This year’s Toronto International Film Festival will doubtlessly be remembered for a wide variety of things: As always, it was a grab bag of glitzy, Oscar-bound premieres, noteworthy indie underdogs and a swath of far-reaching foreign selections, but it was also the festival where so many journalists and industry people were piled together into Canada’s biggest city that long, seemingly interminable lines for the press and industry screenings became an unwelcome way of life. With so many people crammed into film after film, things were bound to get testy, as when a blogger at a screening of lo-fi horror filmmaker Ti West’s The Sacrament called Canadian 911 on a patron he deemed offensive for his continued cellphone use (as far as I know, no police descended on the theater to remove the lout).
The close quarters were vexing in many ways, but they did afford you a chance to speak to a wide variety of people. In one of these incessant lines, I met a grizzled vet of the festival, who explained to me the origin of its rise. It started in 1976 but didn’t gain international interest until 1983 when it premiered Lawrence Kasdan’s The Big Chill, a Hollywood film whose own studio (Columbia) didn’t know quite what to do with it.
The Toronto festival crowd, however, was deliriously ecstatic after its world-premiere screening, giving the attending Kasdan and his estimable cast - including such future stars as Kevin Kline,Glenn Close, William Hurt and Jeff Goldblum - a raucous and extensive standing ovation, a noise loud enough that Columbia realized they might have stumbled onto something significant. It went on to win the festival’s People’s Choice Award and be nominated for multiple Oscars, with its ’60s-influenced soundtrack becoming a huge hit (No. 17 in that year’s Billboard 200). After that success, Hollywood studios began to take more interest in their northern neighbor, sending more films for their world premieres, and helping turn the festival into a behemoth. And to think, but for Kevin Costner’s corpse and “A Whiter Shade of Pale,” the event might never have become so venerated.
With its more humble beginnings in mind, let’s take a look at some of the more noteworthy films and people in this year’s edition.
Most Immersive Cinematic Experience: Filipino director Lav Diaz’s excellent Norte, the End of History, is a brilliant reimagining of Dostoevski’s Crime and Punishment set in a small town in the Philippines. It is also more than four hours long. But rather than dragging by, the film’s length so immerses you in its texture and style, it begins to feel more and more as if you’re actually experiencing what the characters are enduring. You also get to know the streets of that small town so well you begin to recognize specific stray dogs in the background. Obviously, not for everyone, but one of most moving films I saw at the festival.
Most Ubiquitous Presence: This year, organizers could have just renamed the festival the Benedict Cumberbatch Invitational, so abundant was his presence felt (and seen). The fine British actor, known best for his portrayal of the pre-eminent detective in the BBC’s Sherlock series, appeared in no less than three of the biggest ticket films: He starred in the opening night film, The Fifth Estate, a fact-based bio-pic about WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange; he had a small but potent role in John Wells’ adaptation of Tracy Letts’ August: Osage County; and he figured prominently as a slightly more humane plantation owner in Steve Mc-Queen’s blistering 12 Years a Slave. Not to say Cumberbatch isn’t a welcome sight - he’s an excellent actor with a unique screen presence - but it got to the point where you were surprised when he didn’t pop up in a film.
Most Sweeping Spectacle: Among the other heavyweights to earn a good deal of critical buzz at the festival, Alfonso Cuaron’s Gravity was in a different class of mania. The first press screening had a snaking line of hopeful viewers that ran over, around and doubled back throughout the massive Scotiabank multiplex. It’s a 90-minute adrenalin pump filled with such technical wizardry and hallucinatory visuals, you get utterly lost in its astronauts-stuck-in-space narrative. Both leads, George Clooney and Sandra Bullock, are in fine form but the real star is Cuaron’s astonishing vision. It wasn’t the best film I saw but it was easily the most intoxicating. It’s due for wide release Oct. 4, and I can easily see it igniting a pop-culture explosion the likes of which we probably haven’t seen since the vastly inferior Avatar.
