Saturday, Sep. 19, 2009

Five to Watch from the Toronto Film Festival

By Richard Corliss

The Toronto Film Festival ends its 34th annual session tonight, but most of the international press corps has gone home, their heads crammed with images and performances. Toronto, famous for years now as the kickoff to Oscar season, is the place Hollywood visits in search of Academy Award contenders. There were a few — though in a straitened economic environment, with fewer zillionaires eager to bankroll indie movies, some excellent films (Life During Wartime, The Joneses) had a tough time finding buyers. Crystal-balling the Oscars is fun, but it can't compare with seeing and savoring good films that might not be found elsewhere. Here's a rundown of five pictures worth chasing down — if they ever come to a theater near you.

A Single Man, directed by Tom Ford

For close to three decades, Colin Firth has been a reliable, gently charismatic leading man in the theater (Another Country), in movies (Bridget Jones's Diary) and on TV (as the dreamboat Mr. Darcy in the BBC's 1995 version of Pride and Prejudice). But until now, at 49, he never got that Role of a Lifetime that actors pray for. George, in Tom Ford's adaptation of the Christopher Isherwood novel, is it. The movie brought Firth the Best Actor prize at the Venice Film Festival and was bought for U.S. distribution by the Weinstein Company.

Firth plays an English novelist, teaching literature at a Los Angeles college in 1962 and grieving — delicately, obsessively, heroically — for his lover of 16 years, dead in a car crash. Seeing no reason for his life to go on, George meticulously rehearses his own suicide, by gunshot, but has trouble finding a practical or aesthetically elegant way to carry it off. So over the course of a long day, he listens idly to his colleagues' worries over the Cuban missile crisis; has dinner with his oldest friend, a London socialite (Julianne Moore, never more glamorous); and indulges some erotic flattery from one of his students (Nicholas Hoult). All these are distractions as George prepares for death in the manner of a samurai or Roman Senator, and bathes in memories of his precious Jim (Matthew Goode — Ozymandias in Watchmen) (See TIME's Top 10 Airport Books)

Ford, the Austin, Texas, fashion designer who for a decade was the creative director at Gucci, financed his first feature himself. The director turned out to be a good investment for the producer. Nuance, not flash, is his forte. Playing to Firth's subtleties, he photographs the actor's handsome, mourning face in caressing close-up. (In his professor glasses, Firth looks like a young, more studious Michael Caine.) Ford is also attentive to the varieties of Southern California sunlight, which lends A Single Man an orangey warmth that should touch all who see the picture. But it's Firth's performance, as a man bereft, for whom solitude is a life sentence, that will win audience's hearts. Don't be surprised if he earns an Oscar nomination to match his victory in Venice.

Lebanon, directed by Samuel Maoz

Each year, in its City to City program, the Festival highlights a foreign cinema; and when TIFF chose Tel Aviv as the 2009 city, controversy erupted. "Tel Aviv is the military center of Israel," said Canadian author Naomi Klein, "a place from which fighter jets departed on their missions to Gaza last December-January." Soon it was mandatory for politically active stars to take sides. Sacha Baron Cohen, Jerry Seinfeld, Jon Voight and Oprah Winfrey voiced their support for the program; Harry Belafonte, Julie Christie, Jane Fonda and Viggo Mortensen were all for a boycott. Politics aside (which it never is at a film festival), the protesters ignored Israel's recent emergence as a vital national cinema — and that many of the country's prize-winning films, from The Band's Visit to Waltz with Bashir, take a complex humanist approach to Arab-Israeli relations. That is certainly the case with Samuel Maoz's Lebanon, which won the top prize at the Venice Film Festival and was one of Toronto's unarguable hits. (See TIME's Photos: Waltz With Bashir, and Other Animated Films For Adults)

Like Bashir director Ari Folman, Maoz served in the 1982 Israeli-Lebanon war; his film is a survivor's haunted memory of that conflict. Except for the opening and closing shots of a field of sunflowers, the entire film takes place in an Israeli tank holding four very nervous soldiers. The only view to the streets outside is through the gunsight aimed at insurgents and civilians. Which ones to shoot at? Which ones to save? Imprisoning the audience with the soldiers may be a gimmick, but it's an inspired one: the viewer wants both to stay inside — shielding them from harm, or from doing harm — and to get the hell out. The situation may be familiar from dozens of Hollywood foxhole dramas, but the treatment is original: What other movie has, as its exalting emotional climax, the spectacle of one man helping another to pee into a tin can? Working as a horrors-of-war screed and a depiction of men under impossible stress, Lebanon is a salutary, unrelentingly claustrophobic nightmare.

