Waiting on the dock for a water bus to take you from Venice proper to the Lido—the southern island strip that hosts the city’s film festival—you can feel the small holding area between land and sea swaying back and forth, sometimes strong enough to almost knock you off your feet. As you watch the ship come in, the waves buffeting this crowded mini-Pequod with a concentrated amount of force, you think: It’s going to be a bumpy ride. But then you get on, and regardless of how skilled your driver is (or isn’t) at steering his vaporetto, the 20-minute trip isn’t nearly as rough as expected. It’s surprisingly smooth, and the route takes you around the back of Venice, giving you a fresh perspective on the city’s landmarks.

The 65th Mostra Internationale’s boat, however, was being rocked before the red carpet had even been laid down, and judging from the pre-fest press, you’d think the event had already jumped the shark.

The oldest international festival of its kind—it preceded Cannes by a scant four years—Venice has long been considered a second cousin to the Croisette’s annual soiree in terms of glitz and glamor. But this year’s lineup keeps its big-name premieres to a minimum, and includes only five English-language entries on the schedule (that’s six fewer than the 2007 edition). Most of the competition slots are, in fact, filled by rookie filmmakers, with a "Masters" sidebar for established graybeards. The media reports leading up to the opening night, penned mostly by bitter Brits, bemoaned the lack of marquee names that guarantee front-page coverage—festival director Marco Müller defensively blamed the writers’ strike for the scarcity of Hollywood product—and there were whispers that the Italian fest was sprinting toward irrelevance. What can you give us, they ask, that Cannes and Toronto can’t? The problem wasn’t that these people needed the bells, the whistles, the whole megillah of the business they call show. It was that a whole contingent of jaded naysayers had passed the final verdict—failure!—and a single film had yet to unfold.

I understand why people are moaning and groaning. When you’ve delivered decades of high-class ballyhoo and then make good on your promise to scale things back, there’s bound to be grousing. Furthermore, when you look at a lineup full of first-timers and legendary filmmakers who’ve been inconsistent in recent years, people will accuse you of falling short. But personally, I don’t need to come to a beautiful European city to see a Hollywood movie any more than I’d go to Italy to eat a Big Mac. I want a festival that may give me the chance to see works by established auteurs—Abbas Kiarostami, Takeshi Kitano, Barbet Schroeder, Claire Denis, Pupi Avati—who, for whatever reason, may not get U.S. distribution. I want to discover new voices that have an opportunity to blossom because somebody took a chance and offered them a competition slot. I want to say I was there when a future master of the medium made his or her debut. I want a major festival that has cachet and still rolls the dice, even though, yes, I could walk away having seen a number of works that fall flat on their figurative faces. Even as a first-time attendee, I don’t have a problem with Venice branching out from the same-old mold. And for those people who bitch that the venerable festival should deliver more star power, be careful what you wish for: You may end up having to endure a really muddled, mediocre Coen brothers movie.

The only reason that Burn After Reading was chosen as the Opening Night selection can be seen directly below and to your right; when you put George Clooney and Brad Pitt together, you don’t generate star wattage so much as a celebrity aurora borealis. The Coens’ follow-up to No Country for Old Men couldn’t have been chosen on the basis of quality. The brothers’ penchant for misanthropy is back with a vengeance in this comedy about a former CIA agent’s missing memoirs, as is their love of bringing together dimwits like Clooney’s low-rent lothario, Frances McDormand’s lonely-hearts-club member and Brad Pitt’s lunkheaded personal trainer. On the plus side, Pitt does get to model another of the filmmakers’ stellar vertical hairdos, and McDormand turns rubber-faced optimism into something approaching poignancy. On the minus side is…everything else, starting with Clooney having little to grasp onto characterwise and finally ending with the Coens being unable to reconcile Pakula-era paranoia, Tex Avery cartoonishness, half-baked black humor, and a total lack of interest in genre idealogy or genre structure. This is literally a movie that ends with two peripheral characters describing what happened to major ones—offscreen, natch—and then asking what they’ve learned. "Well, I guess we’ve learned not to fucking do that again!" says one. Good, I’m glad the lesson got through and we got all this out of the way. The boat is in the water now; can we just begin the festival proper already?