THE STORY – Elise, a successful novelist, manipulates and transforms the people in her life into the characters she needs for her story. As she blurs the line between fiction and reality, her world descends into secrets, lies, and outright betrayal.
THE CAST – Alison Brie, André Holland, Tom Sturridge & Dustin Hoffman
THE TEAM – Alex Vlack (Director/Writer)
THE RUNNING TIME – 90 Minutes
Alex Vlack’s debut feature, “The Revisionist,” opens with a rush as quick horns pierce the soundtrack, crisp still shots of interiors and exteriors are captured, and the rapid cuts immediately signal that this is a film urgently trying to say something. The energy hooks you with its anxiety, a feeling that continues throughout.
The film centers on Elise (Alison Brie), a professor and author who is two novels deep into a three-book deal and now staring down a blank Word document. Her editor’s verdict is blunt: her books are too comfortable. She’s told to “sprinkle some darkness” into her wonderful life. At the same time, her husband, Jacob (Tom Sturridge), a former advertising man now in the midst of a midlife crisis, is trying to write a biography of his father, David (Dustin Hoffman), a once-celebrated man of the pen who stopped writing entirely after his wife died. Jacob has an advance on the biography, but his father doesn’t want to be written about.
Into all of this walks John (André Holland), Jacob’s old college friend, back in town after fifteen years on the road. When he and Jacob meet by chance on a morning jog, the reunion feels like no time has passed at all. Yet, it’s clearly a lifetime. John published a story in the New Yorker at twenty-three and then essentially disappeared. He has no wife, no girlfriend, no job. He just runs.
Elise, ever the writer, sees John’s arrival as an opportunity. The plan they devise is for John to visit David regularly, who is looking forward to seeing him. John will charm the old man, get his stories, and help Jacob write the biography that David refuses to give his own son. They use the word “spy” and then dismiss it. The film doesn’t.
Dustin Hoffman’s David is the film’s emotional center of gravity. You feel his age in every scene, and you hate it because you don’t want acting legends to get old. He’s grumpy and real and doesn’t care what anyone thinks. Hoffman captures the deep pain David still carries for the loss of his wife, all of those earlier, the unhappiness with life, the emptiness, with devastating understatement. He explains how he can’t wait to experience death, how, in old age, you get to see things with new eyes again. It’s quite beautiful in its writing, and the way Hoffman captures his emotion during these moments is what makes it another Dustin Hoffman performance that reminds you why he’s beloved.
Through the dialogue he is given, he fully captures the other characters. When Jacob approaches him regarding writing his biography, David says, “You want to know who I am? Who the fuck are you?” This deflection hits a nerve because Jacob doesn’t know who he is. He quit his job, walked away from the career that defined him, and now doesn’t know what to do. And it’s not just Jacob. John spent fifteen years running from the life he could have had, and Elise is chasing a version of herself her editor says she hasn’t found yet. No one in the film has a clean answer to that question. David thinks he’s ending a conversation, but he’s actually capturing the one that the whole film is sitting with.
“The Revisionist” stirs a lingering curiosity as the weight of what goes unspoken between the film’s characters slowly builds into simmering tension. Music cues suggest something shifts the moment John re-enters the picture. There’s a look Jacob gives his old pal sometimes that is stone-faced, cold, and watchful, conveying a bitterness. And when John eventually apologizes to Elise for leaving, the film’s romantic history quietly surfaces. The dialogue here is fantastic for how it lets its characters say a lot without directly speaking to each other. With a subtlety of suggestiveness, John, speaking about a character in a novel presented in class by one of Elise’s students, captures a man consumed by love who made the safe choice and has been living with it ever since. It’s the kind of choice that, as John points out with regret, makes sense in the moment but leaves the question of who you would have been if you hadn’t made it. It’s a question you can’t think about too long before the life you actually created starts to crumble.
It’s essentially a film about why we create stories. Every character is writing or telling stories, which opens up to truths they don’t want to hear or acknowledge. David avoided speaking about his wife’s death for decades, and that avoidance hurt Jacob in ways he’s still dealing with. The closure Jacob seeks through his desire to write this biography may propel the film forward. Still, the narrative also reveals other truths, feelings, and words, which is what gives rise to the weight you feel beneath the surface from the very beginning. And emotions long held without closure can’t be contained for long, without repercussions.
There’s a fantastic scene where the narrative cuts to Elise writing; she presses Backspace, and the previously shown scene changes slightly. It’s a destabilizing moment that raises the question of whether everything we’ve been watching is just Elise writing a book, or whether it speaks to how we can shape or reshape the life and story we want. The reveal is slow and subtle, but the back-and-forth as she deletes and edits scenes more frequently later in the film does cause a somewhat stilted feeling. The question of whether we’re inside one of her novels or in reality is compelling in theory, and Vlack’s screenplay doesn’t entirely lose itself in it, but it comes close enough to feel like a wobble.
But through this, the film’s title becomes quite apt. A revisionist is someone who rewrites, who edits, who recasts the past in a new light. The film is fascinated by the truth-versus-fiction dichotomy and by why fiction is sometimes easier to live with than reality. It’s the kind of film whose narrative really emphasizes why only humans can embody the human emotion and complexity of storytelling. And it does so with a sublime cast, some genuinely great dialogue, and an anxiety-inducing score from Philip Klein that keeps everything slightly off-balance.
André Holland continues in his quiet run of doing great work in solid dramas at festivals that somehow don’t get the eyes on them they deserve. “The Revisionist” may fall into that same frustrating category. But, as usual, it shouldn’t.
