The lights go down, the screen becomes illuminated and greatness perhaps will follow.
Film festivals are made for such moments: the first chance for an audience to see a highly anticipated movie, such as Paul Thomas Anderson’s late ’70s/early ’80s porn-industry saga “Boogie Nights,” which just premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival. If it’s a masterpiece, you’ll say you were there. If not, well, dozens of other movies are still waiting to be discovered.
In the case of “Boogie Nights,” which stars Mark “Marky Mark” Wahlberg as an enormously talented porn star and Burt Reynolds as his director, some indeed thought they had witnessed the unveiling of a classic; visiting journalists voted “Boogie Nights” into a first-place tie with “L.A. Confidential” for the festival’s Metro-Media Award for best film.
Others (this viewer included) griped that despite some dazzling sequences and a time-capsule-worthy soundtrack, the movie skimps on character development, has a derivative druggy-downfall second half and isn’t quite sure what it wants to say. Still, if the 2-hours-and-40 minutes-long “Boogie Nights” isn’t the ’90s equivalent of Robert Altman’s “Nashville,” it remains an ambitious, memorable work from 27-year-old writer-director Anderson, whose previous film was the intimate character study “Hard Eight.”
Discovering consensus masterworks turned out to be less the focus of this year’s Toronto festival than recognizing talent. “L.A. Confidential” was widely cheered, but it already had been anointed a big winner at the Cannes Film Festival in May and was appearing mostly as a preview of its broad commercial release this past Friday.
Other much-admired movies — such as Atom Egoyan’s “The Sweet Hereafter,” Michael Winterbottom’s “Welcome to Sarajevo” and Shohei Imamura’s “The Eel” — also were first shown at Cannes, and nothing seemed to wow critics as much as “Breaking the Waves” or to inspire as much of a ticket scramble as “Shine,” both from last year.
Nevertheless, festival veterans considered this year’s event to be among the better ones because of its depth. The festival screened more than 250 features over 10 days, and you could watch movies from 8:30 a.m. past midnight every day and just scratch the surface of the worthwhile entries. Some major discoveries may yet be unearthed from this celluloid avalanche.
Meanwhile, certain winners already are apparent. Canadian director Thom Fitzgerald’s drama about a young gay man’s homecoming, “The Hanging Garden,” received a major boost by winning the festival’s People’s Choice Award, voted by audiences.
David Mamet scored twice, first with his script for Lee Tamahori’s survival thriller “The Edge,” which came in third in the People’s Choice Award balloting, and then with “The Spanish Prisoner,” which he wrote for the screen and directed; it placed behind “Boogie Nights” and “L.A. Confidential” in the critics’ voting and was acquired by Sony Pictures Classics shortly after its world premiere.
“The Spanish Prisoner” harks back to Mamet’s directorial debut, “House of Games,” as a taut intrigue tale about a good person slowly getting snookered. The mark here is a businessman (Campbell Scott) who has devised a fortune-generating “process” for his company and doesn’t know whom to trust among a mysterious aristocrat (a quietly menacing Steve Martin), an evasive boss (Ben Gazzara) and a lovestruck secretary (Rebecca Pidgeon, Mamet’s wife). Although the sum-up ending, featuring what Mamet afterward called a “Joe-the-explainer scene,” is anti-climactic, the movie provides an enjoyably jarring ride.
Writer-director Alan Rudolph also has taken a more audience-pleasing turn with his first movie since “Mrs. Parker and the Vicious Circle.” “Afterglow,” slated for release next year, depicts the romantic intertwining of two troubled marriages: one between a former B-movie actress (Julie Christie in a return to entrancing elegance) and a randy handyman (Nick Nolte), the other between a baby-craving young woman (Lara Flynn Boyle) and her priggish husband (Jonny Lee Miller, whom you’d never know was Sick Boy in “Trainspotting”). The result is sometimes stagy but also moving and entertaining.
