Tony Gilroy is coming back to the movies with a symphony under his arm. Film at Lincoln Center announced that "Behemoth!," Gilroy's music-drenched drama starring Pedro Pascal, will have its world premiere at Alice Tully Hall this Friday, Oct. 2, as the Centerpiece selection of the 64th New York Film Festival.
Pascal plays Alex, a cellist and one-time child prodigy from a storied musical family who abandons his chair in a Chicago orchestra to try scoring Hollywood films in Los Angeles. Gilroy, who wrote and directed the film, tells the story out of order, cutting between Alex's fraying present — a failed relationship with a woman played by Olivia Wilde complicates his attempt to start over — and the childhood that shaped him, all of it scored with original compositions built around the instrument at its center.
A Cast Built Around One Performance
The ensemble around Pascal is dense with recognizable names. Eva Victor, Alexa Swinton, Kaya Ralls, Erik Griffin, JoBeth Williams, Margarita Levieva, Hank Azaria and Will Arnett round out a cast that, TheWrap reports, will join Pascal and Gilroy in New York for the premiere. Festival organizers have made little secret of where their enthusiasm lies.
One of the performances of the year.
— Dennis Lim, artistic director, Film at Lincoln Center
Program notes for the festival go further, describing "Behemoth!" as a tribute to the power of music that builds to what the festival calls an emotional wallop of a climax — the kind of billing that tends to trail a film into awards season.
For Pascal, "Behemoth!" is a departure by design. After several years spent almost entirely inside franchise and prestige-television roles — "The Mandalorian," "The Last of Us" and an ensemble turn in Marvel's "The Fantastic Four" reboot among them — a small, character-driven drama with no swords, armor or superpowers gives him a different kind of showcase, one built around a single instrument and a performer's ability to carry a film essentially alone through long stretches of flashback. It is the sort of role actors take specifically to be talked about in December and January rather than at a summer box office.
Gilroy's Long Way Back to Directing
It has been more than a decade since Gilroy last stood behind a camera on a project of his own. His directing debut, "Michael Clayton," earned him an Academy Award nomination for original screenplay and made George Clooney's corporate fixer one of that era's defining performances; he followed it with 2012's "The Bourne Legacy," having already written the first three "Bourne" scripts and, later, co-written "Rogue One: A Star Wars Story." In between and since, Gilroy became one of Hollywood's most in-demand script doctors and, more recently, the creator of Disney+'s "Andor," the "Star Wars" prequel series that drew 22 Emmy nominations and two Peabody Awards for a notably adult take on rebellion. "Behemoth!" marks his return to original feature filmmaking — and to a far smaller canvas than the galaxy he just left behind.
The film arrives at a festival that has made a habit of using its Centerpiece slot to signal awards-season heavyweights. Its selection alongside an opening-night premiere from James Gray and a closing-night documentary from Ava DuVernay places "Behemoth!" squarely inside this year's highest-profile fall festival lineup, at a moment when studios are still hunting for original, adult-skewing dramas that can find an audience in theaters.
What Comes Next
Searchlight Pictures, which is distributing the film, has set only a general December window for release, positioning "Behemoth!" for a theatrical run before the year's precursor awards begin handing out nominations. Between now and then, the reception out of Alice Tully Hall on Friday night — and whether critics agree with the festival's own enthusiasm for Pascal's performance — will shape how the film is talked about for months.
