Amidst the sea of flickering Blackberries being lovingly fondled by the throng of jaded industry professionals, one thing stood out for me at this year’s Toronto International Film Festival: the films seemed to be dominated by strong women; particularly by actresses of all shapes, sizes, and ages. After being subjected to a long, hot summer filled with the smell of testosterone in the theaters, the ladies are back with a vengeance. And they are ready not only for their close-ups, but also for their accolades.

There are always cries about how women are getting the shaft in film. There’s not a year that passes where there is some wag insisting that it is “a weak year for actresses”. While this might have an unfortunate grain of truth in most typical years, 2007 is shaping up to be unusually warm to the idea of women as equal partners in terms of cinematic importance. The playing field this year may mercifully be leveled, thanks in part to the tremendous achievements of a handful of women who brought their offerings to festival crowds this year.

Most of the buzz this year will revolve around the dozen or so expert performances that had their North American premiere at the TIFF. Most major films had at least one outstanding role for an actress somewhere (or, as was the case with Joe Wright’s Atonement, there were at least four), while many will be competing for spots in the female acting races early next year at the Oscars.

Getting a jump on the competition, Neil Jordan’s polarizing The Brave One, starring the excellent Jodie Foster, showed on day one, proving to be more than just another standard Foster-big budget extravaganza. A tale of revenge and love that owes a debt of gratitude to modern Asian language cinema as much as it does to the classic Western, The Brave One has been criticized by many as being “over-the-top” and “unbelievable”.

Even though most critics have unanimously cited Foster’s performance (which was more natural than anything the actress has done in recent memory) as one of her best—and many, like me, are calling for a deserved Oscar nomination, the film itself has been widely received in a more lukewarm manner than it was by the festival crowds I saw it with; in Toronto, there was nothing but surprised enthusiasm over this one.

Ang Lee’s beautifully made sex thriller Lust, Caution, adapted from one of Eileen Chang’s novels, didn’t quite live up to expectations, despite being technically very solid. Almost every person I spoke with regarding this film found it disappointing, as a whole, but there was universal praise for the debut leading performance of Tang Pei. The actress had a vivid character to play: a naïve young actress that becomes a political radical and ends up using her sexuality to exert control over a government official. The demanding role required Tang to simulate various, intimate sex acts (that come across as looking quite real), as well as hit dramatic highs and lows. Thanks to Lee’s masterful knack for casting, the newcomer pulled it off beautifully, dignity intact.

Noah Baumbach, of The Squid and the Whale fame, offered up one of the strongest displays of female acting at the festival with his newest, Margot at the Wedding; giving his wife Jennifer Jason Leigh and Nicole Kidman their best roles in years as sniping sisters who are inexplicably connected despite years of emotional terrorism towards each other.

Unremittingly dark and unapologetically unafraid to show the main characters as unsympathetically damaged and flawed; Margot (which has more than a few Ingmar Bergman overtones) is a two-woman showcase for Kidman and Leigh to flex their acting muscles as two very different, yet fundamentally linked sisters who share a turbulent history with one another. Leigh, who is always a pleasure to watch, should be up for the Oscar that has eluded her for more than fifteen years (in a just world). Her Pauline is one of the actresses’ finest creations: earthy, natural, and soft; a welcome change from the risky actress known for her portrayals of intense, damaged women. The range and maturity that Leigh conveys is astounding.

Kidman, who can be hit or miss, is on fire as Margot. Not since her role in 2001’s The Others, has the actress found such a perfect character with which to harness her natural iciness and neuroses. Margot is a tangle of nerve endings about to explode. She is brainy, lonely, and what this boils down to is a veritable field day for any actress. Kidman realizes the opportunity and plays the part beautifully. This is a character who would have been right at home in a film in the 1970s by John Cassavetes or Woody Allen, and Margot is the perfect marriage of actresses, director, and script.

In Bloom, director Vadim Perelman’s follow-up to 2003’s House of Sand and Fog, can be seen as a success in that it highlights three strong, unique female performances: Uma Thurman, Evan Rachel Wood, and Susan Sarandon’s daughter Eva Amurri play three women coping with the effects of a high school shooting. Each brings something unusual and strong to the bleak, sometimes off-kilter film. Perelman, as he did with his first feature, shows a clear affinity for working with capable actresses.

While Anton Corbijn’s Control may have been about the boys club of Joy Division, it was co-star Samantha Morton who quietly stole the show as Ian Curtis’ young wife Debbie. In a film where the boys all got to go out and play rock and roll, sleep with all of the groupies, and get all of the glory, it was Debbie’s story that kept the biopic rooted firmly in reality. Morton, in yet another fully-realized portrayal, never lets Debbie slink into the trap of being just another “wife role” –- something that Terry George could have taken pointers on when making Reservation Road, a film that sadly relegates Oscar winners Jennifer Connelly and Mira Sorvino to the supportive sidelines in routine “spouse” roles.

The same, unfortunately, is true for Reese Witherspoon (who won an Oscar for playing “the wife” role in Walk the Line) in Gavin Hood’s Rendition. The actress has very little to do as the put-upon wife of an Egyptian national who is mistakenly labeled a terrorist, other than play a second-rate, shrieking Nancy Drew alongside Peter Sarsgaard. Not even the presence of Meryl Streep (venturing awfully close to self-parody in her essentially stock role) can save this sentimental, clichéd disappointment. What wants to be an edgy, timely examination on Middle East policies and modern warfare instead devolves into an overly-liberal stinker.

For real political edge, the film to turn to at the TIFF this year was an animated one: artist Marjane Satrapi (along with co-director Vincent Paronnaud) adapted her own autobiographical graphic novel Persepolis to resounding success. Spanning decades, beginning in Iran as the Shah comes to power and the Islamic fundamentalists seize control of the government, Satrapi examines what war means for a young, outspoken woman in a country where men dominate almost everything and women are second class citizens.

The second half of Persepolis finds Marjane sent away to Europe by her politically-active parents and taking a pointed look at racism towards people of Middle Eastern descent. There are a lot of bold ideas happening in the film, which is peppered with a droll sense of humor and an assured artist’s touch. Every element that was essential to the success of the books has been gloriously transferred to the big-screen version intact; and while this isn’t a frame-for-frame recreation of the novels, Persepolis never suffers from refusing to be slavishly devoted to its source materials.

While the clear presence of women could definitely be seen in the acting achievements, there was also a major feminine impact in the director’s stakes: Satrapi, Julie Taymor, Tamara Jenkins, Robin Swicord, Alison Eastwood, and Helen Hunt all debuted films at the TIFF this year, to varying degrees of success. But the major thing to remember here is that when you stroll into a local multiplex, and choose a film, it is highly unlikely that a major studio film is going to be directed by a woman. So to see five ladies, all confidently in control of their visions, get a chance to show five very different films at a major festival like this, there is a glimmer or hope for the directorial future of women; even if some of the films ended up as grand misfires.

Taymor’s film, Across the Universe provoked another love-it-or-hate-it reaction from most festival-goers. The visionary director (whose Titus and Frida were both visually stunning) was given near-unanimous praise for its visually stunning uniqueness. The music (culled from the back catalogue of The Beatles) was the real star of the show, as most fans would point out; but the film’s script received a lot of criticism for being of mediocre quality, with laughable dialogue.

Across the Universe garnered some attention earlier this year when the film was taken out of Taymor’s hands (by studio executives), and handed over to another editor to whittle down the three-plus hour running time. While the director and the studio eventually found a happy medium, as far as length goes, the fact that the film was taken away from the artist shows a glaring discrepancy from the way a male director’s film might have been received: with Taymor, her film was taken away because of a perceived incompetence. Had this been a male director’s film, he would have been called an auteur.

The director will have another battle on her hands when the film is widely released: will the public pay to see what is essentially a two and a half hour, grand-scale music video for The Beatles? Is there a viable audience for this music anymore that will come out to support it?

Jenkins fared much better with her biting, effective The Savages, her first feature since 1998’s The Slums of Beverly Hills. Tackling sibling rivalry, the state of elder care in the US, and familial bonds during times of crisis, Jenkins was able to scale back all of the obvious emotions tied to these often taboo subjects and strip everything down to it’s bare bones; creating an indelible, funny, and often touching film about the titular family.

Phillip Seymour Hoffman and Laura Linney, as the brother and sister who must come together and stop being self-involved when their ailing father (Phillip Bosco) becomes their dependent, give career-best performances in The Savages, thanks mainly to Jenkins’ impeccable script – which gives the actors a chance to cover all of the bases.

Swicord is known mostly for being a screenwriter (she famously adapted Memoirs of a Geisha and Little Women), which is why the mild The Jane Austen Book Club, her feature directorial debut, comes off as a bit disappointing.

Despite having a solid cast of women (including Amy Brennenman, Maria Bello, Kathy Baker, and the great Emily Blunt), the film is so conventional and poorly-edited that even the biggest supporters of the “chick flick” will likely be unsatisfied with this lumbering adaptation.

Hunt fares much better in the directorial debut and novel adaptation stakes, mainly because of her familiarity with the genre: the romantic comedy. Then She Found Me is a light, confident directorial debut that shows Hunt at the top of her genre game: the actress directs not only herself with a strong touch; but also gives beloved veteran Bette Midler a chance to prove herself as a character actress after being sadly put out to pasture for the last few years as a performer.

