Awards contenders are love letters to human storytelling and the fragility of memory — two things AI can’t replicate As the major fall festivals draw to a close and the awards race comes into focus, two themes have emerged among a crop of early favorites: what it costs to act and what it costs to forget. At first, those seem like separate matters. On one side, we observe a surge in movies that are love letters to the craft of acting — almost pointedly so amid the rise of artificial intelligence.
It’s there in “Elsinore,” a portrait of thespian Ian Charleson’s final performance playing one of Shakespeare’s most celebrated roles; in Jesse Eisenberg’s “The Debut,” a whimsical ode to community theater; and in Peter Farrelly’s “I Play Rocky,” the origin story of one of Hollywood’s greatest underdog tales. Each showcases human actors and their dedication to their craft in a moment when machines are attempting to replace a face, voice and life force. On the other side are stories about dementia, Alzheimer’s disease and loss of memory, which were prominent in the Toronto Film Festival lineup.
There was the hand-drawn animation “Tangles,” which broke audiences’ hearts, followed by Cody Fern’s family drama “Closing Night” and Lauren Miller Rogen’s dramedy “Babies” starring Anna Kendrick. All these films speak to erasure and ask what remains of a person once the thing that made them singular disappears. Farrelly’s film, which bowed at Toronto, opens Nov. 6 and is timed to the 50th anniversary of “Rocky.” It tells the true story of how a broke but determined Sylvester Stallone wrote one of the most rousing sports films ever and then refused to let anyone else play the titular role.
Lead actor Anthony Ippolito, who landed the part with an unsolicited self-tape, disappears into the garbled diction and hangdog stubbornness of a young Stallone without ever coming off as a mere impression of a person. In keeping with the film’s theme of authenticity, Ippolito found the line between mimicry and craft the way an actor must. He spent months studying footage from the period, then worked “to see through or look past” pop culture caricatures of Stallone “and just kind of find it in myself.” With the emergence of Tilly Norwood — the synthetic “actor” engineered to rattle the unions and the industry — many performers, including Ippolito, are pushing back.
What drew him to the “Rocky” story, he says, was that Stallone wrote the script in longhand with a Bic pen and a Mead notebook: “I think we need more stories about people doing things themselves and thinking for themselves, especially the younger generation coming up.” That idea surfaces in other early awards season contenders. Andrew Scott plays Charleson, the “Chariots of Fire” actor who spent the last year of his life performing “Hamlet” as AIDS took hold. Eisenberg’s movie follows a suburban nobody (Moore) who comes gloriously undone in finding her passion to perform.
In both films, acting is the central source of the characters’ motivations. The loss of memory was explored at Toronto in several films. Once it’s gone, there’s no way to get it back.
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