Great films, bad pizza

The Toronto International Film Festival report

Sam (Alia Shawkat) and Pat (Anton Yelchin) are members of a touring punk band besieged by a group of neo-Nazis offended by their choice of cover songs in Jeremy Saulnier’s Green Room, one of the highlights of this year’s Toronto International Film Festival.
Sam (Alia Shawkat) and Pat (Anton Yelchin) are members of a touring punk band besieged by a group of neo-Nazis offended by their choice of cover songs in Jeremy Saulnier’s Green Room, one of the highlights of this year’s Toronto International Film Festival.

TORONTO -- Most nights, ensconced in my hotel somewhere between downtown and the Church and Wellesley sections of Toronto, I was lulled to sleep by the tender sounds of jackhammer-beat electronic dance music as it wafted across the street from an outdoor Italian-theme chain bar.

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Even before the film debuted at the Toronto International Film Festival, Johnny Depp’s performance as Whitey Bulger in Scott Cooper’s Black Mass was being touted as Oscar-worthy.

In the early morning, that same adjoining office and retail complex would bellow a piercing alarm from deep in the bowels of its underground garage, bookending my restless sleep patterns and leaving me dull and drippy to start my day. It wasn't all bad, though; the music helped me stay awake at night, trying to decipher my hastily scribbled notes from that day's films, furiously writing review capsules, and poring over the next day's lineup with the keening, rapt attention of a Major League Baseball manager cobbling together his lineup card; and the early morning wake-up klaxon gave me a chance to work on the outstanding pieces I had to get to waiting editors.

It is, of course, necessity to be able to make sweet, citrus beverages out of bitter fruit at film festivals as large and unwieldy as the Toronto International Film Festival. I say this not to complain, because it's an extraordinary experience to be there amid that much cinema, one I'm well aware I have been blessed to pursue as a career path. But in the face of that sort of onslaught of films, celebs, and fellow critics, one needs to make the absolute most out of the scant time outside the darkened Scotiabank theater, where a vast majority of film festival's press screenings are held.

This year's edition had the usual mix of galas, special presentations, obscure foreign entries, and big-ticket Hollywood prestige pictures, hopeful to capture some pre-awards-season buzz from the assembled critic contingency. Through that fateful seven days, I managed to watch 24 films, and heard buzz -- positive and negative -- about countless more. Let's wade in with some awards.

Most Notable Stylistic Trend

Sound up from black. Roughly a third of the films I watched this festival employed the austere but provocative ambient-sound-over-black-screen technique to open their films. The effect can range from engaging naturalism (the chirping birds and whirring backhoe in the Apichatpong Weerasethakul meditation Cemetery of Splendor); and anxious peril (the labored breathing that opens the grueling bomb-defusing drama Land of Mine;) to coquettishness (the calm seagulls-and-wind sounds that open Ben Wheatley's otherwise merciless High-Rise); and mysterious foreshadowing (the telltale click-clack of a photo carousel being viewed in Andrew Haigh's excellent 45 Years). All different vibes established by the same effect. There must have been a memo last year.

Most Nerve-Jangling Double Feature

Land of Mine and Kilo Two Bravo. On the same day, I happened to watch these two well-made films concerning explosive devices, and those unfortunate soldiers left to try and dismantle them. Mine, set in post-WWII Denmark, has a small brigade of young German soldiers tasked with cleaning up the mess left behind by their retreating countrymen, and has a way of blowing up characters without warning. Similar in tone, if not time period, is Paul Katis' Bravo, which closely adheres to the true story of a British platoon stationed in Afghanistan that gets trapped in an IED field with several wounded soldiers needing immediate evacuation. It also tends to save its bomb detonations for when you are not expecting them. Needless to say, I was a raw nerve walking home that night.

Best Argument to Move Out of the U.S.

Green Room and The Other Side. Violence, some real, some fabricated, shimmered through many of the U.S. indie offerings this year. In Jeremy Saulnier's Green Room, one of my favorite films of the festival, a struggling punk band unwittingly takes a gig at a white supremacist stronghold, and members have to literally fight and claw their way out to safety. In Italian director Roberto Minervini's curious dramatic documentary The Other Side (he sets up shots and basic narratives, but has his non-actors simply play themselves in front of his camera), he explores the deep southern woods of Louisiana and finds a meth-head couple whose true sweetness toward each other is belied by their habitual need for chemical release, and a group of military-hardware-toting guys in their own militia, who paint an old car with Obama's name and stick a mask of the current president on one of the seats, then proceed to blow the holy hell out of it with high-caliber shells. Yikes.

Best Argument Against Living in England, Though

The Ones Below and High-Rise. Two films made life in the UK seem pretty untenable as well. British playwright David Farr's taut psychological thriller Below features two families living in the same building waging silent war on one another after a tragic accident leaves one in bereavement and the other in turmoil. There was nothing the least bit quiet about the aforementioned Ben Wheatley film, the divisive High-Rise, adapted from the searing satire by J.G. Ballard, about an apartment complex whose rigid social hierarchy eventually descends into a Lord of the Flies-type survival melee.