Hunt’s graciousness in turning each scene Midler is in over to the respected, gifted star is a very smart (and bold) move for both women. The idea of a female director (who is also the star of the picture) supporting another woman of another generation so generously is one that needs to be explored more in feature filmmaking, and Hunt makes it look effortless and fun.

Clint’s daughter, Alison Eastwood, gave it a game try with her directorial debut Rails & Ties, but the formulaic, unbelievable plot and plodding television movie editing kill the film’s emotional pull, despite a very nice performance by Marcia Gay Harden and a less successful one by Kevin Bacon, as a husband and wife who illegally take in an orphan after a train accident.

Films made by male artists, Julian Schnabel’s sumptuous The Diving Bell and the Butterfly and Canadian director David Cronenberg’s expert Eastern Promises, focused more on male lead characters, but still offered up strong female characters with balance and poise: Promises boasted yet another canny, capable performance by Naomi Watts (who has been on a hot streak for a few years now); while Diving Bell featured four strong supporting roles in a film about a male author: Emanuelle Seigner, Marina Hands, Anne Cosigny, and the amazingly talented Marie-Josee Croze all took advantage of their relatively smallish parts and made each woman stand out.

Oddly enough, the festival’s most talked about female contribution came from a woman playing a man: Cate Blanchett as “Jude”, a distaff version of Bob Dylan in his electric, drug-addled era; had everyone frothing at the mouth. Blanchett, who showed amazing range this year playing two legends (Dylan and Queen Elizabeth I in Elizabeth: The Golden Age—which everyone expected to be her runaway success), soared to new artistic, surreal heights as Dylan, out-performing the entire cast that included Christian Bale, Heath Ledger, Julianne Moore, Michelle Williams, Charlotte Gainsbourg, and Richard Gere.

“The image of Dylan is so well-known and so woven into our cultural fabric now that I felt the sheer shock of it that people must have experienced at that time is gone,” said Haynes. “I wanted to find a way to re-infuse it with true strangeness – the eeriness and sexual uncertainty and diffusion. And that’s why I wanted to have a woman play the part. And it took Cate Blanchett to transform that tall order into something more than a cinematic stunt.”

While the casting of the triumphantly weird I’m Not There could be misconstrued as “stunt-y”, director Todd Haynes has directed one of our generation’s most capable actresses to perhaps her most daring, experimental performance to date. In a career that already includes playing Katharine Hepburn (in Martin Scorsese’s Oscar winner The Aviator), Queen Elizabeth (twice!), Nora and Hedda (onstage in Henrik Ibsen’s A Doll’s House and Hedda Gabler), and key part in the Lord of the Rings trilogy; Blanchett’s work in Haynes’ visionary re-telling of Dylan’s story just might be her riskiest maneuver to date—albeit one that pays off handsomely.

It’s refreshing and satisfying to see, for once, a woman getting one of the year’s most interesting, and talked-about parts; a role that theoretically (on the page) should have been played by a man. It is the kind of female contribution to the movies that makes the possibilities for actresses seem limitless. 

—Matt Mazur

In my previous two days at the Toronto International Film Festival, I have learned the hard way that not every film playing here can have the gravitas of my favorite so far, the bright The Diving Bell and the Butterfly. I would go so far to say that some of the films I saw here yesterday shouldn’t be playing anywhere at all.

They can’t all be award winners, I suppose. Yet still, whoever is selecting the movies for the festival is definitely doing something right: the quality overall is surprisingly strong. I’ve been lucky so far to have experienced such quality in quantity. I, like many exuberant festival-goers have been seeing multiple films each day. It is the best marathon ever. Atonement director Joe Wright echoed these statements, excitedly saying he was seeing three films a day, in the theaters, for the first time in a while: “I didn’t know I was so thirsty until I took a drink.”

Other than the two really horrific titles that I will explore today (in addition to three very important, artistic directorial breakthroughs—it isn’t all bad!), everything I have seen here has been mostly a pleasure. The general vibe on this year’s crop, as far as I can gather from other journalists and film fans I have had the chance to talk to, is overwhelmingly excited and positive.

Again, there are spoilers, but you know you love them!

At the showing of Atonement that I was lucky enough to attend, director Joe Wright (who also helmed 2005’s stunning Pride and Prejudice) came out beforehand to introduce us to the film.

Unfortunately, he said he would be skipping the expected Q&A afterwards, but instead he told a charming story about how his father was a puppet-maker (“not a lot of money in puppet-making,” he cracked) and a woman wanted to bring her children in to see what kind of show they could expect as her kids did not like “audience participation” activities.

Wright said that they only “audience participation” required for the puppet show would be the audience using their imaginations. His hope was that we would all do the same for Atonement; a film he called a story about “imagination”.

The film is most certainly about imagination and what kind of havoc it can bring to other people’s lives when it is misguided. Atonement, which begins in 1935 at the classical English country home belonging to the aristocratic Tallis family, also delves into the themes of family loyalty—a topic that has prevalent at this year’s TIFF.

Overall the tone of the piece is relatively somber, with the foolish little white lie told by the 13 year old Briony (Saoirse Ronan, giving a tremendous performance) triggering events that will haunt the Tallis family for the rest of their lives. When a series of misunderstandings lead her to believe sweet Robbie (a beautiful James McAvoy) has turned into a violent sexual predator and has gone after her sister Cecilia (luminous Keira Knightley), Briony thinks it best to make sure he gets his comeuppance.
In truth, what the girl has witnessed between her sister and the son of their housekeeper is a scene of romantic love that will forever be changed because of her lie: Robbie is sent to prison, and given the choice of going into the army or staying in jail. Thus, he embarks on a journey of his own into the horrors of WWII, as both Tallis girls stay behind and become nurses.

Across the board, there is not one bad performance from the cast, but it is the character of Briony that gets to enjoy the most dynamic arc. Played at ages 13, 18, and then as an old, dying woman (by three incredible actresses—Ronan, Romola Garai, and Vanessa Redgrave), this is the character who not only sets the story into motion, but also is the one who recounts all of the details; at the beginning and at the end. Each actress keeps a common thread of intensity brewing in Briony, hinting that she is not only fiercely intelligent and sensitive, but also a little untrustworthy; and in Redgrave’s master class of a final scene, this is confirmed.

The way Wright chooses to edit and flashback through the film is restrained and affecting. While the film is captivating to watch, it’s never flashy. The story’s emotional gravity is magnetic—and you just know that once the big misunderstanding that fuels the rest of the picture happens, that it will all play out tragically. Wright has masterfully set the mood.

The director has crafted a romantic epic with a modern, fresh twist that will likely gain popularity through word of mouth and critical hosannas (and the buzz is hot here in Toronto over it now). Wright’s impressive use of and understanding of the medium (color, light, and shadows, especially) plays out with grandeur as he puts together one of the most magnificent tracking shots I think I have seen; set on Dunkirk’s coast during the war. It lasts for around five minutes and is enthralling.

Visually, the film’s style is what will perhaps set it apart and elevate it from the typical war-set romances we have seen in cinema’s history. From the aforementioned tracking shot to the underwater sequences, credit must be given solely to Wright for this re-invigoration of the genre.

Perhaps the films most important lesson, which during Redgrave’s magnificent final scene is apparent, is that truthfulness (above everything) will set you free; but even the most inconsequential lie can ruin lives and change the course of history. While we may be able to live with the guilt of abusing the truth from day to day, one day we will all have to answer for whatever lies we have told. There are no free passes. Wright implores us, simply, that honesty is the best policy.

The film takes the position that not even a thirteen year old can hide behind age as an excuse. Everyone knows the difference between right and wrong from a very young age. No matter how much regret you feel afterwards (and the Garai/Redgrave version feel plenty), it is that crucial moment of decision in which we can become heroes or villains. Everyone has experienced this kind of choice, which makes the elegant Atonement easy to relate to.

Woody Allen also looks at the dark bonds of family in his newest film, which, like his previous two (Match Point and Scoop) are set in London rather than his usual venue, New York City.

If you are an Allen fan, nostalgic for his past romps in the city, with incisive wit and a light tough, Cassandra’s Dream is not going to be for you. If you are an Allen fan who is excited to see this living legend grow as an artist and boldly take a leap from what people have come to expect from him.

With Match Point and Cassandra, Allen takes out his pent-up aggressions and relieves his existential inquiries in a primal, cinematic way, here unleashing a quiet, sinister fury of complicated allegiances to family and how far you would go to protect yourself (in the most extreme circumstances) instead of your family. The director richly explores personal ethics in a way that he has in many of his films: the playwright who is being forced by the mob to re-write his script (Bullets Over Broadway), and the man who wants to have his mistress killed (Crimes and Misdemeanors) are just a sampling of Allen’s grappling onscreen with conscious and its borders.

Using the story of two working class brothers, Ian and Terry (Ewan MacGregor and Colin Farrell, both in top shape), Allen’s opening sequence shows the men buying a boat together, sweetly reminiscing about their childhood and their fond memories of their wealthy plastic surgeon to-the-stars uncle Howard (the always great Tom Wilkinson) taking them out sailing.

They let nostalgia win out, plunk down $6,000 that Terry (who has a nasty gambling problem and chronic migraines) has just won at the dog track. The brothers christen the skiff “Cassandra’s Dream”, after the winning dog that paid 60 to 1.

