Blame Canada

Our intrepid reporter finds joy in the little things at the Toronto Film Fest.

by Sam Adams

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Published: Sep 17, 2008

WRESTLEMANIA: Mickey Rourke turns in a stellar performance in Darren Aronofsky's The Wrestler, one of the few big-name tickets at this year's Toronto Film Fest. (CLICK IMAGE FOR LARGER VERSION)

Speaking strictly in percentage terms, film festivals are defined more by the movies you don't see than the movies you do. That went double for the just-ended Toronto International Film Festival, where the initial buzz was mainly concerned with the lack of putative Oscar contenders. Assorted delays meant that several highly anticipated titles (Gus Van Sant's Milk, David Fincher's The Curious Case of Benjamin Button) weren't ready in time, while others, like Clint Eastwood's Changeling, were absent without explanation. There are years when, with foresight and a little luck, you could see every best-picture nominee during Toronto's 10 days. This is not likely to be one of those years.

So much the better. With fewer must-sees on the agenda, it was possible to find room for discoveries like J.T. Petty's The Burrowers, a Western horror movie that might best be described as a cross between The Searchers and Tremors. Javor Gardev's stylish Zift is an overstuffed Bulgarian film noir, shot in wide-screen black and white with a wicked sense of humor: Jean-Pierre Melville meets Béla Tarr, perhaps, with a pinch of Tarantino thrown in. Even blacker was A Film with Me in It, a blood-soaked Irish comedy written by and starring Mark Doherty as a struggling actor whose life goes haywire when his brother, his landlord and his ex-girlfriend accidentally kill themselves in his two-bedroom flat. Although Doherty (naturally) makes himself the center of attention, the movie's standout turn is from comedian Dylan Moran, whose exquisitely mangled dialogue is a thing of beauty. Not one to be pinned down, Korea's Kim Ji-Woon followed the tense ghost movie A Tale of Two Sisters and the stylish gangster yarn A Bittersweet Life with the wacked-out and endlessly entertaining Western The Good, the Bad and the Weird.

The press screening for Hirokazu Kore-eda's Still Walking was only half-full, but word spread through the fest that the director had returned to the stellar form of 2004's Nobody Knows after the sword-fighting misfire Hana. Set almost entirely in an elderly Japanese couple's home, the movie takes place on the anniversary of their eldest son's death. Their surviving children, families in tow, come home to commemorate the loss. The skeletons quickly come out of their closets and disappointments surge to the fore. In essence, it's a Japanese equivalent to an American home-for-the-holidays movie, but accomplished with exquisite care to a quietly devastating effect. A colleague dismissed it as "Ozu-lite," but unlike Ozu's movies, the intergenerational conflicts run both ways; the parents have failed their children as much as their children have failed them.

Echoes of tragedy carry through Jonathan Demme's Rachel Getting Married and Michael Winterbottom's Genova. In Rachel (out Oct. 17), Anne Hathaway digs deep as a recovering addict who goes straight from rehab to her older sister's wedding. Sprawling and overlong (the last half-hour should be 10 minutes), the movie is hamstrung by Demme's one-from-every-column approach to the characters; it feels like he's just trying to demonstrate how broad-minded he is. Still, Rachel is a promising break from Demme's stilted recent features, and the performances are fresh and surprising, particularly Bill Irwin's as the New England paterfamilias.

Genova was met with a harsh reception, but Winterbottom's story of a widowed father (Colin Firth) trying to keep his family together after his wife's sudden death left me feeling shaken, and a little worked over. The movie is an exercise in free-floating dread; as Firth's young daughters wander around the Italian city where he's trying to make a fresh start, they're beset by danger from all sides. Every walk down a side street seems to threaten tragedy. The scenes where the dead mother (Hope Davis) appears to Firth's youngest daughter drew particular audience ire, but it's clear that she's not a ghost per se, just a manifestation of a little girl's feelings of guilt and loss. Genova is tough and even unpleasant, but Winterbottom's grasp of the delicate family dynamic is, as always, assured.

