AMERICAN movies dominated this year's Toronto Film Festival representing over a third the whole programme with 64 new features on show. One of the most surprises was Grace Of My Heart, the flawed but pleasurable new movie from Allison Anders after the mess that was her Mi Vida Loca and even worse, her episode in Four Rooms. In Grace Of My Heart Illeana Douglas, so impressive in To Die For last year, plays an aspirant pop singer who moves to New York in the late 1950s.
At the celebrated hit factory, the Brill Building, she is taken on by a manager (John Turturro in an outrageous wig and goatee) who tells her that male groups are eroding the position of girl singers and that she should concentrate on songwriting. Given the number of big hits scored by the likes of Brenda Lee and Connie Francis around that time, that notion seems rather unlikely.
Whatever, Douglas turns out a string of hits while suffering several disappointments in love - with the man (Eric Stoltz) who becomes her co writer, a married disc jockey (Bruce Davison) and the musically ambitious lead singer (Matt Dillon) of a surfing group.
The Douglas character is said to be inspired by Carole King, while Dillon's character is clearly based on Brian Wilson, and the movie flounders when it moves to the west coast and brings both of them together. Nevertheless, Grace Of My Heart is a spirited and energetic picture which oozes affection for the pop music scene at the time, as replicated in some gorgeous pastiches written by, among others, Gerry Goffin (who was Carole King's husband and songwriting partner), Lesley Gore, Joni Mitchell, Dave Stewart, and best of all, Burt Bacharach and Elvis Costello, who collaborate on the big ballad, God Give Me Strength.
The provocative Abel Ferrara is back on form with the intriguing and violent gangster saga, The Funeral, starring Christopher Walken in an edgy and electrifying performance. Scripted by Ferrara's regular writer, Nicholas St John, and set in 1930s New York, The Funeral focusses on three criminal brothers who, as young boys, were initiated in violent retribution by their cold blooded father.
This is a moral tale populated by amoral characters who share a hypocritical avowal of Catholicism. Sex for these men is, like their violence, cold and functional and designed solely to satisfy their masculine urges. Made with a very keen sense of period, Ferrara's compelling and often startling drama features a fine cast including, along with the sublime Walken, Chris Penn, Vincent Gallo, Annabella Sciorra, Isabella Rossellini and Benicio Del Toro.
Director Michael Corrente fails miserably in attempting to capture a similar intensity in his resolutely stage bound treatment of David Mamet's 20 year old play, American Buffalo, adapted by Mamet himself. Beyond recording Mamet's punchy dialogue on film, this effort's only value is Dustin Hoffman's all consuming, expletive spouting performance, a masterclass in close up acting, and he is well supported in this three hander by Dennis Franz (from NYPD Blue) and Sean Nelson (from Fresh). But Corrente most unwisely situates all three on what is achingly obviously a stage set, and his attempts to open out the play are clumsy and grating.
Tom DiCillo, whose previous movie, Living In Oblivion, was actually set on a film set, moves into the great wide open for a characteristically quirky comedy in the engaging and unexpectedly mellow Box Of Moonlight. John Turturro plays an uptight engineer who, when a project is cancelled, encounters an unpredictable, free spirited young man (Sam Rockwell) who helps him to loosen up. Filmed against striking locations in the Smoky Mountains of Tennessee, DiCillo's appealing movie is anchored in the sparkling on screen chemistry of the always reliable Turturro and the very promising young Rockwell.
Screenwriting brothers Larry and Andy Wachowski make a notable directing debut - clearly influenced by the brothers Joel and Ethan Coen - with a quite unpredictable modern day film noir in Bound. After an off putting opening in which the dialogue is too self consciously hard boiled their film commands the attention as it unravels, a murky tale of crime and duplicity in which the protagonists are vibrantly etched by Jennifer Tilly and Joe Pantoliano as a criminal couple and Gina Gershon as the tattooed lesbian ex con who comes between them.
Stanley Tucci, who so memorably played the sinister Richard Cross in Murder One, and actor Campbell Scott join forces to co direct the tender and touching Big Night, which does for Italian food what Bahette's Feast, Tampopo, Eat Drink Man Woman and Like Water For Chocolate did for the preparation and serving of cuisine from other countries.
Set in 1950s New Jersey, the bittersweet scenario of Big Night involves immigrant Bolognese brothers (Tucci and Tony Shalhoub) daring to serve authentic Italian food in their struggling restaurant while rival establishments serving conventional Italian fare draw full houses.
The son of Gena Rowlands and the late John Cassavetes, Nick Cassavetes, makes his directing debut with the melancholy Unhook The Stars, a low key, slow burning character study which gradually seduces its audience. At its core is the luminous Gena Rowlands playing a widow at a crossroads in her life. She befriends a physically abused young neighbour (Maria Tomei) and becomes a mother all over again to Tomei's ingenuous young son (Jake Lloyd), while tentatively getting involved with a Quebecois truck driver played by Gerard Depardieu.
Back in the heyday of John Cassavetes, the factually based 1969 cult movie, The Honeymoon Killers dealt with an unscrupulous gigolo and an overweight nurse exploiting - and sometimes killing - lonely widows and single women. That story is revisited in Arturo Ripstein's new Mexican film, Deep Crimson, which features formidable performances from Daniel Gimenez Cacho as the oily opportunist who styles himself after Charles Boyer, and Regina Orozco as the nurse whose becomes so besotted by him that she gives up her children and takes to the road with him in search of vulnerable victims. Her driven desperation recalls the Kathy Bates character in Misery and there are recurring echoes of Bunuel's influence in Ripstein's imaginative direction.
Set five years later in a dreary postwar England, Philip Goodhew's similarly dark toned Intimate Relations is also based on a true story of sexual obsession that ended in murder, and it evokes the spirit of Joe Orton (and specifically, his Entertaining Mr Sloane) in its blackly satirical humour.
Rupert Graves was named best actor - at the Montreal festival last month for his performance in Intimate Relations as a young sailor who takes boiled sweets to control his propensity for violence, and Julie Walters plays the married woman who takes him in as a lodger and as a lover. Goodhew's sharp screenplay regularly pokes fun at the repressive and hypocritical attitudes of the time and only loses its way when the narrative has to take over in the later stages.
The nadir of the Toronto programme was another British film, The Leading Man, made by the generally reliable Australian director, John Duigan, and written by his sister, Virginia. This rambling and implausible yarn of infidelity among London theatrical types features a chest waxed Jon Bon Jovi in the title role, but he and a cast that includes Anna Galiena, Lambert Wilson and Thandie Newton are set adrift by arch, stilted dialogue. "We can't go on like this," observes one character in the story. Too right!