Coming from a working class family has encumbered the boys’ success in life: Ian has been stuck managing the family restaurant for their father (who is recovering from a heart attack), but his real aspiration is to move to Hollywood, where he once visited his benefactor uncle as a child.

Ian thinks that there is money to be made in hotels there and he yearns for a lifestyle that is far beyond his grasp. Terry has a more modest dream of owning a sports shop, but even this is still sadly out of his reach, mainly because of his gambling addiction and apparent dependency on pills and booze.

Terry loses $90,000 in a card game, as Ian begins taking up with Angela (Hayley Atwell), a scheming, career-minded actress. Just when the brothers think they have lost it all, Uncle Howard steps in with a life-saving proposition: he has had a problem with his business, namely a former employee threatening to go to the courts with evidence of a crime that will put Howard away forever. He asks his nephews to kill the man for him, noting his constant generosity to their family. Nothing is free in Howard’s world, and even murder isn’t out of the question when it comes to repayment.

Allen’s one glaring moment of pure sour grapes shows in his skewed depiction of Angela as a relentless climber with no morals. She is shown as moody, self-obsessed, and materialistic; but above all else, she offensively shown as talentless. This is a disturbing bit of commentary from a director known for getting such ace performances from women over the course of his forty year career. Angela is a relentless opportunist who can’t be trusted, and it feels as though Allen is pointing a finger of judgment at this type of woman.

Still, Cassandra’s Dream remains a taut, if slow-moving morality play in the vein of Allen’s cinematic idol Ingmar Bergman. The film is Allen at his most bleak, there are no moments of slap-stick, there are no real physical comedy gags or kvetching about; there is simply an unpredictable story about how easy it is for a man to commit murder, get away with it (and with a reward), and be able to live with himself after the fact.

Allen should definitely be commended for freeing himself of the restraints of convention that have peppered his cannon, and his principle actors should also be given a pat on the back for turning in two of their finest performances.

One of my most anticipated films playing in Toronto was director Terry George’s follow up to his critical darling Hotel Rwanda, Reservation Road. A drama set in New England, starring four really dependable players (Jennifer Connelly, Joaquin Phoenix, Mark Ruffalo, and Mira Sorvino), the film explores a similar theme to Atonement and Cassandra’s Dream: man’s conscious and its parameters are again tested, to less riveting effect here than in the other films.

“Atonement” and coping with every day life, in the aftermath of a terrible tragedy is what’s on the menu here. One fateful night Dwight (Ruffalo, continuing his ‘07b hot streak with this and Zodiac) is speeding home with his sleeping son (Eddie Alderson) after a Red Sox game. His ex-wife Ruth (Sorvino) is already angry that he is bringing the boy home late.

The Learner family (Connelly, Phoenix, Elle Fanning, and Sean Curley) is coming home from their son’s cello recital. They have to stop for their daughter to use the bathroom at a gas station on Reservation Road, when inexplicably, in the blink of an eye, everyone’s lives are forever changed by an accident, followed by a series of bad decisions and cover-ups.

Dwight, a lawyer, swerved to miss a car that came into his lane, and in the process hit the Learner’s young son. Ethan (Phoenix), in a fit of panic, attends to his son who lay on the side of the road dead. He doesn’t get much of a glimpse of the car (though he knows it is a black SUV), much less a good look at the offending driver. Grace (Connelly) watches the whole thing unfold with their daughter, completely horrified and powerless.

Thanks mainly to the four actors; the opening sequence is unnerving and tense. They seem to rise above the genre trappings. Unfortunately, the film loses steam after this well-crafted build-up.

Ethan goes to Ruffalo’s office on the advice of the police, who tell him he should seek legal counsel—he wants the killer prosecuted for homicide. The penalties for a hit and run, the cop says, are light: 10 years in prison, depending on the judge. Exasperated that his son will become yet another victim without justice, Ethan wants to know what else can be done. The lawyers tell him he can file a civil suit to collect damages, but first they are going to have to find the man who did it. The police have no leads, and Dwight seems to be doing a great job covering up the crime.

Ethan starts looking everywhere for black SUVs, convinced that each one he sees is the one responsible. He is totally desperate, losing himself in a bevy of online chat groups designed to support families of similar crimes. Grace, who is barely functioning for their daughter as it is, receives little support from Ethan once he becomes obsessed with finding justice. He is convinced she just doesn’t care.

After this relatively interesting set-up, things devolve into something less than powerful. What should have been a more absorbing game of cat and mouse, as Ethan closes in on Dwight, becomes routine.

After the lagging mid-section, there is a moment of revelation for Ethan, where he gets a quick flash in his mind of something that happened that night: he remembers Dwight yelling his son’s name at the moment of the accident. Ethan tries to engage Dwight in theorizing about the crime, but Dwight, racked with guilt, won’t budge. Ethan decides to buy a gun.

The final twenty minutes, as everything comes to a head, is well done, if conventional. Phoenix plays a character we haven’t seen from him before and shows a depth and maturity as a performer that had previously been hinted at but not really achieved. Ruffalo is the more capable of the two men, quietly underplaying Dwight’s tortured life.

The big disappointment here is that George has two powerful actresses in throwaway “wife” roles. Connelly plays tragic well (as is evidenced by her work in films like House of Sand and Fog and Requiem for a Dream), and she is a tremendous performer. It is depressing to see her relegated to the sidelines here. It is a treat to see Sorvino back in a decent film again, even though her character’s connection to the Learner family (she was the son’s music teacher) is a bit convoluted.

While the melodrama plays out like you might expect, with maybe a bit less pathos than the story needs, it is still an entertaining, if innocuous film, by a director who probably should have known better than to stick with such a stuffy formula. With the amount of talent on board, this should have been a lot better.

“Never create anything. It will chain you and follow you for the rest of your life”
—Cate Blanchett as “Jude”/Bob Dylan

If raising the artistic stakes, and making one of the most bold leaps stylistically that a director has probably ever made in this history of film equals success, Todd Haynes comes out of the dream-like I’m Not There a resounding winner. The film looks astonishing. If there is anything missing from the idyllic, disjointed re-telling of singer/songwriter Bob Dylan’s life, it is emotional truth; but there is enough present to let Haynes’ vision slide.

Each mannequin standing in for Dylan (Christian Bale, Cate Blanchett, Marcus Carl Franklin, Richard Gere, Heath Ledger, and Ben Wishaw) does a capable job of becoming an appropriate figure head (each is a different “character” with a different name—standing in for the periods of his life), and each brings a vital element of the indefinable musician’s psyche to the table.

This is going to be one of the year’s most demanding films. From an artist’s point of view, the hallucinatory film cannot be criticized: Haynes’ has taken a major risk with his outré visual style that borrows heavily from surrealist cinema of the past (and is filmed in both detached black and white and warm color tones). The real question that begs to be answered, however, is whether or not this film will be able to connect to an audience other than fans of Dylan.

Never underestimate the power of art house cinema—this film practically re-defines that term (with the tripped out visuals like a whale swimming in stark black and white at the bottom of a river). Personally, I am not a fan of Dylan’s music (nor am I familiar with any of his origins), and I found I’m Not There, while visually triumphant to be a little inaccessible.

There are a slew of sight gags running throughout the film, several in-jokes that only people who know the music and mythology of Dylan will be laughing at. The seemingly abstract imagery is lifted directly from the singer’s words; but if you are new to the words, you might get very lost. The audience I saw it with, who was undoubtedly more familiar with the singer’s oeuvre than me, was laughing in spots that I was clueless in.

I’m Not There is still a film that should be given a chance, even if you are not a Dylan stalwart. For lovers of cinema, there is the photography by Edward Lachman (who worked previously with Haynes on the gorgeous Far From Heaven), which is at turns simple and operatic. The visual allure of this piece is worth the price of admission alone—it is like nothing you’ve seen.

Cate Blanchett (who plays “Jude”, the amped-up Blonde on Blonde-era Dylan) conveys a startlingly canny, emotionally truthful portrait of the pressures of fame and the pitfalls it can lead to. Replete with the proper twitches and physicality, the performance is one that is a gender-bender that is destined to be admired.

Blanchett proves again that she is one of the most adventurous actors working by throwing away all traces of her glam, red-carpet friendly persona to become a man who is so beloved. It must have been a daunting proposition, to play a legend like this—but don’t forget Blanchett won an Oscar recently for playing another legend, Katharine Hepburn. She just might get a matching set next year for this much more effective turn.

The other actors, to be fair, are just as capable, but it is Blanchett who astounds given her chance to capture one of Dylan’s most fruitful, turbulent seasons. When Dylan went electric, and threw away all of his prior folkie ideas (and his fan base began to hate him), he grew as an artist. The scene of Blanchett and her band “machine gun” the audience expecting folk is a funny, canny twist on what the singer was going through in this period. It is endlessly intriguing to think about how private Dylan became regarding his opinions, given his rise to prominence based on expressing a radical opinion. “Who cares what I think”, says Jude. “I am a storyteller. What do you care if I care or don’t care?”

