BLACK SHEEP @ THE 32ND ANNUAL TORONTO INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL I

RENDITON and LUST, CAUTION


Who knew that for ten days in September, a little city called Toronto is transformed into something that resembles another little city that you might know as Hollywood? While I’m sure plenty of Torontonians already knew that, this is my first time at the Toronto International Film Festival and I was not prepared for what I became witness to. You can’t walk down the street without seeing someone wearing the orange volunteer T-shirt or with a TIFF tag hanging from their necks. Of course, none of these people are celebrities despite the long list of famous names that are flying in and out throughout the week. Brad and Angelina are here; or is it Angelina and Brad? Jake, Reese, Cate, George, Matt and Woody are all here. Even Ang Lee flew in from Venice to screen his latest, LUST, CAUTION, before it went on to win the Gold Lion for Best Film, much to many critic’s surprise. That said, I don’t know where they’re hiding. Thus far, I’ve only been able to spot them by hanging out on the sidewalks across from the numerous screening venues throughout the city to catch a glimpse of the beautiful people as they make their entrances on the red carpet. I’m convinced they spend the rest of their time shuttling between parties and their hotel rooms. No matter though; I did not come to Toronto to see celebrities … except for Jake Gyllenhaal. I did want to see him and see him I did, if only from very far when at the world premiere of his latest film, RENDITION. No, I came to Toronto to see some movies and that’s precisely what I did.


My first day here was a tad bit chaotic. I was on a bus from Montreal at 9:30 AM. I somehow lucked out and scored a seat all to myself. This gave me the chance to spread out my legs and relax before my stressful arrival. It might not be stressful to you or someone else who is not me but I was arriving at roughly 4:30 and my first film was at 6:30. This gave me two hours to get a cab to my hotel, drop my stuff and make my way to the first venue. When I got to my hotel, I had two e-mails from people looking to sell me tickets to films the next day. I had to now meet someone at their house in Chinatown and then make my way to the first venue. There went my shower. I managed to find my way to both locations with a good deal of ease and before I knew it, I was waiting at the door of Roy Thompson Hall for RENDITION. People were screaming, “Jake! Jake!” as I was let in. I tried to look back but dozens of photographers and reporters waiting for their short window to get that shot, that sound bite, were blocking my view. I opted to go into the venue and get myself a good seat. I should have stayed outside. Considering how much I paid for this gala screening, my seats could not have been much worse. When it came time for director, Gavin Hood and actors, Gyllenhaal, Reese Witherspoon and Peter Saarsgard to make their way on stage, they were barely distinguishable to my eyes. I could still see Jake swaying his hips back and forth with his hands in his pockets though. That was good enough for me.


RENDITION is Hood’s follow-up to his Academy Award winning film, TSOTSI, and his first as an official Hollywood director. He maintains both bravery and integrity by telling the story of Anwar El-Ibrahim (Omar Metwally), an Egyptian chemical engineer who has been living and working in the USA for 20 years. After a suicide bomb kills an American operative in the Middle East, El-Ibrahim is detained as he reenters the US without any explanation. Witherspoon is the pregnant wife who searches frantically for her missing husband. Saarsgard is her college friend working in government whom she hopes can help her find him. Gyllenhaal is the American operative in charge of getting answers from El-Ibrahim. RENDITION is most interesting as a portrait of what it means to be American today. Each major player represents a different faction of Americana. Witherspoon is the non-political soccer mom (literally, we are introduced to her playing soccer with her son) who does not concern herself with world events but chooses to focus on her family, her life. Saarsgard is the American who knows that his government is committing injustices but accepts this and does not fight back in fear of what will happen to him. Meryl Streep plays the woman who gave the order to take El-Ibrahim into custody. She is Witherspoon’s antithesis; she does not concern herself with people or families but rather allows her ignorance to guide her decisions regarding the bigger political fallout. And then there’s Gyllenhaal. He begins as the good American who does what he is told and does not ask questions but eventually turns into the American who just can’t take the silence anymore. Unfortunately for RENDITION, the intrigue portion of this political thriller doesn’t go much further than this. The performances are solid but no actor is ever given the chance to take their characters as far as they could, leaving an unfulfilled feeling in its wake. RENDTION forces us to watch and learn about an atrocious reality being currently committed and then sends us on our way with very little changed. It’s as though we are abducted along with El-Ibrahim, only without the torture.


