From 9 a.m. every day for the 10 days of the Toronto International Film Festival, and sometimes even earlier, the queues began to stretch around the block at various venues throughout the city as avid cinema-goers, armed with juice, coffee and the bulky programme book, lined up for their first fix of the day, writes Michael Dwyer.
For people out there in the real world, Canadians on their way to work every morning, those long and winding queues proved a daily source of fascination, although it was clear that the city's workforce was significantly reduced for the duration of the festival as thousands took time off to immerse themselves in their annual film feast, a vast international programme of 253 feature films and 80 shorts representing 60 countries.
Circumnavigating the festival's schedule involved hours of planning: reading all the laudatory notes in the 418-page programme book, then reading between the lines to weed out the hype, and most complicated of all, drawing up one's own festival schedule when the screenings for so many attractive offerings clashed day after day, even though each film was shown twice and given a third screening for those of us in the media and the film industry whose daily routine started even earlier, with screenings at 8.30 a.m..
Inevitably, the more high-profile movies were early sell-outs, but it was encouraging to note the packed houses every day for films made by and featuring people who were household names only in their own households.
There isn't a better film festival in the world. Toronto generates star power on a scale that now overshadows Cannes, with dozens of Hollywood and international actors and directors on hand to introduce their movies and discuss them with the audience. Refreshingly, Toronto entirely eschews the black-tie pomp of Cannes - as well as its competition-driven ethos, which now deters so many directors and producers from showing films at the French festival. Toronto presents just a handful of prizes, and the most coveted is the People's Choice award based on the votes of the public.
This year, an Irishman took that award when the prizes were handed out in Toronto last Sunday - Terry George for Hotel Rwanda - and the result was no surprise to anyone who attended the movie's emotionally charged world premiere at the festival. As I left the screening five minutes after the closing credits, the standing ovation was still at full force in the 1,200-seater Elgin Theatre.
This is just the second cinema film from George, the Belfast writer-director who is based in New York. His screenplays have all been rooted in conflict - in Northern Ireland for his collaborations with Jim Sheridan on the screenplays for In the Name of the Father, The Boxer and George's own directing début, Some Mother's Son; during the second World War for Hart's War; and in Vietnam for his HBO TV film, A Bright Shining Lie.
His new film, Hotel Rwanda, is a powerful, fact-based drama dealing with the efforts of a Kigali hotel manager, Paul Rusesabagina, to shelter and save 1,268 refugees at the onset of the genocide in Rwanda in 1994. He initially believes that the presence of United Nations personnel and the world media, and the signing of a peace agreement, will all contribute to stopping the conflict, but as a TV news cameraman (Joaquin Phoenix) tells him, viewers around the world will see the footage, say it's shocking and get on with eating their dinner.
Charismatically played by US actor Don Cheadle, Rusesabagina has to draw on all his skills honed as a hotel manager to save the refugees - his tact and organisational skills, and the favours he has accumulated down the years. He is a potent dramatic filter for this tense drama, which is admirably lucid in its picture of the escalating conflict and the bitter hatred harboured by the Hutus for their Tutsi neighbours.
The remarkable German film, Der Untergang (Downfall), is set at the end of the second World War, charting the last 10 days of the Third Reich - and daring to humanise Adolf Hitler, generally the subject of caricatured treatment in movies. There is a rare and eerie authenticity about this intense recreation based on Joachim Fast's book, Inside Hitler's Bunker, and the memoirs of Hitler's secretary, Traudl Junge, herself the subject of a recent documentary, Blind Spot.
In a prologue set in November 1942, the Führer personally selects the 22-year-old Junge (Alexandra Maria Lara) from five applicants for the job, before the film moves forward to Hitler's 56th birthday on April 20th, 1945.
Although Eva Braun, vivaciously portrayed by Juliane Kohler, has organised a party, there is little to celebrate as the Russian forces encroach on Berlin.
At the core of this thoughtful and fascinating film is the riveting pivotal performance from the German-based, Swiss-born actor, Bruno Ganz, playing Hitler as a stooped but domineering figure torn between self-delusion and the reality of imminent defeat. Time and again, he expresses contempt for his fellow Germans, dismissively noting that "in a war like this, there are no civilians" and repeatedly uttering his mantra that "whatever happens to Germans is their destiny".
Although Hitler is depicted as being prone to outbursts of apoplectic rage, self-serving paranoia and rabid anti-Semitism, he is also shown to shed a tear as he and Braun prepare for their suicide. Director Oliver Hirschbiegel, who made the edgy 2001 reality TV-inspired The Experiment, vividly captures the destruction of Berlin and the mounting human toll, as well as the panic gripping the Nazis as their world caves in all around them. In a chilling performance, Corrina Harfouch plays the glacial, impeccably groomed Magda Goebbels as she administers poison to her six young children before she and her husband enact their own double suicide.
