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Beyond the Lens
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Toronto's Top Tales
Highlights for columnist Pam Grady include Cronenberg’s criminally overlooked masterpiece, Pierce Brosnan’s anti-Bond and Shane Black’s surprising noir.
Tuesday, September 20, 2005
By Pam Grady
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Jeff Vespa/Wireimage.com
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Dynamite duo Cronenberg, Morgensen
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The Toronto International Film Festival, which always begins so promisingly, tends to end like a bad hangover. Along with a headache blossoming at the back of the eyes at the realization that there simply is never enough time to see everything one was dying to see, the awards come out for titles that are often barely familiar, lost in the tidal wave of
10 days’ worth of screenings.
This year, it was a no-brainer to predict that Michael Mabott's The Life and Hard Times of Guy Terrifico, a mockumentary about a fictional '70s country singer that features the likes of Merle Haggard and Kris Kristofferson, would win the CityTV Award for Best First Canadian Feature (an honor it shares with Louise Archmabault's Familia). The movie arrived at the festival with a lot of buzz that only continued to build after it screened, as audiences connected with this skewed tale of a never-quite-was who nevertheless becomes a legend.
It was also too sadly easy to foresee that regardless of how great a film it is, David Cronenberg's A History of Violence would be shut out of the Toronto City Award for Best Canadian Feature Film (losing to Jean-Marc Vallee's C.R.A.Z.Y., a '70s-set story described as a "magical cinematic homage"), as it was for the Palme d'Or at Cannes last spring. The crime drama, based on John Wagner and Vince Locke's graphic novel, is a tremendous achievement, but its violence may be too visceral for squeamish juries.
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Steve Grayson/Wireimage.com
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Poetic Irish auteur Jordan
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Personally, I would have given the award to Cronenberg. A History of Violence is an audacious, unforgettable drama, in which the director coaxes star Viggo Mortensen to venture deep into his dark side for a performance that, frankly, one would never have guessed he was even capable of delivering. As such, the film was one of the highlights of this year's festival.
It was far from alone and while it is opening soon after the festival along with other entries such as Liev Schreiber's Everything is Illuminated and Mike Mills' wonderful Thumbsucker, others won't be heard from again until awards season or beyond. Before they disappear into the mists of ‘Coming Soon … Eventually,’ here is the Top of Toronto, based on an admittedly wildly incomplete snapshot. In no particular order, they represent not necessarily the best of the festival (although many are), but the most interesting and audacious:
Breakfast on Pluto: After his appearances as Dr. Jonathan Crane in Batman Begins and murderous Jackson Rippener in Wes Craven's Red Eye, filmmakers might be forgiven if they decided to typecast Cillian Murphy as a villain. But thoughts of that will float right out of their heads after they catch his act as Patrick "Kitten" Brady, a '70s-era Irish transvestite who only wants to find her mother, but instead becomes involved with the IRA.
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Jeff Vespa/Wireimage.com
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Delighted to ditch bond
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While director Neil Jordan is in a sense revisiting the territory of 1993's The Crying Game, the movie is based on a novel by Pat McCabe, who was also the source for 1997's The Butcher Boy. Like that film, this is a high-energy romp in which comedy and tragedy freely mix. Jordan embroiders the action with a wonderful pop music soundtrack that gradually builds in emotional intensity, while never distracting from story he is trying to tell.
Tideland: Terry Gilliam jokes that the critics who dismissed The Brothers Grimm as a ‘flawed Gilliam film’ are really going to be up against it when Tideland comes out later this year. Certainly, this drama that the director describes as an Alice in Wonderland story in which she falls down that rabbit hole and keeps on falling is certain to polarize audiences and critics alike.
One of the characters is a corpse who spends most of the film moldering in a chair; others are doll heads that are a girl's closest friends. Another is a mentally challenged young man with no sense of borders and an unhealthy misapprehension that trains are monsters. At the center of it all is little Jeliza-Rose, a lonely child with a vivid imagination and no sense of the danger that surrounds her. This is a profoundly disturbing film, but one well worth seeing it, because it is just not often that one finds a filmmaker of Gilliam's stature willing to take this much of a risk.
