Toronto International Film Festival, day eight: A Single Man, I Killed My Mother and the issue of consensus

The good folks at Indiewire are compiling an ongoing critical survey on 34 festival films, so look over here if you want to see how my taste stacks up against everyone else's. On one hand, it appears I'm a bit of a hard-ass, running on the lower end of the spectrum on high-profile films like The Road and Up in the Air (though I like the latter well enough). On the other hand, my stances on Chloe and Life During Wartime look generous in comparison to most others', so maybe my level of contrarianism is just about right.

The titles are well chosen, though no 34 films out of a 271-feature festival are going to come close to being an accurate sample. At last night's revelry, my colleagues and I went around the table naming our favorite films. To my surprise, the Coens' A Serious Man seems to have risen to the top of the acclaim-meter after what I initially perceived as a mixed reception. (It's an extremely sour film.)

The Indiewire tally holds its own mysteries. How is it possible that, as of this late-night writing, fashion-designer-turned-first-time-director Tom Ford's ridiculously overhyped A Single Man—bought by the Weinstein Company but getting a love-it/hate-it reception from critics—doesn't have a single grade lower than a B? (Because I haven't updated my grades since yesterday morning, that's how.)

Like much of fashion itself, Ford's movie may be praised because it sells. The film is adapted from Christopher Isherwood's 1964 novel about an English professor (Colin Firth) grieving after his partner (Matthew Goode) is killed in a car accident. My understanding is that Isherwood's book—unread by me—is a searing and perceptive contribution to the tradition of one-day novels. But grief is an inherently interior subject, one that doesn't translate easily to the screen, and Ford attempts to solve that problem by conjuring a battery of arty ways to Show Colin Firth Thinking. (If there were an Oscar for bombastic furrowed-brow shots, this movie would be a lock.) In the most risible moment, Firth is distracted from a conversation about nuclear annihilation when he sees the sweaty pecs of nearby tennis players, which Ford shoots in full-blown, red-filtered close-up. Not to put too fine a point on it, but imagine how critically mauled Ford would get for that fantasy sequence if the tennis players were women.

The movie becomes slightly less amateurish as it goes along, as the character attempts to sort out the past with an old friend (Julianne Moore) and an eager student (Nicholas Hoult). But Ford doesn't show much interest in pain and loss, only smoldering glances, and the upshot of the film seems to be that there's no trauma that can't be at least temporarily soothed by skinny-dipping with a jail-bait pupil.

The cool thing about the festival is that almost any bad film can be countered with a good one. In this case, the antidote to A Single Man is Xavier Dolan's I Killed My Mother, a French-Canadian debut that's a little rough around the edges but is heartbreakingly honest about a teenager's tumultuous relationship with his single mom. (Since the teen is played by 20-year-old writer-director-star Dolan, the intimacy is more than a tad uneasy-making.) Both films are debuts, but one is sharply written and scaled to the level of everyday squabbles; the other is solemn and hushed, filled with locations that seem more suited to a catalog spread than a home where someone might live (though some of Ford's visuals are surprisingly pallid). Dolan may be younger, but as a filmmaker, he's already the more serious man.