Loss of a more literal kind afflicts Michelle Williams in Wendy and Lucy, Kelly Reichardt's melancholy follow-up to her lyrical Old Joy. A sad-eyed drifter on her way to Alaska, Williams stops in Portland and loses her dog and her car in short order, left to trudge the city on foot in search of her only companion. While a few people (like the self-righteous checkout boy who turns her in for shoplifting food) are overtly unkind, most are sympathetic, but within limits that don't approach a real solution to her plight. Dog owners will be weeping in the aisles, and though Williams doesn't ask for pity, the simplicity of her performance is heartbreaking in itself.

Hunger (CLICK IMAGE FOR LARGER VERSION)

As a shell-shocked ex-con who moves in with her younger sister, Kristin Scott Thomas spreads a thin crust of icy hauteur over a deep well of private pain in I've Loved You So Long (out Nov. 14). The first feature by author Philippe Claudel reveals the nature of this woman's crime only gradually, but it's fair to say the movie is of a piece with several other Toronto entries dealing with loss, grief and guilt. Acting entirely in French (which she speaks fluently), Thomas makes a dazzling return to leading roles after far too many years spent playing second fiddle.

If Toronto's movies were more often good than great, they were full of surprising and sometimes revelatory performances. There's no question Mickey Rourke was perfectly cast as a punch-drunk has-been in Darren Aronofsky's The Wrestler (parts of which were shot in Philly), but who knew Jean-Claude Van Damme could cry on cue? In JCVD, the "Muscles from Brussels" plays himself, or a version thereof: a washed-up action star who gets caught up in a bank robbery turned hostage crisis. Although it's more clever in concept than execution, Mabrouk El Mechri's PoMo actioner offers a show-stopping long take in which Van Damme gives what must be the longest monologue of his career.

The Hurt Locker (CLICK IMAGE FOR LARGER VERSIO

Coming the day after The Wrestler took first prize at Venice, the movie's $4 million sale clinched twin comeback stories for Rourke and Aronofsky, although the movie's grainy, doc-style lensing feels like a sop to convention after the financial failure of The Fountain. With little to hold it together beyond the force of Rourke's impressive performance, the movie progresses almost by rote towards its foreordained climax, which feels less like a critique of machismo than an endorsement of it.

For a female director, Kathryn Bigelow has always shown a surprising vulnerability to macho bullshit. A chest-thumping epilogue almost ruins The Hurt Locker, an adrenaline-fueled ride along with a military bomb squad in Iraq. Attempts to frame the movie as a political critique are misguided: It's an action movie, plain and simple, and a cracking one at that. Bigelow isn't interested in whether we should be in Iraq, but what it's like for the soldiers primed to view every piece of roadside debris as a potential deathtrap. Although the British artist Steve McQueen is no action junkie, his Hunger is secretly enthralled by the violence it condemns. Set during the hunger strike called by IRA prisoners seeking political status, the movie watches its actors waste away with a kind of awed fascination. Its formal elegance and unbroken long takes (some of which are effective, and some merely gimmicky) contribute to the sense of sanctified suffering. It's no accident the movie was financed by Mel Gibson's Icon Productions: It's the Irish Republican Passion of the Christ.

Among Toronto's comebacks, none was more unexpected, or more welcome, than that of Terence Davies, the British visionary who in recent years had despaired openly of ever finding the money for another film. Unfortunately, Of Time and the City, Davies' first film in eight years, is a major letdown, an overwrought portrait of his hometown of Liverpool that feels like the work of an eloquent grumpy old man. Making bludgeoning use of sacred music, Davies savages the Catholicism more deftly explored in his autobiographical films Distant Voices, Still Lives and The Long Day Closes. Even so, Davies' magnificent purr is a treat to hear (if not always to listen to) on the narration track, and you can't help but laugh at the sneering "yeah, yeah, yeah" with which Davies dismisses Liverpool's most famous musical export.

Also back after an eight-year layoff (not counting the anthology Cinevardphoto), Agnès Varda charmed with the autobiographical essay Les Plages d'Agnès. Reconstituting her life as a series of beaches, including one she constructs in the middle of a Paris street, Varda ranges freely through her past, linking biography and autocritique until life and work are indistinguishable. It's a trifle, but a deliberate one, an engaging stream-of-consciousness romp in the fields of memory. In a year when many complained that Toronto's films were forgettable, Varda left us with something to remember.

(s_adams@citypaper.net)

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