Best Emotional Sleight of Hand: The thing about slow-paced procedural films is we almost always begin to pull for the caper to be successful - be it a bank heist, a kidnapping or, in this case, an act of ecological terrorism. The more time we spend with the participants, the more we want to see them succeed, even if the result is something we wouldn’t actually want. Kelly Reichardt’s Night Moves is a bedeviling film, following the meticulous preparation of three environmental activists (Jesse Eisenberg, Peter Sarsgaard and Dakota Fanning) as they plan to blow up a dam in Oregon. It’s hard not to root for the trio, but when their action involves an unforeseen consequence, Reichardt is quick to change your whole thinking on the matter. She has created a meticulously crafted film that goads you into sympathy for its protagonists before revealing to you just how wrongminded you were.
Worst Film: Historically, I think Jason Reitman has been a reasonably serviceable director with a decent actor rapport, but Labor Day is a ludicrous misfire. Based on a novel by Joyce Maynard, the paper-thin premise involves a bitter shut-in divorcee (Kate Winslet, I’m sorry to report), her adolescent son (Dylan Minnette) and an escaped convict (Josh Brolin) who uses their house as a hideout for the weekend. Before long, the convict is fixing things around the home, changing the oil in their car and teaching junior how to throw a split-fingeredfastball but, wait, it gets much worse. He also bakes exquisite pies (!) and teaches Bitter Shut-In how to cha-cha. In return, naturally, she falls in love with him. A misbegotten dowdy housewife fantasy tarted up with good actors (struggling for their lives), I only wish I could say it was intended as a comedy. Bleagh.
Best Performance (Female): I know how boring it must be for NBA sportswriters to anoint LeBron James the season MVP year in and year out, but there’s simply no other candidate you can realistically put in his place. In film, any time Meryl Streep makes an appearance, you have to consider the possibility of her pulling in another Academy Award, such is her ability to take almost any part and turn it into something seminal. In her role as Violet Weston, the terminally deranged matriarch of a Southern clan of daughters forced to come home when their father disappears in August: Osage County, she gets to work from a screenplay by Tracy Letts, based on his searing Pulitzer and Tony-winning play, so it’s pretty much lights out. I saw many strong performances over the course of a week - including by Dame Judi Dench, Reese Witherspoon and Lupita Nyong’o - but none surpasses that of Streep, whose leering, slurry agita of a performance is nothing short of revelatory.
Best Performance (Male): Generally speaking, gaining/losing a huge amount of weight for a role does not necessarily guarantee a superior performance from an actor, though, I suppose, it might speak to their degree of commitment. In Matthew McConaughey’s case, however, the 50-odd pounds he lost for Jean-Marc Vallee’s Dallas Buyers Club, in his role as Ron Woodruff, the real-life, hard-partying cowboy who contracted HIV in the late ’80s and kept himself (and others) alive for years by importing various non-FDA approved medications, sets the tone for the whole character. It changes everything about McConaughey’s physicality, for certain, but it also changes his entire manner. Woodruff was anything but asaint - he ran his medication club as a for-profit business, after all - but in the course of the film he goes from sleazy, homophobic redneck to empathetic, politically aware agitator in entirely believable fashion. In continuing his serious trend of recent years, McConaughey has striven to go beyond his good looks and Southern charm to embody complex, multifarious characters he always had in his back pocket.
Best Film: Asghar Farhadi isn’t just Iran’s national auteur, he’s one of the finest filmmakers in the world. His new film, The Past, is every bit as good as the Oscar-winning A Separation, one of the best films of 2011. Set in Paris, Farhadi sets an intricate plot in motion involving an estranged couple, their troubled teenage daughter, and the new man in the wife’s life whose previous spouse committed near-suicide and liesin a coma. In an interview at the festival, Farhadi described his films as small mysteries that slowly get solved as the narrative progresses and the effect, along with his excellent writing and superior character work, is nothing less than spellbinding. I was fortunate to see many excellent films in this year’s festival, but none were better realized and more moving than this one.
Three Films I Wish I Could Have Seen: Alas, the festival is so front-loaded with interesting selections, it’s virtually impossible to see all on your must-see list. Due to scheduling conflicts, I missed Ritesh Batra’s wonderfully received The Lunchbox; the first season of the extremely promising British mini-series Southcliffe; and The Known Unknown, Errol Morris’ new documentary film, another of his interview/interrogation series concerning former U.S. secretaries of Defense, this one with Donald Rumsfeld.
For more Marchant on TIFF, see blooddirtangels.com
MovieStyle, Pages 33 on 09/20/2013