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Toronto Sports Porn Kings, Oscar Queens and Classic Paintings
Festival showcases Wonderland, about a horrific crime involving porn star John Holmes, Robert Benton’s The Human Stain starring Nicole Kidman and based on a Philip Roth novel, and Girl with a Pearl Earring
Tuesday, September 9, 2003
By Pam Grady
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Wonderland, James Cox's drama about a brutal 1981 quadruple homicide, makes its bow on the world stage at the 2003 Toronto International Film Festival, the first test of how audiences will react to a drama that rubs the viewer's face in its visceral violence. The drama centers on infamous porn star John "Johnny Wadd" Holmes, played by Val Kilmer in a role that echoes the dissolute characters he inhabited in The Doors and The Salton Sea. Though the actor initially had reservations about taking the part, he says, because "I wasn't interested in pornography or being associated with John Holmes," he commits himself fully in playing a wreck of a man whose thoughtless actions lead to lethal disaster.
By 1981, Holmes, the star of over 1,000 hardcore movies, was a cocaine addict and little more than a sideshow freak to a group of drug dealers living on L.A.'s Wonderland Avenue. Several weeks after the gang robs Holmes' friend, L.A. nightclub impresario Eddie Nash (Eric Bogosian), two of them, Ron Launius (Josh Lucas) and Billy Deverell (Tim Blake Nelson), along with three women in the house, are bludgeoned with lead pipes. At the heart of Cox's film is the extent of Holmes' participation in both the robbery and murders. The story unfolds Rashomon-style, as surviving participants, none of them trustworthy, relate their versions of the events. Who to believe? Junkie biker David Lind (a practically unrecognizable Dylan McDermott), who loses his girlfriend in he attack; Holmes' devoted teenage lover, Dawn (Kate Bosworth); Holmes' estranged wife, Sharon (Lisa Kudrow); or Holmes himself, who casts himself as another victim in the affair.
In anticipation of the film's September 8th festival premiere, Cox, Kilmer, McDermott, Lucas, and Bosworth met with the press in their own Rashomon fashion to talk about the film and the notorious case that inspired it. The film is technically flawless, blending in images of the real Holmes and the actual crime scene seamlessly into the narrative and stylistically paying homage to dramas like To Live and Die in L.A. and Three Kings. But Cox pulls no punches in depicting this world of lowlifes and the dire consequences of their actions. As Lucas remarks, "That's one of the things – you walk out of this movie and you'll feel pretty gross … these people came out of it dead, destroyed, every one of them." The question that the film festival response may begin to answer in Toronto is whether an audience will want to spend nearly two hours living those doomed, vacant lives vicariously.
Cox and company are betting that the audiences will come if only because, as Lucas points out, Holmes in his moral debasement, remains a magnetic figure. "I think people are fascinated by that level of degradation, that level of that soul that is that gone," he says.
McDermott has a different take on it, commenting on the motley assortment of victims as he ponders alternate meanings to the word "Wonderland." "Wonderland is, whatever that is, I suppose – I mean they had a lot of fun,” he suggests. “You're not supposed to have fun doing crime and taking drugs, but I think that they did. I think this was a close knit group of people who, before it all fell apart, really had some fun."
Kilmer, who had the most difficult job of all in humanizing such a damaged creature as Holmes, finds it admirable that, as strung out as he was, the ex-porn star went to great lengths to protect his ex-wife and girlfriend from harm. "I believe in love," says the actor, "and I believe, for me it's the value of telling this story, that he was able to do one good thing, anyway, after all this." Whether audiences make that same empathetic connection is the question that hovers over Wonderland.
Kidman Heads All Star Stain
Last year's Best Actress Academy Award-winner Nicole Kidman made a glamorous walk down the red carpet at Toronto's Roy Thomson Hall on Saturday, September 6th, as TIFF showcased one of next year's potential Oscar favorites, The Human Stain. If Wonderland is the cinematic equivalent of a destruction derby, then The Human Stain is thoroughbred racing. Its pedigree is unimpeachable: The drama, based on Philip Roth's critically acclaimed novel, was directed by Oscar winner Robert Benton (Kramer vs. Kramer, Places in the Heart), and in addition to Kidman, co-stars Anthony Hopkins, Gary Sinise, and Ed Harris. Add to that a screenplay by Nicholas Meyer, an elegant score by Rachel Portman, and luminous cinematography by Jean Yves Escoffier, and the credits read like a recipe for awards-season gold. But the patrician Kidman is miscast as a working-class woman who becomes college-professor Hopkins' lover and as the professor's skeletons begin to tumble out of the closet, it becomes clear that Hopkins, too, is ill suited to his role. Whether that will make any difference when the nominations roll around in an industry sometimes more driven by style over substance remains to be seen. But Kidman looked far more comfortable on Roy Thomson's red carpet, elegantly attired in her evening gown, than she ever does in The Human Stain.
Johansson Plays Toronto’s ‘It Girl’
A far more realized work could be found on Sunday, September 7th during the gala presentation of Girl with a Pearl Earring, longtime TV director Peter Webber's debut feature film. Scarlet Johansson, undoubtedly this year's festival's ‘It Girl’ by dint of her roles in this and Sofia Coppola's Lost in Translation, stars as Griet, a maid in painter Johannes Vermeer's (Colin Firth) household. Assigned to clean the artist's studio, she develops an interest in the artistic masterpieces she discovers as she discharges her duties, a fascination that does not go unnoticed by her employer. Stressed by constant money troubles and lost in a sea of women that include his petulant, perpetually pregnant wife, Catharina (Essie Davis), Vermeer retreats to his studio where he begins cultivating the one female interested in his art, Griet.
Girl with a Pearl Earring is a love story after a fashion, though the sensuality of Griet and Vermeer's relationship finds its greatest expression in the titular painting. Johansson, so very modern as Giovanni Ribisi's neglected wife in Lost in Translation, is pitch-perfect as the 17th-century servant and touching in her evident confusion over her feelings for her employer. The look of the film, shot in warm tones by cinematographer Eduardo Serra and carefully composed, adds to the richness of the drama as director Webber strives for and achieves the filmic equivalent of a Vermeer painting. This is one of those rare films about an artist that truly captures the glory of his work.
What is a pity about Girl with a Pearl Earring is that both its gala TIFF screening and Monday, September 8th, matinee performance precede the screenings of Wonderland. After experiencing John Holmes' decadence, a visit to Vermeer's world could provide some badly needed uplift. Alas, it is not to be. Not at this year’s festival, anyway.
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