Toronto 2005: Day Ten

DAY TEN

The last filmic image of my 30th Annual Toronto International Film Festival was a woman who, soon after a brain tumor removal, has her jaw lock while kissing an odd younger man, severing his complete tongue from his mouth.

When she spit it out and it got its own close-up, I kinda knew it was time to go..

Somehow, the cheesy excess of it was true representation of the experience. So when Roger Ebert calls it the best TIFF ever, I have to scratch my head and wonder.

I will say that it was the most comfortable berth at this fest that I have experienced. Like Roger, I didn't spend a lot of time at TIFF trying to ride the festival, demanding things and stepping aside from the movies themselves. Roger stands in line for screenings just like everyone else, jams in a lot of movies just like everyone else and is exhausted just like everyone else. Like the old Ginger Rogers quote, he does it backwards and in heels, being the most in-demand journalist at any festival he attends, not only for publicists but for the public where he is the most recognized and most bothered guy wherever he goes.

That said, if I had to guess - and Roger will correct me if I'm wrong - this would be the best TIFF ever because Roger and the rest of us took the smallest bite ever. We all saw a bunch of movies at home... some of us saw a load more at Telluride... and the distance beyond that we had to go this year to feel we had fulfilled our task of doing a reasonably comprehensive coverage of this festival was pretty short.

Like Sundance, almost all of the films that sold this year at Toronto came to the festival with a big muscle salesman attached, whether it was Cinetic or Cassian Elwes or CAA.

On the flip side, I'm not going to look backwards for proof of it, but regular readers will likely recall that I have been touting the strength of the fall to come all summer long as an antidote to the summer "slump." There are a bunch of good movies, many of which are quite commercial. And many of them were at Toronto. If you judged the success of this festival based on the studio films, it was a good year.

But what do we come to a festival for? Is Toronto meant to be the ShoWest of the fall? Missing from the studio "product reel" was a single surprise. There was no Sideways, which came into the festival as a question mark for the vast majority and left with the momentum that would help it nearly sweep the critics awards and go on to an Oscar nomination. There was no Ray even attempted. And there was clearly no Crash.

People are being awfully generous with giving out Oscar nominations at the festival this year. But the reality is, there were 7 or 8 major contenders that were not at the festival. And none of them dared to show themselves unfinished or in-process. Patrick Goldstein ran around the festival making pronouncements about films that very few have seen, but no man is an answer.

Do you think Brokeback Mountain was a surprise? I don't. I'm not surprised by the reaction at all. But it isn't the kind of thing that happened for Sideways or Ray last year. Same with Capote. These are two really well liked films with two really well liked performances, but the only Oscar-lock actors coming out of the fest are Reese Witherspoon and Joaquin Phoenix... and Fox has been showing that movie to the press for a month already. (I'll be doing a post-Toronto Oscar chart during the week and you will see then, I have taken press reaction to both Phil Hoffman and Heath Ledger into full consideration and it is clear that if the media stays behind either one of these guys, there will be a nomination. The question is, if they fragment award support - as they often do - the road is still fraught with peril.)

As for the "indie" stuff, there were a bunch of good films, but greatness was consistently elusive. At the time when Thank You For Smoking would have been made by HBO Films for cable release, written by Larry Gelbart, memorably, it was appropriate for that venue. It's very good... very smart... very funny... and very, very narrow. I will still stop channel hopping and watch James Garner, Jonathan Pryce, Peter Reigert, Fred Dalton Thomson, and Lailani Sarelle tear it up in Barbarians At The Gate any time it turns up on the network. It is funny, smart, insightful, sexy, silly, and still completely relevant... a less brutal (and less prescient) cousin of Network, which is still one my all-tie favorites. But is it a theatrical movie or a big, strong step forward for what HBO was going for? The line gets blurrier and blurrier - which is still one of my nagging fears about the shortening home entertainment window and the idea that there is no boundary between theatrical and TV (even when it's not TV, it's HBO).

I really like The Notorious Bettie Page, but will it find more than a cult life as a theatrical offering? Probably not. Still, given the way things are, I would consider, were I HBO and Picturehouse, a qualifying awards run for Gretchen Mol. She could never win anything, but she could be a nominee and that would be a great opportunity for the film. Simply put, I am not aware of a more joyous female performance that is under real awards consideration than that one. And awards voters of all stripes like some variation in their eating habits.

The Bart Freundlich film, Trust The Man, was enjoyable for two acts for me... and then deteriorates into a very stupid, broad, nearly unwatchable mess. Before that, David Duchovney is remarkably charming, as usual. Perhaps Searchlight can turn that into a trailer that generates $20 million. But much as I think The Brothers McMullan is grossly overrated, this film is not The Brothers McMullan, meaning that it is not a surprise.

Crash was a surprise. Lions Gate was the right company to sell the film and they have done a brilliant job with it on every level. I don't think anyone else would have had that success and its because it needed the kind of nurturing that a truly independent film needs. And what it tuned into was a cultural phenomenon. There was no "culture phenom" film even in play this year.

Lions Gate, by all rights, should have gotten Harsh Times and sold it as an urban horror film. We'll see if the new distribution company, which has never put anything on as many as 10 screens at a time, can make hay. My guess is that they will try hard not to lose money in the theatrical release before really chasing money with Batshit-Crazy-Man in home entertainment.

The one film I saw that could be converted into a small phenomenon is Brothers of the Head, though it is a crapshoot. The film is not ready for prime time yet. And when you have to go in and make changes other than just tightening, you never know how it will turn out. But the raw materials are there for this to be a Spinal Tap or near-Napoleon Dynamite type phenom.

I didn't see the Michel Gondry's Dave Chapelle film, but it I hear it's funny and it sounds like an arty take on the TV show that was. But the hottest festival doc was Heart of the Game, which as I wrote yesterday, was enormously mediocre. Greatness is elusive.

None of this is the fault of TIFF. It has been a mediocre couple of years in almost every indie venue. More and more films are making into every major festival. And the crisis, which it is, will work itself out as the foundations of what the indie/dependent business is settle in.

I'll do a real wrap-up of the festival in Monday's The Hot Button. Right now, I'm just happy to be in my own little corner in my own little room.

by David Poland