Toronto festival begins the long road to Oscars

TORONTO - What if they gave a film festival and only half of Hollywood came?

The 2008 edition of the Toronto International Film Festival began on Thursday in a spirit of mild but nagging confusion. Many of the fall's major releases aren't here at this, the by-now traditional starting gun of the annual Oscar race. Still, the star wattage in attendance remains blinding: Brad Pitt is on hand with the new Coen brothers movie, "Burn After Reading" - advance word is that it's a return to antic Coen snark and a comedown from the Olympian heights of "No Country for Old Men" - and the gossip columns are clucking that he may run into his ex, Jennifer Aniston, who's promoting the romantic comedy "Management."

Anne Hathaway is present to chat up "Rachel Getting Married," a hopeful return to form for director Jonathan Demme in which the actress has a change-of-pace role as a family black sheep. Colin Farrell, Liam Neeson, Laura Linney, and Viggo Mortensen are in town. Spike Lee arrived from New York early yesterday morning to give bleary-eyed interviews about his new war film, "Miracle at St. Anna." Parties are planned and, no, you can't get into the VIP room. So it's a festival.

Yet the lingering aftereffects of last year's writers' strike means that Oliver Stone's George Bush drama "W." is still in the final tinkering stages and won't be here, nor will Baz Luhrmann's epic "Australia," the biopic "Milk" (starring Sean Penn as assassinated gay politician Harvey Milk), and David Fincher's "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button," in which Pitt ages in reverse.

Adding to the general malaise is a limp overall market for independent films and documentaries in this year of blockbuster box office - no one's buying rights and, aside from the modest success of "The Visitor," no one's watching the movies - and the shuttering of studio specialty divisions like Warner Brothers' Picturehouse and Warner Independent. A good film festival is supposed to feel like a celebration, but this year no one's certain exactly what we're celebrating.

And yet there are 312 movies screening at Toronto, give or take, some of which are important and some of which are good. They include films taking their second major festival lap after Cannes: Steven Soderbergh's four-hour, two-part "Che," starring Benicio Del Toro as the guerilla T-shirt icon was critically mauled in France but is already getting a reappraisal here, as is "Synecdoche, New York," the directorial debut of "Adaptation" screenwriter Charlie Kaufman. Cannes discoveries like the animated Israeli war film "Waltz With Bashir," the old-folks-boogie German sex drama "Cloud 9," and "Hunger," about IRA martyr Bobby Sands, finally land on North American soil. "Slumdog Millionaire," the sensation of the just-ended Venice festival from "Trainspotting" director Danny Boyle, is also unspooling in Toronto.

This festival has always been a two-headed beast, and one head is the autumn marketplace where the big studios show off their most prestigious wares. In theory, at least: The presence of the Ricky Gervais seeing-spirits comedy "Ghost Town" and "Clerks" director Kevin Smith's "Zack and Miri Make a Porno" keeps the festival's brow setting from getting too high. But then there's a film like "Nick and Norah's Infinite Playlist," the latest youth comedy but one with a smart, soulful, romantic center. Directed by Peter Sollett ("Raising Victor Vargas"), and starring Michael Cera and Kat Dennings as high schoolers falling in love over one long Manhattan evening, "Nick and Norah" plays like a John Hughes rewrite of "Before Sunrise" with a shot of "Juno" on the side. It's as cute as a bug's ear.

One of the lessons the studios have learned from the past year is that if you have an Iraq war movie, you can't call it an Iraq war movie. So "The Lucky Ones," about three returning veterans (Tim Robbins, Rachel McAdams, and Michael Pena) from director Neil Burger ("The Illusionist") is being positioned as a road comedy-drama, while "The Hurt Locker," about a Baghdad bomb squad, is getting promoted as a tense action film from Hollywood maverick Kathryn Bigelow ("Point Break").

The war films that are allowed to call themselves by that name revisit earlier conflicts, like Canadian Paul Gross's festival opener "Passchendaele," a WWI epic, and Lee's "Miracle at St. Anna," about four GIs from the all-black 92d infantry division going behind enemy lines in WWII Italy. The latter finds the controversial director at his most epically inclined since 1992's "Malcolm X," and it struggles, sometimes clumsily, at other times with poetic force, to explode the war-movie cliches of white Hollywood. It's less Spike Lee's answer to Clint Eastwood (the two sparred nastily last spring over the genre's racial make-up) than his considered response to Steven Spielberg's "Saving Private Ryan," and it only stumbles badly when dealing with a female partisan played by Valentina Cervi. But this director has always had his problems with women.

Another genre getting a makeover is the Western, in the form of "Appaloosa," directed by Ed Harris and starring him and Viggo Mortensen as bounty hunters called in to clean up a western town. It's a handsome but odd work, stranded between the classicism of John Ford and the revisionism of "Unforgiven," less successful in some of the casting (Renée Zellweger as a prim love interest with a roving eye) than in other roles (Mortensen's laconic second-in-command, Jeremy Irons as a scruffy dandy of a villain).

Toronto's other head is the actual "international festival," in which films from 64 countries come as close as most of them will ever get to the inside of an American movie theater. Here's where devotees of the work of Japan's Kiyoshi Kurosawa ("Tokyo Sonata"), Iceland's Baltasar Kormakur ("White Night Wedding"), Iran's Samira Makhmalbaf ("Two-Legged Horse"), and Turkey's Nuri Bilge Ceylan ("Three Monkeys") can play catch-up.

One film US moviegoers probably won't ever see is the spare and tender "35 Rhums" ("35 Shots of Rum"), from France's Claire Denis ("Chocolat"). Sketching out a few months in the life of a subway motorman (the regal Alex Descas), his college-student daughter (Mati Diop), and the neighbors (Gregoire Colin, Nicole Dogue) who pine for them, it plays for all the world like a Yasujiro Ozu movie set among black Parisians - specifically, Ozu's 1949 classic "Late Spring," also about the relationship between a father and daughter. At times, "35 Rhums" is so subtle it dissipates into thin air, but it's also strangely moving and, in its wordless way, conveys the bone-deep intimacy that comes from families living together. Points to Denis, too, for taking a scene in which the four main characters dance to the Commodores' 1985 cheese landmark "Nightshift" and making it spine-tinglingly erotic.

For every shot of the sublime, like "35 Rhums," at Toronto there's something equally ridiculous, like "The Brothers Bloom," the overstylized second film from the talented Rian Johnson (he made the 2006 high school noir "Brick"). A comedy/drama/shaggy-dog story/con game, it follows two grifter brothers (Mark Ruffalo and Adrien Brody) as they try to fleece a rich, lonely heiress (Rachel Weisz) before going their separate ways. Sounds straightforward enough, but Johnson goes heavy on the whimsy, to the point where "Brothers Bloom" makes a Wes Anderson movie look like a plea for sobriety.

A full-on sophomore work, woozy with filmmaking ambition and abandon yet lacking the chops to back it up, "The Brothers Bloom" is typified by one random shot of a camel swigging whiskey from a hip flask. If that actually sounds weirdly delightful, it is - for 45 minutes or so, after which the movie corners you like a drunk at a party. Still, we should be thankful Johnson got the film out of his system, and thankful, too, that he's giving work to Rinko Kikuchi, "Babel" Oscar nominee and here a silent demolition expert with hats to die for. In its mixture of artful daring, commercial yearning, and hardcore quirk, his movie stands for all that's both cheering and problematic with non-blockbuster filmmaking these days. In other words: the perfect movie for Toronto 2008.

Ty Burr can be reached at tburr@globe.com. For more on movies, go to www.boston.com/ movies.