Toronto heads in new directions

LOS ANGELES - When the Toronto International Film Festival announced its high-profile premieres on Tuesday, the lineup was filled with the expected prestige pictures - an adaptation of a Pulitzer Prize-winning work starring Meryl Streep and Julia Roberts (August: Osage County), a 19th-century race drama from the British artist and director Steve McQueen (12 Years a Slave).

But the list also included a more surprising crop of films. Among the world and North American premieres set for the festival when it begins Sept. 5 are potential awards turns for mainstream commercial actors such as Matthew McConaughey (The Dallas Buyers Club) and Kristen Wiig (Hateship, Loveship) and upscale science-fiction movies starring Sandra Bullock (Gravity) and Scarlett Johansson (Under the Skin).

Ron Howard is coming with an auto racing movie starring the man who played Thor (Rush). The director of the Oscar-nominated foreign-language Incendies, Denis Villeneuve, will be there with a thriller starring Hugh Jackman (Prisoners).

There’s even a feature from Mad Men creator Matthew Weiner, starring Owen Wilson and Zach Galifianakis (You Are Here).

More than most cinema gatherings, Toronto offers the possibility of reinvention. Coming at the end of a movie summer filled with explosions but before autumnal awards-ennui kicks in, the festival offers a chance for audiences to get a fresh start - and plenty of famous film people to do the same.

“There’s a shorthand that movie stars have that has us enjoying watching them do similar things again and again,” festival artistic director Cameron Bailey said Tuesday. “But there’s also something very liberating about seeing them do something new, and it’s part of our mission to bring that to audiences.”

Toronto serves as a critical early stop for movies that will embark on significant awards campaigns and commercial rollouts in the fall months. Last year, Silver Linings Playbook and Argo established themselves as potential hits and Oscar front-runners there. A film’s receptionin Toronto often makes or breaks its prospects.

The reinvention is in full effect this year. After a period of pushing in new directions with Magic Mike and Mud, McConaughey expands further with The Dallas Buyers Club as the real-life, fast-living Texan Ron Woodroof, who, after being infected with the AIDS virus in the 1980s, began smuggling drugs from Mexico to help himself and other patients. The film also stars Jared Leto, in his second big-screen role in six years, as a cross-dressing AIDS patient, and Jennifer Garner as a doctor.

“Ron Woodroof ’s determination to live and to refuse to die inspired this film. Inspired me. And wait to see how it inspired Matthew, Jared, Jenny, the whole cast and crew!” enthused Dallas Buyers Club director Jean-Marc Vallee.

A similar unexpected spirit permeates Hateship, Loveship, a movie that stars Wiig but is directed by Liza Johnson, a filmmaker who previously made the intimate military-theme indie drama Return. The new movie has Wiig playing a shy caregiver who finds herself in the grip of a new desire, in an adaptation of a novella from the Man Booker International Prize winner Alice Munro.Bridesmaids this isn’t.

Meanwhile, after coming to Toronto with the hard-hitting Incendies in 2010, Villeneuve delivered the long-gestating Hollywood script Prisoners, about a desperate father (Jackman) who seeksanswers after his daughter is kidnapped.

“The first three days making this movie I almost had a heart attack when I realized that this could be my movie but also a Hollywood movie,” Villeneuve said in an interview, adding, “People will get a chance to see Hugh Jackman do things they don’t get to see him do.”

Genres are being cast in a new light too. Bullock stars opposite George Clooney in the outer-space tale Gravity, a movie that marks Alfonso Cuaron’s first new film in seven years - and offers a rare chance for a science-fiction movie to be viewed as an awards contender. “The people who responded most to the film when we screened it are the ones with the most sophisticated tastes,” Bailey said.

Also in the sci-fi realm is Under the Skin. Jonathan Glazer, who more than a decade ago directed the heist antihero picture Sexy Beast, unveils his first movie in nine years. Johansson plays an alien who must drug and kidnap earthling hitchhikers.

Johansson will have competition on the new-horizon front from Adam Levine: The Maroon 5 frontman and The Voice mainstay takes a turn on the big screen as a star of Can a Song Save Your Life?, the new drama from Once director John Carney.

For his part, Oscar winner Howard has turned his attention to Formula One racing, making the fact-based Rush, about the 1970s rivalry between Niki Lauda ( Daniel Bruhl) and James Hunt (Thor’s Chris Hemsworth).

Finally, Mad Men’s Weiner, who made one little-seen feature 17 years ago, hits the festival with You Are Here, a story about two slackers that has its two leads trying to come back from box-office flops.

Among its other reinvention-theme offerings, the festival this year will give an unusually large number of actors a platform to show off something very different: directing talent. The slate it announced Tuesday is filled with movies by actors who have gotten behind the camera, including Jason Bateman for his spelling-bee comedy Bad Words; Ralph Fiennes for his Charles Dickens romance The Invisible Woman; and Keanu Reeves, whose Mandarin-English martial-arts film Man of Tai Chi was financed by the Chinesegovernment.

Perhaps epitomizing that trend: Mike Myers, the Saturday Night Live veteran behind some of the biggest comedy franchises of the last several decades who hasn’t had a major film in five years, will come to this year’s festival as a director - of a documentary.

It’s called Supermensch and tells the story of the talent manager Shep Gordon. The film is financed and produced by A+E Studios, a company best-known for hard-hitting documentaries like The Tillman Story. “We are excited by the passion Mike Myers has brought to this project,” said President Bob DeBitetto in a statement.

And then in a phrase meant to capture its subject but perhaps also shed light on the shape-shifting nature of its filmmaker and others who are Toronto-bound, the release added: “Capitalist, protector, hedonist, pioneer, showman, shaman … Supermensch.”

MovieStyle, Pages 34 on 07/26/2013

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