Toronto film festival features a decidedly split personality
TORONTO - In its 32d year, the Toronto International Film Festival is a binary experience. You notice it in ways that are useful, irrelevant and, above all, reflective of how deeply the event has become entrenched in Hollywood's annual business cycle. Toronto is now the official starting gun of Oscar season; what used to be an evenly spread 10-day smorgasbord of cinematic riches (for the most part) is now front-loaded with studio premieres and red carpet photo ops.
By contrast, the back leg of the festival has become a parade of unheralded world-cinema pleasures and unfilled theaters. The audience, too, has split in two. Toronto used to be known for packed public screenings where locals knocked knees with critics and producers. As the festival has grown, though, so have closed screenings for press and industry, to the point where it's possible to come to Toronto and never once sit next to a Torontonian. There are two festivals now - one for the public and one for the trade - and with that improved efficiency has come a loss in unique civic flavor. Toronto is more necessary than ever, but it could be taking place anywhere.
This year, a not terribly exciting one for the festival, the duality has extended to the offerings onscreen. There were two Keira Knightley premieres ("Atonement" and "Silk") and two new films by the Chinese-American director Wayne Wang ("A Thousand Years of Good Prayers" and "The Princess of Nebraska"). There was a dramatic film about the pioneering post-punk band Joy Division (Anton Corbijn's "Control") and a documentary about the group ("Joy Division").
Other films were so similar in theme and dissimilar in impact that it became impossible for festivalgoers not to discuss them in the same breath. Brian De Palma's "Redacted" and Nick Broomfield's "Battle for Haditha" drove audiences into opposing camps, for instance. Both films recreate atrocities in the war in Iraq, "Redacted" by cooking up different faux-documentary approaches, "Haditha" by pursuing a more traditional reenactment style.
People liked one and hated the other; there was no middle ground. Either you found the crudeness of the De Palma film intentional and politically electrifying, or you preferred the craft and humanity of Broomfield's film.
There were two movies about brothers turning to crime. Woody Allen's "Cassandra's Dream" is the third film to come from what now has to be called the filmmaker's English period, and Ewan McGregor and especially Colin Farrell are moving as two working-class siblings who get sucked into dirty business with differing reactions. Even though it's arguably better than "Match Point," it feels as if Allen is making the same film about greed, striving, and consequence over and over.
Much more gripping was "Before the Devil Knows You're Dead," an unexpected return to form for the 83-year-old director Sidney Lumet. Shot on high-definition video, with some of the bare-bones energy of Lumet's early TV work, "Devil" is a small, tense, fascinatingly ugly tale of family betrayal that gives juicy roles to Philip Seymour Hoffman, Ethan Hawke, and Marisa Tomei, all of whom rise - and fall - to the occasion. While Allen is off on his British adventure, Lumet has plugged back into his beloved Manhattan and recharged his batteries.
"Margot at the Wedding" and "Angel" both sketched portraits of troubled and troublesome women writers, but from opposite ends of the spectrum. "Margot" is writer-director Noah Baumbach's follow-up to the critical success of "The Squid and the Whale," and like that film concerns an upper-bourgeoisie New York family whose dysfunctions are comic and horrifying. Jennifer Jason Leigh gives one of her warmest performances as a middle-aged muddler and Jack Black is both broadly and finely funny as her loser fiance, but the film belongs to Nicole Kidman, who rights her tilting career as the title character, a celebrated novelist and manipulative busybody. Set in the Hamptons and rich with people talking neurotically past each other, "Margot" hints that Baumbach may someday become a tougher, more truthful Allen.
"Angel," by contrast, is a delicious lark. Based on a book by the cult English writer Elizabeth Taylor ("Mrs. Palfrey at the Claremont"), it's an airy but ruthless satire of Edwardian romantic novels and the pre-Raphaelite drama queens who wrote them. This is a tricky tone, but director Francois Ozon ("Swimming Pool") locates the film equivalent of Taylor's knowing prose - patently fake rear-projections, Philippe Rombi's too-sugary score - and Romola Garai makes the title character a heroine you want to simultaneously cherish and strangle. Audiences either get on the film's peculiar wavelength or they don't, but those who do seem to have an awfully good time.
The festival's most telling accidental duo may have been Julie Taymor's "Across the Universe" and Todd Haynes's "I'm Not There," two sprawling fantasias about '60s rock godheads. The former, which opened in movie theaters yesterday, is an act of conceptual karaoke in which fictional characters burst into Beatles song; while the movie has its defenders, the reaction in Toronto was derisive if not dumbfounded.
"I'm Not There," the long-awaited Bob Dylan project from director Haynes (his first film since 2002's "Far From Heaven"), will play to a much narrower audience, but it succeeds brilliantly on its own terms, as cinema, as fractured biopic, and as a meditation on the ways fame eats its young. Haynes cast six different actors to play the Bard of Hibbing, a calculated artistic affront that pays off. As the "Blonde on Blonde"-era Dylan, Cate Blanchett imperiously rules the movie, but Christian Bale, Heath Ledger, Richard Gere, Ben Whishaw, and the young African-American actor Marcus Carl Franklin (playing pre-fame Dylan, already re-inventing himself as a rootless blues prodigy) each makes his mark. Nonlinear, electrifying, and hardly perfect, "I'm Not There" is the film biography Dylan probably deserves, and the exact opposite of the canned pop pomposity of "Across the Universe."
There were many other films, too, that were unique. "Christopher Columbus - The Enigma," by the 98-year-old Portuguese director Manoel de Oliveira, Roy Andersson's phantasmagoric "You, the Living," Johnnie To's schizophrenic-crime fighter thriller "Mad Detective" - these are works that could have been made by no other filmmakers. In this festival of dueling identities, they continued to stake a claim for singularity of vision.
Ty Burr can be reached at tburr@globe.com. For more on movies, go to boston.com/ae/ movies/blog.