One interesting element to this section of the film is that Haynes shows the fickle nature of fandom. One wrong move, and they will turn on you. It’s a fascinating, under-explored topic—the allegiance of a fan to their idol. As Jude talks to a reporter (“who said I was sincere? You want me to say what you want to say”), Haynes is unafraid to show the unsympathetic sides of a musician hating his fans and what they stand for just as much as they begin to dislike him. Haynes is just another fan giving her own interpretation of a legend’s story. It is too bad we might never know the real Dylan’s opinion on this film.

I really wanted to like these films (and I don’t like to hate on anyone offering roles to actresses of this caliber), because of their interesting directors (Richard Attenborough for Ring, and Paul Schrader for the latter) and their accomplished kaleidoscopic casts, but in the end, these films turned out to be the only ones I walked out of during the festival. You can’t win ‘em all, can you?

The terribly-titled Closing the Ring starts out in 1991, in a small town in Michigan, where Marie is giving a eulogy for her recently deceased father, a celebrated WWII veteran. Her mother, Ethel Ann (an acerbic to the point of being crass Shirley MacLaine), stumbles around thinking about the past and drinking. Jack (Christopher Plummer, totally wasted here), the couple’s pal from the good old’ days tries to console her.

Abruptly, we switch theaters to present day Northern Ireland, where Michael (Peter Postlethwaite, also wasted) is digging like a madman for aluminum fragments left by crashing aircraft from the war.

Then, with no notice, we are taken back to 1941, back in the States, where a young Ethel Ann (the absolutely horrific Mischa Barton) is a happy-go-lucky war time dame surrounded by soldiers getting ready for war; she has her pick of potential husbands. These American flashbacks feature literally some of the worst acting I have ever witnessed. Starting with Barton (ludicrous in her naked love scenes), who completely embarrasses herself.

The script offers them no reproach either, the dialogue seems to be made of wood—it is laugh-out-loud bad. Not even a master director like Attenborough can save this tripe. MacLaine and Plummer deserve more than this. The flashbacks used here are choppy and poorly done—one second we’re in war-time Ireland, another, the US. It’s hard to keep track of all of the moving, and after an hour you won’t care. This film has the distinction of being the worst film I saw at this festival, possibly ever.

And by the way, isn’t Neve Campbell a little young to be playing a) Shirley MacLaine’s daughter, and b) the child of people married in 1941?

Prior to this night I had only ever walked out of maybe two movies in my entire life. After The Walker, the number doubled.

Another old-guard Hollywood legend, Lauren Bacall, fares a bit better than Plummer and MacLaine in Paul Schrader’s (the man wrote Taxi Driver for God’s sakes!) lame exploration of gossipy Washington DC women and their gay boy toy Carter (a silly Woody Harrelson). Carter and his hags (who include Lily Tomlin, Kristin Scott Thomas and Mary Beth Hurt), sit around playing cards and talking shit. To them, gossip is an art form.

Carter is a “walker”—a worldly man who escorts his gal pals around town, listens to their woes and bolsters their relentless egos. As is the case with most of Schrader’s films, there is a striking detachment from reality and a strong sense of visual style filled with color (Carter’s office is carnal red). Everything seems so artificial, especially when Lynn (Scott Thomas), a senator’s wife, finds her lover stabbed to death.

The performances are bizarre, all around. Harrelson gives a really odd performance as the gay mystery man (and employs a head-scratcher of an accent) who minces about town doling out jaunty little bon mots and little pearls of wisdom to these strange rich ladies who seem to flock to him en masse.

The entire murder mystery is stale and Harrelson as Nancy Drew should have been a lot more entertaining. The banality of the dialogue, which dishes about things like redecorating and scandals that no one in the real world would even think twice about (like blackmailing someone because they’re gay!). For a film so obsessed with secrets and conspiracies, the “action” is milquetoast-y and flaccid.

The Walker sadly plays out completely formulaically, and gimps along at a tortoise’s pace; like a half-baked Law and Order rip-off hiding behind the guise of being an edgy art film. I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but this isn’t anywhere near edgy, not matter how many S&M-themed “art photos” of men in bondage there are in it.

—Matt Mazur

“Had I been blind and deaf, or did it take the harsh light of disaster for me to find my true nature?”
—Jean Dominique Bauby

I am a guy who isn’t particularly afraid of being in touch with his sensitive side. In fact, there are days where the people who know me best might even say that I take it one step too far. I rarely cry at movies, especially in the theater in front of a groups of strangers (at home, well, that’s another story). There are certain features I can recall that evoked that response from me, and made me break my “no crying in public/be a man” rule: American Beauty, The Royal Tenenbaums, Thelma and Louise, and Dead Man Walking (damn you, Susan Sarandon!) each broke me down.

This is probably something that is so much more common place than I am giving it credit for, but today I found myself bawling at one film in the theater, which somehow was OK because the entire theater seemed to be weeping; and getting extremely choked up over two others. Now liberated of any shame, and still able retain my dignity in the face of public sobbing, let me share my findings on four of the Toronto International Film Festival’s finest offerings with you:

Again, there are major spoilers ahead:

When I woke up after less than five hours of sleep, my feet covered in blisters (mental note for next time: bring more sneakers rather than good-looking but torturous white leather boots), burned out from seeing an onslaught of fine filmmaking and sightseeing; I did not want to get out of bed. The last thing on my mind was a sure-to-be depressing French film that started at 9 AM that featured a lead character who could only communicate through blinking his left eye.

I literally flung myself from the bed, tried to check my crap attitude by grabbing a gigantic cup of coffee, and hit the street like every good little reporter should. After forcing myself to see The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, and being more moved by it that almost any other film in recent memory; I felt like an ungrateful, spoiled dilettante.

Here I was watching a film about a man (Elle magazine editor Jean-Dominique Bauby) who suffered a massive stroke and became “trapped inside” his own body, who blinked out (in code, to an assistant, letter by letter) the entirety of his autobiography, from which the film takes its cues; and I had the gall to almost miss the screening for an extra hour or two of sleep. Director Julian Schnabel gave me a wake-up call that pretty much instructed me to appreciate what privileges I have. Funny how timing works with things like these isn’t it?

From the opening scene (created personally by Schnabel, a renowned artist) of antique x-rays to the scene immediately following (jaw-droppingly photographed by Academy Award winner Janusz Kaminski) immediately following, where “Jean-Do” (an astonishing Mathieu Amalric) awakens from a three week long coma (curiously, the second of the festival) –- only to think that nothing is wrong, the director and the technicians are able to transport the audience into another world. This is the kind of thing that I personally love about film; the ability to really connect and experience someone else’s life, visually and emotionally. Schnabel and crew miraculously do this in the first two minutes of the movie. Diving Bell feels like another world and visually, it looks like no other film.

It takes a solid fifteen minutes or so to become fully oriented to the film’s pioneering visual style, likely a deliberate move on the filmmaker’s part to get us to empathize with the man’s predicament. Characters move up to the camera, getting close to Jean-Do’s face to talk to him, but essentially, they are talking directly to us.

In Jean-Do’s mind, he is still OK. We experience his thoughts through Amalric’s narration as if nothing major has happened, but then are dealt a devastating blow as the doctor’s inform him of his condition. They assure him everything will be fine. It is a strikingly filmed opening montage, especially when Jean-Do comes to the realization that he can no longer speak or move, and that no one can hear the inner monologue happening exclusively in his head.

The hard truth is that Jean-Do is paralyzed from head to toe and will never speak again.  “It’s just one of those things”, says a callous doctor, at a loss for words while explaining his condition. This randomness echoes as images from the man’s childhood, and his mind’s eye come crashing all around him with a fragmented urgency; a point of view which he referred to as “the butterfly”.

Henriette (an incandescent Marie-Josee Croze) is Jean-Do’s speech therapist, who calls him “the most important job she’s ever had”. She gets him to learn the blinking code (first a simple “one blink” for “yes”, two for “no”), and makes him answer inane questions (which the narration hilariously skewers, unbeknownst to her). He flashes back to his life as a fashion director for the magazine.

After such a sweet recollection, we are confronted with more ugly truth: Jean-Do’s right eye must be sewn shut to prevent the cornea from being destroyed. Since the point of view the audience experiences is lived directly from the man’s eye line, we too get a birds-eye view of an eye being closed forever, and it is shocking. Everything is mercilessly taken away from this once-successful man.

The dedicated Henriette begins to teach him a more advanced version of the blinking code, this time the alphabet, through a board that is set up by frequency of letter usage. In a scene where she has a breakthrough with him, thrilled at the prospect of communication with the man; she ends up not getting the kind of responses she had hoped for—Jean-Do wants to die. In a lush scene on the beach (where the hospital is located in France), she convinces him that there is still purpose in life. It’s a very tricky speech; one that could have been contrived or sappy, but Croze underplays it with supreme elegance.

The unpredictability of the accident is mirrored in the unpredictability of the imagery in Jean-Do’s mind. A glacier dissolving and crumbling into the sea, a sumptuous green valley, a flower being pollinated; these seemingly unrelated shots all figure in prominently with the poetry of the man recalling his life (and the poetry of the Oscar winning scripter for The Pianist Ronald Harwood). He tells us that some of it is real and some of it is made up, but it keeps him alive. “I can imagine anyone, anywhere”, he says as more odd pictures are displayed onscreen.

