Two years after launching his frank picture of sexual duplicity, Two Girls and a Guy, at the Toronto International Film Festival, the screenwriter and director James Toback returned a fortnight ago to deliver one of the festival's edgier American movies in Black and White, in which Toback stirs up a provocative cocktail of sex, race and hip hop.
The opening scene sets the tone as the camera observes two young white women having sex with a black man in Central Park in broad daylight. The film sets out to explore why so many privileged white New York teens have immersed themselves so deeply in black culture that they assume their dress, language and mannerisms, while living their lives to a soundtrack of rap and hip hop. To this end, Toback features Brooke Shields (unrecognisable in dreadlocks and with a ring in her nose) as a film-maker making a documentary on the subject.
"We call ourselves niggas," one of the white women from the park scene tells her. Played by singer Bijou Phillips, she is involved with a Harlem rapper (Oli "Power" Grant from the Wu Tang Clan). Model-turned-actress Claudia Schiffer plays a graduate student who drops her white detective lover (Ben Stiller) for a young black basketball star (Allan Houston), who makes the point that "white people are as different from each other as black people are from each other". Self-evident, of course, but worth stating in the context of the movie.
Time and again Toback's topical, simmering film rings true, but ultimately it is undermined by the sheer scale of Toback's ambition. By threading the narrative with so many situations and characters, he distracts attention from the picture's keenly-observed central focus, especially in the superfluous sub-plot involving Stiller's sexually jealous and morally dubious detective.
Robert Downey Jr, a regular actor in Toback's films, is wonderfully deadpan as the Brooke Shields character's gay husband who has a propensity for coming on to avowedly heterosexual men. In the film's funniest scene, he persists with propositioning the bulky, lisping Mike Tyson (who plays himself), and Tyson's reply is unprintable.
After the disappointments of Wyatt Earp and French Kiss, the American writer-director, Lawrence Kasdan, is back on form with Mumford, which had its world premiere in Toronto. The movie takes its title from the archetypal small American town where it's set and from the surname of the area's urbane new psychiatrist (Loren Dean) whose success with his patients threatens the practices of the town's two other shrinks (Jane Adams and David Paymer).
Dr Mumford is a patient listener to all his patients, with the exception of an overbearing lawyer (Martin Short) whom he throws out. He helps a middle-aged suburban woman (Mary McDonnell) who's neglected by her investment banker husband (Ted Danson) and becomes addicted to mail order shopping. He befriends a lonely, skateboarding young billionaire (Jason Lee) who produces a quarter of the world's modems yet finds it difficult to connect in his personal life. And Mumford is drawn to a pallid, young, divorced woman (Hope Davis) who suffers from chronic fatigue syndrome.
The result is a well-judged, multi-charactered, serious comedy played by an exemplary cast in the tradition of Kasdan's The Big Chill, Grand Canyon and The Acci- dental Tourist. At the centre of this film about people re-inventing themselves there is a neat narrative twist which proves refreshingly at odds with Hollywood's traditionally respectful treatment of psychotherapy.
The US theatre director Jim Stern makes his feature film debut with All the Rage, which employs black comedy to deal with the controversial issue of the easy availability and casual misuse of guns in contemporary American life. Stern lines up an attractive cast which includes Joan Allen and Jeff Daniels as a couple who split up after he kills a colleague, claiming he mistook him for a burglar; Andre Braugher as a married lawyer secretly involved with a jilted film buff (David Schwimmer); Anna Paquin as a street urchin and Giovanni Ribisi as her protective brother; Robert Forster as a disillusioned detective; Gary Sinese as a wealthy, eccentric recluse and Josh Brolin as his aide who quits to work in a video store.
In attempting to bring all these characters together, Stern begins to lose the point of his film, despite the promise of its initially intriguing sequences, and he sacrifices the talent of his well-chosen cast to a screenplay which turns gradually more feeble and flaccid.
Irish interest at Toronto centered on The Last September, I Could Read the Sky, and Damien O'Donnell's East is East, which was so enthusiastically received that many thought it a strong contender for the annual Audience Award. In the end, however, from the 265 feature films screening at Toronto, audiences chose as their favourite the Sam Mendes film, American Beauty, featuring Kevin Spacey and Annette Bening, with second place going to the first film from Bhutan, The Cup, which is showing at the Cork festival this month (see above).
There was no award at Toronto for best title; had there been, I would have a nominated a Canadian short dealing with foot fetishism and titled Babette's Feet.
