Scaling the heights

Ang Lee's latest movie, Brokeback Mountain, took top prize in Venice, now it's taking Toronto by storm. Elsewhere Joanquin Phoenix sparkles as Johnny Cash and Steve Coogan provides light relief in Michael Winterbottom's new movie. Michael Dwyer reports.

ANG LEE'S transatlantic flight had just touched down in Toronto last Saturday when the Taiwanese director was told to get back to where he came from - to the Venice Film Festival where the jury had just chosen his new movie, Brokeback Mountain, as the winner of the festival's premier award, the Golden Lion. Later that day, the film's cast and screenwriters were engaged in a press conference in Toronto when Lee phoned them from the stage in Venice to share the good news.

That was a rare extrovert gesture from a man who is possibly the most quietly-spoken and unassuming director working in cinema today, and arguably the most versatile, given the apparent ease and unostentatious skill with which he moves between genres. He follows such diverse movies as Eat Drink Man Woman, Sense and Sensibility, The Ice Storm, Ride With the Devil and Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon with a captivating, deeply emotional love story between two cowboys in Brokeback Mountain, adapted by Larry McMurtry and Diana Ossana from an Annie Proulx short story.

It opens in 1963 in the dusty small town of Signal, Wyoming where taciturn cowboy Ennis Del Mar (Heath Ledger) and outgoing rodeo rider Jack Twist (Jake Gyllenhaal) are hired for the summer to herd hundreds of sheep up on Brokeback Mountain. On one particularly cold night, they share a tent and their passion is released in abrupt, functional sex.

"You know I ain't queer," Ennis says the next morning, to which Jack replies: "Me neither". But they become even more intimate that night, and for days and nights afterwards, until summer and their jobs come to an end and they are parted. Both men marry and have children, leading separate lives for four years until Jack takes the initiative and their sexual relationship resumes with greater intensity.

It is altogether more complicated now, however, and they live in rigidly conservative communities. They are only a few hours away by plane from the Summer of Love celebrations and the gay rights-driven Stonewall riots, but they might as well be on another planet.

With characteristic sensitivity, Lee acutely observes their dilemma - torn between passionate love for each other and the guilt and fear it provokes in them - and the plight of their wives (Michelle Williams and Anne Hathaway).

Proceeding at a perfectly measured pace, the drama is set against striking landscapes handsomely framed by Rodrigo Prieto.

Lee's tender, thoughtfully composed love story is rooted in a universality that addresses forbidden relationships far beyond the movie's specifically gay theme, and it is shaped with honesty, conviction and compassion. The natural rapport between the two lead actors is palpable, and while Gyllenhaal has never been more impressive, Ledger's performance is, quite simply, revelatory.

Playing Johnny Cash in Walk the Line, Joaquin Phoenix goes a significant step further than Jamie Foxx's Oscar-winning performance in Ray, in that Phoenix convincingly performs Cash's songs whereas Foxx lip-synched to recordings of Ray Charles. The format of the two movies is similar: each follows its protagonist from a poor upbringing, through the loss of a sibling in an accident, the bus journey out of town to seek fame and fortune, and the fall into addiction that almost destroys the success achieved.

Phoenix gets under the skin of the complex character that was The Man in Black, and Reese Witherspoon sparkles as vivacious singer June Carter, the object of his desire for decades before they finally married. The chemistry between them when they perform on stage together is electrifying, as is the recreation of Cash's celebrated show for the inmates of Folsom Prison.

The string cast notably includes Ginnifer Goodwin as his much-suffering first wife Vivian, Robert Patrick as his cold, disapproving father, and Dallas Roberts as Sun Records boss Sam Phillips, along with neat cameos along the way from actors playing Jerry Lee Lewis, Roy Orbison and Elvis Presley.

One of America's finest actors, Jeff Bridges is wasted in more ways than one in the patience-stretching Tideland, which writer-director Terry Gilliam describes as "Alice in Wonderland meets Psycho". In a nod to the Hitchcock film, Bridges spends most of the movie as a corpse, and his limited earlier screen time explains what killed him, as his character, a former rock star, consumes vast quantities of drugs.

