What’s old is new again—that was the message of the 81st Venice Film Festival this year.
The festival opened with Tim Burton’s Beetlejuice Beetlejuice, the daffy, gory sequel to the 66-year-old director’s beloved 1988 horror comedy, with its stars Michael Keaton, Winona Ryder, and Catherine O’Hara reprising their roles at double their age in the original.
That was followed by Alfonso Cuarón’s erotic thriller miniseries Disclaimer, starring Kevin Kline—now 76 years old, what?—Cate Blanchett (55) and Sacha Baron Cohen (52), and Wolfs, Jon Watts’ zany buddy film about professional fixers, with real-life pals Brad Pitt (60) and George Clooney (63).
Then came Luca Guadagnino’s Queer, an adept adaptation of William S. Burroughs’s semi-autobiographical novella starring Daniel Craig (56), and 74-year-old Pedro Almodóvar’s extraordinary The Room Next Door, his first English-language film, with its two leading ladies, Tilda Swinton and Julianne Moore, both 63, poetically dealing with impending death, each in their own way. When the lights came up, the film’s team rightly received a 17-minute standing ovation, and last night, Almodóvar won the Golden Lion, the festival’s top award.
What was clear was that Hollywood’s senior talents—most of these folks are Social Security age, or within spitting distance—still have draw on the red carpet: Fans camped out for days in the blazing heat to catch a glimpse of them, and the shrieks when Pitt and Clooney arrived could be heard for half a mile away.
And they still have serious might on the screen: Nicole Kidman (57) won the best actress award for her portrayal of a sexually-charged CEO in a toxic affair with an intern in Halina Reijn’s Babyface.
The question is do they have enough juice to pull people back into movie theaters?