Canada dry

The fall chill that reliably descends at the end of the Toronto International Film Festival came early this year—both in terms of weather and critical reception. One big ticket after another disappointed, with high-profile movies evenly divided between bloated self-importance (The Burning Plain, Miracle at St. Anna) and smug inconsequence (Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist, Zack and Miri Make a Porno). A few buzz items even managed to bridge both categories, like Danny Boyle’s audience award winner Slumdog Millionaire—a crowd-pleaser about Indian poverty that derives most of its entertainment value from Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? excerpts. By the festival’s end, the Coens’ mildly disappointing Burn After Reading seemed like the work of seasoned masters.

Continuing a trend from Cannes, this was a year when great directors went slumming. Or at least, that’s the impression you’d get from the shrugs accorded the world premiere of Richard Linklater’s enormously entertaining Me and Orson Welles—“made for the Zac Efron crowd,” a friend scoffed. Whatever. Anyone could have made a camp drama about a 17-year-old (Efron) who gets cast as Lucius in the Mercury Theater’s 1937 production of Julius Caesar; Linklater transforms it into a film about ambition, the artistic process and the simultaneous frustration and awe of working for a genius. It helps tremendously that unknown Christian McKay, who had played Orson Welles in a one-man show, is the most convincing screen Welles since Charlie Kane himself.

Among other small-scale pleasures, the fest featured three extended homages to the master of the Japanese family drama, Yasujiro Ozu. Hirokazu Kore-eda’s Still Walking takes a typically Ozuian family and ups the dysfunction level, along with the sentimentality. Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s sensationally shot Tokyo Sonata was even more interesting; the sonata that closes it notwithstanding, it often suggests silent Ozu—particularly Tokyo Chorus—in its themes and visual comedy, although the political anxiety and left-field third act are pure Kurosawa. The pastiche most clearly subsumed into its maker’s sensibility was Claire Denis’s 35 Shots of Rum, a portrait of a working-class family in Paris that—Ozu-alluding trains and rice cookers aside—seems distinctly Denisian in its narrative gaps. In a much-beloved scene, the characters, who find themselves stranded at a restaurant, hesitantly dance to the Commodores’ “Nightshift.”

If anything, 35 Shots seems more authentically multicultural than one of the festival’s biggest hits, Jonathan Demme’s terrifically directed but unevenly written Rachel Getting Married. The movie audaciously makes interracial marriage a nonissue even though—as a few critics noted—it affords no inner lives to its African-American characters. Despite knee-jerk comparisons to Something Wild, the film feels like Demme cutting loose in an entirely new way.

No departure, however, was as surprising as Darren Aronofsky’s gritty Venice winner The Wrestler, which modifies the redemptive sports movie by treating its aging-wrestler protagonist (Mickey Rourke) as an emotional fuckup throughout. (He grows, but not too much.) Rourke’s astonishing, self-reflexive performance is not only physically challenging but good-humored, never more so than when his Randy “the Ram” Robinson is working his day job pounding meat—at the deli counter.

One of The Wrestler’s boldest gambits is its inclusion of lengthy, brutal wrestling sequences—it insists that you acknowledge what pain looks like. Other festival highlights also seemed attuned to physical procedure—and not just Steven Soderbergh’s brilliant, tweaked-but-not-damaged guerrilla epic Che. Kathryn Bigelow’s The Hurt Locker takes a close-range look at an American bomb squad in Iraq, perhaps cravenly withholding politics to zero in on combat with a level of a detail ignored by TV. It’s a movie about the stoicism necessary for one of the war’s most dangerous jobs; not for nothing is Jeremy Renner’s unflappable staff sergeant, William James, named for the father of modern psychology.

Likewise concerned with process, the work-in-progress Columbia ’68 documentary A Time to Stir was inexplicably relegated to the festival’s last day, slated to end near boarding time for the last flight back to Chicago. In his introduction, director Paul Cronin explained that he’d just shot two interviews the day before and that we’d actually be watching only “the last four hours.” Solely on the basis of what will become hours three and four, then, it’s clear that A Time to Stir takes an amazingly comprehensive approach, tracing the occupation of various buildings, the divergence of student ideologies and the snowballing media sensation with an apparent fear of leaving anything out. (It’s a film that, full disclosure, this former editorial-page editor of the Columbia Daily Spectator can only watch with something like glee.) Sometimes, you not only catch the most ambitious films on Toronto’s margins. Sometimes, you catch them on the way to the airport.

For our daily reports from Toronto, read the TOC blog.