At This Year’s Toronto Film Festival, Women Get All the Best Roles
It wasn’t so long ago that it was nearly impossible to make a movie about “difficult” women. Audiences, it was claimed, are turned off by aggressive heroines—which usually meant that male studio execs felt that way. That has begun to change. There’s still a long way to go, of course, but it says something that, this weekend at the Toronto Film Festival, the most interesting movies I saw were about women who break the rules.
The hottest ticket of the bunch was for the world premiere of Widows—great title!—a feminist revenge-heist thriller directed and co-written (with Gillian Flynn) by Steve McQueen as his follow-up to 12 Years a Slave. While the story serves up more twists than a pasta factory, the set-up is simple. A crew of professional Chicago thieves led by Liam Neeson gets killed doing a job. They leave behind a group of widows threatened by a gangster (Atlanta’s great Brian Tyree Henry) whose money was stolen and destroyed during the crime. Led by Viola Davis’s character, Veronica, these widows—who include Michelle Rodrigues and an excellent Elizabeth Debicki—plot to pull off a heist of their own, targeting a crooked local politician played by Colin Farrell whose family has run an African-American ward of the city for decades.
While this may sound like your garden variety genre picture, McQueen clearly wants this to be more than that—he wants his garden to flaunt the orchids of high art. And so the movie takes itself very seriously. The action is overlaid with rather heavy-handed political themes—about women’s empowerment, the police murder of young black men, the sociology of Chicago’s impoverished communities. But none of this is as serious or convincing as what you found in, say, The Wire. That’s because McQueen and Flynn also want to make the movie glossy and exciting, so there are big surprises, huge betrayals, hammy outbursts (Robert Duvall has big one), and violent murders that McQueen takes an unseemly pleasure in find original ways to shoot (“Look how I did this!”). All this showbiz stuff doesn’t quite mesh with the film’s loftier aspirations or the deeply felt performances by Debicki and especially Davis, whose performance occupies a different emotional universe to the one occupied by the soulless murderer played by Daniel Kaluuya.
This isn’t to say that Widows is no good. It’s very entertaining, has moments of real power, and McQueen does know how to shoot scenes in arresting ways you haven’t seen before—Sean Bobbit’s cinematography is quite beautiful. The movie could well be a hit. Yet it also feels like an arted-up thriller made by a director who feels superior to the material he’s chosen. He wants to “elevate” a genre that was good enough for far greater directors.
The scale is smaller but the heroine wilder in Can You Ever Forgive Me?, a true-life comic drama by Marielle Heller (Diary of a Teenage Girl) which had the Toronto crowd roaring its approval. Based on a bestselling memoir, it stars Melissa McCarthy as Lee Israel, a misanthropic celebrity biographer who dreams of being a great writer like Dorothy Parker. But nobody wants to buy her books, so, in the 1990s, she begins to forge letters by the likes of Parker and Noel Coward. Abetted by her louche gay drinking buddy, Jack (Richard E. Grant’s best role in eons), she’s more successful as a forger than she ever was as a writer. Then again, what’s she’s doing is illegal.
Now, Lee is far from a likable heroine—she’s prickly, messy, cold to those who want to get close to her. And in truth, her life is a bit, well, dank. Although it doesn’t soar, the movie boasts some wonderful jokes, nifty performances throughout (Grant and Dolly Wells are terrific), and above all, it’s got a revelatory performance by McCarthy in a role unlike the ones that made her a star. The role of Lee lets her show off her impeccable timing—nobody can nail a zinger any better than she does—but it also reveals a whole new emotional depth, a secret raw melancholy that has previously remained hidden in her work. “I didn’t know she was such a great actress,” the woman next to me said after the premiere.
Nobody would ever say that about Natalie Portman, whose talents are by now a given. Still, she’s never played a character like the one she does in Vox Lux, a movie that comes on like the evil twin of A Star Is Born. It was written and directed by Brad Corbet, a 30-year-old American guy I’ve mocked for being a wannabe European auteur. I was unfair. Even when it’s exasperating (and it can try your patience), this brash, wildly inventive, and occasionally assaultive movie is the most ambitious film I’ve seen so far in Toronto.
Put simply, Vox Lux is a satirical portrait of a representative 21st century figure: a young, single-named pop star, Celeste. As wittily narrated in the voice of Willem Dafoe, her story begins in 1999 with an eerily staged Columbine-like school shooting. One of the survivors is 14-year-old Celeste (English actress Raffey Cassidy) who, at the funeral, sings a song her sister wrote about the experience. With the help of a cunning manager (Jude Law, really good), the song becomes a huge hit, an American anthem of healing, and launches Celeste’s career, transforming this quiet, devout Christian girl into a pop star whose hooky songs (written for the film by none other than Sia) makes people feel good. Cut to 2017 and the adult Celeste is now a monstrous diva played by Natalie Portman, who, as is Portman’s way, throws herself into her stylized role with mad brio—sporting delirious hair, laying on a thick, trashy Staten Island accent, flinging her body in dance routines a la Madonna, even thumping to the floor in a drug-induced stupor. Meanwhile, terrorists seem to be borrowing ideas from her videos.
I’m not sure how big the audience is for this film, which is, among other things, how real life trauma gets transformed into packaged, feel-good vacuity. But no matter. Vox Lux really is something. It bristles with ideas and cinematic invention, be it the interplay between Sia’s catchy songs and brilliantly discordant score by Scott Walker, funny riffs on modern America and the creation of ABBA, the audacious casting of Cassidy as both Celeste and Celeste’s daughter, Albertine, or Celeste’s final, extravagant concert whose heavily-costumed, robotic dance moves are choreographed by Portman’s real life husband, Benjamin Millepied. Needless to say, the movie divides the audience. Equally needless to say, it wants to.
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