He imagines a life that is not really his own, but that of Marlon Brando; until we finally get a chance to see what his life was like when he wasn’t strapped to a chair. At this point, the point of view changes once again, and Jean-Do becomes a character in his own story. He begins to dictate his memoirs to a nurse, feeding her poetic ruminations on the life he once led, and freeing himself of past shackles in the process. He recalls, in touching fashion, a day with his 92-year-old father (a brilliant Max Von Sydow), where the men talk about living to be old; then there is a telephone scene between the two men that had many audience members reaching for the Kleenex.

Amalric is able to convey more pathos with one eye (and his voice in the narration) than most actors can do with their entire body. With this performance (and solid work in the under-seen Kings and Queen), the actor proves to be one of the boldest, most talented working. With his privacy stripped, completely dependent on others for everything, and everything taken away from him, Amalric’s Jean-Do cleverly figures out a way to become expressive once again, and it is genuinely beautiful and heart breaking to witness not only the death of a man, but also his artistic rebirth that gives him grace in the end.

The director is particularly adept at putting all of these pieces of film together like an assertive artist with a distinct vision. The film plays out like a painting in many scenes—a smattering of soft blue here, a touch of fleshy pink there; and it all comes together bathed in a golden halo of sunlight. This is more special than the hundreds of other run-of-the-mill bio films that have been produced ad nauseum over the last few years. Schnabel continues to innovate, and this is hands down his best film.

Schnabel’s previous two efforts (Basquiat and Before Night Falls), both highlighted the true-life stories of creative types (one a painter, the other a poet) who have to overcome insurmountable odds to release their demons and turn their visions into art (it is rumored that Schnabel’s next adaptation will continue along these artistic lines with an adaptation of The Lonely Doll with Naomi Watts and Jessica Lange). These films are all tied together with the thread of art and what it means to be or to become a true artist, and each has Schnabel’s distinct stamp of personal artistry on it.

The final deluge of choppy imagery, as Jean-Do lay dying, and is visited for the final time by his loved ones, is some of the most haunting, beautiful photography I have seen this year and I will carry them with me for a long, long time. I don’t think a director (other than maybe Ingmar Bergman) has ever so eloquently captured the personal experience of dying as Schnabel has here. “I wanted this film to be a tool”, said Schnabel. “Like his book, a self-help device that can help you handle your own death. That’s what I was hoping for and that’s why I did it.”

He takes us right up to the end, through the fear and through the acceptance. Even though Jean-Do was totally immobile and survived much longer than anyone expected, it is still tragic to learn that he died only 10 days after his book was published.

After getting all worked up at Diving Bell, I figured I would cool down with some literate laughter from director Noah Baumbach’s newest offering, Margot at the Wedding.

Since this was a film by the same guy who delivered the goods with the whip-smart The Squid and the Whale (my favorite film of 2005, which mixed family dramatics with high-brow humor), I thought that I could expect non-stop chuckling throughout. Wow, was I wrong.

There are a lot of jokes in Margot, but they aren’t light-hearted, whatsoever. What Baumbach has done instead (wisely), is avoided relying on his past glories in favor of exploring something fresh and uncharted for him.

Margot has some moments of sublime gloom that will possibly scare people thinking that they are in for some sort of light-hearted romp about two sisters getting together for a girly reunion on the eve of one’s wedding. This film is sort of like what Bergman would have made had he been a French New Wave-era filmmaker. Yes, that means it is absolutely spectacular.

In a stark, bleak look at familial wounds and the seething bonds that hold sisters together, Margot (a top-form Nicole Kidman) is like a storm on the horizon as she gathers herself (and her adoring teenage son Claude, played nicely by Zane Pais) together to rain all over Pauline’s (Jennifer Jason Leigh) wedding to Malcolm (Jack Black).

The sisters have had a major falling out and have not spoken in a long time. Neither of them is willing to admit blame. The two have shared a rocky, desperate past with one another, as abused children and as adults who find sport in inflicting emotional damage on one another and then making up. Every word is like a poison dart. Every interaction between the sisters has some hidden meaning. Their connection is mysterious, but the actresses run with it, obviously thriving on the co-dependency.

Even though they have been estranged for an unspecified amount of time (it is implied that has been years), the bossier-than-hell Margot appears for Pauline’s special day, even though she talks nastily about her fiancée behind Pauline’s back. Pauline, meanwhile, lies to people when she refers to her sister, a famous writer, as her “best friend”. The two tell little lies to one another constantly, make hurtful jokes, and are constantly second-guessing and sniping (not just to each other—to everyone). It is their dysfunctional way of showing affection, apparently.

Both women have gotten really good at pretending. Margot, though she claims to be brutally honest about everything, all the time; is lying to everyone (including her impressionable son) about the wrecked state of her marriage to Jim (John Turturro). She is carrying on an affair with one of Pauline’s neighbors (Ciaran Hinds), and insists that neither he nor the discussion of her newest writing at a local bookstore had any influence in getting her to come out to the house they grew up in for Pauline’s wedding; even though Pauline herself has her doubts.

The brisk 92 minute film starts from this simple premise and explores, cannily, the intensity of the women’s relationship, and how they are inherently tied to one another, whether they like it or not.

Baumbach, who also wrote the script, has an ear for unusual, awkward language; as well as uncomfortable situations. As was the case with The Squid and the Whale, he demands that his players show everything. There is no narcissism in the acting, only in the two lead characters—which come off as realistically self-obsessed and even immature at times. It is this sort of bravery in creating a dark character on the page and seeing it through until the finished product that Baumbach should be credited for. His characters may not be showy, but they are an actor’s paradise. 

Kidman, though she has a terrible habit of making really bad Hollywood films (and yet somehow she gets away with one big budget bomb after the other), has surprised me before with her skills. It took me a long time (probably like the rest of the world) to get over the whole “married to Tom Cruise” thing, but I remember seeing her in both Moulin Rouge and The Others in 2001 and thinking that she had really shown considerable range. With Lars Von Trier’s Dogville, the actress went to some unexpected, experimental heights, and again showed chops.

Her performance as the title character here, who is obsessed with knowing if people are talking about her (even though she is constantly gossiping about them) ranks with her greatest achievements. This is character she was born to play: cultured to a fault, prissy, nosy, icy-as-hell and mean. She is often snippy and hurtful with her son, repeating a cycle of abuse that is hinted at when we meet her. Hidden behind her shellacked veneer is something truly sad: a woman who has everything who can be destroyed by simple things like someone laughing at her. Kidman knows that this is chance to redeem some of her box office sins, and she runs with it, making this terribly unsympathetic woman human rather than a power-bitch caricature.

The absolute highlight of the daring film is the loving way in which Baumbach directs his spouse Leigh to perhaps the most nuanced, relaxed role of her accomplished career. The actress has been known to get down and dirty with her roles, and really disappear; but here she seems so poised and ordinary, it’s easy to forget that she is acting. Margot is the showier part, but as is the case here, and in countless other films in which people take the more quiet supporting roles; showy doesn’t always equal better. Leigh has somehow never been up for an Oscar, despite at least ten viable roles throughout the last seventeen years and it is beyond a crime she wasn’t up for one in 1995 for her tour-de-force in Georgia. This year, hopefully will not add to the shameful list of egregious awards snubs towards one of the most challenging, honest actresses I can think of. If anyone has paid their dues, it is Leigh.

There are many moments in Gus Van Sant’s Paranoid Park where you just don’t know what is going to happen next. Alex (fresh-faced Gabe Nevins, who the director recruited through MySpace stunt casting) has some sort of secret that he isn’t telling people. He’s a smart, good kid, but it feels like he is getting away with something big.

A Portland homicide detective drags him out of class to gently interrogate him about the recent death of a security guard, who was run over by a train near a dangerous skateboarders hang-out called “Paranoid Park”. This is a place where all of the kids whose parents don’t care go. They’re skaters, druggies, and castaways. They built it themselves. They have claimed it as their own have created an urban legend out of the place. “No one’s ever really ready for Paranoid Park”, says one boy to the cop).

The way the film unfolds is mysterious, and watchable. Van Sant tells the small story with striking images, and a slight flashback structure that never feels overly slick or un-organic. You might wonder, from the loving shots of pretty little skater boys in their boxers or in the shower if you are dealing with a director who is just nostalgic and reverent with his subjects or if he is just a dirty old man. Thankfully, it is the former. Don’t mistake the up-close-and-personal shots of the boys’ faces and bodies for anything other than a master approaching his subjects with loving care for detail and mood.

More honesty is folded into the mood by allowing the actors to be completely naturalistic (other than the screeching Taylor Momsen as Alex’s girlfriend). There is a shot of Alex, borrowing his mother’s car to go to the park to skate, alone, driving and listening to loud music, that is so reminiscent of that period in one’s life where being alone driving around, having your freedom, and doing what you want within reason is intoxicating and entertaining enough. It’s a brief, sweet scene, and the actor lets it happen unforced.

What could have been just another bogus, preachy after school special (adapted from Blake Nelson’s novel) has found a champion with the visually modern-thinking Van Sant and his new partner in crime, the masterful cameraman Christopher Doyle—who has shot for, among other projects, Wong Kar Wai’s spectacular In the Mood for Love. The marriage of photography and direction is one of the most important elements in personal filmmaking like Paranoid Park; without the marvelous mix of Super 8 (to mimic skate videos), and luxuriant 35 mm footage, the film would have just been another low budget, predictable, straight-to-video for the teens outing. The shots that build tension, the lighting, and even the way rustling grass is shot by Doyle gives the proceedings a more meditative mood, rather than chaotic. There is a very Zen quality to the look of the film.

