It’s rare that the festival itself is as much the story as the films in it . But the 35th Toronto Intl Film Festival, or TIFF as it’s called locally, settled into its new home, the Bell Lightbox complex of theatres, shops and restaurants at the base of a new skyscraper addition located on Reitman Square in the downtown Fashion district.
There is no square when you get to the Lightbox. But what TIFF has built is one of the most comprehensive mechanisms for showcasing the art and business of indie and Hollywood specialty filmmaking in the world.
While most festivals are 10 day affairs –TIFF ends this weekend—the Lightbox’s 5 theatres are 365 days a year. The sense you get is that filmmakers and financiers can meet at this somewhat cold, silver clad Gropius style building to make things happen in a way that no other festival in North America can offer
Glad you asked, since Score, A Hockey Musical opened the festival in a nod to hometown production that seemed like a bad idea at the time. I can’t tell you how many Americans I ran into on the way to the theatre who said they were skipping this Canadian film, followed by a roll of the eyes and an “O Canada!” I had me doubts, too. I wasn’t particularly swayed by director Michael McGowan’s first film, Saint Ralph (2005), about a kid who runs the Boston Marathon in the mid-‘50s with a sick mum, and after 8 hours drive up here, I was looking forward to a nice dinner and an early eve.
But traffic on the QEW parted like I was Moses at the Red Sea (it was the second night of Rosh Hashana), and those pesky organized Canadians in the press office had my ticket and badge waiting for me at my hotel. Next thing I know, I’m sitting in Roy Thomson Hall wondering how I got to a hockey musical—and where was everyone I knew?
Joke was on them. Score was wonderful fun, a boy–girl next door romantic opera set in storybook Canada that pokes fun at the Canadian tree-hugger sensibility.
Looking back over the films in Toronto, they fall into a few rather convenient thematic categories, give or take, that follow below.
The Brits turn in their usual round of well crafted, wonderfully acted and directed films that break no new ground but are cut from first class wool to fit the perils of kings, crooks and working class queens.
The King’s Speech is the usual highly tailored British
entry emerging from 2010 Toronto. Predictable as a waltz, nary a surprise in sight
but glorious to look at and listen to, The King’s Speech is this year’s British
costume drama in the Upstairs, Downstairs category, with gentlemen in Saville Row
suits struggling to touch the primal chord and transcend 1000 years of training
to make sure there will always be an England.
Directed by Tom Hooper, the film features Colin Firth
and Geoffrey Rush in a psychological pas de deux between king and commoner with
the fate of England hanging in the balance. Famously, King George VI, played wonderfully
by Firth, stammered in public appearances.
That is until his wife, Queen Elizabeth (the late
Queen Mum of the present day Elizabeth), played by Helena Bonham Carter in a rare
turn of agreeability, seeks out the services of a psychologist played by Rush, to
help the King answer Hitler in a nationwide radio broadcast. George’s demons fall
into classic Freudian territory, as he struggles to throw off the psychological
curtain dropped on him by his father, George V, a role that Michael Gambon, that
old man eater, can do sleepwalking and somewhat does. But British history is built
on kings and crusades, and it has fallen to the retiring George, who backed into
power when his more favored brother, Edward (Guy Pearce), abdicated his crown to
marry commoner Wallis Simpson, to rally Britain to go to battle Nazism in 1939.
The Weinstein Co. picked this one up at the Toronto
film festival to take it to the Academy Awards ball, where it has a guaranteed spot
at the head table.
Never Let Me Go directed by Mark Romanek from A Kazuo Ishiguro screenplay and novel. We’re dropped into a special English private school, an orphanage it seems, run by a proper English headmistress, Charlotte Rampling—whom I invariably ran into getting popcorn or coffee up here. As headmistress it is her job is to take her young charges from toddler hood to young adult hood whence they will complete their mission: being organ donors for the more privileged classes. In that sense it’s a very quiet sci-fiction film. It whispers its fear about the world we’re heading into, even while it is very much like Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day. Remember that film was about the last gasp of the servant class. NEVER LET ME GO is the ultimate butler movie—Jeeves and Jane bring sherry and their liver to the table. Of those born luckier. Opened this past Wednesday.
Many of the films onhand here delve headlong into the perils of youth, particularly the 20-somethings grappling with Internet sex, getting that big job, and rocks and roll.
