Northern lights

Politics and pregnancy dominate this year‘s Toronto Film Festival.

Each critic sees 30-plus films in an order of his or her own devising, but for me, the 32nd Toronto International Film Festival (which ended September 15) announced its theme between Saturday’s Midnight Madness revelry and Sunday morning’s conversation starter: George A. Romero’s Diary of the Dead versus Brian De Palma’s Redacted—twin experiments in first-person filmmaking, screened 12 hours apart. In between, I watched Werner Herzog journey to Antarctica in Encounters at the End of the World. In a festival with 275 features, you can’t ask for all the transitions to be smooth.

The fifth movie in Romero’s zombie series, Diary of the Dead doubles back to Night of the Living Dead by starting from the first day the zombies appear. The allegorical tropes are familiar, but the Blair Witch shooting style is new: The no-name actors take turns filming each other, providing a handmade contrast to the propagandistic newscasts the characters see on TV. (Michael Moore would probably agree with Romero’s DIY message, though the Sicko director’s unspeakably lazy Captain Mike Across America—reconstituted footage from his 2004 get-out-the-vote tour—accomplishes nothing beyond self-aggrandizement.)

De Palma takes a similar antimedia stance in Redacted, a veritable Iraq War remake of his Vietnam film Casualties of War (1989), inspired by a real-life murder-rape case in Samarra. De Palma wanted to use footage from the incident, but his lawyers wouldn’t allow it. Instead—calling attention to his artifice—he builds a narrative out of the fictionalized soldiers’ footage, a fake French documentary and YouTube-style videos.
His glibness in quoting from Casualties borders on appalling; indeed, notwithstanding Captain Mike Across America, Redacted sparked some of the festival’s most scathing reviews. But the movie’s use of the Casualties template can be read as De Palma’s statement that Iraq and Vietnam should be treated with equal crudeness. Redacted may be hard to like, but it was also Toronto’s most provocative film.

It’s not as if there weren’t respectful alternatives. Nick Broomfield’s effective Battle for Haditha reenacts an incident in which marines retaliated for a roadside explosion by slaughtering two dozen civilians. And both films were preferable to Rendition, a glossy Reese Witherspoon vehicle about secret government torture that seems overplotted to avoid clarity.

Arriving late at a fest with loads to admire but little that sparked true passion, Todd Haynes’s I’m Not There became a predesignated flash point, promising the spectacle of six actors playing characters modeled on Bob Dylan. Cate Blanchett fares best, wandering around in an 8½-inspired landscape and sparring with a journalist played by Bruce Greenwood. Richard Gere fares worst in the Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid thread, which is too clever by half.

I’m Not There’s collage of visual styles (from Fellini to Godard to Pennebaker to Peckinpah, all brilliantly aped by cinematographer Ed Lachman) keeps it hypnotic from start to finish. But the moment when Haynes brings it together is itself not quite there. For all the movie’s fascination with the Dylan mystique (and Julie Taymor’s bizarrely conceived Beatles numbers in Across the Universe), the festival’s best use of music involved a crucial moment in Gus Van Sant’s Paranoid Park, as the protagonist burned a letter to the strains of Elliott Smith’s “Angeles.”

Toronto came billed as reviving the gritty urban thrillers of the ’70s, whether it was with Neil Jordan’s The Brave One, a gloss on Death Wish, or Sidney Lumet’s unhurried heist movie Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead, which has shades of both Dog Day Afternoon and Reservoir Dogs. A more enjoyable throwback, Ira Sachs’s superb, 1949-set comedy Married Life takes the Preston Sturges–style premise of a philandering husband (Chris Cooper) who’d rather murder his wife (Patricia Clarkson) than see her unhappy and turns it into a parable about the compromises of marriage.

Turning back the clock in a different sense, Toronto contributed to this year’s crop of preemptive post–Roe v. Wade movies. The nuptials in Noah Baumbach’s sharply written (if contrived) Margot at the Wedding hinge in part on an unplanned pregnancy. The Romanian Palme d’Or winner 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days chronicles a girl’s struggle to obtain an abortion under the Ceausescu regime.

But the best-loved film involving a pregnancy was Juno, directed by Jason Reitman (Thank You for Smoking) and written by Diablo Cody (yes, a former stripper). Like Knocked Up, it’s a disarmingly hilarious treatment of a politically incorrect premise: teen decides to keep her baby and give it up for adoption. The movie’s success is due almost entirely to lead actor Ellen Page, who even redeems the final slide into sentimentality. If Toronto offered no masterpieces, it did, at least, announce that a star was born.

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