Toronto festival: The superlatives

Every year the Toronto International Film Festival packs 300 films into its highly compressed 10-day run in early September, and every year, no matter how many of these films you get to see -- and I knew a noncritic fan who claimed to have seen 30 in five days, which is pretty scary when you do the math -- you will always leave with the vague, unsettling feeling of still having missed a lot. It's like attending a fascinating lecture while suffering through a narcolepsy episode.

While this is the case with every festival, the 2014 edition proved especially consternating. The powers that be made it especially hard on the hundreds of press and industry types in attendance by front-loading the press screening schedule so much that it was impossible to see more than a handful of the films we were most interested in. On the opening Thursday of the festival, there were no fewer than a dozen films I was desperate to watch, but through scheduling conflicts and overlapping times, I was able to take in only three of them.

And I got lucky: One of the other films I initially missed ended up getting an additional, nonfestival screening, which I was able to attend on my last night in Toronto -- and which ended up being my favorite film from the festival, one of the best of the year so far (see below).

Still, it's hard to complain too bitterly about simply having too much of a good thing around you for a week, even if you found yourself cursing the cinema gods that would force you to make such difficult choices. The truth is I still got to see a lot of really exciting and diverse international cinema. Here are some of the high (and low) lights:

Creepiest Film: Nightcrawler, Dan Gilroy. Actually, this was a pretty competitive category at the festival this year. Between the eerie paranoia of the STD-as-horror-motif It Follows and the real-life macabre menace of billionaire scion Jon Du Pont, explored in the very strong Foxcatcher, you could say this year's festival was steeped in ill-vibes. But the most unrelenting and dark film prize has to go to Gilroy's appropriately named Nightcrawler, which stars Jake Gyllenhaal as an eager, go-getting sociopath in L.A., who finds a niche for himself filming bloody car accidents and homicides for local TV news. Unrelenting in its dark, satiric bent, it brings us a Travis Bickle-like ghoul, updated for the 21st century.

Best Backdrop: The Alps, Swiss or French varieties. With the combined glory and grandeur of the mountains in Switzerland featured in Olivier Assayas' Clouds of Sils Maria, and the absolutely stunning French Alps found in Ruben Ostlund's black dramedy Force Majeure, the European peaks have never seemed so inviting.

Most Idiotic Film: Without a doubt, the stupidest film I saw this year was Jean-Baptiste Leonetti's dopey "thriller" The Reach, which stars Jeremy Irvine as a young desert tracker and Michael Douglas -- working on the bazillionth take on the rich, smug character he has played his entire career -- as a loathsome, wealthy big-game hunter, who hires the kid so he can bag a bighorn sheep, but ends up trying to cover up an accidental murder instead. It's the kind of film that earned derisive laughter from the packed house of film critics, because it's beyond stupid, and because it didn't have to be. An afternoon with a red pen and a halfway intelligent screenwriter could easily have turned the film into something a good deal more worth watching.

Best Interview: Eddie Redmayne, The Theory of Everything. While the festival affords many opportunities for interviewing filmmakers and actors, you have to be judicious in your selection process, else you'll be trapped in very nicely appointed hotel conference rooms all day instead of inside darkened theaters, actually watching the films these artists have striven to bring to the screen.

The British Redmayne, who stars in Bennett Miller's quite good Stephen Hawking bio-pic, is absolutely devastating in the film, which follows the brilliant physicist from his early days at Cambridge, before getting stricken with ALS, to his worldwide fame as one of the great minds of his era. It's a potentially Oscar-winning performance, and one that will surely get the actor a huge amount of attention, but meanwhile the kid was so humble, thoughtful, and well-spoken, he completely won me over.

Funniest Film: While We're Young, Noah Baumbach. Typically, you don't get to see too many comedies at the festival -- most of the truly worthy selections tend to involve high, tearful drama, or documentary -- but every so often, an auteur with a crackerjack wit will deign to put out something with a lot of laughs.

Baumbach, whose previous festival effort was 2012's delightful Frances Ha, has made a smart, droll film about hanging on to the last threads of youth. It stars Ben Stiller and Naomi Watts as a middle-aged couple who suddenly become friends with a couple of quintessential Brooklyn hipsters, played by Adam Driver and Amanda Seyfried. Ever erudite, Baumbach's film has plenty to say about growing old and remaining open to new energies, but it's also a fine, laugh-out-loud comedy.

Deepest Experience: From What Is Before, Lav Diaz. Friends, I know I wrote in my preview that I wasn't going to be able to watch Filipino genius director Diaz' latest effort, a five-and-a-half-hour affair, shot in black and white, about his country before and after despot dictator Ferdinand Marcos' decree of martial law, but when the time came, I simply couldn't resist the opportunity.

As it happens, the director was there (at least at the beginning), extolling us to get a pillow and a blanket in order to stay comfortable, but he needn't have worried: The film is so brilliantly paced and utterly gorgeous to look at, so fascinating in its effect, the time flies past. You have to accept the deliberate slowness of the pace, but once you do, it casts a powerful -- and deeply affecting -- spell.

Most Surprising Performance: Steve Carell, Foxcatcher. Carell, known for his delicious comic turns in such fare as The Office and The 40-Year-Old Virgin, has always shown an intuitive pathos in his sad-sack, alienated characters, so I suppose you could just say this is the other side of that same coin. But his turn as the malevolent and disturbing Jon Du Pont, whose obsession with building an Olympic wrestling team yields tragic results, is a revelation of quiet menace.

Carell is not a physically large man, especially amid a group of actors portraying world-class wrestlers, but he's adept at playing the worst kind of sociopath: one who so deeply believes in his paranoid fantasia-world, he has virtually no handle on any other strand of reality.

Best Performance: Timothy Spall, Mr. Turner. There's a reason British director Mike Leigh's films so often earn acting nominations come awards time: He has meticulously worked out an exacting methodology with his actors where they conjure up their characters over a great amount of time and reflection. But here, working on a film about the great British landscape artist J.M.W. Turner, Leigh and his star, Spall, had to find a way to portray a very real man of whom very little was actually known.

Reticent and bear-like, with a grunting grumble of a voice, and a decisively cantankerous nature, Spall plays the artist with just the right amount of social and antisocial elements, finding a way to bring his humanity to light, even as the reclusive artist buries his emotions very deeply into his stocky core.

Best Film: Two Days, One Night, Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne. I got very lucky on my last full day of the festival when an email got sent out to the press corps about an added screening of this absolutely brilliant film from the Belgian Dardenne brothers. The film stars the beguiling Marion Cotillard as a delicate, working-class mother of two, just back from a mental breakdown, who finds out in her absence, and under pressure from her manager, her co-workers have voted her out of a job in order for the company to have the money to allocate for their annual bonuses. She is given one weekend to change everyone's mind to allow her to come back to the job her family desperately needs.

The film is an absolute philosophical triumph, on the order of vintage Vittorio De Sica. Its seeming simplicity -- using the Dardennes' trademark unadorned cinema verite style -- completely belies the complex emotional inner life of its character. Heartbreaking and warming in equal measure, it will definitely remain in my top five this year.

MovieStyle on 09/19/2014

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