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Jeff Vespa/Wireimage.com
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Festival standout Ledger
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The Matador: There has been much talk over whether or not Pierce Brosnan was really ready to leave James Bond behind or whether the producers made the decision for him, but from the looks of The Matador, which he stars in and produced under his Irish Dream Time banner, he was more than ready to dance on 007's grave singing ‘Glory Hallelujah.’ Call his character, Julian Noble, in Richard Shepard's deft black comedy, the anti-Bond.
Like the elegant spy, he is a well-traveled professional in the world of international intrigue, but the similarities end there. Julian is a hit man specializing in ‘corporate gigs’ in the midst of a full-blown mid-life crisis, who gloms onto Greg Kinnear's Danny, a sad sack businessman, in a Mexico City bar simply because he's so lonely. Shepard has fashioned a great offbeat buddy movie with terrific performances all around from a cast that includes in addition to Brosnan and Kinnear, Hope Davis and the wonderful Philip Baker Hall. But the movie belongs Brosnan, who - in a single scene guzzling a beer and walking across a hotel lobby clad only in boots and tiny black Speedos - regulates Bond to the dustbin of history.
Brokeback Mountain: This was one picture that arrived in Toronto with a lot of hype and then lived up to its promise. Directed by Ang Lee, based on an E. Annie Proulx short story that Larry McMurtry and Diana Ossana have adapted to the screen, it is a love story made epic and is already the recipient of much Oscar buzz, as well as the Venice Film Festival's Golden Lion.
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Jeff Vespa/Wireimage.com
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A Toronto tradition
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Heath Ledger and Jake Gyllenhaal are cowboys in the early 1960s who fall for each other while tending sheep one summer on Brokeback Mountain. When the season ends, they return to their conventional lives, but never can find the contentment they can only feel in stolen snatches with each other. Not only is it a tremendously moving tale, but both Ledger and Gyllenhaal reach new heights in performance on screen. In particular, Ledger should be the deserving recipient of a bucketful of nominations when awards season rolls around. His work as laconic, uptight Ennis is tremendous.
Brothers of the Head: Keith Fulton and Louis Pepe, the filmmakers behind Lost in La Mancha limning Terry Gilliam's aborted Man of La Mancha project, premiered their first narrative feature in Toronto, albeit one in a mockumentary vein. Like The Life and Times of Guy Terrifico, it is set in the music world in the 1970s, but the similarities end there.
Twenty-one-year-old identical twins Harry and Luke Treadaway make an auspicious debut as conjoined twins who are groomed for rock stardom. The music is fierce, the boys even fiercer in proto-punk milieu of '70s England as two face the pressures and manipulations of rock 'n' roll life in the face of their already intensely symbiotic relationship. An impressive debut for both sets of partners behind and in front of the camera, propelled by a glorious era-perfect soundtrack, it will evoke comparisons to This Is Spinal Tap, but Brothers of the Head is much more resonant.
Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang: Who ever would have guessed that Shane Black, the screenwriter responsible for the Lethal Weapon series and prophetic Last Action Hero, would have had something like this in him? He makes his directing debut with this sardonic neo-noir, loosely inspired by an old Mike Shayne novel.
Robert Downey Jr. is small-time crook Harry Lockhart, who stumbles his way into a movie audition that sends him to Hollywood where he meets private detective to the stars Gay Perry (Val Kilmer) and becomes embroiled in murder. Black separates his film into ‘chapters,’ with inter-titles borrowed from Raymond Chandler, and there is something of Chandler's modern-day knight Philip Marlowe in screw-up Lockhart. Downey has the presence of a wounded angel, while Kilmer is simply daffy – never a bad thing.
Where the Truth Lies: Atom Egoyan aims to broaden his appeal with this sun-drenched noir set in Hollywood in the 1970s and among the East Coast nightclub glitterati of the 1950s. For his troubles, the MPAA has slapped an NC-17 on the film and critics have not always been kind as the filmmaker delivers a straight genre picture, albeit one with shifting narratives that characterize his work.
| In truth, the film is not without problems, but Egoyan has taken a not very good novel by Rupert Holmes, a roman a clef obviously inspired by Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis, and taken in somewhere else entirely. By removing the Martin-Lewis intimation from the nightclub stars played by Colin Firth and Kevin Bacon and humanizing O'Connor (Alison Lohman), the young journalist who hopes to write their biography and unlock the dark secret behind their breakup, Egoyan has come up with something richer and deeper, a mirror on our celebrity-mad society. |
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