A quadriplegic man's claim for the right to suicide is the theme of Mar Adrento (The Sea Inside), Alejandro Amenanar's masterly and profoundly moving Spanish drama based on the experiences of Ramon Sampredo, who was paralysed from the neck down after a diving accident at the age of 19 and who spent most of three decades confined to a bed as he fought his legal case "to die with dignity".
He is surrounded by his caring family, although most of them would prefer if his death-wish were denied. His father observes that the only thing worse than knowing one's son is dying is knowing that that's what he wants. However, Sampredo, who is in full possession of his alert mental faculties, insists he has made the most rational decision.
Javier Bardem, the gifted star of Before Night Falls, plays him in a marvellously expressive, perfectly judged performance that is precisely in keeping with the unsentimental tone of this utterly enthralling and powerfully life- affirming drama that confirms Amenabar, the 32-year-old director of The Others and Open Your Eyes, as one of the most imaginative and insightful artists working in world cinema today.
Bardem has to be a frontrunner for the best actor award in next spring's Oscars, as does Liam Neeson for his vibrant and authoritative portrayal of the pioneering American sexologist, Alfred Kinsey, in writer-director Bill Condon's wonderfully adept biopic, Kinsey, which, over the course of just two hours, incisively charts his life and work within a hostile, rigidly conservative environment.
Prompted by sexual problems early in his own marriage to one of his students, Clara MacMillan (the ever versatile Laura Linney), Kinsey, then a biology lecturer at Indiana University, embarks on an exhaustive survey that produces his landmark, highly controversial 1948 study, Sexual Behaviour in the Human Male, and its even more eye-opening sequel dealing with female sexual behaviour. In a uniformly fine supporting cast that includes John Lithgow, Chris O'Donnell, Timothy Hutton and Oliver Platt, Peter Sarsgaard is outstanding as the coolly bisexual student assisting - and seducing - Kinsey.
In 1948, when Kinsey's first study was published, Ray Charles was en route from Florida to Seattle, where his own voracious sexual appetite soon became evident. This is the starting point for Taylor Hackford's biopic, Ray, which dwells primarily on Charles's rise as a popular singer over the next 18 years.
Blind since childhood, Charles is depicted as an uncommonly resourceful individual, an astute businessman, and an unswervingly ambitious performer who never felt any sense of loyalty to his long-time band members nor to the Atlantic Records executives who nurtured his career. The film does not shirk from showing the uncontrolled adultery that persisted throughout his marriage, nor his growing dependence on heroin, which almost wrecked his career.
The screenplay places undue emphasis on the lingering guilt Charles felt from boyhood onwards about helplessly witnessing (while still sighted) the accidental drowning of his younger brother. However, Hackford has assembled an engrossing chronicle of his life, punctuated with many of his memorable recordings and featuring another likely Oscar-bound performance from Jamie Foxx, who so credibly inhabits the role of Charles that it's very easy to forget one is watching an actor at work.
The exact opposite is the case with the other major musical biopic launched at Toronto, Beyond the Sea, which is so awkwardly structured that it consistently draws attention to its artifice. Kevin Spacey doubles as director and leading actor for this misconceived picture of actor and singer Bobby Darin, who died in 1973 at the age of 37 - eight years younger than Spacey is now.
That significant age gap is confronted early on in the movie when, in a fictitious device whereby Darin is playing himself in a movie of his own life, a reporter asks if he is too old for the role. The movie's most grating misstep is to fabricate conversations between the older Darin and the precocious boy who plays him as an ailing child in the film-within-the-film. When the child questions an elaborately staged all-dancing fantasy sequence, the older Darin assures him: "Listen, kid, movies are like moonbeams. We do with them what we will."
What Spacey does with this movie is as much a disservice to the screen musical as Lars Von Trier's similarly stylised and hollow Dancer in the Dark, and a disservice to Darin, who is sketchily drawn and largely underestimated in terms of his own evident talent, so much so that one wonders what attracted Spacey to the project in the first place.
The answer is that Spacey clearly can impersonate Darin's singing voice convincingly, as he does time and again in the many well-staged performance sequences that provide welcome relief from the banality of the trashy screenplay and the thickly sliced ham of the supporting cast that includes Bob Hoskins, Brenda Blethyn, John Goodman and Caroline Aaron, along with a miscast Kate Bosworth, who plays Darin's actress wife, Sandra Dee - who was one of the biggest box-office stars in the US in the early 1960s - as vacuous, untalented and alcoholic.
Michael Dwyer continues his Toronto reports in The Ticket on Friday and in Weekend Review on Saturday
