The current Toronto film festival is premiering a number of Oscar contenders - and one hilarious send-up of the whole awards mania. Michael Dwyer reports
AMONG its many distinctions, the Toronto International Film Festival has developed a track record for triggering the start of the Academy Awards season. Most of this year's Oscar winners - Brokeback Mountain, Walk the Line, Capote, Tsotsi - were launched here last autumn, and Crash, the surprise winner of this year's Oscar for best picture, had its world premiere at Toronto back in 2004.
It's entirely appropriate, then, that this year's programme includes a movie following the progress of an unheralded US low-budget indie when Oscar buzz builds around it. For Your Consideration takes its title from the euphemism traditionally used to emblazon advertisements in the film trade press for potential contenders. The movie's tongue is firmly in its cheek.
For Your Consideration reassembles the core team whose mockumentaries have lampooned heavy metal bands (in This Is Spinal Tap), small-town theatre (Waiting for Guffman), pedigree dog contests (Best in Show) and folk music (A Mighty Wind). Opting for a fictional narrative, scripters Christopher Guest (who also directed) and Eugene Levy have produced their funniest satire.
A lowly paid cast and crew are working on a tacky sentimental melodrama, Home for Purim, when an internet rumour on filmtattle.com suggests that lead actress Marilyn Hack (Catherine O'Hara) - who hasn't had a decent role since she played a blind prostitute decades earlier - could figure in the Oscar nominations for her performance as the movie's ailing materfamilias. Desperate for space-filling material, various TV shows pick up on the rumour, and two other cast members (Parker Posey and Harry Shearer) are also touted as potential Oscar nominees.
This merciless spoof pokes fun at the vanity and insecurity of actors, the vacuity of US TV entertainment and talk shows and their absurdly coiffured presenters, along with an inept but mercenary agent (Levy), a clueless producer (Jennifer Coolidge) whose money comes from her family's nappie-cleaning business, and a studio head (Ricky Gervais) who is patently insincere. The irony is that the movie itself could secure Oscar nominations next spring for its hilarious screenplay and for the admirably deadpan O'Hara. (You read that rumour here first.)
The laughs come even faster in the uproariously politically incorrect Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan, starring Sacha Baron Cohen in a gleefully oversized performance as Borat Sagdiyev, the Kazak TV reporter he created on TV in Da Ali G Show. A prelude set on his home turf briskly establishes Borat as a naive, opportunistic and sexist character who actually boasts that his sister is "the number four prostitute in all of country".
Landing some state funding, Borat and his obese producer (gamely played by Ken Davitian) embark on a fact-finding documentary about the US where his multiple misadventures involve kissing startled men on both cheeks; shocking representatives of the Veteran Feminists of America; enraging a rodeo audience by singing the lyrics of the Kazakhstan national anthem to the tune of the US anthem; and appalling a southern family when he brings a prostitute as his dinner guest, not because of her profession, but because she's black.
Directed by Larry Charles at a frantic pace, Borat never misses an opportunity to poke fun at American mores. To make his points about bigotry in a movie with something to offend everyone without a sense of humour, Cohen, who is Jewish, peppers the picture with casually anti-Semitic remarks. The narrative, such as it is, involves Borat discovering a Baywatch repeat on latenight TV and setting out to marry Pamela Anderson, sportingly playing herself in a movie that had the Toronto press screening audience quaking with laughter from start to finish.
The humour is more nuanced and bittersweet in Venus, which reunites director Roger Michell and screenwriter Hanif Kureishi after their collaboration on The Mother, in which a 60-something woman falls for a man half her age. In Venus, an irascible, elderly actor, Maurice Russell (Peter O'Toole) finds himself unexpectedly drawn to Jessie (Jodie Whittaker), the 19-year-old grandniece of his best friend and fellow thespian (Leslie Phillips).
Even though they are polar opposites in every respect, Jessie gradually responds to the caring attention Maurice offers. The suspicion lingers that Maurice has an ulterior motive, and this is fuelled when he sets her up as a nude model at an art class, where her pose recalls the Velazquez painting, Venus, from which Maurice borrows his pet name for her.