Van Sant is no stranger to turning ordinary stories into extraordinary films: My Own Private Idaho, Drugstore Cowboy, and To Die For all blossomed in the director’s hands. Along with the Cannes triumph Elephant (which Paranoid Park will unjustly get compared to), the Portland native shows that he has the market cornered on telling the stories of teenagers in the most realistic way of any working director. He has a feel for youth counter culture that other directors just miss completely.

Like in Vadim Perelman’s In Bloom, being at this peculiar in between age is seen by Van Sant as a time of great reflection and great exploration of one’s own conscious. The scene where Alex wrestles with his own questions as he leaves the park is a marvel of sound editing (as is the rest of the ambient mixing used throughout). He is trying to rationalize this crime in his own mind, deciding for himself what is right and what is wrong. It seems like this could be the first time he has been left to his own devices like this, no mom, no dad to bail him out.

Both films employ successful flashback structures, and both are similarly informed by the traumatic effects of violence (albeit accidental), on someone so essentially innocent (and In Bloom does owe a lot to Elephant. While calling these films and their themes “coming of age” is probably not appropriate—as that arouses connotations of bad memories of teen flicks past, it is safe to say that Van Sant is concerned with portraying the developing moral compass of a jaded youth with a heartfelt sincerity and a steady hand.

The films by the directors I watched today are setting them up to be the most fascinating, erudite, and inventive men working in the medium and each has found their respective niche. It can’t get much better than today at the festival—it was like Halloween came early and three great directors just put three different full-sized candy bars in my trick or treat bag. But if we are talking the best of the best, and talking about someone who has definitely carved out a specific niche market over the years, we can’t have a discussion without bringing Mr. David Cronenberg to the table.

Cronenberg seems to just get better and better as the years pass. After 2005’s scathing A History of Violence, it didn’t seem possible for the Canadian native to possibly be able to top himself, but with the bold, tight Eastern Promises, he actually does.

A compassionate, yet bloody look at codes of honor among Russian gangsters in London, Cronenberg sets the stage for exploring another microcosm of operatic themes played out in an tight-knit, secretive community; without a trace of fat encumbering the script (lean and mean by Steven Knight) or interrupting the flow of the film.

When Tatiana, a 14 year old junkie prostitute (who is also hugely pregnant) wanders zombie-like off the streets into a local chemist and passes out in a pool of blood, she is taken to a hospital where she is placed under the care of midwife Anna (Naomi Watts), who is able to deliver the girl’s baby but loses the mother.

A clue is left behind to speak for the tragic émigré: her diary. Luckily for Watts (or perhaps not so luckily), she is half Russian and can call on her vodka drinking uncle to translate the pages. In a ghostly fashion Cronenberg makes the choice to let the voice of Tatiana tell the rest of the story as the mystery of who she was unfurls.

A business card found on the dead girl leads Watts directly to the doorstep of Semyon (the terrifying Armin Muehller-Stahl—who has all but cornered the market on Eastern European old man scariness), a seemingly helpful restaurant owner who tries in vain to use his criminal charisma to pull the wool over the eyes of the innately curious, justice-seeking Anna. He tries to play every angle in the book to get her to hand over the diary, to no avail.

Anna tries to elicit some help from Semyon’s chauffeur and lackey Nikolai (a career-best Viggo Mortensen), with whom she shares a raw chemistry. Outside of the restaurant, she also meets Semyon’s son Kirill (Vincent Cassell, adventurous as usual), a vile, aggressive, and impotent drunk who likes to get wasted and force Nikolai, technically his employee to have sex with prostitutes while he watches. A good employee, Nikolai complies.

The homo-eroticized power dynamic between the two men plays out many times throughout the film, quite cleverly (and it becomes obvious that Kirill is a repressed homosexual in love with Nikolai). Another scene imbued with hints of gayness, though it by no means is sexy at all, is the sure-to-be-buzzed about sequence in which assassins are sent into a steam room to get Nikolai. A totally naked (and brave) Mortensen plays this meticulously-choreographed ballet of skin being filleted and multiple stabbings taking place like a seasoned dancer; writhing and panting while nude and wrestling the men. It is an incredible feat of physicality that I seriously doubt any other Hollywood actor would be willing to tackle (the camera really gets up close and sees everything in an unforgiving light during this scene). Major kudos to the Lord of the Rings star for raising the stakes and tipping the scales a little bit as far as cinematic nudity goes.

Anna gets the distinct feeling that Kirill has something to do with Tatiana’s murder, and she tries to get Nikolai to help her out—despite her furious uncle’s warnings about how dangerous these men really are. Cronenberg puts it best: “think of Kirill like Sadaam Hussein’s son; too much power, too little depth, and a lot of insecurities—a very dangerous combination.”

Their dealings find them tied to all sorts of intense business; slave trading is only the tip of the ice berg. These are men, who in reality, conspire with other Eastern-world criminal sects (such as the Chinese or Turkish) to make a living illegally. Their grasp is far-reaching, and once Anna begins her quest, there’s no turning back. These Russian gangsters are unforgiving when it comes to messing with their secrets. Anna doesn’t even seem to care that her family is at risk, she wants to know what happened.

From the get-go, this is a swift affair touched by revenge and the search for justice for the innocent; Cronenberg and company don’t mess around when it comes to telling a good story. What makes Eastern Promises Cronenberg’s best film is the masterful way in which he creates this universe: each detail, down to the star tattoos on the men’s chests, to the borsch being served at Semyon’s restaurant, is placed deliberately to give a sense of what this reality is like.

In what has become a trademark for the director, he employs a clinical, bloody, observational point of view. He definitely shocks the audience with gore, but in a way that cinematic cousin and fellow intellectual auteur Michael Haneke does—the scenes of violence or tension all are hyper-realistic, which is getting mistaken for “shock value”. You can have action films where hundreds of people get massacred and still not get the same reaction out of people as one grisly death in a Cronenberg film. Why? Because he shows it without glamorizing it.

What is so disturbing about these scenes in a Cronenberg film is that he makes them easy to access—you feel like you’re there because it isn’t stylized or glamorized like, say, in something like the new Coen Bros. film. Just because the guy has a specific style, at which he excels, does not equal him being up to any “old tricks”. This is new, uncharted Cronenberg, and it is exciting.

—Matt Mazur

Days three and four found me sitting through three movies directed by women, which is an anomaly in the real world. It’s unheard of to have this much female influence happening in the world cinema all at once, and even though it is really nice to be treated to such displays of female power and intelligence, it still doesn’t make up for the fact that women in Hollywood (especially female directors) are still getting pigeonholed. Not many multiplexes are going to relish the thought of relinquishing their straight guy- and kid-friendly popcorn palaces to this current work directed, produced, starring, and, essentially made for women. Oh, and Many of these ladies are over 40.

While this mini-renaissance may have gained steam starting late last year, with three women over 50 (Helen Mirren, Judi Dench and Meryl Streep) claiming three of the five coveted spots for Best Actress at the Academy Awards for the first time in what felt like forever, it looks like we can look forward to the return of stories about real, contemporary women (of all shapes and ages) to the big screen this season. It’s about damn time.

As good as some of these films were, though, I sat in the theater pondering on whether or not these well-made, good-intentioned films would actually connect with an audience outside of it’s target demographic. I can’t really see any teenage boys getting all revved up for The Jane Austen Book Club when they have the choice of seeing Superbad, but perhaps one or two of these deserving pictures can get some critical buzz behind them to garner some sort of noticeable box-office receipts.

Female directors do get the raw end of the deal for one misogynist reason or another when it comes to the success or failure of their films. Take for example Julie Taymor, whose Across the Universe (which I will see Tuesday) was recently taken out of her hands by studio executives after the director refused to edit and whittle her vision down to meet their demands of making the film shorter. If a lengthy, challenging film like this was directed by a man, he would be called an artist, but a woman standing up against a studio is probably going to be called something much nastier. There are signs that the old guard Hollywood boys club may be showing signs of weakness, and this is why these pro-female films should be supported, and celebrated—even though one of them isn’t exactly firing on all cylinders.

Beware of spoilers ahead

Actors directing themselves can turn out really well because of their innate understanding of the medium, but more often they just turn into vain, preening bombs. I have never been a fan of Helen Hunt. At all. I really disliked her critically popular television series Mad About You, and I got really pissed off when she took Judi Dench’s deserved Oscar win for Mrs. Brown away from her for the capable, but schmaltzy James L. Brooks crowd-pleaser As Good as It Gets. I cheered when her annoying character got shot in the head in Bobby. I was fully prepared to bring my grudge into this theater and take it out on her. Then something quite impossible happened: Hunt won me over with this surprisingly assured, well-made directorial debut.

Taking a cue from an old New York master, Hunt seems to be channeling Woody Allen with her first film. Then She Found Me is a sweet little film about the travails of real people dealing with messy life situations. In the film (adapted from a 1990 Elinor Lipman novel), Hunt plays April Epner, a kindergarten teacher who we meet on the day of her wedding to fellow teacher Ben.