When the credits rolled at RENDITION, I sprang out of my seat and bolted out of the theatre as fast I could. It’s not that I didn’t care for the movie; it was enjoyable enough. It’s just I had another one starting in ten minutes and I couldn’t afford to get caught in the crowds. A cab dropped me off at the beautiful Elgin theatre of Yonge street and I somehow still managed to find a seat somewhere near the back just in time for Ang Lee to introduce his follow-up to BROKEBACK MOUNTAIN. I had already heard mixed things about LUST, CAUTION. At just a little under three hours, I heard the film went too long. With an NC-17 rating and rumours that some of the film’s explicit scenes were real, I had heard the film might be a bit much at times. I simply found it be unfocused. It was as though Lee could not decide the style in which to tell his story. The film is part espionage, part historical, part suspense and part love story. It is at times epic while classical or noir at others. Still, like most of Lee’s work, there’s an underlying meaning to devour. LUST, CAUTION tells the story of Wang Jiazhi (Wei Tang), a young student who gets involved with a political acting troupe that decide to up their game by infiltrating the operations of a known traitor in order to kill him in the name of their invaded China. Wang is embraced by the wife of the traitor, Mr. Yee (Tony Leung) when she poses as a society lady. Before long, she catches Mr. Yee’s attention and they begin an intensely sexual and violent affair. The genius of the story is the exposition of the love’s epicenter. Lee throws his characters into it and forces them to struggle between their duties and their desires. Unfortunately, the unsteadiness of the film is distracting and almost makes it impossible for the point to be made.


While the screenings were somewhat disappointing, the magic of just being there was certainly not. I left the Elgin with all the other patrons pouring into the street. They were unimpressed and dismayed but all I could think about was what was to come next.
Next …
Part Two
PERSEPOLIS
and MICHAEL CLAYTON

YEAR OF THE DOG

Written and Directed by Mike White


“Animals are like us; they live for love.
And if you have too many of them,
then there isn’t enough love to go around.”

Dog people. When I think of dog people, I think of my friend, Lloyd. He’s got this puppy, Andy. Andy’s got his own personal walker, play dates on weekends and some pieces of his wardrobe are more stylish than mine. Despite being the dog that has everything, the most important thing he has is Lloyd. If you spend any time with this twosome, it’s hard to tell who loves who more. Some people say that owning a dog is selfish, that having another living being depend on you and give you nothing but love in return only serves the owner’s ego. I guess these people forgot about the natural human need to nurture. I suppose these people also have not had the chance to see Mike White’s YEAR OF THE DOG. White, writer of indie faves CHUCK AND BUCK and THE GOOD GIRL, makes his directorial debut with the simple tale of one woman, whose tightly wound life of disappointment unravels after the death of her dog, a beautiful beagle named Pencil.


Before Pencil’s unexpected passing, Peggy (Molly Shannon) spent her days with a permanent smile on her face. Whether she was at the office comforting her boss (Josh Pais) while his neuroses got stuck in spin over office politics, or at the mall listening to her colleague (Regina King) yammer on about her boyfriend’s commitment issues or even walking on eggshells while visiting her brother and his overprotective wife (Thomas McCarthy and Laura Dern), Peggy never frowned. Sure, she never found her dream job or got married or had any kids of her own. But why should she let that bother her? She has her health, a home and Pencil. Finding herself without Pencil though finds Peggy feeling lost. The beauty of White’s script is that Peggy is not suddenly lost but only suddenly realizing that she has been for years. Anchoring this decent into the depth of an internal fear that has been avoided for years is Shannon. As Peggy, she never fully abandons her comedic luminescence but shows new sides of her range, including fragility, determination and sparks of buried hope. She sits one night in a passenger seat at the end of a date. Her suitor (John C. Reilly) asks without tact if she has ever been married. The woman who answers no longer has the strength or the desire to pretend anymore. She simply stutters through an evasive response and stumbles as she exits the car.


Pencil’s death leads to her meeting Newt (Peter Saarsgard), a dog trainer that coaches her how to tame her newly adopted dog, Valentine, while unknowingly waking a part of her heart thought long to be dead. Meeting people is easy. Getting to know people is tricky. Navigating a relationship through the hope and apprehension that comes after years of potentially difficult experiences can be more than enough to make you run home to your dog. For Newt and Peggy, neither has had much success with other human beings. Other human beings are complicated and come with their own set of expectations. Animals on the other hand, want very clear things from you, like food and attention, and, in return, give you unqualified love and admiration. You don’t have to think about what to say to a dog when there is an awkward silence. There is no experience to be had with a dog that mirrors the dance between two people who are trying to figure out whether this is or isn’t the right time to kiss the other person. And while all of this can be infuriating, it should not be forgotten that this is an excitement that cannot be had with a dog.


White’s script works because he does not categorize the characters but rather allows them to grow into themselves, no matter whether that self fits into society’s mold or not. As a film however, YEAR OF THE DOG, is occasionally just as awkward as its characters. White’s direction and cinematic approach are often static and flat, ultimately taking away from the warmth of the whole. Thankfully, Peggy’s late life journey towards embracing her true self is so winningly portrayed by Shannon that the film’s cinematic limitations never go from flaw to fault. By the time she realizes that her own compartmentalized cubicle life bares its own resemblance to the life of a dog in a pound, she sees that it is also just as wrong for her as for the dogs. After all, dog people are people too and if there's anyone out there who should give you unconditional love, it's yourself.

