Seven Winners & a Dog

Highlights from the Toronto International Film Festival

Synecdoche, New York

Recall if you will the parable of the blind men and the elephant: Six blind men approach an elephant and are asked to describe it. One feels the pachyderm’s tail and determines that an elephant is like a rope; one feels its trunk and says the beast is like a tree branch, etc.

That’s what the Toronto International Film Festival, which over the years has grown to a size that can be called elephantine, is like these days. There was a time when one observer could hope to offer a reasonably comprehensive account of the event, fleshed out with second-hand information about the key movies that you didn’t get to see.

But that was a long time ago. As I write this I haven’t yet read the piece by my colleague Girish Shambu in this issue detailing his experiences in Toronto, but I feel safe in assuming that there will be no overlap between our reports.

It’s not merely a matter of seeing different films. A dozen people could go to 26 films each and still not have any overlap among them. You will experience the festival in fundamentally different ways, for instance, if you go to the evening galas, where you can spend several hours standing in line and pay up to $40 for a ticket in order to see celebs on the red carpet, than if you see the same films at daytime screenings.

In our case, I went on a press pass while Girish paid his own way, which means we were barely even at the same festival. There are separate press and industry screenings, which you can easily be shut out of if you don’t get there early enough—and sometimes even if you do: Last year the festival instituted “preferred press” screenings for the top tier press, who get to go in first while everyone else has to wait outside until 15 minutes before the film starts. That policy kept me from seeing at least three films at which I arrived half an hour before showtime. And if there’s anything worse than not being able to see a film, it’s being turned away from it after you’ve stood in line for 30 minutes.

Edison and Leo

But the real reason I saw substantially fewer films this year (a mere 16) than I usually do is because I went the interview route, taking advantage of opportunities to get interviews with stars and directors of soon-to-be-released films. One gets a nice backlog of stories this way, but it takes up a lot of time you could otherwise be using to see movies.

(Another drawback: In recent years the festival has become absurdly front-loaded. All of the big movies compete for media attention over the first weekend of the 10-day fest, and by the time Tuesday rolls around there’s little chance left to see the films you missed.)

But enough of my whining—here are some highlights of what I did see:

Synecdoche, New York is scheduled for limited release in late October, which means they’ll see how it does in New York and LA before deciding whether to put out in the rest of the country. It wouldn’t surprise me in the slightest if it never does play wide, because this directorial debut by writer Charlie Kaufman (Adaptation, Being John Malkovich) is about as mass market-friendly as the last David Lynch feature. A dreamlike depiction of the soul of an artist, in this case Philip Seymour Hoffman as a theater director trying to work out his life in his art, the nearest film I could compare it to is Bob Fosse’s All That Jazz. (Minus the music.) Alternately funny, sad, confounding, compelling, and inexplicably touching, it could just as easily be a hit in movie houses because those who tune into Kaufman’s abstruse soul-baring will want to see it several times in order to pick it apart.

It was no surprise that Slumdog Millionaire was voted this year’s favorite film of festival audiences. Adapted from the novel Q&A by Vikas Swarup, this picaresque recounts the youth of an Indian orphan and his experiences growing up on the streets of Mumbai (where it was filmed). That may make it sound like a depressing tale along the lines of Pixote, and it does have Dickensian scenes of childhood poverty. But director Danny Boyle (Trainspotting, 28 Days Later) grounds the tale as a flashback as the boy is being examined by a police detective for suspicion of cheating during a winning appearance on the Indian version of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire. As usual with Boyle’s films, it can be too hyperactive and scatological for some tastes, but with its rich palette of story and scenery and an energy borrowed from Bollywood spectaculars, it’s a genuine crowd pleaser. Look for it in theaters around Thanksgiving.

Slumdog Millionaire

Boyle’s contemporary Guy Ritchie, of late famed more for his famous wife than his films, had a welcome return to form at the festival with RockNRolla, an ensemble crime adventure in the mode of Lock Stock and Two Smoking Barrels and Snatch. It’s not deep but it’s certainly loud and fast-moving, and Ritchie and producer Joel Silver are already at work on two sequels. It opens on Halloween.

Possibly the oddest experience I had during the festival was one morning around 8:30 when, on my way to he first screening of the day, I was faced with festival volunteers asking if I was looking for easy virtue. It turns out that this was not a new service being offered to journalists (as you might momentarily expect in a city where hookers advertise openly in the phone book and the weekly papers) but rather a reference to a new movie by Stephen Elliott (The Adventures of Priscilla). I guess my mind was just in the gutter anyway, given that I was headed to see American Swing, which was not a film about Benny Goodman and Glenn Miller but instead a documentary about Plato’s Retreat, the infamous public sex club of the disco era. (Had it opened in the 1980s, they probably would have called it “Orgies R Us.”) The audience was surprisingly small, though for all I knew those panning to see it may have ended up by mistake at Easy Virtue. At any rate, it was a fascinating look at a scene that you can hardly believe existed as recently as 30 years ago. It’s the kind of movie where Al Goldstein looks normal compared to most of the interviewees, and if HBO doesn’t already have it on their schedule I would be very much surprised.

Written by Buffalo native George Toles, brother of Tom and scripter of many of Guy Maddin’s movies, Edison and Leo is a suitably bizarre animated fantasy about a scientist who forsakes everything in the quest for a perfect light bulb filament. At least that’s how it starts, before heading off in directions unknown around a version of the early 20th century that Maddin fans will feel at home in. The stop-motion animation of this Canadian production is somewhere between Wallace & Gromit and Robot Chicken (okay, closer to the latter than the former), and it’s definitely not for children, but the lovingly rendered details and plot twists should find it an audience somewhere.

Cooper's Camera

Toronto’s hectic pace works to the advantage of splashier films that are able to slam their way into your consciousness through the haze, just as it keeps smaller films of quality from having the impact they might otherwise.

I was thus unimpressed with Olivier Assayas’ well-crafted L’Heure d’été (Summer Hours), about the efforts of a family to deal with their heritage, a substantial art collection over which their recently deceased mother presided for decades. Would they keep it in the family or sell it? I found it awfully hard to care. I was more touched by Le Silence de Lorna, the latest from Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne, the Belgian brothers whose films about the lives of the socially disadvantaged have won them numerous awards at Cannes but little attention at the American box office. Here they bring their typically restrained aesthetic to observing the life of an Albanian woman in Belgium making a serious of increasingly bad decisions in order to keep from being deported.

Over my 20-plus years of the Toronto festival, I have learned not to stick too long with a movie that I don’t like—there’s almost always something else to see instead. But sometimes a movie is so bad that it just pins you to your seat in horror. Such was the case with the final film I saw, a last-minute choice after being shut out of two others I wanted to see. I took a chance on Cooper’s Camera because it co-starred Jason Jones and Samantha Bee, of The Daily Show. In doing so, I forgot the rule which holds that performers who are funny on TV are almost never funny in movies. Set in 1985 and shot as if it were a home movie, Cooper’s Camera records Christmas Day for a white trash family with an endless stream of crude gags that Larry the Cable Guy probably rejected as being insensitive to working class viewers. I’m almost afraid to mention an odd and senseless reference in the movie to North Tonawanda, lest anyone use it as an excuse to bring it to Buffalo. And of former Kid in the Hall Dave Foley’s cameo appearances as the star of home sex tapes, well, let’s just say I will never be able to look at News Radio without shuddering. I suppose it gained entry to the Festival on the grounds that it’s a Canadian production. But it’s the very definition of the kind of movie you go to a film festival to avoid.