As much as I did not like many of Hunt’s critical successes prior to this movie, it is likely that she is able to direct herself in such a distinct, natural way because of her experience with working in this genre. This is familiar territory, as far as the delicate balance between whimsy, comedy, dramatics, and romance goes; only this time it doesn’t suck.

April is a 39 year-old adopted child with a sibling who was not adopted. She hears her biological clock ticking loudly, but the advice of her mother (the great character actress Lynn Cohen) is “adopt a baby”.  It worked for her, so it will work for April, who feels it necessary to have her own, as she thinks that it will just “feel different”. The problem is that Ben thinks he made a mistake in marrying her and isn’t interested in doing anything other than leaving. To make matters worse, April’s mother dies suddenly. Not exactly the ideal time for conception.

Hunt does a really nice job of exploring what it is like for single women in their 30s to feel the pressure to have a child before they are too old. People are constantly asking freshly-separated April when she’s going to get pregnant (and isn’t it funny that it is somehow ok for people to assault women with this sort of intimate question in reality?). Going on 40, she realizes that it might not happen after all and she is trying to come to terms with it.

She meets Frank (Colin Firth, doing his wry, romantic comedy thing) at school the day after her husband leaves her and he becomes almost instantly taken with her. Talk about bad timing. Not only is she his son’s teacher, recently divorced, and on the edge of a nervous breakdown, now she finds herself reciprocating his affections, much to her dismay. The two fall hard and fast for one another.

Then an even bigger whirlwind of complication (or maybe more like a “typhoon” of complication) hits her hard: her biological mother comes from out of the woodwork to reconnect. At her mother’s funeral April notices a mystery man lurking in the crowd staring at her. He turns up again at her school with a proposition: he represents her mother, who requests to lunch with her the following day. Curious, and more than a little confused, April neurotically consents.

Bernice (Bette Midler), an uproarious television talk show hostess, barges into her long-lost daughter’s life with a shocking boldness, bound and determined to worm her way back into the woman’s life come hell or high water. Rightfully, April is skeptical, and perhaps since her life is in such an upturned state, she gives the mystery woman a chance. The relationship the two forge is the cornerstone of the film, and it is a genuinely funny and touching alliance.

When April finds out that her “one last time” with Ben has gotten her pregnant, he returns (the scene with both of her men at the ultra sound is especially well done). It looks as though the two might get back together, but when the pregnancy fails, it becomes clear that she is meant to be with Frank.

Hunt makes quite a few interesting comments on motherhood with this film, beginning with the notion that having children is not something only for the nubile, and continuing with the idea that sometimes it is ok not to have your own children at all. And she argues that that while kids can be fulfilling and rewarding, if they don’t end up happening, life moves on, and there are always options for people who feel destined to be parents.

The film overall is more than worthy of an audience’s love, and Hunt is aces in her role (there is a professional maturity in her that comes across nicely), but the filmmakers and studio should drop all plans for mounting any sort of awards campaign for it’s star, and concentrate their time, money, and efforts on securing a Supporting Actress nomination for Midler—who could feasibly walk away with the gold next year if positioned correctly. If ever there was a time to be hading out “career achievement” or “make-up” Oscars, this is it—Midler has not ever given such a clever, well-rounded and subdued performance.

Kudos must be given to Hunt for directing the legend in her best role in more than 20 years. Graciously, she allows the revered veteran to steal every scene she’s in. Midler continues to hold audiences in the palm of her hand after all these years, this time with her first actual “character role” since maybe her Oscar nominated, doomed singer in The Rose all the way back in 1979. She really disappears as Bernice—she isn’t “Bette Midler” the outrageous, loveable wisecracker that everyone adores (even though her outrageously loveable character isn’t really too much of a stretch).

Often Midler’s acting ability can unfortunately get buried behind her other talents (singing, comedy, etc.), but here she proves that female performers over 50 still have a few tricks up their sleeves. One of the saddest causalities of the war on “women of a certain age”, Midler was, for years, one of the most bankable, watched performers of her time, and then sadly, like many actresses who hit that magical age, she stopped getting parts worthy of her talent. Midler, surely, is not losing sleep over her lack of acting gigs, but hopefully this showcase can serve as a wake up call for casting agents to start thinking outside the box.

Thankfully, Hunt gets it. It will be interesting to see if her next move will be as a director or an actress or something else altogether. Women telling intimate stories like this that don’t devolve into television movie garbage need to be given more money to tell simple, real stories about women in this age group (and they need to direct and star in them too). Because the star and director of this film is a woman in her middle age, the public probably won’t buy it, but it will be their loss. Preconceptions about this one should be disposed of right now.

While Helen Hunt impressed me greatly with her directorial debut, and I just had a huge rant about women being given money to direct and got all feminist on your asses, it’s going to be a little bit tough to disparage the good intentions of screenwriter Robin Swicord’s obviously heartfelt ruminations on the work of Jane Austen.

It’s not that Jane Austen Club is terrible or anything, it’s passably entertaining, but there is something that rings false throughout the entire film that is very distracting and artificial.

With a cast of some of the most unique actresses working, the problem with this film is that is completely stolen by the charisma of one man: Hugh Dancy as Grigg, the daffy nerd who becomes the titular book club’s lone male member. Why, with the gloriously earthy Kathy Baker (as the six-times married Bernadette), Maria Bello (as dog trainer Jocelyn), Amy Brennenman (as the newly-single Sylvia), and the very strong Emily Blunt (as Prudie), does Swicord let the audience’s affections all get directed towards the most prominent male figure?

This is not to belittle Dancy’s deft touch, who gives his best performance to date as the technology-loving goofball that all the ladies gravitate towards; he was able to do something that the rest of the mainly female cast wasn’t able to: create a really solid character. Blunt (one of the most promising young female actors working today), does her best with Prudie, the only one of the women to really rise above the tepid script.

What sets out to be literate soon turns overly pretentious and obsessed with being witty, even though it has some major moments of disorganization. One of the most glaring problems with the film is that none of these women seem real; they’re all archetypes or stereotypes for the most part. This is in no way a reflection of the rest of the game cast, who are more than capable of moments of greatness; it’s a reflection on the lame script.

Plodding along at a leisurely, awkward pace, the group reads the novels month by month but it feels as though years are passing by due to the directorial choices to meander on subplots that could have been completely left on the cutting room floor. And why was an entire sequence set to Aimee Mann’s song “Save Me”, which was a song written expressly for another movie: Magnolia? That was a definite misstep. I am thinking of Maggie Grace as Sylvia’s lesbian daughter—who eats up way too much screen time to do basically nothing but whine and be oppositional.

In the end, everyone is making out, having sex, and in love. Not with each other, but neatly coupled off with a partner and finding true love in the end. Despite two really good performances (Blunt and Dancy), this last development was nauseating. Everything is wrapped up nicely, and even Bernadette—who Ursula Le Guin (whose feminist science fiction is referenced smartly by Grigg throughout) would probably refer to as the “crone” of the bunch, overcomes the fact that she and her newfound Latin lover don’t even speak a common language, but heck, they’re going to give it a go anyhow.

The performers try their best and look like they might be having a great time doing it, but there is an artifice that hovers above the material that can’t be ignored. It made me wonder if the cast has actually read the novels or was just pretending to. That’s a bad thing to be thinking in a film like this. Just because you are doing a movie about a group reading a great author does not automatically guarantee that your film is going to be smart by osmosis.

I think that in asking director Vadim Perelman what his favorite female performances were during an awkward Q&A session that followed the premiere of his newest film, the tightly-wound In Bloom, I might have either a) totally caught him off guard or b) deeply offended him by not asking a specific question about the new movie.

His answers, for the record, were: Wood in this film (maybe because she was standing right next to him); Anna Magnani in Open City; and Jessica Lange in Frances—which came with no solicitation from me whatsoever, even though that happens to be one of, if not the number one personal favorite of yours truly. Like someone with impeccable taste in actresses, Perelman did not go with the stock answer, much like he doesn’t go with the obvious casting.

My goal in asking such a seemingly vague and out of context question was, of course, was to make the connection to the director’s reliable instincts (so far) in directing female performers to glory. He accomplished this with Jennifer Connelly and Shohreh Aghdashloo (in his debut House of Sand and Fog; and he does it again here with three more equally impressive ladies: Uma Thurman, Evan Rachel Wood, and Eva Amurri. Each woman plays an integral part in this elliptically-edited tone poem of a film about the traumatic after-effects of a high school torn apart when a student methodically decides to massacre his classmates.

As enigmatic as it is infuriating at times, the symmetrical nature of the film’s structure is plotted out expertly: We first meet Diana (Wood) and Maureen (Amurri), in a school bathroom talking like you would expect two girls of this age to be talking. Everything seems normal. When their freakazoid classmate barges in with an automatic assault weapon and demands that they choose who lives and who dies, and the anxiety goes through the roof. At the brink of the intensity, Perelman mercifully cuts away, preferring an unconventional narrative that is honestly a bit confusing at times but quickly finds its footing.

This is when Perelman chooses to cut away to the adult Diana (now Thurman), who is steadying herself for the 15th anniversary of the shootings, to be commemorated, complete with survivors on full display, at the school where the event took place. Diana is a nervous wreck, slugging through life as an art history teacher and trying desperately to inspire someone. Not even her much older professor husband or even her young daughter wants to hear it from her; much less her disinterested students. That Diana made out of this situation alive, Perelman draws the audience immediately into the elusive mystery of what happened in that bathroom on the day of the shootings.