Most Defiantly Unique Film

The Lobster. Anyone who had seen Greek auteur Yorgos Lanthimos' previous Dogtooth knew to expect something profoundly strange, but there's almost no way to have prepared yourself for his new effort, whose conceit is as thrillingly bizarre as any film you might catch this year. At a special hotel outside an unnamed European city, single guests are given 45 days to find a suitable mate, or be medically transformed into the animal of their choice and released into the wild. As with Dogtooth, there is a sly sense of absurdist humor at work here, but the film's penchant for powerful, jarring violence makes you pay for every giggle. Kafka used to say a majority of his work was intended as comedy; you get the sense he and Yorgos would be fast friends.

Most Moving

Anomalisa. Charlie Kaufman is a bit hit-and-miss for me. His dedicated followers love most everything he has done from Inside John Malkovich on, but I find his decidedly offbeat material can get a bit too sucked up into the vortex of his churning mind. His new stop-motion animated feature, Anomalisa, which he made with animator Duke Johnson, is a different sort of fish. The story focuses on a sad and lonely British motivational speaker named Michael Stone (voice of David Thewlis), who spends a single evening in a Cincinnati hotel, and possibly meets the solution to his misery in the form of a younger woman (voice of Jennifer Jason Leigh), whom he finds captivating. There is a big gambit Kaufman employs, which I shall certainly not spoil for you here, that acts as a pretty powerful central metaphor for love and its countermeasure, which adds a potent dollop of pathos to the proceedings, one you won't soon forget.

Biggest Disappointment

Sunset Song. I have to acknowledge that it is entirely possible I haven't seen enough of British director Terence Davies' best work to make a fair comparison here. The deliberate, precise director has been making much-lauded features since the early '80s -- but this film, an adaptation of the novel by Lewis Grassic Gibbon, about a young Scottish woman coming of age in the shadow of World War I and coming to grips with a largely tragic life, feels mostly inert from the get-go. The pacing is slack, the dramatic arc is flattened so that everything that happens to her feels oddly equally weighted, and a major character turn doesn't feel the least bit justified. Davies has a way with his settings -- the beautiful Scottish Highlands are given their proper visual due -- but nearly everything else in this turgid film falls achingly flat.

Worst Meal

Scotiabank Theater Pizza. Well, I can't say I didn't have this coming, but one afternoon, given a very short period of time between films, I ordered a slice of the pizza served at the theater, a Canadian chain called simply "Pizza Pizza." Suffice it to say I think the box the slice was served in would have offered a roughly equal culinary experience.

Best Male Performance

Tom Courtenay, 45 Years. Heading into the film festival, the odds-on favorite in this category would likely have been Johnny Depp, whose turn as James "Whitey" Bulger in Scott Cooper's Black Mass will very likely be rewarded with an Oscar nomination in a couple of months. But Tom Courtenay's brilliant turn as the slightly addled husband in Andrew Haigh's subtly scorching film is something else entirely. Depp gets to employ a bevy of attention-getting tics and gestures to create his portrait, but Courtenay, using not much more than the power of his distinctive voice and a quiet command of his character's inner life, is able to embody the role so indelibly, it feels as if he and his co-star have been cohabiting for eons.

Best Female Performance

Charlotte Rampling, 45 Years. That co-star happens to be Rampling, a gifted actress in her own right who has never quite gotten the attention she has richly deserved. But with this film, and her portrayal of the other half of that fusty couple, she might finally get recognized for her notable talent. The film, set on the eve of an elderly couple's significant anniversary, is entirely powered by the strength of its two leads, and both are so superb, it gives the film an enormous emotional wallop.

Best Film

Spotlight. In the age of absurdly hyperbolic filmmaking, with CGI-enhanced stunts that break every law of physics, and huge scenes with famous actors dwarfing their storylines, it's more than a little refreshing to see a craftily made film with a big-name cast instead go the other direction and produce a hushed, engrossing procedural drama. Based on real people and events, Tom McCarthy's film documents the fine journalists at The Boston Globe as they uncover the massive Catholic Church pedophilia cover-up, a story that broke open the church's deeply routed invincibility, and lead to equally widespread exposes throughout the world. Despite having an absolute killer cast -- including Mark Ruffalo, Rachel McAdams, John Slattery, Michael Keaton, Stanley Tucci and Liev Schreiber -- McCarthy wisely tones down the dramatic histrionics and keeps the film focused on the journalistic nuts-and-bolts of how the team finally got their story. It's a marvel of tightly constructed, level-headed filmmaking and is rightly earning comparisons to All the President's Men.

MovieStyle on 10/02/2015

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