The annual Toronto International Film Festival, a.k.a. TIFF, is usually the barometer that tests the temperature of the coming movie year. But this year, the 33rd installment has tested a whole lot more: patience, I.Q.s, trash resistance, and bladder control. Film festivals (and let’s face it, there’s one in every town) have good years and bad years. For Toronto, this is a bad one. Veterans who have been coming here for decades all agree. The fun days when fans and critics and movie moguls all stayed in the Sutton Place Hotel and turned the Bistro 990 across the street into their local commissary, trading anecdotes with John Cassavetes and hanging out with Clint Eastwood, are only memories, like first marriages.
With 1,200 press and industry passes tightly clutched by mobs fighting to see more than 300 movies in 10 days, the thing is so over-programmed that you face at least five schedule conflicts per hour. Not satisfied with glut, the Canadians moved on to über-glut. Spreading the TIFF circus from one end of town to the suburbs, Toronto staged three other film festivals at the same time and blocked off an entire square to show free movies like Citizen Kane to the unwashed masses with empty wallets and no entree to the main events. Hotel room rates have tripled from what they are the rest of the year; Canadian suburbanites in convertibles cruise the streets looking for celebrities; loitering American tourists in knockoff sunglasses block the entrances and exits to every screening; and teenage gawkers litter the sidewalks hoping for a glimpse of Brad Pitt. But it’s hard to spot the major players with any kind of legitimate reason for being there, and the real stars sneak in and out of back doors, surrounded by bodyguards. But still they come. Anne Hathaway, Michael Caine, Debra Winger, Julianne Moore, Susan Sarandon and Tim Robbins, Mark Ruffalo, Ed Harris, Renée Zellweger, George Clooney, Jeremy Irons, Greg Kinnear, Keira Knightley, Ralph Fiennes, Liam Neeson, Antonio Banderas, Laura Linney, Colin Farrell—looking like a slimy troll in sandals and a toque; they came, they fled. The parties this year have been dismal, the bar bills astronomical, the food all served on sticks. (I never want to see another chicken kabob again as long as I live.) Assaulted at every red light by press agents selling, marketing moguls buying, and the ubiquitous publicity hound Paris Hilton, sucking up paparazzi oxygen, I escaped to TIFF’s most prized invite—the famous yearly chicken-pot-pie lunch at the Four Seasons staged by veteran Hollywood columnist George Christy, where I rubbed elbows with Norman Jewison and such non-showbizzy folk as ex-prime minister of Canada Brian Mulroney and Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
In addition to plugging movies, the TIFF has become a magnet for everyone with a cause to promote or a product to launch. Terrified of missing out on something, people who haven’t made a movie in years arrived to pose. Shirley MacLaine flew in from Santa Fe to accept a humanitarian award. Matt Damon hosted a charity benefit to raise money for needy children. A visibly ill Michael J. Fox unveiled a star in his name on Toronto’s Walk of Fame. You see everything at the TIFF. Boy George acted as DJ at one club venue where Lindsay Lohan sucked face for the cameras with girlfriend Samantha Ronson; hordes of screaming rockers jammed the rap party hosted by Sean Combs, a.k.a. Puff Daddy or P. Diddy or whatever it is he calls himself now. Three pop divas—Queen Latifah, Jennifer Hudson, and Alicia Keys—graced another party but did not sing a note. The TIFF, grouse the old-timers, has turned into a Hollywood shopping mall. Some of it is fun, but the sad fact must be faced: Taking a cue from the vulgarity of Cannes, the purity of joy fueled by a passion for movies that once made Toronto a kind of class reunion for serious film buffs has been replaced by gridlock and greed.
