TIFF warms up with pre-festival soirée,
The movies are strewn with performances that almost weren’t, that could have been.
For every Forrest Gump almost played by John Travolta but made quintessential by Tom Hanks, there’s a Pretty Woman that was supposed to star Molly Ringwald but ended up being the starter gun for Julia Roberts.
Likewise, Gwyneth Paltrow was initially courted for Kate Winslet’s role in Titanic, and Tom Selleck, not Harrison Ford, was wooed first for Indiana Jones. Mr. and Mrs. Smith? Well, the Mrs. to Brad Pitt’s Mr. was slated originally for Nicole Kidman, who had to drop out, creating the entrée for Angelina Jolie. (Talk about changing the headwinds of history!)
As the film festival gets going in Toronto this week, we’ll be privy, yet again, to the elaborate embroidery of casting that shrouds Hollywood — casting directors being the true unsung heroes of the industry, in my view. (Celebrated writer Edward Albee once quipped — about any production, really — that “90 per cent of it is casting.”)
In this game of TIFF what-ifs, there is perhaps no more interesting case than that which will play out Sunday evening in our fair town. Two Academy Awarded actresses. Two different premieres. Both linked, incidentally, by the spectre of JFK’s widow.
At the Winter Garden Theatre, on that particular night, we have Natalie Portman, the headliner in Jackie, a much anticipated biopic about one of the most famous women in history (in a period before her name took on the ‘O’). At the Princess of Wales, meanwhile, attending the unspooling of her own prestige film is Rachel Weisz, here for the festival film Denial, about a famous Holocaust libel case. What’s so interesting about the two starlet ships passing on the same night? Weisz was supposed to be on the other red carpet. Jackie, which now comes to us courtesy of Chilean director Pablo Larrain, has had an interesting gestation, you see. It was originally a shared passion project of Weisz and her then partner, director Darren Aronofsky. The plan: to make it together. But then, the project appeared to flatline when Aronofsky and Weisz broke up, not long after Weisz worked on the movie The Dream House with Daniel Craig, whom she later ended up marrying.
You still with me? The place where The Dream House was shot, and where the Weisz-Craig spell was cast, was none other than Toronto. It’s a homecoming of infinite varieties, in other words.
The behind the scenes of Jackie continued this way: in 2012, Fox Searchlight sought out Natalie Portman (who’d starred, incidentally, in Aronofsky’s Black Swan). When the dust settled, Aronofsky was back on the project, now as producer, and Larrain brought in for his first English production.
Me? I can’t wait. Aware that America’s forever iconic first lady has been played by a whole conga line of brunettes over the years — everyone from Jaclyn Smith to Jeanne Tripplehorn to Katie Holmes has tried her take on a woman once dubbed a “Mona Lisa in motion” — I think Portman is ably up for the task. Does she look like her? Not exactly. But I have a Spidey sense she could do in Jackie what Philip Seymour Hoffman did so memorably in Capote. Hoffman didn’t look a lick like Truman Capote but, more impres- sively, captured his essence.
Jackie, by the way, is not a full biopic by any means. It’s a tightly focused look at Jacqueline Kennedy in the days following President Kennedy’s assassination in 1963. This, as any Kennedy-phile knows, is a particularly fascinating period, in that Jackie was the embodiment of what we call grace under pressure, and, even more importantly, helped to cement some of the mythology about what’s come to be known as “Camelot.” Even the funeral itself — right down to the iconic shot of JFK Jr. saluting the flag-draped coffin of his father — was a grand piece of theatre stagemanaged by Jackie.
Party Watch Lavelle, on King Street, is proving to be one of the hot new venues for parties this year indeed, with Hugo Boss all set to host a red-hot celebration there for the Ryan Gosling-Emma Stone spectacle La La Land, and Nespresso gearing up to put on an extra-buzzy party for the Joseph Gordon Levitt-helmed Snowden there as well.