Life During Wartime, directed by Todd Solondz

The central scene in Todd Solondz's 1998 drama Happiness was a bedroom conversation between a man and his 11-year-old son. Because the boy was frustrated that he hadn't achieved his first orgasm, and the father was a child molester, it hit audiences like a jolt of electroshock therapy. Eleven years later, Solondz returns to this extended family — three sisters and the men and kids in their lives — but with a new cast.

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Helen (Ally Sheedy) is a self-sufficient Hollywood screenwriter. Her soft-touch sister Joy (Shirley Henderson) keeps getting visits from dead boyfriends (including ex-Pee-wee Herman Paul Reubens). And Trish (Alison Janney), whose convicted pedophile husband (Ciaran Hinds) is about to be released from jail, has found a new beau, the solid, stolid Harvey (Michael Lerner), whose touch makes her "feel wet, all over." That doesn't please Trish's son Billy (Dylan Riley Snyder), who's also troubled to learn that his father is still alive. "I just wanted you to grow up free and happy," Mom explains, "as if he were dead." Well, everybody has problems.

Most directors take conventional scenarios and lay on comedy or pathos with a trowel. Solondz (who also did Welcome to the Dollhouse, Storytelling and Palindromes) creates worlds suppurating with unspeakable domestic horror and lends them the benison of tragicomic sympathy. Whatever domestic crimes the people close to you may have committed, in the end they're family and you have to try to understand them. This sense of connection, despite all, and the pitch-perfect playing of Solondz's large cast, makes Life During Wartime one of the year's best films, in whatever year it ultimately finds theatrical release.

The Bad Lieutenant — Port of Call: New Orleans, directed by Werner Herzog

"What's an iguana doing on my coffee table?" wonders Nicolas Cage as Lt. Terence McDonagh in this dark, daft, vagrantly intoxicating melodrama. It's a sequel of sorts to Abel Ferrara's 1992 Bad Lieutenant, which starred Harvey Keitel as a nameless, coke-addled sadist who has visions of Jesus. Director Werner Herzog — who made great movies in the '70s, and whose oneiric documentaries landed him on this year's TIME 100 list — says he never saw the Ferrara film, and simply worked from a script by William Finkelstein, who's written more than 100 episodes of cop shows (Law & Order, NYPD Blue, Brooklyn South, Cop Rock). Anyway, McDonagh is a good lieutenant: during Hurricane Katrina, he dove into the floodwaters to save a drowning prisoner; and for his efforts got severe back pains and an addiction to prescription drugs. Besides, McDonagh's visions are reptilian: an alligator on the highway, and that living-room iguana. (Watch the Video: TIME talks to Werner Herzog)

The new Bad Lieutenant isn't a film to cherish, but for Cage fans it marks a welcome return to his early days, before he became a conventional leading man in Jerry Bruckheimer films. In his young prime Cage was a weird, tortured actor with highly eccentric impulses; you never knew if he'd punch a wall or eat the flowers. Here he trashes half of lower Louisiana and rips the breathing tube out of an old lady's nose. Both narcotized and energized by his drug regimen, he confronts everybody with the intense stare of a man trying desperately to stay awake, like Robert Mitchum at the end of a long night and too many tokes. But whether he's playing it stricken or stuporous, Cage gives an oddly compelling tutorial in Method acting. Note to budding thespians: Don't try this onstage.

The Joneses, directed by Derrick Borte

As the perfect family foursome — Kate (Demi Moore) and Steve (David Duchovny) and their teen kids Jenn (Amber Heard) and Mick (Ben Hollingsworth) — motor toward their new suburban home, Steve smiles and says, "We are gonna do some serious damage in this town." Damage? Their upmarket neighbors instantly fall in love with the Joneses and all their cool stuff: the golf clubs, electronics, cosmetics. These nice folks have everything, and everyone else wants it all. Is it affordable? We'll worry about that later.

In movies, no family is perfect. We get a hint of that as Steve leaves Kate to sleep in a separate bedroom, and then Jenn tiptoes in to have sex with him. (When Kate breaks up the trust, Jenn says, "Sorry, Dad.") Yes, the Joneses have a secret; and no, they're not vampires, exactly. Professional leeches is more like it.

Tone is all in a social fable, and first-time writer-director Derrick Borte shows an impressive command of mood and pace. He doesn't push your face into the message of conspicuous consumerism; he lets the characters and actors breathe, allows viewers to detect the toxic undertaste in their own good time. In its amiable, ambling way, The Joneses is a zeitgeist film: it says as much as a Michael Moore screed about the American way of debt. It's also a feature-long joke about Hollywood's mania for product placement.

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