TIFF Highlights: Keith Richards, Space, and Utter Destruction
In between all the late night parties, meetings, and schmoozing sessions, 473,000 audiences and industry pundits, miraculously, also managed to catch some films at this year's Toronto International Film Festival. Some ballots were cast, too, and the Grolsch People's Choice Award went to Lenny Abrahamson's Room, told through the eyes of a young boy who'd never known a world beyond the confines of a single 10-by-10-foot room. The two runner-ups were Pan Nalin's comedy Angry Indian Goddesses and Tom McCarthy's Spotlight, about Boston Globe journalists that uncovered the Massachusetts Catholic sex abuse scandal.
Ilya Naishuller's Russian cyborg film Hardcore, touted as the world's first action-adventure film to be entirely shot from the first person perspective, won the Midnight Madness Award, with Jeremy Saulnier's Green Room and Todd Strauss-Schulson's The Final Girls as runner ups.
Meanwhile, Evgeny Afineevsky's Winter on Fire: Ukraine’s Fight for Freedom was the People's Choice on the documentary side.
New to TIFF this year was the $25,000 Toronto Platform Prize handed out by an international jury. Ironically, the prize went to a Canadian, Alan Zweig's Hurt, about cross-country runner Steve Fonyo's difficult journey through life. Stephen Dunn's Closet Monster, about a young gay man's coming of age, won the $30,000 Canada Goose Award for Best Canadian Feature Film.
The 11-day festival closed with a special treat for cinema lovers, a screening of Alfred Hitchcock's classic, Vertigo, accompanied by the Toronto Symphony Orchestra and the now 82-year-old star of the film, Kim Novak.
Here are some more films that you should know about that we caught at the festival.
AnomalisaDirector: Charlie Kaufman, Duke Johnson
Stars: Tom Noonan, Jennifer Jason Leigh, David Thewlis
It takes a real gift to take the numbingly mundane and make it feel extraordinary. Actually, it just takes Charlie Kaufman. Anomalisa is a stop-motion animated picture that subtly brings to life the very familiar in a way that feels so incredibly intimate. We gaze with recognition as Michael Stone, a productivity expert with a bestseller to his name endures a taxi ride with a chatty driver, checks into a hotel and tucks away into his room before the next day's speaking engagement—the stench of loneliness in the air. Everything looks and feels the same, and everyone, literally, sounds like Tom Noonan. That is, everyone except Lisa (Jennifer Jason Leigh), a shy, self-deprecating but vivacious woman whom he meets at the hotel.
He is jolted alive by her presence, an anomaly, that captivates him. Stone lives in a modern world that's largely indifferent, impersonal, and soulless. More than anything it is that thirst for a raw human connection—no matter how fleeting—that consumes him and draws him to Lisa. Anomalisa is a beautifully rendered, heartbreaking, funny, and piercingly poignant observation of life and its melancholy nature. It's got a truly special humanity that breaks through all the clutter.
DemolitionDirector: Jean-Marc Vallee
Stars: Jake Gyllenhaal, Naomi Watts, Chris Cooper
It's normal to go into mourning after your wife dies in a car crash. But it is decidedly less conventional to begin to gleefully take things apart in order to cope with that loss. Yet that's exactly what Davis Mitchell (Jake Gyllenhaal) does in Jean-Marc Vallee's Demolition. A successful investment banker by day, he sleepwalks through a life he doesn't quite fit into anymore—until he discovers a penchant for deconstructing objects and demolishing buildings. A series of long-winded letters to a vending machine company's customer service department begins an unlikely, oddly-matched correspondence with a fellow troubled soul, Karen Moreno (Naomi Watts), and helps Mitchell find a connection with the world again.
Demolition is perhaps a little too leaden with metaphors and melodramatic emotional cues for the structure to sustain at times, and it isn't entirely grounded in realism either. But the film's quirk, humor, moments of raw honesty, Vallee-esque soundtrack, and Gyllenhaal's performance might just penetrate the numbness and make the audience feel something, just like Mitchell is so desperate to do by blowing things apart. Within the chaos sometimes we find ourselves.
The MartianDirector: Ridley Scott
Stars: Matt Damon, Jessica Chastain, Kristen Wiig, Kate Mara
It's not everyday your fellow astronauts ditch you on Mars. Yet that's exactly what happens to Mark Watney (Matt Damon). To be fair, they thought he was dead. Still, the facts are the facts, and Watney is left all alone on Mars, with a dwindling food supply and only himself as company. Luckily, he's pretty entertaining and equally resourceful—the best botanist on Mars, even. Damon, is a joy to watch, which is a great thing given that he's a domineering presence for most of the film's running time. The rest of the time it can feel like a big-budget Ridley Scott-directed NASA recruitment video. But it's smart, looks stunning, and has Jeff Daniels running NASA—so why not? At its heart though, The Martian is an ode to science, math, human ingenuity, perseverance, and collaboration. It celebrates the best of humanity.
Keith Richards: Under the InfluenceDirector: Morgan Neville
Stars: Keith Richards
"To 99.9% of people, it's Keith Richards smoking a joint, a bottle of Jack Daniels in his hand, walking down the road, cursing the fact that the liquor store is closed," explains Keith Richards in a documentary dedicated to himself, "Image is like a ball and chain, when the sun goes down it doesn't disappear." It's hard not to appreciate getting a chance to spend some time with the chain-smoking Richards in a more intimate setting, whether tagging along for a visit to Chicago’s Chess Records, the recording studio, or the Ryman Auditorium in Nashville. The stories are interesting. And we get a fascinating peek inside the evolution of a classic like "Sympathy for the Devil" from a Dylan-esque ballad to the rock song we know today.
But the focus on the new tunes from Richards' Crosseyed Heart, is a little less thrilling and comes off more on the promotional side. It could have been interesting to explore how a legendary musician continues to create and evolve in the overbearing presence of his "image," but doesn't dig deep enough, instead inadvertently reinforcing the notion that perhaps the glory days are behind him now.
High-RiseDirector: Ben Wheatley
Stars: Tom Hiddleston, Sienna Miller, Jeremy Irons
It's taken some time to get J.G. Ballard's 1975 novel High-Rise onto the big screen, with cult filmmaker Ben Wheatley intriguingly at the helm. There's no doubt this one will split audiences firmly into two camps. If one is attached to proper linear narratives and character development, then they'd certainly struggle to find either of those here. But what do you expect from a movie that introduces its main character while he's roasting a dog on his balcony? Instead, we are thrust into a visual and visceral experience of nightmarish proportions.
In London a young doctor (Tom Hiddleston) moves into a luxury tower where residents are beginning to rebel, presumably, against the inherent class injustice within the building—as timely a subject now as it was in 1975, though it isn’t established with any real clarity in the film. Soon it's complete anarchy, with residents eating dogs, having orgies, and plenty of violence, madness, and degradation. High-Rise is a heavily stylized display of sex, destruction, and violence—but it feels all too free-flowing and abstract with much of the book's social commentary covered up by the decadent behavior and mayhem on the screen. As the film goes on you start to pinch yourself in hopes of waking up. But like any good nightmare, it's hard to shake off the next day.
Katherine Brodsky is an entertainment writer whose work appears in Variety, Playboy Magazine, Entertainment Weekly, USA Weekend, A.V. Club, Mashable, and many others. Follow her on Twitter @mysteriouskat.
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