‘Under the Silver Lake’ screened at Cannes yesterday and several film reviews have surfaced from The Hollywood Reporter, Variety, IndieWire and others. You can read some excerpts below. A couple of new clips from the film have also been released and you can see them here or below. Andrew also attended yet another event yesterday. This time the New Dramatist’s Spring Luncheon. You can see images from that in the gallery.
Like Mitchell’s two other features, “Under the Silver Lake” transforms a familiar genre into a unique context, in this case channeling the shaggy-dog detective story into the ambivalence of a millennial who keeps losing the narrative thread of his own life. The movie personifies the male gaze, but it’s also conspicuously about that, deconstructing privilege more than lingering in its confines. It’s a bizarre and outrageous drama grounded in the consistency of Garfield’s astonishment at every turn.
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I’ve long thought that Andrew Garfield would be the perfect actor to star in a biopic of Anthony Perkins, and in the early scenes of “Under the Silver Lake” he’s got a Norman Bates twitchiness about him. Covered in unkempt shaggy hair (very ’70s), he seems slightly out of it, lost in a sensual daze, and since one of the film’s motifs is that there’s a serial killer of canines on the loose (that’s right: someone is slashing dogs in L.A.), we wonder, for a while, if it could be him, especially when he gets on the phone with his mother, who starts yammering on about the glories of Janet Gaynor.
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But it’s Garfield, gamely straddling the bridge between seedy slacker and driven truth-seeker, who anchors every scene and will represent A24’s best shot at drawing an audience with the early summer release. Seen back to back with the actor’s fearless emotional deep dive in the current Broadway revival of Angels in America, this film again shows Garfield in magnetic form, shaking off his somewhat earnest nice-guy persona to explore a darker, looser, more unknowable side. Mitchell even inserts sneaky nods to his star’s Spider-Man past, though he’s traded great power and responsibility for a porn stash, a Peeping Tom habit and a shower of skunk spray.
