Clooney’s the big buzz at Toronto film fest
TORONTO - What does it mean that after four days of North America’s most important film festival all anybody wants to talk about is George Clooney? It means his publicity people are thrilled. It also means that this man has suddenly recaptured the imagination of a media and moviegoing public hungry for the approachable, chummy Hollywood glamour Clooney represents. With two movies at the Toronto International Film Festival, he’s been charmingly unflappable since he arrived. Wearing a cast on his arm hasn’t stopped him from signing autographs and singing to strangers.
If he is a studio’s dream, he is also many other people’s. On my way home from “The Men Who Stare at Goats,’’ a so-so comedy that stars a mustached Clooney as a psychic soldier, I passed an argument among three teenagers in which Clooney was “irresistible’’ to the girl and one boy, the other boy saying he wanted to be Clooney.
A friend even expressed embarrassment the other day about going to a dinner that Clooney would be attending. She said she’d feel guilty for the rest of her life if she didn’t go. So maybe that’s it: If we’re to believe that this man is the second coming of Cary Grant, then none of us wants to be Deborah Kerr. No matter what, we’re meeting him on the Empire State Building observation deck.
Yet for 12 years Clooney has been a star on that deck. He was in Toronto as recently as 2007, and he didn’t make nearly as much news. Why the excitement now? He’s here to promote the two films he has at the festival (the other is a dramatic comedy called “Up in the Air,’’ from Jason Reitman, the director of “Juno’’). But the fanfare around him is a demonstration - carefully orchestrated or not - that despite what the box-office reports say, stars matter. This is a festival with a major movie in which Charlotte Gainsbourg pounds Willem Dafoe below the belt (“Antichrist’’) and another, less major one in which kids dressed as old people pound themselves into inanimate objects (“Trash Humpers’’). But all anyone can talk about is George Clooney.
That is one of the charms and one of the frustrations with this festival lately. More of a bazaar than a meticulously curated event, like the Cannes or the New York festivals, Toronto is many things to many people. More and more that thing is an awards-positioning system for films with distribution locked up and a solid release date weeks away. Now that the Oscars have ballooned the best-picture category to 10 nominees, positioning seems crucial to the studios and producers guiding their movies toward prizes, top-10 lists, and, yes, audiences. But so far the American movies in this middlebrow vein have been rather toothless.
“The Road’’ is the highly anticipated post-apocalypse film based on Cormac McCarthy’s novel and starring Viggo Mortensen as one of the few survivors, along with his son. It’s harrowing. It’s well-made. It’s also too handsome for its own good. The despair has a Hollywood tinge that shows lots of horror but can’t get that horror to stick.
The Coens have a new comedy, “A Serious Man,’’ that picks up where the ruthless “Burn After Reading’’ left off, albeit no one gets hacked at in broad daylight. The movie, about a put-upon physics professor (Michael Stuhlbarg) in 1967 suburban Minneapolis, parades a collection of Jewish grotesques, once or twice to hilarious effect. It just doesn’t have a soul.
Harmony Korine’s “Trash Humpers ’’ takes the risks the Coens don’t. It’s at the other end of the spectrum from highly polished, exquisitely accomplished awards-bait like “The Road.’’ Shot on what must have been a barely functional camcorder, it’s no-fi. Its antics are random and inexplicable. It comprises a bunch of pranks whose intent is ultimately inexplicable. The humpers hump a lot, just not each other. There’s an artist’s spirit behind its mischief.
Korine’s work has annoyed and alienated enough people for him never to receive a fair hearing. The screening for “Trash Humpers’’ was only half full. And by the time the lights came up, a quarter of that number had made an early exit. The movie is surreal and deranged (a middle-age man reads a poem wearing a chambermaid’s uniform), but it’s also fully committed to that derangement. With all due respect to Clooney and the Coens, that’s exactly the sort of movie I come to this festival to see.