127 Hours the new film by Danny Boyle, was one of the most hotly awaited films here. And Boyle, who used Toronto two years ago to take Slumdog Millionaire to the Oscars, has made a better film—and one that I liked better—from real life mountain bike and crevasse climber California dude Aaron Ralston’s book. Which is the account of how Ralston, here played cocksure but likable by James Franco (Harry Osborn from the Spidermans), fell into a crevasse and was stuck there for five days by a boulder which fell in with him and pinned his arm to the canyon wall—until he worked up the nerve to sever it.
This is a tough film—not for reasons you may think. For one thing it’s an anti-motion movie—guy pinned to a wall. And in terms of gore, this is a Hollywood film, after all. Fox isn’t going to risk a bad rating or potential boxoffice on explicit footage that turns theatres into vomitoriums. This is the cheesecake pornography of violence rather than the real thing. And so there is no truly grisly scene, it’s all legerdemain, making you think you’ve seen what you haven’t.
But the film is better than I expected. It’s a right wing film in the mold of Straw Dogs a generation or two ago, about cutting through the clutter of civilization—here that means all the toys that 20-somethings depend on--and finding that animal instinct for survival—but only when you’re ready, or out of options. Count yourself pinned to your seat. Opens NOV. 6 from Fox.
One of the other notable film in this category, Black Swan, by Darren Aronofsky, about a Ballet Dancer played by Natalie Portman, is like 127 Hours but for women. Oh the savagery an aspiring ballet dancer must find within herself to overcome her rival, played by Mila Kunis, but is mostly an excuse for these two 100 pound bean sprout eaters to have a lesbian fantasy sequence. Black Swan is a lot of overheated hooey that is supposed to be about performance psychology and drive. But it resorts to the language of horror films—scary stuff thrown at you from the right in reflected surfaces with a loud noise grafted onto soap opera while still pretending it’s deeply insightful.
There are several interesting films in Toronto in this category:
Phillip Seymour Hoffman’s directorial debut, Jack Goes Boating, taken from a stage play, about two NYC working class couples—the grandchildren of the Honeymooners with more pathos than laughs.
Stone. By director John Curran (The Painted Veil) with Robert DeNiro as a prison psychologist who’s got a particularly challenging prisoner on his hands played by Edward Norton. In its way, this film is a little like Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf, the great Albee play and film, as two couples one older and tired—DeNiro and Frances Conroy (6 Feet Under)—collide with a younger couple played by Norton and his sex bomb wife, Milla Jovovich. It’s a very accomplished piece of work-- a cross between any number of four character marital plays by Mamet or Albee or Altman, and redemptive pieces like Dead Man Walking. Very well nuanced in script and performances, which were wonderful. And very much an Overture film—Men Who Stare at Goats--in its thematic spine of new age spiritual quest. I liked it a lot. Opens October 8.
Finally, CLIENT 9: The Rise and Fall of Eliot Spitzer is about you know who—that CNN talking head, who resigned from being Governor of New York only two short years ago. Alex Gibney is one of the best documentary guys of his time, as a triple threat writer-producer-director of Enron The Smartest Guys in the Room, Taxi to the Dark Side, Freakonomics, Casino Jack (Abramoff) and the United States of Money. Gibney pulls it all together here about Spitzer, a whirlwind of a state attorney general dubbed the Sherriff of Wall Street, who took his prosecutorial skills to Albany as governor. Hellbent on cleaning up the cesspool of NY state government, the Sheriff ran squarely into State Senate majority leader Joe Bruno and a couple of dozen lawmakers and Wall Streeters, who didn’t so much get Spitzer in a back alley as much as throw Klieg lights on Spitzer when he was in the back alley.
We get a good tour of the Emperors Club scandal that felled Spitzer, but Gibney’s main original contribution to the record is to reveal that the girl who brought Spitzer down, one Ashley Dupree, parlayed a one shot deal into a bimbo of the moment career. She was not the governor’s tryst mate of choice, one Angelina, a bright, whip smart call girl, with whom Spitzer met on a recurring basis and who spoke for the record but not on camera. An actress whose name shot by me stands in for Angelina. But it’s to Gibney’s credit that he has Spitzer answer the hard questions himself. I’m not sure it’s a must-see in these sordid times, but Client 9 makes the case that Spitzer’s story was less High Noon than High Midnight -- and that the bad guys won. How un-Hollywood is that
It opens via Magnolia Films, November 5
