At Toronto film fest, the buzz is building
TORONTO -- Each year it seems as if the Toronto International Film Festival can't get any bigger, and each year it does. At the midpoint of the event's 30th incarnation, it's impossible to look out at the films, the countries they represent, and the film industry-ites swarming like killer bees around a welcoming Canadian hive and not feel this is the most critical North American film festival of all. Indeed, because Toronto consolidates many of the discoveries from Sundance and Cannes and allows the business to take stock before plunging into Oscar-movie season, this may be the most important festival on the planet.
It's also impossible to get one's arms around. There are more than 350 films this year, with new work from David Cronenberg, Atom Egoyan, Guy Ritchie, Tim Burton, Ang Lee, Steven Soderbergh, Neil Jordan, Stephen Frears, Roman Polanski, Lars von Trier, Mary Harron, Abel Ferrara, China's Hou Hsiao-hsien, Japan's Takeshi Kitano, Iceland's Baltasar Kormakur, and many more. The new ''Wallace and Gromit" movie is here, and so is Annette Bening as murderess Jean Harris in ''Mrs. Harris." So are not one but two well-received films from Cameroon: Jean-Pierre Bekolo's erotic sci-fi fantasy ''Les Saignantes" and ''Sisters in Law," a documentary about two women, a judge and a prosecutor, changing laws and mores in a small town.
Hollywood is here, too -- in force. Toronto has increasingly become a launching pad for the American film industry's classier autumn fare, to the point that smaller movies are in danger of getting overshadowed. ''Tim Burton's Corpse Bride" and Steve Martin's ''Shopgirl" are making their debuts at the festival, alongside such hopeful awards-bait as Cameron Crowe's ''Elizabethtown," the Johnny Cash biopic ''Walk the Line," and even the Dakota Fanning horse flick ''Dreamer." In their wakes trail the films' stars, directors, and -- most crucial of all -- publicists.
Val Kilmer and Robert Downey Jr. walked the carpet for the prankish neo-noir ''Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang," and Keira Knightly was giving interviews to promote her new version of ''Pride and Prejudice." A massive crowd waited three hours outside the Birks clothing boutique on Bloor Street to catch a glimpse of Johnny Depp arriving at the ''Corpse Bride" party. The belle of the ball early in the festival was comedian Sarah Silverman, button-cute and cruelly funny both in her performance film ''Sarah Silverman: Jesus Is Magic" and on the festival stage following the film's midnight screening. (When an audience member asked how Lenny Bruce has influenced her, she deadpanned, ''I really don't know that much about Lenny Bruce. I hear he was a good singer.") By the next evening, spotted at the party held in her honor by the film's distributor, Silverman appeared gracious and dazed. Longtime festival attendees know that look -- it's called the Toronto Death March Stare.
If Sundance and Cannes are buyers' markets, Toronto is less focused on deals and more on art, pomp, and publicity. The exceptions included ''Thank You for Smoking," a joyously malicious satire about a tobacco lobbyist (Aaron Eckhart, riding high) based on the Christopher Buckley book and directed by Jason Reitman. After the film's Saturday morning screening, acquisitions executives from the boutique wings of the studios huddled outside the theater and traded anxious cell calls; after a long day of negotiations the film had apparently been sold to Paramount Classics, but that studio's buyers awoke yesterday morning to find that the ''Smoking" team had unexpectedly jumped horses to Fox Searchlight.
For all this, Toronto maintains a reputation as a people's festival, and the city's inhabitants support it by selling out almost every screening. You can literally hear the buzz pass from one person to the next, building in excitement or tailing off in disappointment. An early favorite was Bennett Miller's ''Capote," and for good reason: Philip Seymour Hoffman gives a tour de force performance as Truman Capote, and the film, covering the years the author was researching and writing ''In Cold Blood," is a funny, increasingly damning meditation on artistic privilege and journalistic abuse.
''Breakfast on Pluto" confirmed both the talent of director Neil Jordan and the promise of Irish newcomer Cillian Murphy (''28 Days Later," ''Batman Begins"), who plays a young transvestite coming of age in 1970s London. It's a character and a film whose cheekiness masks enormous pain, and the star layers his performance so you're never sure where the playacting ends and the real person begins.
Acting was the main attraction in Ang Lee's ''Brokeback Mountain," which transcended its superficial ''gay cowboys" rep as soon as people saw it, but the film also marks the director's return to the quieter emotional territory of ''The Ice Storm" after the full-on action of ''Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon" and ''Hulk." Tracing the secret love affair of two men in the American West from the early 1960s onward, ''Mountain" is surprisingly honest and honorable about what its characters can say and are even able to say, and if it has strong acting from Jake Gyllenhaal as one of the men, it has in Heath Ledger's tortured yet terse Ennis Del Mar a performance of Oscar caliber.
If you couldn't tell already, pushing the envelope is a concern of many of the movies in the festival. It was true of Soderbergh's ''Bubble," a small-town murder mystery cast entirely with local nonprofessionals (interesting idea, problematic execution). It was true of ''Brothers of the Head," a glam-slam fable about conjoined-twin rock stars in punk-era Britain. It was even true of ''Corpse Bride," which turns out to be as short, focused, and sweetly sour as Burton's 1995 film ''The Nightmare Before Christmas" was overcooked. A grim yet gently emotional stop-motion tale of love and the afterlife, it's a kids' movie that may be too ghoulish for kids, but it works beautifully on its own terms and that may be the point. Said Burton in an interview at the festival, ''I think some adults are so concerned about labeling what their children see and protecting them from being scared that kids end up unprepared for the scarier things in life."
Polanski's ''Oliver Twist," on the other hand, is a disappointment only in that the hand of its infamous director is hardly evident in a handsome, professional literary adaptation. The gritty setting and Ben Kingsley's full-throttle Fagin -- sure to stir the old controversies anew -- are the film's chief assets.
And then there was Terry Gilliam's ''Tideland," a movie about which its own director told the world premiere audience, '' 'Enjoy' is maybe not the right word, but I hope you survive the film." If it was transgression you were looking for, this one had it by the boatload: Jeff Bridges as a junkie rock star dad who overdoses early on, rots on-screen, then is skinned and tanned; exploding Amtrak trains; talking doll heads; hints of pedophilia; and a young girl who escapes her hellish existence by treating it as the stuff of fairy tale. The movie's a classic case of a gifted filmmaker's obsessions finally sailing over the edge and taking him along, but as the prairie Candide at the movie's center, 10-year-old Jodelle Ferland has a talent to make Fanning call her agent in alarm.
Interviewed while digging enthusiastically into a baked potato at a downtown hotel, Ferland, clad in a pink Chanel knockoff, giggled and looked askance at suggestions that what her character goes through might be considered profoundly disturbing by audiences. ''I don't usually do happy films," she said, then went on to note that her favorite scene in the movie, a food fight between her character and the mentally defective epileptic man with whom she falls in love, was cut. Welcome to Hollywood, kid.
By the third day of the festival, the familiar sensation of seeing one film after another until the walls of reality began to bend was kicking in for many people. Outside the ''Capote" screening at the palatial Elgin Theatre on Yonge Street, filmgoers were startled to see several dozen screaming young women chase a man on a motorcycle up the street. It turned out to be a local movie shoot, but for a moment all bets were off. Were we watching life or seeing another film? In Toronto, in September, it's all the same.
Ty Burr can be reached at tburr@globe.com. 
