spirit is doing this and put it to rest first.
Ooh, a lot to get to with this one.
Let’s break down the first 10 pages since that’s been the theme this month.
The great thing about starting your story in a captivating manner isn’t just that it hooks the reader. It’s that it hooks an audience. It’s a good thing for the movie. Amateur screenwriters on the brink of breaking in understand this (as do struggling professionals who’ve been forgotten). They toil over those first ten pages because they know if they hook you off the bat, there’s a good change you’re going to like their script.
In Nightcrawler, Gilroy starts his screenplay with Louis Bloom stealing something. He’s immediately confronted by a cop and has to talk his way out of it. Not only is something interesting happening in this opening, but Gilroy does an excellent job establishing who Louis Bloom is through the interaction. There’s a moment where Louis says, “Excuse me, but that gate was open, sir. I was under the opinion that it was a detour. What kind of uniform is that?” Just the fact that Bloom is turning the questioning around on the cop gives us a great feel for who this person is.
But something funny happens when a screenwriter becomes an established professional, when they get to that stage where their projects are greenlit without anyone having to read their script. They get lazy with their openings. They rationalize that they can take their time, sometimes defiantly so. This can result in 20 pages going by before anything interesting happens.
Velvet Buzzsaw falls into this category. Some guy played by Jake Gylenhaal stumbles into an art showing, yet we have no idea who he is or what he does. He seems slightly arrogant and bored, but that’s all we have to go on. We watch as he ricochets between people and displays, never sure why he’s here or what he’s doing. It’s the complete opposite of Nightcrawler, which started with something happening that clearly established our hero.
We then ping pong over to the street where some British woman gets dumped on the phone. Who is this woman? What does she do? Why do we care that she just got dumped if we don’t know these things? As these questions linger, she joins us in the art showing as we continue to bounce around without purpose. Even if you make the argument that Gilroy is eschewing a compelling opening in order to introduce the cast of characters, it doesn’t work because none of these characters are well established. We only know that they work in the art world. I actually had to go to Wikipedia after the movie to find out what Josephina’s job title was. That’s bad writing.
If there’s anything I’ve learned, it’s that when the first ten pages are sloppy, you’re going to get a sloppy movie. And that’s exactly what happens. This movie is all over the place. First of all, who’s our protagonist? I thought it was Morf since we meet him first. But eventually I realize it’s Dumped Girl. And I only came to that conclusion because she’s the one who found the dead artist. But if you would’ve asked me if she was the hero before that, I would’ve said no. Morf was. Confusing confusing confusing.
On top of that, there’s no clear genre here. This starts off as a goofy satire about the art scene. Then it becomes a thriller. And then, out of nowhere, it becomes an out and out horror film, where paintings come to life. WTF??? I guess you can throw single protagonists and genre out the window if you want. There are no rules. But don’t be surprised when people leave your movie feeling like they watched some quickly thrown together experimental student film.
I mean everything was messy here. Louis Bloom was so carefully constructed, you understood him intricately. He’s a sociopathic capitalist who will try to talk his way out of anything. In contrast, Morf is vague and random. It seems like the only reason he’s bisexual is because Gilroy didn’t know how to make him interesting and threw the bisexual tag on him in the hopes that it would somehow make him more complex.
It’s becoming increasingly clear to me that filmmakers are using Netflix as a way to explore their weirder more experimental ideas that nobody else would let them make. In theory, that sounds good. In practice, it means we get movies like the pointless Mute, the jumbled Hold The Dark, the boring Roma, and now Velvet Buzzsaw, a sloppily constructed mish-mash of ideas in search of a protagonist, a genre, and a plot.
[ ] What the hell did I just watch?
[x] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the stream
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: A lot of writers don’t realize how much effort screenwriters put into their dialogue. They assume the words just magically come out of the writer’s head. But how can a writer understand the way someone speaks in an industry they know nothing about? I wasn’t surprised at all, then, when I heard Gilroy’s answer to this question about how he wrote authentic “art world” dialogue. Here’s the question and answer, from a Vulture interview…
One of the elements of the film that I can imagine was fun, certainly in the writing process, was the “art-speak” — the very obtuse, heady way in which critics and gallerists and artists create meaning around their work. Did you work with anybody while writing those parts of the script, or did you just immerse yourself in that language and read a bunch of “Art in America?”
Yeah, I researched it for months, read articles, interviews; I brought in three technical advisers. And it is its own world, and it is its own sort of language. And I thought I had the language down at times, and then somebody who runs a gallery in L.A. would come in and say, “You should change that word to this, because that’s not a word we use.” And it is its own lexicon. There’s no question about it. But I like going into a world and learning the language of it.
