CIFF 2024 In Review: Peacock, Okie, Slice of Life: The American Dream. In Former Pizza Huts.

A small handful of films about the many things that make hope difficult.

With the 60th Chicago International Film Festival in full swing, DoomRocket is here to highlight its choicest selections. In review: Bernhard Wenger's Peacock, Kate Cobb's Okie, and Matthew Salleh's Slice of Life: The American Dream. In Former Pizza Huts.

PEACOCK [Austria, Germany; North American premiere]

A career can easily devour any hyper-professional. For Matthias (Albrecht Schuch), the imperturbable mustache at the center of Bernhard Wenger’s Peacock, the gig is the thing. As co-founder and ace employee of “MyCompanion,” a “rent-a” service for folks who need a perfect companion — an urbane boyfriend, the perfect son, you name it, and he becomes it — Matthias is immaculate. Deferential. Attentive to every need. If only his partner (Julia Franz Richter) benefitted from such care and attention. See, Matthias puts his job and identity in front of everything else at the cost of his personality. And, it seems, his spine.

Peacock is an absorbing and shockingly ridiculous gawk at our over-mannered modern life. Wenger, in his feature debut, displays an eye for sharp social commentary, with every frame (shot in Scope by DoP Albin Wildner) including some tiny detail that, when contrasted with what’s happening onscreen, provides his film some of its most gut-busting gags. Given the overall sterility of his world, the finale Wenger arrives at is appropriately messy, a go-for-broke final statement about seizing one’s life before it slips away forever that is positively Cheeveresque in design. “So pretentious,” one person notes of the gorgeous bird that gives Wenger’s film its namesake. “I pity him.” Indeed, the peacock can’t change what it is, and more’s the pity. But the wisest among us know to change their feathers when it’s time. There may be hope for all of us yet.

8.5 / 10 

Peacock premiered at the 60th Chicago International Film Festival on October 17.

Written and directed by Bernhard Wenger.
Cinematography by Albin Wildner.
Starring Albrecht Schuch, Anton Noori, Julia Franz Richter, and Theresa Frostad Eggesbø.
Produced by Nikolaus Geyrhalter, Markus Glaser, Martina Haubrich, Michael Kitzberger, and Wolfgang Widerhofer.

Unrated. Contains an inordinate amount of genitalia and even more social malaise. 

OKIE [United States]

Successful author Louie (Scott Michael Foster) returns to his humble bucolic roots and discovers naught but raw feelings and lingering regrets in Okie, the feature debut from Chicago-based filmmaker (and co-star) Kate Cobb. As Louie's Budweiser-soaked yarn uncoils, we discover this man — dubbed "Lucky" by his former classmates who still dwell in the small town he grew up in — has been lifting personal details from the folks he lived among in his formative years and exploiting them in his popular novels. "A writer is like a sponge," he says to old pal Travis (Kevin Bigley), which is, of course, a vocal example of snobbish, unimaginative hackery. 

Okie is an odd duck as far as small-scale regional dramas and psychological-decents-into-personal-hells go. For one, its premise is strong enough that it doesn't require a clumsy, late-in-the-game plot twist to give the film resonance, so compelling are the themes Cobb and her screenwriter, Kevin Bigley, wish to convey. (After all, a certain Vice Presidential candidate has a similar background to Louie.) Yet Okie indulges a twist anyway, attempted in the cadence of Kaufman-does-Synecdoche-but-in-rural-Illinois only without the clarity to pull off a haunting, or even convincing, myopic psychological odyssey. 

Unfortunately, Cobb's tricks, which include a Tinnitus screech to convey a tortured mind and an admirably brazen crack at "shooting the rodeo," don't make Louie, a pretentious hypocrite, any more sympathetic, nor do they make his story compelling. Bigley, however, turns in a notably charismatic performance — I call it Robin Williams by way of Tom of Finland — that makes characters around him seem less interesting by contrast. Travis is the best person to trust to get your point across, and when Cobb centers him, Okie's point is clear: you truly can't go home again, especially when nobody wants you there.

5 / 10

Okie premiered at the 60th Chicago International Film Festival on October 19.

Directed by Kate Cobb.
Written by Kevin Bigley.
Cinematography by Wojciech Kielar.
Starring Scott Michael Foster, Kevin Bigley, Kate Cobb, Josef Bette, and Dan J. Johnson.
Produced by Kate Cobb, Kevin Bigley, Scott Michael Foster, and Joseph Ettinge.

Unrated. Contains drink, shrooms, and loose, folksy chit-chat.

SLICE OF LIFE: THE AMERICAN DREAM. IN FORMER PIZZA HUTS [United States; North American premiere]

One thing that occurred to me during my screening of Matthew Salleh's thoughtful and lovely documentary Slice of Life: The American Dream. In Former Pizza Huts. was how so many of the franchise restaurants that spring up from the ground these days, like so many money-grubbing weeds, more resemble a Social Security office than a fun space to bring a family to. As fast food grows, identity diminishes; now, the locations of McDonald's, Dunkin' Donuts, and Wendy's all look institutional, a slate-grey cog amid our joyless urban sprawl. 

Pizza Hut, that foundational red-topped restaurant chain that was nigh omnipresent in the Eighties and Nineties, has been in a perpetual state of corporate rebranding since the Carney family sold their company to PepsiCo in 1977. Those restaurants, with their barn-style rooftops and distinctive trapezoidal windows, replete with in-dining seating and a salad bar that I still daydream about, are the topic of Salleh's doc. But don't go thinking Slice of Life is some wistful nostalgia trip about Pizza Hut's rise and slow trudge towards obscurity; rather, the film focuses on the second life its many (many) abandoned buildings have brought to local communities throughout the United States.

Sallah is concerned about transformation and renewal, following the inspiring lives of the many small business owners who have built their enterprises within the iconic framework of long-since jettisoned Pizza Huts, tucked away in different pockets of the United States: The Church of Our Savior in Boynton Beach, Florida; Yupp's Karaoke Bar in Fort Worth, Texas; Bud Hut, a cannabis dispensary in Walsenburg, Colorado, Big Ed's BBQ in Waukegan Illinois; Nico Oysters + Seafood in Charleston, South Carolina; and Taco Jesus in Lynchburg, Virginia. By the film's end, you may find yourself charting an impromptu road trip just to throw some cash their way.

There are the requisite documentary talking heads who make up the spaces between these wonderful small-biz sagas: a Professor of History from Wichita State University (based, obviously, in Kansas, where Pizza Hut was founded), architecture writers who talk about the restaurant's iconic make, the curator of the Pizza Hut Museum in Wichita, and, perhaps most egregiously, a Pizza Hut enthusiast who veers the film towards Netflix-friendly deep-cut details about the company, including the differentiation between PH's three- and four-window building units. Distractions aside, Salleh deftly tracks the trial and error of corporate and small business success, detailing the individual struggle to find a space where one might be content in this American life while sharing it with a larger, more diverse community. As any drive through America will tell you, the Pizza Hut shape remains, but its purpose has long since changed. For the better.

7.5 / 10

Slice of Life: The American Dream. In Former Pizza Huts. premiered at the 60th Chicago International Film Festival on October 23.

Directed and shot by Matthew Salleh.
Produced by Rose Tucker.

Our CIFF 2024 coverage continues later this week.