Boogeying on down in Toronto

Bi-location would have been a prerequisite to catch even a third of the 279 movies shown over the course of 10 days at the 22nd Toronto International Film Festival. At the awards lunch last Sunday afternoon, the Metro Media Award, voted by the 740 international media at Toronto, resulted in a tie between Curtis Hanson's terrific L.A. Confidential, on which I reported from Cannes, and Paul Thomas Anderson's provocative and exhilaratingly well-made Boogie Nights.

Spanning seven years from 1977 (when Anderson himself was just six years old), Boogie Nights is an ambitious, epic chronicle of the Los Angeles hardcore porn film industry. Powering along for a vibrant 21/2 hours, it captures an authentic picture of a hedonistic era of drugs and sex excesses, glaringly tacky clothing and pounding disco music.

Into this tawdry neon underworld comes an impressionable 17-year-old dishwasher from Southern California. Thrown out of home by his mother who derides him as a loser, Eddie (played by Mark Wahlberg) finds a surrogate family in the extended entourage of a skinflick director named Jack Horner (in a pun on Jack Warner?). Played by Burt Reynolds, Horner naively dreams of elevating his craft into an art form. In the old backstage musical tradition, he spots Eddie in a nightclub and perceives the young man's very prominent sexual endowment as a future box-office attraction. Eddie responds with boundless enthusiasm and re-names himself Dirk Diggler.

In this sharp, perceptive and exhilaratingly well-made drama of decadence and self-destruction, writer-director Anderson never feels the need to moralise about his many principal characters, and his treatment of them is thoughtful and even tender. The brilliant extended finale, which reveals the fates of those characters, is a tour de force. That sequence also dares to reveal the much-admired (and prosthetically created?) appendage of Dirk Diggler.

Accompanied by an incessant, astutely selected soundtrack of pop music from the time and marked with a spoton eye for detail in its sets and costumes, Boogie Nights features an immensely confident Mark Wahlberg (formerly the rapper, Marky Mark) in a star-making performance, and a craggyfaced, greytoupeed Burt Reynolds in his best performance since Deliverance. The fine cast also features Julianne Moore, Don Cheadle, William H. Macy, Heather Graham, John C. Reilly, Alfred Molina and Robert Ridgely.

Toronto opened this year with local resident Atom Egoyan's The Sweet Hereafter, to be reviewed here next Friday, with second place going to David Mamet's deliciously clever The Spanish Prisoner. Mamet's sly, eloquent screenplay teasingly unravels the narrative, in a movie which returns him to the confidence trickster's milieu of his directing debut, House of Games.

Campbell Scott plays a trusting man who devises a lucrative invention for the mysterious company which employs him. Steve Martin is the high-living stranger who queries how appreciative Scott's employers are of his work, and Rebecca Pidgeon is the secretary who increases Scott's insecurity as she ponders: "Who in this world is what they seem?" It would be unfair to relate any more of the smart storyline in a very satisfying movie which doesn't even explain its title until an hour in, as the plot thickens.

Mamet also wrote the screenplay for The Edge, another study in men who do not trust each other. Directed by the New Zealander, Lee Tamahori (who made Once Were Warriors), The Edge, originally titled Bookworm, features Anthony Hopkins as a well-read billionaire who goes on a photo-shoot to Alaska with his model wife (Elle McPherson) and her photographer (Alec Baldwin) whom he suspects is having an affair with her. The film circuitously brings the two men together in isolation, after a truly alarming plane crash scene in the Alaskan wilderness. However, despite their earnest efforts, both Hopkins and Baldwin are defeated by the narrative contrivances in this handsome but laborious production.

Nevertheless, The Edge was voted third in the audience poll at Toronto, behind the Canadian The Hanging Garden (of which more next week) and L.A. Confidential. Another close contender for those places must have been Frank Oz's comedy, In & Out, which had a 900-strong audience shrieking with laughter. Written by Paul Rudnick and inspired by Tom Hanks's acceptance speech when he won his Oscar for Philadelphia, this often hilarious comedy is set in the Capraesque Indiana town of Greenleaf, where Howard Brackett (Kevin Kline) is a respected high school English teacher.

