Review: The Death and Life of John F. Donovan

Last Updated on July 30, 2021

PLOT: A closeted actor (Kit Harington) on the cusp of landing a major role shares correspondence with his biggest fan, an eleven-year-old child (Jacob Tremblay).

REVIEW: THE DEATH AND LIFE OF JOHN F. DONOVAN marks the English-language debut of Quebec director Xavier Dolan. While he may be unknown to most American audiences, here in Quebec, Dolan is a pretty big deal. Having only just turned thirty, he’s managed to crank out eight films, with him having already won boatloads of awards at Cannes. Most of his films have played there, beginning with his debut, I KILLED MY MOTHER, which he made when he was only nineteen years old. It was only a matter of time before the bilingual actor-writer-director tried his hand at a big-budget English film, but the road to the big screen has not been a smooth one for this belabored, deeply flawed opus.

Having played to awful reviews at TIFF last year, THE DEATH AND LIFE OF JOHN F. DONOVAN is finally getting a wide Canadian release, even though it still doesn’t seem to have a U.S distributor. One can assume that when a movie that stars Natalie Portman, Kit Harington and Jacob Tremblay struggles to find distribution it must be pretty bad, and indeed Dolan’s film is a mess – even if it’s an intriguing one. Biting off more than he can chew by adopting a style that attempts to unite three stories while he should have focused on one, this is a messy two-hour film with some pretty visible seams throughout. Dolan’s rough cut was much longer and a whole subplot involving Jessica Chastain was sliced out of the film. I wonder if it might have worked better with these scenes intact, but even still, it’s hard to imagine much salvaging this indulgent mess.

The three-story narrative is the film’s biggest misstep, by giving short shrift to what should have been the whole point of the film – the titular “death and life” of the main character. Harington is perfectly acceptable as the hot young actor on the cusp of playing a superhero part with Disney (with this bit set in 2007) who’s afraid he’ll be outed before signing on. Certainly, this is a fear shared by – one assumes- many closeted leading men. What’s not clear is what drives him to start his soul-baring correspondence with his young fan, played by Tremblay. It gets clearer when you learn that Dolan himself wrote a similarly adoring fan letter to Leonardo DiCaprio in his childhood, and when you see that Tremblay’s character – once he’s all grown up – is played by Ben Schnetzer, who doesn’t look a thing like Tremblay but is a dead ringer for Dolan. The film is a wish-fulfillment fantasy, but one that never gels.

For one thing, we barely ever learn what’s in the letters Donovan writes to his young fan. We hear enough that we know they’re essentially innocent, with him kind to his young fan, but you never understand why he’d start such a long correspondence (with letters in the hundreds) and what they could talk about. By doing this, the pivotal relationship never makes any sense, even if Tremblay, as always, is good as the young fan. Strangely, the one who comes up short here is Natalie Portman, who plays Tremblay’s mom but is poorly developed throughout. Their tearful reunion, set to a Florence + the Machine cover of “Stand by Me” while likely elicit more stifled giggles than tears. Susan Sarandon, as Harrington’s alcoholic mom, is given a role that comes off as too stereotypically cartoonish, although Kathy Bates steals scenes as his hard-nosed agent (shades of her role in THE LATE SHIFT), who dresses him down in the film’s most effective moments.

The framing device, where Schnetzer’s grown-up version of Tremblay is interviewed by Thandie Newton’s pissy journalist is where the film really goes awry. Coming off as insufferable, he criticizes Newton’s cynical journalist, who’s on a short stopover between covering war zones, for not attaching enough importance to his story, while Newton, for her part, has to believably convey this writer being enthralled by what’s ultimately a pretty dull tale. There’s no reason for us to ever get why she’d finally be convinced that this is such a worthy tale, and you get a sense that she’s supposed to be a stand-in for the audience, with the fantasy being that we’ll all be as utterly shook as she is by the end.

The Death and Life of John F. Donovan

NOT GOOD

4