The poetic nature of the film’s script, which slips nimbly back and forth through time periods and moments of nervousness, allows for Thurman and Wood to create a unique version of the same woman, even though the two could not possibly be any more different from one another. It makes for a compelling story, though, following the younger Diana as she become the older version, and the circumstances through which she becomes this other woman are extraordinary.

Perelman has cemented himself as a director of visually stunning, brutally emotionally honest pieces that are grounded in an ugly America reality (and showed off his prowess in working with adaptations of novels—this time the source material is Laura Kasischke’s The Life Before Her Eyes. In Bloom is a movie that audiences and critics will probably love and hate, in equal numbers; not unlike the polarizing House of Sand and Fog.

In his first film, the director tackled an embarrassing facet of American culture—racism towards people of Middle Eastern descent (as well as a slew of other hot-button issues), and In Bloom finds the proficient director handling another challenging, singularly American phenomenon: the high school shooting spree. By employing such dynamic elements to the film such as the fluid editing rhythms and the surreally-saturated color choices of yellows and reds that pop off the screen like radioactive particles during the obtuse, quick scenes of nature, this becomes something more than just another film about the loss of innocence.

As girlhood becomes fleeting and adult personalities are starting to blossom, the film shows the catastrophic, far-reaching repercussions of violence on a sensitive, impressionable mind—and how something so horrifying can never be simply forgotten. It lives in the minds of the victims every day as they replay those crucial, irreconcilable moments over and over again in their minds during even the most mundane tasks.

Thanks in part to the duality of the characters of “Adult Diana” and “Teen Diana” (and also to the dichotomy of making the younger Diana a conventional Lolita while the Maureen is a well-adjusted Christian), viewers will be able to get a sense of who this girl really was, who she wanted to become, and what she will end up as eventually. It is rare to get such a complete back story on a character in a film, but every behavior is fully explained here.

The nuanced performances of the three women in this film will likely fly under everyone’s radar, but all deserve major consideration—especially the resourceful, soulful Amurri and Wood as the victimized young women. Wood said at the Q&A that she wanted these characters to “not be talking about boys, and Ugg boots and stupid shit like that”, and she again shows a side to the teenage experience that is unique and skillful.

Director Tamara Jenkins, who crafted a similarly off-kilter environment in 1998’s Slums of Beverly Hills, returns in tip-top shape with her newest offering The Savages; a film that shows her in a new light as a reputable auteur.

Opening with a winking shot of old ladies in sparkly blue uniforms doing a synchronized dance, and others doing synchronized swimming in a retirement community, Jenkins, without delay, puts us smack dab in the middle of the bizarre world of senior citizen Lenny Savage (played with astonishing humility by the great Phillip Bosco). Lenny is a dotty old man who is quickly losing it. His elderly, sick girlfriend of 20 years (with whom he shares a home) is hopelessly ill, and Lenny is starting to show signs of a quick descent into dementia.

When his long-time partner dies, the woman’s family contacts Lenny’s estranged children Jon and Wendy (Phillip Seymour Hoffman and Laura Linney) to come and pick him up before they throw him out. The dead woman’s family no longer wants the responsibilities that come along with taking care of a sick old person. Jon and Wendy don’t particularly want that responsibility either.

Still, the guilt-riddled Wendy and the practical Jon fly in from New York (he from Buffalo and she from NYC) to Arizona to prepare the old patriarch for the rest of his life, to be lived out in a low-income nursing home.

The intricacies of a fractured family’s dynamics play out over the next two hours in a poignant, often hilarious way, as the cast richly explores the mysteries of what binds a family together and how these relationships become strained in situations of extreme duress. In a crisis, these bonds can make or break the strongest families, and one astute thing that Jenkins subversively points out is that something like this can happen to any family. Sometimes the bonds that are necessary to get you through the day just miraculously appear out of nowhere.

Though the Savage kids are both a self-involved (he is a professor of drama while she is a struggling playwright/temp), they begin to rekindle their own long-ignored relationship as they clash over the way their father should be cared for. Wendy wants Lenny to reside in a sunny, tree-lined elderly care facility in the country (that would cost an arm and a leg), the opposite of her brother’s practicality—he thinks that these fancy rest homes are designed to prey upon the guilt of people who think they owe their parents something for past mistakes.

Jenkins and her gifted cast have put together an insular film that subtly examines and questions the state of elder care in the United States and endowed it with larges doses of merciless, incisive wit (if you are easily offended, specifically by sight gags involving racism, I would say steer clear); a sense of hopefulness in the face of adversity; and a humanness that anyone who has ever had a sick relative will be able to connect with on a very personal level.

Linney and Hoffman deserve every bit of the critical adoration I expect they will receive and both are expertly suited to play these roles: he is a sad-sack schlub who is just a damaged little boy inside; she is an abrasive, opinionated aimless woman who can’t find her footing in life. Hoffman seems almost born to play a sensitive, grizzled old academic, and Linney shines in yet another delicate balancing act that requires her to hit soaring comedic and neurotic heights, and vanity-free unsympathetic lows. Their professional affinity for one another (and the material, and their jobs) is obvious, and their chemistry is off the chain. Each nuance, each gesture, and each word comes across as totally natural, never contrived. It is two of this generation’s best, handling a tricky subject with poise.

Tomorrow I will look, hopefully with some degree of rational depth, at David Cronenberg’s masterful Eastern Promises (after another viewing—I want to make sure I love it as much as I think I do), in addition to seeing a whopping five more films, hopefully including Nicole Kidman and Jennifer Jason Leigh in Noah Baumbach’s Margot at the Wedding, Julian Schnabel’s The Diving Bell and Butterfly, and Gus Van Sant’s Paranoid Park. Poor me.

—Matt Mazur

So far, in my three days here, I have seem some crazy stuff go down in Toronto at the film festival: I sat next to Marilyn Manson (at the world premiere of In Bloom), I saw literally every inch of Viggo Mortensen’s naked body thanks to David Cronenberg’s Eastern Promises (which has nothing at all to do with the stellar review I plan on giving it), and then I saw a bicyclist get hit by one of the city’s hundreds of scary taxi drivers (he is fine, don’t worry!). Then a woman that I am pretty sure was a prostitute or a stripper (maybe both) told me that I didn’t “sound like an American” while we were both waiting on a shady corner for a streetcar. Is it weird that I took it as a compliment?

Oh, and I have now seen ten films in three days. In the theater. This would be overwhelming for even the most hardcore festival fan, with or without seeing Viggo’s religion. More on that (and the flat-out brilliance of Eastern Promises) tomorrow, though; along with some insights into Helen Hunt’s surprisingly assured directorial debut Then She Found Me, the hopelessly mediocre The Jane Austen Book Club, and Vadim Perelman’s curious, strong In Bloom, starring Uma Thurman and Evan Rachel Wood.

For now, let’s do a little globe-trotting over to the Middle East:

Co-directors Vincent Paronnaud and artist Marjane Satrapi deliver the goods with this hand-drawn adaptation of Satrapi’s spectacular autobiographical graphic novels. Persepolis is like no other animated film I have seen: it is fiercely intelligent, provocative, and devastatingly funny.

At a crucial moment towards the end of the film, the character of Marjane (voiced by Chiara Mastroianni) has a bit of a breakdown over the way Westerners perceive her: as some sort of murderous, vacant savage. Through its entirety, the film continually raises questions about the phobias people have towards matters they know nothing about. It dares to suggest that these fears are often based largely on what they are learning from a media spinning out of control horror stories about Iranian people. What Satrapi implores viewers to do is to learn some of the real stories.

In telling this story, the author turned director is able to tell the stories of many other fallen countrymen who gave their lives for what they believed in; in addition to inviting the audience to see what war is like through the eyes of a young, rebellious woman growing up with it every day.

From the very second the sumptuous black and white opening sequence begins to roll, the moving images mirror (but don’t replicate) the graphic novel’s smart sensibilities beautifully –- in being able to use movement, Satrapi’s once flat renderings leap to full-blooded glory. 

The young Marjane says to her Grandmother (voiced by Danielle Darrieux) that under her (non-existent) authority “old women won’t suffer”; and it is her intuition that something big is about to happen combined with her precocious, lofty ideals that make her so endearing as a character. Satrapi is also able to make a statement with this part of the film, essentially saying that children are much more perceptive of things going on in the world than they are usually given credit for; especially during times of war and of violence. Sometimes parents (perhaps rightfully) try to keep them a bit too sheltered, but in her case, this first-hand experience has translated into vital contemporary art.

Satrapi makes it clear from the get-go that the film and the graphic novels are two separate entities. There are stunning, simple details scattered throughout each frame of the film that could only be imagined on the page. Architecture, menacing shadows, and landscapes all twist and wiggle around magically in the clean black, white, and gray tone on tone motif.

The film succeeds on two distinct levels: as a literary adaptation and as an accomplishment in the field of animation. There is no shying away from violence here as the Islamic Revolution begins in Teheran and Iraq begins to bomb them –- in particular the scenes of warfare are stunningly realized with white flashes and blurs that stand in for mortar fire