JARHEAD

Written by William Broyles Jr.
Directed by Sam Mendes

Something I like to do before writing a review is avoid writing it. Before sitting down to write this particular piece about Sam Mendes’ war epic, “Jarhead”, I made a quick stop at a local sandwich shop for a large club. Whilst waiting in line, I paused Kanye West’s “Jesus Walks” on my ipod to listen in on the conversation taking place between the young, male sandwich maker and his customer counterpart. The sandwich maker had just seen “Jarhead” the night before and he was very vexed by the experience. You see, he had spent his hard earned sandwich making money on this war flick after not having seen anything on the big screen for a very long time. Imagine his disappointment when he sat through an entire film about the gulf war, the first one, and didn’t get to see any war. I’m paraphrasing here, as I don’t make it a habit to write down everything I hear other people say but his complaint went something like, “You just watch these guys drift around in the dessert forever and nothing happens. Finally it seems like something’s going to happen, they’re gonna get to fight and then nothing. No one fires a single shot.” I snickered silently to myself. Hmmm, I wondered if the sandwich maker would eventually connect his frustration to the infinitely more frustrating experience it must have been to actually be a marine in the Gulf War marching aimlessly through the dessert and never getting to take the shot you’ve trained so thoroughly for or if he’d figure out that his frustration may very well have been the desired effect of the film to begin with. Then | got distracted and wondered if I wanted mayo or Dijon.

In many ways, “Jarhead” is not that different from other war films. There is a loud, foul drill sergeant at boot camp; there are strapping, young men horsing around for no reason in particular other than having pent up sexual energy; there are familiar character types like the unbalanced loose cannon and the quiet, uncomfortable farm boy. What does differentiate “Jarhead” from films it is quite clearly influenced by, like Stanley Kubrick’s “Full Metal Jacket”, is that these soldiers’ war never comes. There are no ultra-violent, intensely choreographed battle sequences in Sam Mendes’ take on the war movie. Instead the soldiers simulate warfare, play football, have drunken parties (thank you whoever you are who decided Jake Gyllenhaal should wear only a Santa Claus hat in this particular scene) and make themselves look useful and sound like appreciative, dedicated soldiers for the media cameras. By the time they’re told the war is on, you may find yourself also excited and anxious for their piece of the action. What they get is more walking through the dessert. What they came across made me nauseous enough to not want a large-scale attack scene anyway. I guess the sandwich maker has a larger bloodlust than I.



Not having the bloodbath to distract us or shatter our naïve impression of how violent war genuinely is leaves us with very little other than the characters themselves to focus on. Whereas Mendes suggestion that these expectations may in fact be what is actually naïve, none of his characters are developed further than boys who think they’re men and want to kill and get back to their girlfriends and wives. Even the central character, Anthony Swofford (played by Gyllenhaal and based on the author who wrote the book the screenplay is based upon) is only given about two minutes of quick flashbacks, giving us some incite into his family history and sex life but not enough to give him any clear storyline to carry the film forward and home. And though cinematographer Roger Deakins frames and lights everything in a beautiful yellow-orange haze and editor Walter Murch keeps the pacing steady as a marine’s march, the characters come off as a bunch of apes in a cage. That may have been what Mendes intended but it isn’t always compelling or engaging. We are detached but so are they.

By testing our patience, Mendes leaves us frustrated and wanting some much-needed release. In addition, he points out that the very disturbing need to kill these men exhibit is inherent in you, me and sandwich makers everywhere. Did you know that was there?

FLIGHTPLAN

Written by Peter A. Dowling and Billy Ray
Directed by Robert Schwentke

There is a moment about half way through “Flightplan” where I began to wonder how the mystery that drives this film was going to maintain my interest. There are only so many times an airplane captain can debate with a passenger as to whether or not a certain other passenger was ever in fact on board this particular flight. Of course, Jodie Foster plays the passenger he is arguing with here and the missing passenger is her daughter. Understandably, she isn’t backing down. Consequently, logic takes on instinct and filmmaker Robert Schwentke allows us to debate her sanity on our own. Combine this with the camera moving frantically, yet stylishly, through the maze of this massive aircraft, peeking in and out of every possible hiding place and you’ve got a movie soaring miles above whatever in-flight movie the passengers of “Flightplan” were subjected to. (For their sake, I hope it wasn’t the infinitely less superior “Red Eye”.)

Throughout the search, a range of complexity washes over Foster’s face, from fragility and fear to determination and will. In the confines of her claustrophobic world up above the clouds, she never gives up hope amidst a group of people who care more about the disturbance to their sleep than the fate of a small child. It’s this hope that dispelled my concerns and kept me involved until we landed safely at the closing credits.