Their relationship is treated delicately and credibly in this melancholy movie where most of the principal characters are of an age to be acutely aware of their mortality. Phillips seizes on one of the meatiest roles of his long career, and there are engaging appearances by Richard Griffiths and a radiant Vanessa Redgrave, while newcomer Whittaker impressively holds her own in such august company.
The movie, however, belongs to O'Toole, who is on peak form for a lovely, endearing portrayal that has prompted a great deal of Oscar buzz in Toronto. That award would be long overdue, and Miramax doubtless will remind the voters that O'Toole has been nominated seven times without winning.
Two US pictures that had seemed primed for Oscars took a serious stumble at Toronto.
Steven Zaillian's new screen treatment of the Robert Penn Warren novel, All the King's Men, originally was set to open last December, but post-production delays pushed back the release to autumn, as the awards season kicks off. Robert Rossen's 1949 film of the same novel won three Oscars, including best picture and best actor for Broderick Crawford's powerhouse portrayal of Willy Stark, a corrupt politician modelled on Louisiana governor Huey Long.
Zaillian insists that his film is a fresh interpretation of the novel and that he didn't watch the Rossen version before making his own. If he had, he might have become aware of the crucial structural problems in his own screenplay, which is all too sketchy in its depiction of Stark's rise from door-to-door salesman to socialist political campaigner to state governor.
Sean Penn plays Stark in a grandstanding performance that seems shallow compared to Jude Law's subtly effective portrayal of journalist Jack Burden, who joins Stark's team and is eventually faced with an ethical personal dilemma that appears to interest Zaillian at least as much as Stark's rise and fall. The rest of the stellar cast - Kate Winslet, Mark Ruffalo, Patricia Clarkson, Anthony Hopkins - are generally underused.
A deeper disappointment is Darren Aronofsky's third feature film, The Fountain, which arrived in Toronto trailing boos from critics at Venice last week. I approached it with an open mind, given the cinematic force and imagination of the director's earlier Requiem for a Dream. The Fountain certainly does not lack for ambition, being set across three eras (1500, 2000 and 2500) and following a quest for the Tree of Life as noted in an opening quote from Genesis regarding Adam and Eve's expulsion from the Garden of Eden.
Hugh Jackman plays a conquistador devoted to the queen (Rachel Weisz) in 16th-century Spain. That story is the subject of a novel elegantly handwritten in the present by an author (Weisz again) whose husband (Jackman again) is a cancer specialist experimenting on chimpanzees to find a cure for her brain tumour. A bald Jackman plays the futuristic astronaut in the space oddity intersected with the other strands in a movie that is visually quite interesting, but dramatically and emotionally uninvolving.
By contrast, writer-director Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck's The Lives of Others (Das Leben der Anderen) is firmly conventional in form, classically so - and riveting to experience. Set in East Germany in 1984 when, an opening caption notes, "glasnost was nowhere in sight", it introduces its protagonist, Gerd Wiesler (consummately played by Ulrich Mühe) as a Stasi officer utterly dedicated to his position at the department of state security. In an early sequence, Wiesler succinctly demonstrates his skills for collecting evidence against suspected miscreants in an illustrated lecture on interrogation tactics.
Complications arise when a venal minister assigns him to investigate a respected playwright and his lover, a highly rated actress. Wiesler approaches this task with characteristic diligence, becoming obsessed with the subjects of his meticulous surveillance operation.
Eschewing histrionics and heavy-handed hindsight, this remarkable film is a riposte to the sharp comic satire of Good Bye Lenin! This is the serious flipside of that story - the gruelling repression of those years before the Berlin Wall came down, when state informers abounded, nobody could trust anybody else, and personal freedom was barely a notional aspiration.
Foolishly rejected by the Berlin and Cannes festivals this year, The Lives of Others has struck a chord in Germany, where it has been a significant commercial success, and it swept the boards at the country's national film awards. It is a chilling, fascinating and salutary drama, and a formidable contender for an Oscar in the spring.
Michael Dwyer concludes his reports from Toronto in The Irish Times next Wednesday
