Walk on the wild side

Rock rebellion and youthful swagger pump up Toronto’s volume.

Screams, gales of laughter, Canadians gone wild: Anything is possible when a beach ball comes into play. Toronto’s cavernous Ryerson Theatre became an impromptu volleyball court last Saturday as the clock ticked past midnight and zealous viewers aimed for the balcony. One hoodie-clad pummeler became an instant celebrity. When France’s Julien Maury, codirector of the riotously gory Inside (imagine an evil twin of Knocked Up), finally hit the stage in baggy jeans and a baseball cap, he jumped right in: “Where is zee beach ball? I want to play with you guys!”

The Toronto International Film Festival was coming to an end. Only nine days earlier, the vulpine Asia Argento stalked the stage and thanked her father, horror maestro Dario, for making her “a freak.” Between those two bookends unspooled one of the more exuberant fests in recent memory, a showcase of youthfulness in which the best new work gave off sparks of punk attitude and irreverence. Go ahead and put the Argentos’ The Mother of Tears in that category—unless, of course, you find roving packs of leather-clad succubi old hat. Stodgier horror purists bolted for the exits, while the beaming director himself celebrated his 67th birthday at the world premiere of his lovably ridiculous future cult classic.

Toronto has always worked best as a one-stop shop, skimming the cream from Cannes, Sundance and other festivals. But if you tuned out those preapproved highlights, the prevailing spirit was one of revolution, of youth supplanting elders. In short, it was not a good week to be Ben Affleck. Judging from brother Casey’s star-making turn in The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford (playing the latter with equal parts squirmy insecurity and desperate lunging), the family’s true talent has arrived. Here, too, was plucky Ellen Page, barely out of her teens, stepping up mightily as a pregnant high-schooler in the terrific Juno, which boasts some of the most viciously sarcastic dialogue since Heathers. (Expect more carping about a young woman’s choice come the film’s December release.) Even hippie relic George Romero attuned himself to the panic of terrified film-school students in Diary of the Dead, a YouTube-era nightmare that outdid Brian De Palma’s clumsy, Iraq-themed Redacted for political urgency.

Those still unconvinced of Toronto’s newfound vigor could bask in the deafening power chords of Pete Townshend, reverberating in the same theater where the Who performed Tommy nearly 40 years prior. Amazing Journey: The Story of the Who is a near-definitive tribute to the group’s abandon, loaded with euphoric footage of guitar destruction and Keith Moon’s exploding drum kit. No film proved as majestically loud as Julian Schnabel’s revelatory concert document Lou Reed’s Berlin, both a reclamation of the singer’s most challenging album (a bracing cocktail of cabaret decadence and lyrical nihilism) and an improvement on it. These two films—along with the moody Cannes holdover Control, the Ian Curtis biopic—made up an impressively rebellious listening library. Asia Argento, Casey Affleck, the Who: The kids were all right.

At the apex of Toronto’s rock & roll riot perched Todd Haynes’s brilliant I’m Not There, positioned as an oblique biography of Bob Dylan—embodied by six actors, including a wonderfully cryptic Cate Blanchett—but played more as a cousin to Velvet Goldmine’s glam poseurs than anything out of this world. (The true subject may be the director himself.) A gaping void yawns at the center of the movie, crystallized in the moment when a white-faced ghost wails Dylan’s lesser-known “Going to Acapulco” on a stage that might be Missouri, the Wild West or Sam Peckinpah’s Pat Garrett & Billy Kid—or a purgatorial combo of all three. This non–Dylan fan was shaken for days.

After such open-throated boldness, was there room for (yawn) respectable dramas about emotional containment? Sure, although Joe Wright’s Atonement definitely seemed to lose steam after its dazzling first act, set at a sexed-up British mansion at the onset of WWII. It’s not that Wright’s adaptation of Ian McEwan’s best-selling novel wants for polish, only that its subsequent wrinkles feel a touched too smoothed out. Meanwhile, Ira Sachs’s Married Life, a demystification of late-1940s upper-class infidelity, was perhaps the find of the festival and the sole notable exception to the week’s assemblage of younger-feeling drama. Chris Cooper, Pierce Brosnan and a robustly liberated Patricia Clarkson all excelled at cheating. In a festival of succubi and guitar windmilling, it was the least they could do.

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