The Death & Life of John F. Donovan (2018)

(On Cable TV, July 2020) Expectations ran high about French-Canadian wunderkind Xavier Dolan’s English-language debut The Death & Life of John F. Donovan, especially considering the calibre of the Hollywood cast that joined the project. But it doesn’t take all that much time to realize that the whole thing is a misfire. Emotionally fake and yet self-satisfied with itself, it features characters doing either implausible things (such as having an eleven-year-old being pen pal with a troubled star actor) or being amazed at their own actions when they’re fairly standard stuff (i.e.: a journalist being seduced by a rather humdrum story). The film quickly undermines its own internal coherence, as it mixes a framing device with two other previous plotlines, except that the framing device can’t even be aware of much of the previous timelines—it’s a bit of a mess and it rings hollow the way that other similar pretentious movies as The Goldfinch also did. The Death & Life of John F. Donovan is slick all right—and you don’t have to look all that deeply to spot Dolan’s usual cinematographic tics or thematic obsessions. I’m always lenient toward movies that take a poke at celebrity and filmmaking, but even considering that, The Death & Life of John F. Donovan is a disappointment, taking itself far too seriously from the title onward.