Brackett is about to marry another teacher (Joan Cusack) when a former student of his (Matt Dillon in blonde hair and a goatee for a Brad Pitt parody), wins the best actor Oscar, for his performance as a gay soldier in a Vietnam war movie (itself a spoof of Born on the Fourth of July, from the clips we see). In his speech, he mistakenly refers to Brackett as gay, and the media promptly descends upon Greenleaf and the hapless teacher.

Although the movie takes a typically Hollywood maudlin turn in the last act, it mostly sparkles with humour as it plays with stereotypes and prejudices - and there are some very funny Barbra Streisand jokes. In a vigorously physical performance, Kline rarely, if ever, has been better, and Tom Selleck, as a snooping, vain and openly gay TV reporter, certainly outshines his past work.

Wesley Snipes took the best actor award at the Venice Film Festival last week for the new Mike Figgis film, One Night Stand, also shown in Toronto. In a refreshing break from his action movie roles, Snipes plays a commercials director who, when stranded overnight on a trip to New York, has an adulterous fling with a married woman (Nastassja Kinski). Although it is saddled with one huge coincidence with which it just about gets away, and it lacks the raw emotional punch of his Leaving Las Vegas, Figgis's new film is intriguing and compelling, and made all the more atmospheric by Figgis's own jazzy score. Robert Downey Jnr is haunting and touching as Snipes's best friend, a gay man dying of AIDS.

In another take on sexual duplicity, Downey Jnr impressively plays a smooth-talking actor heavily involved in simultaneous love affairs in James Toback's claustrophobic three-hander, Two Girls and a Guy, which is set almost entirely in a Manhattan apartment. It opens with an exterior sequence as the two women in the actor's life meet for the first time and discover that they are lovers of the same man. Even when the movie begins to sag under the weight of its dialogue in the later stages, it is carried by the conviction of its three actors - Downey Jnr, Heather Graham (from Boogie Nights) and Natasha Gregson Wagner, the daughter of Natalie Wood and Robert Wagner.

The fast-rising young Irish actor, Jonathan Rhys Meyers, featured in two movies at Toronto. In Guy Fleder's cynical morality fable, Telling Lies in America, he has a supporting role as the brash but insecure high school student who makes life difficult for a 15-year-old Hungarian immigrant, Karchy, played by the promising Brad Renfro. An exuberant Kevin Bacon plays the slick discjockey who takes Karchy under his wing - as a cover for payola - in this untypically understated and sensitive, autobiographical screenplay from the sensationalist, Joe Eszterhas.

Jonathan Rhys Meyers has more space to impress, and he rises to the occasion, in Tim Hunter's The Maker, as a free-spirited young Californian coming under the influence of his criminal older brother (Matthew Modine) who re-appears after 10 years. Director Hunter, best known for the gritty 1987 River's Edge, skillfully avoids the most obvious pitfalls and plot turns in this mostly engrossing urban drama.

One of the liveliest US indies in Toronto, first-time director Evan Dunsky's Life During Wartime features David Arquette on fine form as a charming young man taken on to sell security systems by a suspect operator (the redoubtable Stanley Tucci). Apparent non-sequitors knit together surprisingly well in this black-humoured satire which lobs in some outrageous lines about sexual experience. It also features Mary McCormack (who was in Murder One with Tucci), Kate Capshaw and Ryan Reynolds.

At 37 a veteran of the US indies, Hal Hartley delivers some more outrageous humour in his essentially tragicomic Henry Fool, in which an introverted garbage collector, the aptly surnamed Simon Grim (James Urbaniak) is encouraged by the loquacious Henry Fool (Thomas Jay Ryan) to express himself in poetry. Characteristically for Hartley, it makes too many superfluous digressions which overstretch the material and undermine its intermittent flashes of brilliance.

More from Toronto next Friday, including new films from Zhang Yimou, Takeshi Kitano, John Sayles, Jim McBride and Sally Potter.