Yesterday was another busy event day for the Santa Barbara fest. It was a shame the Director’s Panel was canceled, but participant Andrew Stanton switched gears to join Robert Knott (“Appaloosa”), Tom McCarthy (“The Visitor”) and Dustin Lance Black (“Milk”) for an Anne Thompson-moderated discussion on their work at the keyboard this year.
It was a good discussion, though I couldn’t help a double take at Black’s prepubescent appearance as he waltzed casually on stage. I mean it as a compliment. I was also intrigued by his noting one of the things that really interested him when working on the spec “Milk” script was the famed politician’s not-so-heroic side. “Sometimes he’d be in the bath house when he should have been home with his boyfriend,” Black said. I say intrigued because one of the key criticisms of the film has been its overly haloed depiction of the man, a criticism that, frankly, hasn’t been properly defended by even the film’s legion of supporters (and I count myself in their ranks).
Stanton, meanwhile, was perhaps the most thought-provoking member of the panel, finding a nice place amid Black’s low-key veneer, McCarthy’s wit and Knoll’s hilarious interjections. And thankfully, Jeffrey Wells martyred himself by asking why Stanton continued to be “oblique” when addressing the overweight “teletubbies” of “WALL-E.” This has been a bone of contention for me on the film for some time, not so much because I feel it undermines the film, but because I believed it to be an easy opportunity for mean-spirited “fat” jokes, so to speak.