To be honest, some of the images I remember most from TIFF '05 were in Cameron Crowe's much-maligned Elizabethtown, which continues to advance Crowe's faith in classical Hollywood cinema and classic rock, in no particular order. When you strive to be the heir to Billy Wilder, you're going to make movies that strike some people as hokey and artificial, but on a purely stylistic level, Crowe has a lot of what I look for in a great filmmaker. He uses the full range of cinematic grammar in ways that don't draw undue attention. There's no staggeringly long takes for the sake of staggeringly long takes. What sticks are the moments, not the style.
ST: I'd agree that there are plenty of memorable images in Elizabethtown—though some for reasons of infamy—but Crowe makes the mistake of falling in love with every shot, which is why the film reminds me of Heaven's Gate, another unwieldy endeavor where a director invested so much in the details that he lost sight of the big picture. For all its embarrassing excesses, it's hard not to feel a little protective of Elizabethtown, because Crowe puts himself out there like few others would dare, even if his warehouse of personal inventory spills over too messily. (It should be noted that a shorter and possibly far different cut of Elizabethtown is currently in the works, though I'd suggest Crowe put away the splicer and pick up the gardening shears instead.)
That money shot in Haneke's Caché would probably top anyone's list of unforgettable moments from this festival, if only for the experience of hearing a thousand shocked moviegoers gasp in unison. Other images I can't shake: My first glimpse of legendary Hong Kong star Grace Chang in 1960's The Wild, Wild Rose, vamping it up (and at one point, growling lustily) to a reworked standard from Georges Bizet's Carmen. Then there's the myriad applications of watermelons in Tsai Ming-liang's The Wayward Cloud, Emperor Hirohito and his minions puzzling over a gift box of Hershey's chocolate bars in Aleksandr Sokurov's The Sun, a deranged Janice Dickenson turning up for a cameo in Larry Clark's sublimely retarded Wassup Rockers, and the closing credits of Lars von Trier's Manderlay, which seem especially resonant after the New Orleans fiasco. I'm not convinced that von Trier cares about black people, but he sure makes a good case that Americans have been less than hospitable.
For critics and cinephiles who don't travel the festival circuit, the Toronto Film Festival is a smorgasbord of world cinema unlike any other, but with only a few prominent exceptions, most of these great films premièred at Cannes, Berlin, Sundance, or other festivals earlier in the year. In fact, if you were to put together a schedule that purposely elided titles from the major festivals, you'd probably have a pretty miserable time. Yet article after article keeps popping up declaring Toronto to be the world's premier festival. Should we believe the hype?
NM: Toronto probably deserves the hype because it features such a broad selection of films, and because it sets the agenda for the American arthouse over the next year or two. But let's be honest. The main reason TIFF has become so important is because it's the opening bell in the Oscar race. Ever since American Beauty went from potential cult hit to Best Picture contender on the basis of its Toronto momentum, canny studio marketers have used the festival to get an early lead. The heaviest hitters still get saved for after Thanksgiving—and even after New Year's Day—but a lot of the names that fill out the acting and screenplay categories make their debut in Toronto.
But curiously, those prestige pictures don't always look their best when placed up against the new masterpieces of world cinema. Later in the year, compared to other Oscar-bait, the staid biopics Capote and Walk The Line might seem top-drawer, because they feature outstanding lead performances and explore the darker side of artistic genius. But compared to the jangled immediacy of L'Enfant or The Death Of Mister Lazarescu, both Capote and Walk The Line look processed and diluted. They hold back, so as not to scare off their target audience of middlebrow movie buffs. They're just too darn prestige-y, right down to their reserved, piano-and-string-based instrumental scores.
Maybe there's a middle ground, though, between awards-ready and hardcore-cineastes-only. And maybe David Cronenberg found it with A History Of Violence. The small-town crime-and-punishment story is too neatly arranged, and too shallow in its depiction of how Americans alternately fear and welcome violence. But it's crackling, accessible entertainment with a simple but effective message, and I wouldn't be surprised to see it catapult out of TIFF with a ticket to Oscarville. Final destination: Best Picture nomination.
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