Critiques from my living room
The virtual cinema experience is safe and convenient but lacks the thrill of the crowd.
My screening companion ditched me about 15 minutes into Tomm Moore and Ross Stewart’s “Wolfwalkers,” a captivating animated feature that turned out to be one of the highlights of my 2020 Toronto International Film Festival. Not hers, though. What can I say? One person’s treasure — in this case, a 17th century Irish fantasy about a plucky girl and a pack of gorgeously shapeshifting wolves — can be another person’s terror. Here is where I should probably note that the venue was my living room, my companion is 4 years old and the movie — a thrilling reminder that
hand-drawn animation needn’t be cute or cuddly — featured a few too many crossbows, guns and growls for her taste.
Kids or no kids, wolves or no wolves, this has been a TIFF like no other. In normal times, Toronto is a massive undertaking that attracts thousands of moviegoers, journalists and industry professionals and, along with the Venice and Telluride film festivals, marks the official beginning of the fall movie season. But in the year of the COVID-19 pandemic, which has led festivals like Cannes, South by Southwest and Telluride to cancel, TIFF is one of the first major film events to take place against a dramatically altered landscape.
Like Venice, which concluded a successful 2020 edition a week earlier, Toronto managed to pull it off with a slimmed-down program, reduced-capacity screenings and other safety protocols, including mandatory face coverings. (The latter requirement was implemented, it should be noted, only after much criticism of an initial “mask-optional” policy.) I opted to cover the festival (not my face) from home, slipping on noise-canceling headphones and screening as many films as I could using TIFF’s handy digital platform. A festival at your fingertips! How easy. Or so the logic went.
Such convenience, of course, comes at a price, especially in a medium that works best when it achieves your wholehearted surrender. And by surrender I mean actively putting aside your convenience, putting aside your phone, your work, your tiredness, your phone, your competing thoughts, your other appointments, your phone. I saw some very fine TIFF movies this year, though even the best ones left me wondering how much better I’d have liked them if
I’d seen them as they were meant to be seen, on an enormous glowing screen in a crowded theater.
An optimal candidate for such an experience would be “David Byrne’s American Utopia,” Spike Lee’s electrifying film of the musical spectacular that premiered last year on Broadway. The movie (on HBO and HBO Max on Oct. 17), a spiritual successor to Jonathan Demme’s Talking Heads concert film “Stop Making Sense,” is the kind that can lift your soul to the rafters. Or it should, anyway. Instead it premiered on the festival’s opening night at a drive-in, where I trust it played to a well-earned multitude of flashing headlights and honking horns.
A very different musical experience could be found in “The Disciple,” a bracingly unsentimental drama from the Indian director Chaitanya Tamhane. It follows the artistic and spiritual journey of a young man (Aditya Modak) who longs to become a great singer, and who finds that his ambition may ultimately outstrip his talent. If you, like me, know nothing about Hindustani classical music and the lifelong devotion required to master its nuances, you’ll come away from Tamhane’s film a bit wiser. You’ll also sink gratefully into a story whose insights into the eternal struggle between art and commerce ring true in any culture and language.
What critics ponder
In a way, “The Disciple,” which will next play at the New York Film Festival on Sept. 29, brought me deeper into the peculiar mind-set of a film festival than any other Toronto movie I saw, partly because it touches on some of the questions critics often ask themselves and one another when confronted with a sudden deluge of good, bad and mediocre art. Who are the brilliant new talents, the promising discoveries? What judgments of this year’s artists are being rendered, and who is rendering them? Will any of these works be of interest or relevance to the outside world beyond a tiny, localized pocket of enthusiasts?
Not all of them will, of course, but some might. “The Disciple,” though likely to draw a limited audience in this country, has made an excellent case for itself, armed with a screenplay prize from the jury of the Venice festival, where it had its world premiere before heading to Toronto. Meanwhile, that Venice jury gave its top prize, the Golden Lion, to “Nomadland,” Chloé Zhao’s ode to American wanderlust, which Searchlight Pictures will release in December. Toronto followed suit by giving Zhao’s film its People’s Choice Award, marking the first time in history that the two festivals have crowned the same picture. Even in a year when the Oscar-season logic has been dramatically shaken up, “Nomadland” has emerged as as a favorite, especially for Zhao’s direction and Frances McDormand’s achingly great lead performance.
