TIFF Round Up 2009

Tom Charity reports on the latest from the Coens and Clooney at a star-studded Toronto International Film Festival

"I like Cannes," director Jon Amiel teased, introducing opening night attraction Creation to a momentarily slighted Toronto audience. "Palm trees... the Riviera... I do like Cannes. And Venice. Berlin. But I LOVE Toronto!"

It was nicely delivered, and of course the estimable British filmmaker had the audience eating out of the golden palm of his hand, especially after explaining that what made TIFF so great was the audience. Unlike Cannes, this isn't primarily a place for deal-makers and deal-breakers (aka film critics), but somewhere, like the London film festival, that brings moviemakers and ordinary movie fans together.

The critics and industry types do get a look in, but we're very much a side event to the mutual love fest going on in the city's biggest venues, its swankiest restaurants and clubs, on the red carpets that unroll across pavements throughout the downtown core, and in the city's media, which covers virtually nothing but movie star sightings for the best part of ten days.

Give or take a Colin Farrell spat or two, the stars soak up the attention like this is the reason they got into the biz in the first place – which may well be the case. Among the beautiful ones this year:George Clooney, Mariah Carey, Jennifer Connelly, Paul Bettany, Oprah, Edward Norton, Natalie Portman, Keanu Reeves, Woody Harrelson, Julianne Moore, Ewan McGregor, Colin Firth, Drew Barrymore, Willem Dafoe, Nic Cage, Ellen Page and Ricky Gervais (to name just a few). It's like a throwback to the days of the locust, the golden age of Hollywood glamour. And why shouldn't the celebrated come out in droves? All they have to do is smile to the crowd, maybe sign an autograph or two, and scuttle off to the next VIP area.

Mr Farrell was in town with two films, and had a run-in with the paps over the honour of his sister, poor thing. Brief as it was, such animosity is unusual here – the festival runs smoothly and knows how to keep everybody happy, at least most of the time.

There was a more serious and substantive tiff at TIFF this year (and I don't mean Megan Fox comparing making the Transformers films with Michael Bay to being directed by Hitler, though I can't imagine this is going to make Transformers 3 much fun to work on).

The festival introduced a new program strand, called City to City, a showcase for films from one metropolis. Not a bad idea, except that they inaugurated the show with half a dozen features from Tel Aviv, which inspired protests and petitions from pro-Palestinians including Elia Suleiman, Naomi Klein and Jane Fonda, and the withdrawal of two Egyptian films from the program. It was a regrettable episode, and one the organisers should have seen coming. On the other hand the Israeli films were generally agreed to be of high quality and very far from Zionist propaganda.

The best of these (and not one of the Tel Aviv movies) was Lebanon, screening here right after its triumph at Venice, a powerful autobiographical anti-war film about the same 1982 campaign as Waltz with Bashir, but this time shot almost entirely from the spam-in-a-can perspective of a four-man tank crew. It's a harrowing, claustrophobic film that won't cheer Israeli conscripts one bit.

For some reason many of the best films this year shared an ominous, apocalyptic outlook. They include John Hillcoat's faithfully grim, grueling adaptation of Cormac McCarthy's The Road, with Viggo Mortensen escorting his young son south through an ashen, presumably post-nuclear landscape, scouring for food where there isn't any, and always on the lookout for cannibals.

Even more depressingly, two documentaries, Michael Moore's Capitalism: A Love Story and Chris Smith's Collapse, suggested that this year's recession is only a taster for the irrevocable economic cataclysm to come, when peak oil comes home to roost.

A more subtle but equally powerful vision of apocalypse soon came in the Coen brothers' latest. A Serious Man seems to be a more modest film, on the surface – it doesn't feature any stars you will have heard of, and it appears to be a relatively banal story about a physics professor coping (barely) with the news that his wife is leaving him just as a work promotion hangs in the balance. Yet from these domestic tribulations the Coens have fashioned a movie that is, on the one hand, a probing examination of mortality, faith, and guilt; and on the other, a bitingly acidic black comedy about middle-American Jewish mores in the late 1960s. It's their best film since Fargo.

Meanwhile one of the Coen's favourite actors, George Clooney, appeared in two pictures. I missed The Men Who Stare At Goats, and word was mixed on this quirky adaptation of Jon Ronson's non-fiction piece about the US military's hippie-nutball wing. But I can report that Up in the Air is a winner, a slick, smart very Coenesque comedy from Toronto-local boy Jason Reitman. In what is probably his finest comic performance to date, Clooney plays a terminations consultant, whose job it is to break the bad news when employees are being "let go" and their bosses are too cowardly to tell them face-to-face. Not only does this occupation really exist, it's one of the few growth industries in the US right now. But Clooney's bumper air-miles executive class lifestyle is threatened when a new colleague advocates a more hi-tech approach to the business.

Two years ago Reitman enjoyed a smash TIFF hit with Juno. The much more mainstream Up in the Air will pitch him right to the forefront of contemporary US directors.

Meanwhile two more Juno alumni were back. Screenwriter Diablo Cody suffered a grumpy critical backlash with her horror comedy Jennifer's Body (with Megan Fox as a demonic cheerleader), though the midnight movie audience I saw it with found plenty to enjoy. And star Ellen Page fared better with the warmly received rollerblade chick flick, Whip It, a likeable directorial debut from Drew Barrymore.

More on these – and other TIFF discoveries – as their UK releases and the London Film Festival rolls around in the upcoming weeks. In the meantime, do check out the star ratings guide below...

Tom Charity
tom.charity@lovefilm.com

Star Ratings

Accident

Director: Pou-Soi Cheang

Bright Star

Director: Jane Campion

Collapse

Director: Chris Smith

Creation

Director: Jon Amiel

The Disappearance of Alice Creed

Director: J Blakeson

Down For Life

Director: A Jacobs

Face

Director: Tsai M-L

The Imaginarium of Dr Parnassus

Director: Terry Gilliam

Invention of Lying

Director: Ricky Gervais

Jennifer's Body

Director: Karyn Kusama

Lebanon

Director: Sam Maoz

Life During Wartime

Director: Todd Solondz

Like You Know It All

Director: Sang-soo Hong

Mother

Director: Bong J-H

Partir

Director: Catherine Corsini

Politist, Adjective

Director: Corneliu Porumboiu

Precious

Director: Lee Daniels

The Road

Director: John Hillcoat

A Serious Man

Director: Joel and Ethan Coen

Trash Humpers

Director: Harmony Korine

Up in the Air

Director: Jason Reitman

Valhalla Rising

Director: Nicolas Wending Refn

Whip It

Director: Drew Barrymore

White Material

Director: Claire Denis

Titles related to this article

The Disappearance of Alice Creed

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Down for Life

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Collapse

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Accident

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Trash Humpers

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Valhalla Rising

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