Coulda Been a Contender

This year's Toronto International Film Festival lacks Oscar oomph.

by Sam Adams

Fox Searchlight I HOPE YOU DANCE: Natalie Portman's limitations match up too perfectly with her character's in Black Swan.

[ movies ]

First, the bad news: By general consensus, 2010 was the Toronto International Film Festival's most lackluster year in recent memory. There are years when I've seen as many as half of the films on my year-end list within a few days of each other; this year, the contenders number precisely one. Given that at best it's possible to see one-tenth of the films on display, there's a chance I might simply have chosen the wrong ones, but as the week went on, I tried in vain to find someone who was crazy about something, some passionate outlier from whom I might borrow a cup of enthusiasm. But no dice.

There were plenty of near-misses, movies that fell just short of greatness, as well as some that might be nudged into the latter category when seen on less than a few hours' sleep. The dark comic-book comedy Super, for one, with Rainn Wilson as a mild-mannered nerd who turns costumed avenger when his wife is seduced by an evil drug lord. Yes, it sounds an awful lot like Kick-Ass, especially once Wilson picks up a pint-size sidekick in Ellen Page. But writer-director James Gunn (Slither) is sharp and self-aware where Kick-Ass was merely craven, indulging the genre's bloodlust without pandering to fanboy fantasies.

Darren Aronofsky's Black Swan was one of Toronto's most hotly anticipated titles; journalists without a coveted priority pass showed up as much as 90 minutes before the 9:30 a.m. screening. Essentially melding the effects-heavy psychosis of his earlier films with the grainy, handheld style of The Wrestler, the movie's operatic psychodrama centers on ballet dancer Natalie Portman, whose ticket out of the corps arrives in the form of the lead for Swan Lake. The catch is that she must be able to dance both the virginal white swan and its seductive opposite, which requires tapping into layers of her psyche that the technically flawless but emotionally sterile Portman has rarely exposed, on stage or in life. Plumbing levels of body horror that would do David Cronenberg proud, Aronofsky literalizes Portman's inner transformation, a move that, as his movies often do, straddles the line between affectingly gonzo and merely over-the-top. The movie's Achilles heel is Portman herself, whose limitations as an actress match up perfectly — perhaps too perfectly — with those of her character. It's easy to buy Portman as a frigid perfectionist, less to swallow the encroaching madness that purportedly engulfs her. Taking the role is a bold move on Portman's part, but even after watching the film, I'm not sure she can dance the black swan.

Black Swan is bloodier than the average ballet movie, but it pales beside Danny Boyle's 127 Hours, based on the true story of a lone hiker (James Franco) who was trapped at the bottom of a narrow canyon for five days by a loose boulder that pinned his arm to the rock face. Friends found Boyle's adrenalized style inapt to a story that is fundamentally about stasis, but Boyle takes his cues from the character's surging mind rather than his immobilized body. With a solid emotional undercurrent focused on Franco's lone-wolf persona, it's an extreme-sports Into the Wild. That's not to say Boyle neglects the physical; the sequence when Franco frees himself is as (literally) nerve-jangling as anything I've seen on screen. I had to wait for my stomach to settle before I could pass judgement on the film.

One of the festival's most pleasant surprises was the darkly comic coming-of-age tale Submarine, written and directed by British comedy veteran Richard Ayoade, whose credits include The Mighty Boosh and The IT Crowd. With its sardonic narration and wistful pop songs, the movie treads on the edges of Wes Anderson's turf, but Ayoade is more interested in his character's interiors than how they're lit. The movie never goes quite where you think it will, and despite a few missteps (Paddy Considine's overstated New Age guru seems to come from a different and altogether less interesting movie) it's tender and genuinely wise about the way adolescents deal with familial upheaval, while at the same time bitterly funny and utterly unsentimental.

Kelly Reichardt's Meek's Cutoff is an even more eccentric genre riff, a placid Western in which a handful of pioneers lose themselves in the Oregon desert. The real Stephen Meek led a wagon train of some 1,000 people on an unexplored detour from the Oregon trail, but his cinematic counterpart (Bruce Greenwood, buried under a massive beard) shepherds fewer than a dozen, including Michelle Williams, Shirley Henderson, Will Patton, Paul Dano and Zoe Kazan. Reichardt, who shoots her landscapes in boxy Academy ratio rather than spreading widescreen, is unmaking myth, focusing on the physical hardship and uncertain progress of American expansion. She and her regular screenwriter, Swarthmore grad Jon Raymond, clearly have their eyes on present-day delusions, as well; it doesn't take much imagination to link up the wandering pioneers, whose captive Indian guide may be leading them toward salvation or death, with the rudderless confusion in Iraq and Afghanistan. But although Reichardt often talks up her films' political subtexts, it's often less engrossing than the characters themselves, which is where Meek's Cutoff gets into uncharted territory. Between the (relatively) expansive cast and the glancing genre riffs, I'm not sure the characters have space to develop, although I may feel differently on further viewing.

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And now for the bombs, the worst of which was Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck's It's Kind of a Funny Story. It's not that the directors of Half Nelson and Sugar have sold out so much as that they've tried and failed. A potentially affecting story set in a mental ward populated by a melancholy Zach Galifianakis is torpedoed by jokey cutaways and a spectacularly ill-conceived musical number. Sylvain Chomet's The Illusionist takes an unfinished script by the late master Jacques Tati and turns it into a joyless romp full of strained magic and unearned sentiment. Werner Herzog's Caves of Forgotten Dreams, which explores ancient cave paintings in dimly lit 3D, is the first of his made-for-TV documentaries to feel as if it were made for TV. The drawings themselves are spectacular, but the stereoscopic view adds little but a touch of blurriness.

(s_adams@citypaper.net)