A loving tribute to veteran casting director Bonnie Timmermann, Simon Wallon's Bonnie shoots herself in the foot in the opening minutes. As we watch raw VHS tapes documenting the subject's first interviews with actors like Benicio Del Toro, Natalie Portman, and Kate Winslet, all incredibly young, beautiful, and lovable, we're already bothered by the more mundane documentary stuff to come. Why not just round up all these tapes that you can get permission for, have Timmermann do a little intro, and turn it into a series to stream? Most moviegoers would watch hours and hours before they get their fill.
"Casting directors can be the bridge between nothing and everything for an actor," Mark Ruffalo can be heard saying near the beginning of "Bonnie," a tribute to one of the profession's leading figures in Bonnie Timmermann, one of the first calls for directors like Michael Mann and the Scott brothers, which becomes a Trojan horse about the crucial role in any production of detecting talent and taking it out of any artist, which shows that it is an art in itself. Timmermann sits reflecting on his career, as do the countless collaborators and actors he's helped over the years, but the main attraction for most is probably the decades worth of audition tapes he lets director Simon Wallon examine for gems. material that director and editor Michael T. Vollman know exactly what to do with.
Director: Simon Wallon
Stars: Bonnie Timmermann, Paul Auster, Steve Buscemi
While images of a 15-year-old Ben Affleck or an even younger Natalie Portman auditioning for "Heat" will naturally draw attention, Wallon and Vollman take things a step further when you start to see what Timmermann does on the tapes without polishing, aided by interviews with actors who talk about the audition process, and Timmermann and various directors talk about what they look for when they meet an actor and the conversations they have with each other. Successions of clips will reveal variations on the same piece of dialogue from actors vying for a specific part, often revving up fast enough to have a bit of a whiplash realizing all the possibilities that were available – Benicio Del himself Toro is surprised to learn that Timmermann considered him for "Dirty Dancing," even though Patrick Swayze's natural dancing skills made him the clear favorite, but the effect sheds light on the innate variations that even the highest-ranking actors can bring to the table. to a part and how it may or may not fit with the director's vision of a film.
When Timmermann searches for the essence of an actor, there's something appropriate about the limited amount of biography in "Bonnie," throwing in only a few tantalizing details, like being born to a boxer and an opera singer and surprising colleagues when he landed Leonard Cohen. . for a small role in "Miami Vice," though the ace up his sleeve was that they often dated. Instead, the film is about the landscape she helped create, saying it "may be old-fashioned" for insisting on a brief interview with the actor before jumping into a scene, but they become illuminating when Adam Sandler talks about knowing that he's going to get involved in sitcoms since he's on "SNL" as he thinks he might be capable of something more and Keanu Reeves is asked to explain himself while objecting to why he moved to Toronto as a kid for "weird reasons ", and he finally responds with the kind of enigmatic and poetic quality that would become one of his great gifts later on.
It certainly helps to have eloquent subjects like Mann, Liam Neeson, Laura Linney and Laurence Fishburne talking about their craft while articulating what Timmermann really does, and while the absence of interviews with other casting directors is felt when discussing some of the broader claims of the industry where Timmermann was undoubtedly a pioneer, such as bringing diversity to casting with her work in “Miami Vice” or recognizing the independent film scene as a hive of actors, “Bonnie” shows the impact that a single person can have on those who does. in front of the cameras. Although Timmermann gave up any notion of being an actress before she hit puberty, realizing that she was more skilled as an observer, it's nice to see her get such a well-deserved and insightful close-up.
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