Wife-swapping turned out to be a mini-theme at the festival (as it is in Ang Lee’s upcoming “The Ice Storm”). Philip Haas’ “The Blood Oranges” drew unintentional giggles for addressing the subject with groovy gusto, and Mike Figgis’ “One Night Stand” also touches upon it.
But the focus of Figgis’ uneven follow-up to “Leaving Las Vegas” is a brief affair between a successful commercial director (Wesley Snipes) and a married woman (Nastassja Kinski) and their highly coincidental reunion a year later. Although the central relationship remains sketchy, Figgis brings considerable humanity and dark humor to the director’s friendship with a dancer dying of AIDS (Robert Downey Jr.).
Downey was filming “One Night Stand” when he had his much-publicized run-ins with drugs and the law, and at the festival Figgis praised his gutsy performance under tough conditions. Writer-director James Toback used almost the same words in lauding Downey’s work in “Two Girls and a Guy,” shot quickly after his release from rehab.
This talky tale, written in four days and partially improvised, gives the impression of exploring Downey’s demons as it examines an actor’s duplicity after he’s caught carrying on simultaneous relationships with two women (Heather Graham and Natasha Gregson). Audiences seemed to respond to it, though it wore down this viewer with its contrived, therapy-like confrontations and not-so-profound insights.
Noah Baumbach’s “Mr. Jealousy” provided a lighter, truer look at male-female relationships. This comedy, Baumbach’s accomplished follow-up to “Kicking and Screaming,” stars Eric Stoltz as a guy who enters group therapy under an assumed name so he can spy on his girlfriend’s (Annabella Sciorra) ex-boyfriend.
More subtly unsettling is Richard Kwietniowski’s sly “Death in Venice” variation, “Love and Death on Long Island” (slated for next month’s Chicago International Film Festival). It features a wonderfully shaded performance by John Hurt as a reclusive British author who travels to Long Island to meet a teen idol (Jason Priestly) with whom he’s become infatuated.
Zhang Yimou’s “Keep Cool” — a rare modern-day, city-based story from the director of “To Live” and “Raise the Red Lantern” — showed in Toronto after the Chinese government kept it out of Cannes. Featuring much hand-held camera and jumpy editing, it begins as a quirky comedy about a bookseller who aggressively pursues his ex-girlfriend but becomes heavier as it shifts to the male characters’ bonding.
Like “Keep Cool,” Viatcheslav Krichtofovitch’s darkly comic “Friend of the Deceased” depicts a Communist society in transition, the Ukraine, where personal relationships have taken a back seat to business dealings. Robert Bierman’s adaptation of George Orwell’s “Keep the Aspidistra Flying,” meanwhile, gets a star performance out of Richard E. Grant as an advertising writer who thinks he’d rather become a penniless writer than remain a bland member of the 1930s British bourgeoisie.
Hal Hartley’s latest, “Henry Fool,” demonstrated that the filmmaker’s distancing irony can be a bit much over 137 minutes. But the big closing-night premiere was Jean-Jacques Annaud’s “Seven Years in Tibet,” starring Brad Pitt as an Austrian mountaineer (complete with distracting accent) who escapes a World War II British prison camp and eventually befriends the 14-year-old Dalai Lama.
The Himilayan scenery is beautiful, and certain viewers will feel the same about Pitt, with his gleaming white teeth and impressive array of hair configurations. But the movie tells less about the Tibetan religious leader than how a selfish explorer learns to become a better father by hanging out with him.
The movie’s festival press conference was as lively as what was on screen. Annaud discussed how he made the mountaineer’s Nazi affiliation more explicit after a magazine reported the real character’s ties to the SS.
“Halfway through the film,” cracked Pitt, who was clean-shaven and bleached blond with dark roots showing.
The actor also got to flex his vocabulary muscles, saying of his character, “We’ve already characterized this man as egotistical, solipsitic and full of hubris.” And every time he raised his hand to gesture, a barrage of flashbulbs exploded in his face.
The first time, Pitt paused and laughed good naturedly. But when another arm motion resulted in blinding lights, he moaned, “C’mon, already!” and snapped a pencil in half, tossing it gently toward the cameras.