A startling early sequence shows his young daughter (Jodelle Ferland) preparing his heroin and injecting him with it, and this is closely followed by the demise of his equally strung-out wife (Jennifer Tilly). Clearly a gifted young actor, the 10-year-old Ferland has terrific screen presence, but that alone cannot carry a trying, self-consciously weird movie in which she acts out her childhood fantasies.

In The Squid and the Whale, Jeff Daniels gives a career-best performance as a self-obsessed author not dissimilar to the vain writer portrayed by Jeff Bridges last year in The Door in the Floor. Daniels plays a creative writing teacher who fails to get a publisher for his own new book, and his frustration intensifies when his wife (Laura Linney) gets a story accepted by the New Yorker.

Set in mid-1980s Brooklyn, this very witty but hard-edged picture deals with the collapse of their 17-year marriage and the impact of this on their two sons, the impressionable older of whom (the excellent Jesse Eisenberg from Roger Dodger) has inherited his father's arrogance and pretentiousness, while the younger (Owen Kline) struggles awkwardly with the onset of puberty. The movie's evidently talented writer-director is Noah Baumbach, who scripted The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou in collaboration with its director, Wes Anderson.

Having produced the gritty Monsters Ball and The Woodsman, Lee Daniels makes an initially promising but decidedly heavy-handed directing debut with Shadowboxer, which operates from the unlikely premise that a middle-aged woman, Rose (Helen Mirren), and her stepson, Mikey (Cuba Gooding Jr), are not only cold-blooded professional assassins but also caught up in a torrid sexual relationship.

Not surprising, then, when she declares "The only man a woman can count on is her son", and later she watches with misty-eyed admiration as he does a striptease to a rap song. The plot gets overloaded when Rose, who has been diagnosed with terminal cancer, decides against killing their next target, a pregnant woman whom she assists in giving birth. The cast also includes Joseph Gordon-Levitt as a chain-smoking doctor, and Stephen Dorff as a gangster who, in one scene, annoyed by people talking outside the door while he's having sex, storms out while wearing only a condom and shoots them all.

There was even heavier material on show at Toronto in the distinctly unsettling Sympathy For Lady Vengeance, the concluding film in the revenge trilogy from South Korean director Park Chan-wook. Anyone familiar with his previous film, the powerful, immensely stylish Old Boy, which played havoc with viewers' minds and took the runner-up prize at Cannes last year, will know not to expect an easy, passive experience.

The protagonist, Lee Geum-ja (Lee Yeong-ae), is introduced as a notorious criminal jailed at the age of 18 for abducting and killing a child, and released after 13 years as apparently a model prisoner, although we later learn that she discreetly added to her murder toll behind bars.

We also get to know her cellmates, one of them an exceptionally demanding lesbian imprisoned for murdering her husband and his mistress - and eating them. There is even more daunting imagery ahead, as Geum-ja gets down to the movie's agenda of exacting sadistically protracted vengeance on the real villain of this challenging, calculatedly disturbing and eerily compelling psychodrama.

Welcome light relief at Toronto came from Michael Winterbottom, a director whose past work has not been marked with levity, but he delivers one of the funniest films of the year in Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story. It operates from the premise that Laurence Sterne's classic 18th-century novel is unfilmable and then proves this as it charts all the problems faced by a film crew in bringing Tristram Shandy to the screen.

As it happens, the source material proves to be among the least of their problems, given that they have to cope with the egomania and absurd demands of their leading actor (played with deadpan relish by Steve Coogan), the cynicism and compromises of producers, the boring, loud-mouthed views of a history anorak, and a hopelessly inadequate budget - in an inept battle scene an actor leads "literally tens of men".

Although scrappy in parts, and clearly not very bothered by that, the movie coasts along on a wicked, self-referential sense of fun, and it's played with gusto by an ensemble cast that includes Gillian Anderson (as herself), Dylan Moran, Stephen Fry, Shirley Henderson, Keeley Hawes, Jeremy Northam, Ian Hart, David Walliams, Kieran O'Brien, and Rob Brydon, who steals scene after scene and offers some spot-on impersonations of Al Pacino - and Steve Coogan.

Michael Dwyer concludes his reports from Toronto next Thursday in The Irish Times