But what—you have a perfect right to ask—about the movies? The projectors never stop running. Even the subway system is showing what it called a “fun and free alternative to TIFF,” running one-minute films across a digital network of screens in 300 subway station platforms. Polite to the outer limits of exasperation, Canadians will sit through anything; good or bad, they applaud everything. The opening night film is traditionally Canadian, which gives everyone a night off. It’s the first and last time you can eat a proper meal in the ecstasy of leisure. This year it was Passchendaele, an epic about the slaughter of 5,000 Canadians on the World War I battlefields of Belgium in 1917. What a bore, and Stanley Kubrick did it better 50 years ago with Paths of Glory. Next came Burn After Reading, an alleged Coen brothers comedy with a criminally wasted all-star cast that is never remotely funny—more cornball than screwball. Part campy pastiche, part goofy, paranoid spy thriller, this fiasco fails to either convince or entertain at any level. Brad Pitt, sporting a doo-wop hairdo with frosted tips, is a fitness trainer who gets mixed up in a blackmail scheme involving a C.I.A. analyst (a cross-eyed John Malkovich) and a plastic-surgery-obsessed Internet dater (Frances McDormand). Brain-dead performances by George Clooney and Tilda Swinton never deliver the laughs this misguided mess desperately needs. It’s a miserable experience. The Coens have a habit of following serious, well-made, critically acclaimed films (Blood Simple, Fargo) with idiot farces (The Big Lebowski). But treading water on the heels of the Oscar-winning No Country for Old Men with a lame, insipid, ludicrously overacted load of junk like this is inexplicable, nose-thumbing career lunacy. Worse still was the incomprehensible Synecdoche, New York, a bucket of rancid swill as pretentious as its unpronounceable title, a directorial debut not so much lensed as regurgitated by the dismally untalented Charlie Kaufman, who writes movies about how he can’t write movies. So what makes anyone think he could direct one? Showcasing a repulsive performance by Philip Seymour Hoffman that is beneath discussion, it was generally considered the most contemptible of all the 300-plus films in Toronto, not even rising to the standards of an Australian shocker called Not Quite Hollywood: The Wild, Untold Story of Ozploitation! It described an “Ozploitation” flick as full of “boobs and pubes” and promised a “full-frontal explosion of sex, violence and horror!” Takes one to know one.
Amid the paranoia surrounding the search for Toronto’s latest serial killer and Sarah Palin-inspired editorials excoriating soccer moms, the daily newspapers during the TIFF vibrated with buzz that Téa Leoni bailed from the premiere of her new movie Ghost Town because she was too embarrassed by husband David Duchovny’s high-profile check-in for sex addiction to make a public appearance. What nonsense. I’m convinced she canceled for a much better reason: She saw the picture. Directed by writer David Koepp (Jurassic Park), this sub-mental bomb is about a Manhattan dentist (played by porcine TV question mark Ricky Gervais) who dies for seven minutes in the middle of a colonoscopy, leaving him with the ability to see dead people, and resulting in a series of awkward scenes in which he talks to a lot of noisy, pushy ghosts nobody else can see. These lost souls, wandering the earth with unfinished business in search of a mortal who can act as intermediary, include an obnoxious cheating husband (Greg Kinnear, in his first unbearable role) who needs to ease his wife’s pain so he can rest in peace. When the dentist himself falls in love with the angry widow (Téa Leoni), a museum curator who specializes in preserving the penises of Egyptian mummies, he starts three-way conversations only two people can hear. Then he dies again, and … oh, the agony of it all. Rare audience members who sat through the whole thing were left with a serious need for a dose of the dentist’s nitrous oxide themselves.
The paralyzing Che, a four-and-a-half-hour endurance marathon with Benicio Del Toro as legendary Cuban revolutionary Che Guevara, is less a movie than an explosion of director Steven Soderbergh’s massive ego. This interminable bore catalogs two phases in the guerrilla’s life. The first half, which was filmed last, covers the years from 1955, when Che and Castro joined forces to overthrow the corrupt Batista regime, to the conquering of the city of Havana, in early 1959. The second half, which was shot first, covers his adventures in Bolivia and the Belgian Congo, organizing a military force and training peasants to become a new generation of storm troopers. The film explains a few things about the enigma of Che, but you can’t survive it without a sandwich and a change of underwear, and I don’t know one person who sat through the whole thing. The wags at the TIFF dubbed it Havana’s Gate, and I can’t resist quoting one critic who declared that the whole thing could have just as easily been played by a Che T-shirt.
