Toronto Diary: In Fall Movies, Truth Is Stranger (and Better) Than Fiction

The buzz this past weekend in Toronto was all about strippers—specifically, the four in Lorene Scafaria’s hotly anticipated new film, Hustlers. Crowds clamored to catch a glimpse of Jennifer Lopez, resplendent in a golden Maison Yeya dress, at the premiere on Saturday night; the afterparty, at a small Toronto lounge, created the kind of gridlock that makes even the famously polite Canadians lose their cool. Hype like this is fun, but here at the Toronto International Film Festival, it can feel a little beside the point. You come to TIFF not to find out about movies opening next week, but next month, November, December, and beyond.

And the news on that front has somewhat less sex appeal. Docudramas! This is shaping up to be quite a year of them. Many of the films I’ve seen in four days of running around this busy city were all sophisticated dramatizations of recent history—much of it political. Maybe we need to have our reality explained to us? Truth being stranger than fiction these days, and all of that...

Anyway, with a Canadian federal election looming, politics was definitely in the air, and nowhere more so than at the The Report, a chilly and chilling recreation of the five-year effort that led to the U.S. Senate’s report on the CIA’s illegal use of torture after 9/11. Since it debuted at Sundance in January, The Report—which opens November 15 (and streams on Amazon Prime two weeks later)—has drawn comparisons to Spotlight for its methodical, talky, procedural approach. And yet I found this movie more tense and riveting than that Oscar-winning film, and credit goes to a formidably contained Adam Driver as real-life Senate aide Daniel J. Jones and writer/director Scott Z. Burns for managing to make a story of men and women in conference rooms talking about ethics and policy comprehensible, lucid—and gripping.

Also in the category of films that sound dull but definitely aren’t, please file the brilliantly entertaining two-hander, The Two Popes. This Netflix film, which arrives in theaters and then on the streaming service in late November, stars the inimitable Jonathan Pryce and Anthony Hopkins as Pope Francis and Pope Benedict XVI, respectively, and chronicles the moment when Benedict resigned from the papacy, clearing the way for Francis. It’s two hours of these spiritual leaders talking and arguing: politics, Catholicism, life, football. Does that sound like fun? It is! Brazilian director Fernando Meirelles gives us sumptuous on-location visuals of the Vatican and the Papal Summer Palace, and the script (by Anthony McCarten) has wit, hilarity, and sophistication.

I had a more mixed reaction to two other true-story films, both hotly touted for awards. The first, Just Mercy, had its world premiere on Saturday night and stars Michael B. Jordan as real-life civil rights lawyer Bryan Stevenson and Jamie Foxx as Walter McMillian, the wrongly convicted man on death row in Alabama for whom Stevenson fought. The film, which opens on Christmas Day and is directed by Destin Daniel Cretton and adapted from Stevenson's best-selling book is somber, modest in look, and, I’m afraid, stiflingly earnest. Jordan and Foxx are gunning for Oscars here, and they may well get them. Everything about Just Mercy says Very Important Movie, and the standing ovation after the crowd-pleasing end went on and on.

Subtlety was likewise in short supply in Marielle Heller’s A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood, also a Toronto world premiere and opening in theaters in November, in which Tom Hanks plays the late, beloved Fred Rogers and Matthew Rhys an Esquire writer (Lloyd Vogel, based on the journalist Tom Junod) sent to interview him. Hanks is Hanks, which means he’s brilliant as Mr. Rogers. But the movie is unworthy of him. Flat-footed, saccharine, and dull—it has little of the magic of last year’s breakout documentary, Won't You Be My Neighbor, nor much of the quirky, rough-hewn charm of Heller’s last film, Can You Ever Forgive Me?

I'm saving Toronto’s best true story for last—and it's a bit of a cheat, as Noah Baumbach’s staggeringly moving Marriage Story isn’t really a docudrama. But it is pretty obviously an autobiographical rendering of his split from former wife Jennifer Jason Leigh. Marriage Story stars Adam Driver and Scarlett Johansson as a Brooklyn playwright and Los Angeles-born actress whose marriage is dissolving before their eyes. It chronicles, in heartbreaking detail, the way good intentions devolve into passive aggression, out-and-out recriminations, and high-priced lawyers. All the while their 8-year-old is on the sidelines—a desperately sad witness. This is a Netflix film too, with a theatrical release on November 6, and it can’t come soon enough. I want everyone to see this nuanced, humane, frequently hilarious, but equally painful film. Fact or fiction, I doubt I’ll see a better movie this year.

Originally Appeared on Vogue