An underwhelming batch of films at Toronto festival
TORONTO — I’ve never walked out of a movie at the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF) before, not even Golden Turkey Hall of Shame bow-wows like “The Human Stain” or “Revolver.” The sheer investment of time and energy that it takes to get into any TIFF screening — upward of two hours for the really hot titles — discourages auditorium-hopping.
But when you see people fleeing in the middle of a brutally bad flick (and there were plenty to choose from this year, trust me), your mind begins to play tricks on you. Do they know something you don’t?
As it turns out, nobody knows anything at TIFF. Everyone is capable of (repeatedly) making the same boneheaded decisions that you are. Some folks are just better at playing movie Russian roulette. I’m sure that it was possible to have had a great time at the 33rd edition of the Toronto film fest, which concluded over the weekend. That just wasn’t my experience this annum. Sure, there were plenty of good films to see, but even the best ones were overshadowed by the soul-crushing disappointments and flat-out stinkers, many of which, ironically, were the most difficult to get into.
The few “big” studio films to premiere at TIFF (Spike Lee’s WWII epic “The Miracle of Saint Anna”; Oprah-endorsed “The Secret Life of Bees”; “Pride and Glory” with Colin Farrell and Edward Norton; Ed Harris’ oater “Appaloosa”; supernatural rom-com “Ghost Town”; Greg Kinnear’s Oscar wannabe “Flash of Genius,” et al) sank without a trace, leaving the Great White North without the requisite bounce they were hoping for; and that many desperately need to make any sort of commercial inroads.
Toronto’s reputation for being the official launching pad for the upcoming awards season took a serious beating in 2008. Conspicuous by their absence were such heavily touted Oscar contenders as “Milk,” “The Road,” “The Soloist,” “Revolutionary Road” and “Doubt.” The official line was that they weren’t ready in time, but conspiracy theorists like me spent the entire festival debating the veracity of that claim. Anything to keep our minds off the (generally) underwhelming movies that did manage to show up.
With his shot-in-Pittsburgh rom-com “Zack and Miri Make a Porno,” former Sundance whiz kid Kevin Smith officially became culturally irrelevant. Like John Waters whose shock-at-all-cost modus operandi became pass once gross-out comedy went mainstream with the Farrelly Brothers, Smith’s potty-mouthed, pop-culture-referencing schtick now seems positively antiquated in the Judd Apatow era. Maybe Smith should do a Broadway musical version of “Clerks” (a la Waters’ “Hairspray” smash) for his next act.
Any hopes that Sony’s “Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist” might become this year’s “Juno” died halfway through the TIFF press screening when it became apparent that director Peter Sollett (of “Raising Victor Vargas” fame) was more interested in sophomoric toilet humor than pathos or insight. The only thing “Juno” and “N&N” have in common is the same leading man-child, Michael Cera.
Sollett wasn’t the only TIFF filmmaker experiencing a precipitous sophomore slump.
Rain Johnson followed his brilliant 2005 high school noir “Brick” with “The Brothers Bloom,” a failed Wes Anderson homage that repeatedly hits the same note of arch whimsy. Even with its spectacularly gifted cast (including Mark Ruffalo and Oscar winners Adrien Brody and Rachel Weisz), Johnson’s grifter farce fails on nearly every conceivable level. And Neil Burger blew whatever indie cred he earned with 2006’s “The Illusionist” by inflicting pedestrian Iraq homefront road movie “The Lucky Ones” on TIFF audiences.
It wasn’t just relative newbies like Sollett, Johnson and Burger who came up short.
Oscar-winning director Jonathan (“Silence of the Lambs,” “Philadelphia”) Demme’s self-indulgent, multiculturalism-with-a-trowel “Rachel Getting Married” squanders terrific performances by Anne Hathaway, Rosemarie DeWitt and long MIA screen veteran Debra Winger on piddling material. The result is as wearying as spending two hours in the company of a recovering addict which, come to think of it, Hathaway’s sister-of-the-bride character is.
Despite a bravura performance by Jeff Goldblum in the leading role, Paul Schrader’s Holocaust drama “Adam Resurrected” is so unfocused, meandering and overwrought that most of the audience at a morning press screening bailed before the end credits. Currently without a U.S. distributor, the only hope “Adam” has of finding an audience is via the Jewish Film Festival circuit.
British stalwart Mike Leigh was represented by one of his least satisfying films to date. “Happy-Go-Lucky” is a character study about a young woman (Sally Hawkins’ Cockney elementary schoolteacher Polly) who’s more fingernails-on-a-blackboard grating than charming or endearing. After two hours with the relentlessly chipper Polly, I felt like wringing her scrawny neck.