Caveats aside, the key word has been versatility. Actors with an eye on the Oscars battled enormous misconceptions and tackled major challenges playing against type. I am no fan of either Mickey Rourke or director Darren Aronofsky, but in a grim movie called The Wrestler, they have collaborated to create a devastatingly disturbing portrait of an over-the-hill fighter hanging onto the shards of a shattered life with steroids, mayhem in front of crowds screaming for blood, and the sad vestiges of broken relationships with an estranged daughter (Evan Rachel Wood) and a tortured stripper (Marisa Tomei). The film grafts the skin of a new career onto the battered face and body of Mickey Rourke. In Rachel Getting Married, Jonathan Demme’s magnificent canvas of dysfunctional family life in Stamford, Conn., Anne Hathaway strips away the gorgeous all-American-girl beauty she displayed in The Princess Diaries and The Devil Wears Prada and bares the scar tissue of an emotionally wrung-out drug addict released from rehab in time to wreck her sister’s weekend wedding. With its colorful characters, sensational cast, brilliant screenplay by the fresh, talented Jenny Lumet (daughter of Sidney Lumet and granddaughter of the great Lena Horne), and overlapping dialogue, it is Mr. Demme’s homage to Robert Altman, only better because you can hear every word and don’t want to miss a heartbeat. If the programmers for the forthcoming New York Film Festival had any taste or brains, they would have selected this American masterpiece instead of A Christmas Tale, the French take on a similar subject with a matronly Catherine Deneuve as the matriarch of a family of mental defectives who is dying from a rare cancer that requires a bone marrow transfusion. Rachel Getting Married is vastly superior filmmaking in about a million ways. I’ll share more detailed enthusiasms for its U.S. release in a few weeks.
“Viggo!” “We want Viggo!” In contrast to the prancing egos on display at the TIFF, the undisputed hero this year has been charismatic, versatile and totally charming Viggo Mortensen, who’s enthralled in two distinctively contrasting performances. In the revisionist western Appaloosa, directed by Ed Harris, he is a leathery deputy marshal in a lawless stretch of New Mexico in 1888. But in the electrifying German-British co-production Good, my favorite film of the festival, even this mesmerizing chameleon, who has proved he can play anything, surprised the hell out of audiences, who emerged stunned. Set in the dusky shadows of 1938 Berlin, he plays a shy, nerdy professor of literature who writes a novel about euthanasia that attracts the rat-eyed attention of Himmler, Goebbels, and Hitler himself, all of them hungry to recruit talented intellectuals with admirable reputations to give a veneer of false respectability to the social reforms of the Reich. Flattered, the innocent and apolitical professor finds himself slowly seduced into a political machine he neither understands nor has any interest in, until his best friend, a Jewish psychiatrist (also played against type by the terrific Jason Isaacs, who usually plays villains), shows him firsthand the cruelties his fellow privileged Germans are capable of. “I don’t even go to the office,” protests this “good German,” but by the time he is shaken from his complacency by a visit to the “camps,” the movie has left him—and everyone who sees it—wrenched. Fabulous movie, haunting performance, and Viggo was everywhere doing PR chores to give it the promotion it deserves—shaking hands, helping one fan repair his camera for the best angle, smiling widely at all and sundry, and charming a jaded festival out of its socks.
Renowned for idiotic questions, the press conferences are always worth avoiding, but the one with Viggo earned applause, as he was a good sport and demonstrated his rarely seen sense of humor. One jerk, referring to his roles as cowboys and as the full-frontal-nude Russian spy in the brutal sauna scene in last year’s Eastern Promises, asked, “Which is harder—appearing stark naked or carrying a six-gun?” Viggo’s trademark sex smolder faded, and bursting into a shit-kicking grin and without missing a beat, he shot back: “I would say appearing stark naked while wearing a six-gun.”
I’ll have what he’s having.