Zhao is only the sixth woman to win the Golden Lion in Venice’s 77-year history. Meanwhile, in an even more startling and frankly depressing milestone, Oscarand Emmy-winning actor Regina King became the first Black female filmmaker ever to have a movie screen at the Venice festival. Her feature directing debut, the Amazon-acquired “One Night in Miami” (also at Toronto), is an expertly played talkfest, adapted by Kemp Powers from his stage play, that shoves Muhammad Ali (then known as Cassius Clay), Malcolm X, Jim Brown and Sam Cooke into a Florida hotel room in 1964, the night of Clay’s upset title win over Sonny Liston, and lets the conversational vibes flow until the verbal sparks begin to fly.
King bears out the truism that actors are often especially good directors of other actors. Her approach pays particular dividends with Leslie Odom Jr. (“Hamilton”) as Cooke and Kingsley Ben-Adir as Malcolm X. Their furious arguments — Malcolm sees the successful Cooke as a white-pandering sellout, while Cooke believes that economic freedom is the only kind that matters — raise tough, unresolvable questions about the nature of Black progress, representation and liberation. They’re another reason I wish I could’ve seen “One Night in Miami” in a theater; it’s the kind of movie you can feel an audience leaning into, choosing favorites, sometimes switching allegiances and hanging on every word.
Another film I wouldn’t have minded seeing with a crowd: the Netflix-acquired “Pieces of a Woman,” a blistering melodrama from the Hungarian auteur Kornél Mundruczó (“White God”), making his English-language debut. Starring Vanessa Kirby and Shia LaBeouf as a Boston couple whose relationship threatens to be torn apart by grief, it begins with a series of elaborately choreographed tracking shots that pretty much let you know what you’re in for: John Cassavetes’ emotional raggedness paired with Alejandro González Iñárritu’s visual showmanship. There’s no denying the watch-throughyour-fingers intensity of that opening set piece, or Kirby’s shattering restraint in the kind of lead role she’s long had coming to her.
Oscars talk begins
Kirby and McDormand figured heavily in the early guesses at who might be nominated for a lead actress Oscar next year, as did Kate Winslet for her work in “Ammonite,” Francis Lee’s drama of forbidden love. There were raves, too, for Rosamund Pike in J Blakeson’s con-artist thriller “I Care a Lot,” in which she plays an icy schemer who’s turned legally sanctioned elder abuse into her own cottage industry, but makes a startlingly ill-advised choice of targets. Watching the outrageous campaign of oneupmanship that ensued, I found myself flashing back on “Game of Thrones,” mainly because Pike’s scenes opposite Peter Dinklage generate real Cersei-Tyrion vibes.
There were fine performances from male actors too, notably Reid Miller, whose turn as a bullied gay teenager desperate for the acceptance of his father (Mark Wahlberg) was one of the few redeeming qualities of the redemption-peddling misfire “Good Joe Bell.” It’s never a surprise to note the excellence of Mads Mikkelsen, but I was particularly taken with his work in “Another Round,” a Danish dramedy that reunites him with the director Thomas Vinterberg eight years after their Oscar-nominated “The Hunt.” Mikkelsen plays one of four buddies, all high school teachers, who decide to overcome their midlife slumps by giving new meaning to the term “high-functioning alcoholic.”
Drenched in snow and Smirnoff, “Another Round” is ultimately a bittersweet affirmation of community. “New Order,” a horrorthriller from the Mexican filmmaker Michel Franco (“Chronic”), might be described as the opposite. Opening with a nod to “The Godfather” — a lavish wedding where a man shows up requesting a favor — it devolves into the bloody chaos of a class uprising that plays out with tension and unsparing violence, as well as some questionable political framing.
Like last year’s haves-vs.have-nots parable “Joker,” “New Order” won a major prize in Venice (coming in second only to “Nomadland”), and while it’s likely to draw only a fraction of that blockbuster’s audience, its reception may be similarly polarizing. I myself cautiously look forward to seeing it again on a bigger screen, in a darker room — and, needless to say, with no kids present.