'Wendy and Lucy' won plaudits, Danny Boyle's new film went down a storm, and Colin Farrell and Vincent Cassel terrified the crowds at the Toronto International Film Festival, writes Michael Dwyer
COLIN FARRELL HAS generated more than a few screams on arriving at movie premieres, but he had Toronto audiences screaming in shock at the festival screening of Pride and Glory last weekend. He plays New York police officer Jimmy Egan whose wife (Lake Bell) is from another Irish-American family that includes three fellow officers, her father (Jon Voight) and her brothers Ray (Edward Norton) and Francis (Noah Emmerich).
When four colleagues are killed on duty and police corruption is suspected, Ray is put on the case and traces the trail to his brother-in-law, Jimmy. Farrell portrays Jimmy as a smooth operator whose disarming demeanour masks his capacity for viciousness. This is unflinchingly revealed in a scene that had us all squirming in our seats. Threatening a criminal contact for information, Jimmy casually places the man's baby on the ironing board and brandishes a hot iron over the child.
Violence is frequent in this downbeat thriller directed by Gavin O'Connor, whose screenplay is overloaded with subplots. The film benefits significantly from the moody, atmospheric images captured by Irish-American cinematographer Declan Quinn, and from the quality of its sturdy cast, among which Farrell smoulders ominously.
Ethan Hawke tackles a villainous role with relish in his gritty performance as one of two Irish-American crooks at the core of the south Boston-set thriller What Doesn't Kill You. Based on the personal experiences of writer-director Brian Goodman, before he reformed and took up acting and making movies, it features Hawke and Mark Ruffalo as childhood friends who are recruited by local gangster. Driven by hubris and greed, they break away from their criminal mentor (played by Goodman) with consequences overshadowed by imminent doom but lined with the hope of redemption in a compelling character story.
The most intimidating gangster on screen at Toronto was the reckless, utterly unscrupulous Jacques Mesrine, portrayed with chilling conviction by Vincent Cassel in L'Instinct de Mort (Public Enemy Number One). Mesrine is introduced as a French soldier whose cold-blooded nature is tapped as an interrogator in late-1950s Algeria. Returning home to his well-off family, he drifts into daylight robberies. He marries a Spaniard but becomes passionately involved with a Frenchwoman (Cécile de France), who becomes his partner in increasingly audacious criminal exploits in Paris and then in Montreal, where he falls in with radical Québécois separatists.
Director Jean-François Richet demonstrates terrific flair for orchestrating the visceral action set-pieces that abound in his vigorously-staged thriller, which is based on the autobiography Mesrine wrote in jail. Stranger than fiction, this movie is the first of a two-part saga - the second will follow next year - but it is thoroughly and satisfyingly self-contained.
Eight years ago, Joan Allen played a US vice-presidential nominee whose past is raked over in writer-director Rod Lurie's prescient The Contender. Lurie's latest film, Nothing But the Truth, fictionalises, but clearly is based upon, the outing of Valerie Plame as an undercover CIA agent and the imprisonment of New York Times journalist Judith Miller, who broke the story and refused to identify her source.
Lurie makes several lapses of judgment in his fictionalised film treatment, and Kate Beckinsale struggles unconvincingly as the jailed journalist. Vera Farmiga is much more persuasive as the CIA agent in a cast that includes Matt Dillon as a driven special prosecutor and an engaging Alan Alda, bespectacled and resembling an older John Gormley, as the sagacious attorney hired by the newspaper's editor (Angela Bassett). The final scene is simply ludicrous and just has to be jettisoned.
EVEN MORE disappointing, given all the talent it assembles, is Richard Eyre's adultery yarn, The Other Man, in which Liam Neeson and Laura Linney play spouses for the third time (after Kinsey and the Broadway revival of The Crucible). Neeson is cast as a businessman discovering that his wife, a successful shoe designer, has been involved in a long affair. In his dogged quest to learn more, he becomes as obsessive as Judi Dench's character in Eyre's superior previous picture, Notes on a Scandal.
An oddly accented Antonio Banderas plays the title role in The Other Man, a tiresomely contrived tale unworthy of its players.
Irish theatre director John Crowley, who made a vibrant feature film debut with Intermission, gathers together a fine cast led by Michael Caine in the low-key, melancholy Is There Anybody There?. Set in 1980s England, it features Caine as a magician reluctantly moving into a residence for the elderly and befriending the young son (Bill Milner from Son of Rambow) of the owners (Anne-Marie Duff and David Morrissey). The chemistry between Caine and Milner is appealing in this affecting, generally unsentimental tale, although it lacks the powerful dramatic hold exerted by Crowley's Boy A last year.
Last seen as a transvestite in Alan Gilsenan's Timbuktu, adventurous Irish actor Karl Geary comfortably takes to the saddle in The Burrowers, an intriguing hybrid of the western and horror genres set in 1870s Dakota. He plays Fergus Coffey, an Irish immigrant who joins the search party when the love of his life and her family have apparently been abducted by the Sioux, but there are more sinister (and grotesque) forces underfoot in this gory but handsome production, which was written and directed by JT Petty. Unusually for Irish immigrants of that era, Fergus speaks some basic French, which proves handy in communicating with the Ute tribe. And in what has to be a first for a western, he delivers the line: "I gotta go to the jacks."
In The Loss of a Teardrop Diamond, the central character is Fisher Willow (played with a decadent swagger and an extravagant wardrobe by Bryce Dallas Howard), a self-absorbed society debutante who declares: "A person of my kind never has enough money." Chris Evans, Ann-Margret, Ellen Burstyn and Will Patton get to parade their southern drawls in director Jodie Markell's attractively designed and photographed melodrama based on a Tennessee Williams screenplaythat proves too slight to be stretched across almost two hours.
While writer-director Matt Aselton's Gigantic strives to be original, it is unbalanced by an eagerness to be quirky, which is one of the recurring missteps in US independent cinema. Paul Dano, who fuelled the power of There Will Be Blood, brings a likeable presence to the central character, Brian, who is 28, wants to adopt a Chinese baby, sells mattresses for a living and falls for the insecure daughter (Zooey Deschanel) of a bombastic customer (John Goodman). The mostly under-used cast includes Edward Asner and Jane Alexander in a movie pointlessly saddled with an inexplicable subplot of a homeless stalker who assaults Brian at every opportunity.
The most heartening and accomplished of the US independent movies I saw in Toronto was one of the simplest and most modest, Wendy and Lucy, which more than affirms all the promise writer-director Kelly Reichardt displayed with her earlier Old Joy.
On screen throughout, Michelle Williams is hypnotic as she immerses herself - and the viewer - in her character, Wendy, a determinedly self-sufficient loner accompanied by her beloved dog Lucy on a long journey to Alaska and the hope of a new life.She experiences the kindness - and the dangers - of strangers in this touching, acutely observed film rooted in honesty, concern and compassion.
Deservedly, Wendy and Lucy was warmly received at Toronto, but the festival's most coveted prize, the annual audience award, was given to one of the early favourites, Danny Boyle's exhilarating Slumdog Millionaire. To thank the avid Toronto audience that turned out in record numbers, the organisers added a free extra screening of Boyle's film in a 1,500-seat theatre on closing night. It was a high note ending another memorable 10 days of round-the-clock new movies in Toronto.
