A TIFF riff

What’s cracking at this year’s Toronto
International Film Festival

GRIT AND GRAPPLING: The Wrestler

by MARK SLUTSKY

This year at the Toronto International Film Festival, the hottest ticket, one of the most talked-about films, and by far the longest line-up I’ve ever had the privilege to stand in has been for, amazingly, a Jean-Claude Van Damme movie. Directed by Mabrouk El Mechri, JCVD is a post-Charlie-Kaufman (incidentally, I haven’t seen Synecdoche, New York, his latest, yet, but I will report on it soon) meditation on celebrity and martial arts.

JCVD plays himself, an aging action star with too many bills and a waning box office draw, and when he gets caught up in a bank robbery, the world outside assumes he’s cracked. The film climaxes with an incredible monologue, one long unbroken take, as Van Damme unburdens himself and breaks down into tears. It’s really something.

It’s also not the only film at TIFF you could categorize under a strange new genre involving poignant comebacks of addled ’80s beefcakes. Hot off its Golden Lion win at Venice, Darren Aronofsky’s The Wrestler, his first after the whole Fountain debacle, is a comeback of sorts for the director too. I’ve never been a fan of his work, until now. It’s the story of a washed-up ’80s grappler, played by Mickey Rourke, living in a trailer park and performing at small-potato events to make his rent, and his attempt at redemption. Aronofsky eschews his usual over-intense flashiness for a more restrained, grainier style with great attention to detail and real sympathy. Though by the end it shows the lack of emotional subtlety that characterizes his earlier work, to its detriment, there’s some undeniably great stuff here, and Rourke is just incredible.

ROCKIN’ ROM-COM: Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist

Danny Boyle’s latest, Slumdog Millionaire, is a real-crowd pleaser: it’s about a poor kid who ends up a big winner on the Indian version of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? and is suspected of cheating. Set entirely in India, it’s an old-fashioned story almost in the Robert Louis Stevenson mode, and pure fun to watch, colourful and rambunctious. As Toronto’s Eye critic, Jason Anderson, said to me as we were exiting the screening, “It’s nice to see a movie that’s actually going to be a big hit.”

Another film that seemed to make audiences happy, though it’s also dividing critics, is Peter Sollett’s Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist, staring Michael Cera, Kat Dennings and other attractive teenagers discovering romance and sex as they search New York for a secret concert by their favourite band. There’s definitely a little Superbad, and a little Dazed and Confused, and a little sprinkling of stuff from many other teen movies, but I found it pretty darn winning and heartfelt.

Fest faves

SMALL AND BEAUTIFUL:
Wendy and Lucy

So far, though, my two favourite films at TIFF have been Jonathan Demme’s Rachel Getting Married and Kelly Reichardt’s Wendy and Lucy. The first is an improvised-feeling drama about a recovering addict (Anne Hathaway, in a really raw and impressive performance) who gets out of rehab for her sister’s wedding. It’s a rich and complicated multi-character drama with so much nuance and texture that I feel like I need to see it again right away. The cast (which also includes Debra Winger and Bill Irwin) performs such complex roles with so much unforced naturalism, you really feel like you’re hanging out with a real, if deeply troubled, family.

Wendy and Lucy is a deliberately and beautifully small film by Kelly Reichardt (Old Joy). Michelle Williams plays a young woman, kind of a drifter, who stops in a town in the Pacific Northwest and sees things go bad when she’s picked up for shoplifting. Gentle pacing, thoughtful filmmaking and a truly outstanding performance by Williams, who pretty much carries the entire film on her shoulders, make this something really special.

Controversy surrounds a couple of festival films. Bill Maher’s Religulous, in which he travels the world talking to holy types and wondering aloud about their sanity, and which is directed by Borat’s Larry Charles, had its premiere greeted by a rag-tag group of protesters who object to the film’s un-pious, mocking tone. Maher and Charles can probably expect the same sort of treatment, if not more vociferous, when the film opens in the U.S.

There was also weird drama surrounding Canadian director Kari Skogland’s Fifty Dead Men Walking, which purports to tell the true story of IRA informant Martin McGartland, the real-life snitch and double agent who wrote the book of the same title. The movie stars Jim Sturgess as McGartland and Sir Ben Kingsley as his handler, code-named “Fergus,” and is bookended by the 1999 attempt on McGartland’s life—he’s apparently still under threat.

The problem was in the whole “real-life” thing, as McGartland came out of the woodwork right before the festival and threatened legal action against the film, which he claimed distorted the facts. With producers looking to sell the film at TIFF, this made things a little uncomfortable for everybody, but luckily for them, McGartland agreed to a (meagre, if you think about it) 20,000-pound settlement and the addition of a disclaimer to the film. A headache for the studio, sure, but also one that drummed up a tremendous amount of publicity for the film—I was turned away from the first press screening, along with about 100 other people, and additional screenings had to be organized to accommodate all the interest. Might have been the best thing to happen to this frankly mediocre movie.

WEIRDNESS IN THE WILDERNESS: Vinyan

Rough cuts

Yeah, not everything is good—and the feeling among most here is that this is a pretty uneven year for the fest. I was disappointed by the Coen Brothers’ Burn After Reading (see the review on page 44 for more), and by Rian Johnson’s hyper-affected and whimsical The Brothers Bloom, about a pair of con artist brothers (Mark Ruffalo and Adrien Brody) and the dizzy heiress (Rachel Weisz) they choose as their latest mark. Johnson, who also wrote and directed the much better high-school noir Brick, can’t seem to restrain himself here, with rhyming couplets, endless visual gags and a general sense of Wes Anderson-ish twee foppery that seems forced and tired at this point. I swear, if I see another emotionally-damaged saddo dragging around a steamer trunk, I’m not going to be happy.

Antti-Jussi Annila’s Sauna looked, and started off, promising enough: Set in the 16th century, it follows a group of Russian and Swedish cartographers as they set the boundary lines between their countries following a long and ruinous war, only to find something scary happening in the frigid northern wilderness—something that involves a spooky sauna! The film’s careful to set up a lot of scary stuff, but it makes less and less sense as it goes along, and it’s finally just frustrating and stupid.

Viggo Mortensen stars in the inaccurately titled Good, where he plays a nice German novelist who gets seduced by Nazi power. In truth, he plays the world’s stupidest Nazi, and when he finally—finally—realizes what’s going on, he stands in the middle of Auschwitz and sheds a single tear. Unforgivably kitschy, and further mangled by some truly poor filmmaking.

Still, for all the bad, there’s always a discovery that reminds you what film fests are all about. Belgian director Fabrice Du Welz’s Vinyan is about a couple (Rufus Sewell and Emmanuelle Béart) who’ve lost their child in the Indian Ocean tsunami, but who’ve stayed behind in Thailand, unable to move on with their lives. When Béart thinks she sees her son in a video shot by a charity organization, they hire a local mobster to take them into the Burmese wilderness, where things start to get weird. Call it Apocalypse Don’t Look Now. Though Du Welz doesn’t seem to have absorbed the lessons of post-colonialism (the army of savage children could date from a ’30s serial), this is still an effective and spooky film with terrific sound design. Hopefully we’ll see it in Montreal sometime soon.