“Iris”/”Notes on a Scandal” director Richard Eyre erred with the decently acted, if profoundly inconsequential “The Other Man.” Not even a reunion of “Kinsey” stars Laura Linney and Liam Neeson — playing a straying wife and her cuckolded husband — could make “Man” a must-see.
Larry Charles created tsunamilike waves at TIFF with “Borat” in 2006, but his new documentary “Religulous” — made in tandem with political satirist Bill Maher — was too scattershot and seriously overextended at 103 minutes. Perhaps it would have worked better as a one-hour HBO comedy special.
Some of my fondest TIFF memories were supplied by films that arrived either sans buzz (the lushly appointed period romance “The Duchess” starring an excellent Keira Knightley and Ralph Fiennes) or suffering from bad buzz. Maybe it was diminished expectations (they flopped at Venice and Cannes respectively), but “The Burning Plain” (the directing bow of “Amores Perros”/”Babel” screenwriter Guillermo Arriaga with Charlize Theron and Kim Basinger) and “Synecdoche, New York” (another directorial debut, this one by surrealist scenarist extraordinaire Charlie Kaufman) both seemed pretty OK to me.
I was particularly taken with “Synecdoche,” which features a dream cast (Philip Seymour Hoffman, Samantha Morton, Catherine Keener, Emily Watson, Hope Davis, Michelle Williams, Jennifer Jason Leigh, et al) in a Hellzapoppin’ comic phantasmagoria that felt very much like Kaufman’s personal spin on Fellini’s masterpiece “81‚Ñ2.”
Most of my favorite Toronto films came from ringers — pet directors who never seem to let me down. Arnand Desplechin’s “A Christmas Tale,” Olivier Assayas’ “Summer Hours” and Claire Denis’ “35 Shots of Rum” all told beautifully nuanced stories of families in crisis. Michael Winterbottom’s superb “Genova” also dealt with a family trauma (Colin Firth takes his two young daughters with him to Italy for a teaching gig after the tragic death of wife Hope Davis), and Terrence Davies’ Liverpool memento mori “Of Time and the City” proved that auteur filmmaking is alive and well, at least on the international circuit.
Jia Zhang-ke’s “24 City” continued the award-winning Chinese director’s winning streak with an artful blend of documentary and fiction. Kelly Reichardt’s “Wendy and Lucy,” featuring an award-caliber performance by Michelle Williams, displayed the same humanist rigor as Belgium’s Dardenne Brothers. Guy Ritchie returned from the dead with “RocknRolla,” another boys-with-guns gangster flick, but his most larkishly entertaining and accomplished work to date. Richard Linklater’s winsome life-in-the-theater fable “Me and Orson Welles” features an amazing simulacrum of the “Citizen Kane” genius by newcomer Christian McKay that has to be seen to be believed. Veteran Swedish director Jan Troell (1972 Best Picture Oscar nominee “The Emigrants”) reclaimed his rightful place in the cinematic pantheon with the exquisite “Everlasting Moments,” an intimate family saga set in the early 20th century. And genre specialist Kathryn Bigelow (“Point Break,” “Near Dark”) may have finally made an Iraqi movie that audiences will actually pay to see. “The Hurt Locker,” Bigelow’s crackerjack suspense thriller about a military bomb disposal unit stationed in Baghdad, opens in theaters next spring.
I could tell you about “Lovely, Still,” a lugubrious gender-reversal spin on “Away from Her” reimagined as a 90-minute “Twilight Zone” episode; the repulsive French splatter flick “Martyrs;” or “The Loss of a Teardrop Diamond” based on a “rare original screenplay” by the late Tennessee Williams that had an early morning press screening audience howling with unintentional laughter, but I’d rather end things on a more positive note.
The happiest distributor leaving Toronto was undoubtedly Fox Searchlight. After wowing them at Telluride, Danny Boyle’s irresistible, ingeniously structured Charles Dickens Meets Bollywood “Slumdog Millionaire” maintained its exalted buzz status by winning TIFF’s Audience Choice Award. And Twentieth Century Fox’s boutique label was also the lucky winner of the “Wrestler” sweepstakes. Darren (“Requiem for a Dream”) Aronofsky’s superbly gritty melodrama about a down-and-out pro wrestler (Mickey Rourke in a revelatory performance destined to win him at least a Best Actor nomination) parlayed its Venice Golden Lion into a $4-million acquisition deal with the company. Not surprisingly, F-S has already announced an awards-wooing Dec. 19 release date.
Hmmm; maybe TIFF hasn’t lost its Oscar-prognosticator status after all.