When fact and fiction collide

The movies that generated the most attention in Toronto were those dealing with political issues, writes Michael Dwyer, Film Correspondent

Although the media coverage of the 31st Toronto International Film Festival was dominated by all the star wattage on the red carpet - not surprising given that the festival is the best in the world and attracts celebrities in droves - the movies that generated the most attention were those dealing with political issues and reflecting on the edgy times in which we live.

One of the most popular films was Dixie Chicks: Shut Up and Sing, an absorbing documentary charting the repercussions after the group's lead singer Natalie Maines declared at a 2003 London concert: "We're embarrassed that the president is from Texas." Another notable documentary, The US vs John Lennon, deals with the former Beatle's five-year period under threat of deportation from the US because of his outspoken anti-war comments.

Spike Lee's four-hour documentary, When the Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts explicitly targets the White House for mishandling its response to Hurricane Katrina last year. The Prisoner or: How I Planned to Kill Tony Blair deals with Yunis Khatayer Abbas, a journalist who was working with a British television crew in Iraq when he was arrested, held and interrogated at Abu Ghraib and released without charge after nine months.

The hottest ticket of the festival, however, was Gabriel Range's provocative Death of a President, which had international distributors waving their chequebooks and had the press queuing in such numbers that a second preview had to be added. A fictional film meticulously structured as a documentary, it begins on October 19th, 2007, when President Bush arrives in Chicago where the streets are lined with angry anti-war protesters.

Having addressed a business forum at a downtown hotel, the president is leaving the building when he is fatally shot. What follows is speculative, involving a rush to judgment when a Syrian immigrant becomes the prime suspect. Tensions rise in the Middle East and president Cheney introduces draconian amendments to the Patriot Act.

Range's film seamlessly blends archival footage (raising questions in the process about media manipulation) and interviews with fictional White House aides and security agents. The build-up to the assassination is remarkably effective, skilfully building suspense in the style of a superior thriller.

It takes a non-judgmental view of the president himself, prompting the viewer to care for his plight as the gunman prepares to strike. The film - on which prolific Irish film-maker Ed Guiney is one of the producers - was sold in Toronto to distribution companies around the world, although it will go directly to television here when Channel 4 screens it next month.

ACTOR, WRITER AND director Emilio Estevez employs a similar technique on an elaborate scale to confront a real-life assassination in Bobby, which is set at the Ambassador hotel in Los Angeles over the course of a single day, June 4th, 1968, culminating in the killing of presidential candidate Robert Kennedy.

As with Bush in Range's film, Kennedy is featured exclusively - and extensively - through archival material, in this case chosen to celebrate his idealism and all the promise he offered in those turbulent times, when the US was involved in another unpopular war, in Vietnam.

Estevez layers his movie with multiple overlapping stories involving fictional characters in the hotel on the day, and this proves distracting initially as it brings on so many well-known actors. There's William H Macy as the hotel manager, with Sharon Stone as his beautician wife, Christian Slater as his racist catering manager, Anthony Hopkins as the lonely, retired hotel doorman, Demi Moore as an alcoholic singer and Estevez himself as her husband, Ashton Kutcher as a hippie resident who turns two naïve young Kennedy campaigners on to LSD, Lindsay Lohan as a bride marrying a friend (Elijah Wood) to save him from Vietnam, and the excellent Freddy Rodriguez as an immigrant working a double shift in the kitchen.

Espousing the liberal values he inherited from his father Martin Sheen (who features as a hotel guest), Estevez laces these neatly juggled storylines with heartfelt sorrow for Kennedy's fate on the day he won the Californian primary. His film raises the intriguing "what if" scenario had Kennedy lived to run against Richard Nixon in the presidential election five months later.

Yet another politically charged drama that opens on establishing newsreel material, the new Shane Meadows film, This Is England, is set at an unprepossessing English coastal town over the summer of 1983, during another divisive war, this time far away in the Falkland Islands. The patriotic fervour fuelled by the Thatcher government is taken to violent extremes when a rabidly racist ex-convict (Stephen Graham) takes an impressionable 12-year-old boy (remarkable newcomer Thomas Turgoose), whose father was killed in the Falklands, under his wing. The consequences are unflinching and chilling in this powerful, necessarily violent film.

Extremes of wealth and poverty collide in Anthony Minghella's Breaking and Entering, set in present-day London as the King's Cross area undergoes an urban regeneration scheme. Jude Law plays a landscape architect whose hi-tech office is burgled several times, bringing him into contact with one of the thieves, a 15-year-old boy (Rafi Gavron) who lives with his mother (Juliette Binoche), a struggling Bosnian refugee. Although it relies on a few coincidences too many, this strand of the movie proves far more interesting than the problems in the architect's strained relationship with his wife, a Swedish documentary-maker wanly played by Robin Wright Penn.

The illegal trafficking of immigrants is the timely theme of writer-director Steve Hudson's bleak first feature film, True North, featuring Gary Lewis as a Scottish trawler owner faced with losing his boat. His son (Martin Compston, very impressive) accepts a lucrative offer to smuggle a dozen Chinese immigrants on the hazardous journey home from Ostend. Peter Mullan and Steven Robertson complete the trawler crew in a grim drama that vividly captures the fear and desperation of the immigrants. The film was shot (under the title Dragnet) on the eastern and southern coasts of Ireland.

Two Irish actors born within a year of each other in the early 1950s, Liam Neeson and Pierce Brosnan, take the leading roles in David Von Ancken's striking western, Seraphim Falls, set in the aftermath of the American civil war. His handsomely photographed film takes the form of an extended chase involving two men who fought on opposite sides in the war, with Brosnan as the prey and Neeson his dogged pursuer. Dialogue is minimal in this gripping action movie with an underlying anti-war theme.

After 20 years working on such Hollywood blockbusters as Total Recall, RoboCop and Basic Instinct, Dutch director Paul Verhoeven returns home for Black Book, a war movie set in 1944-45 during the German occupation. Inspired by factual events, it features the spirited Carice van Houten as a resourceful young Jewish woman willing to do anything to survive, even if this entails having sex with Nazi officers. Verhoeven skilfully orchestrates the many vigorous action sequences while indulging one of his primary preoccupations in liberally peppering the picture with nudity and sex scenes.

The sex in the Australian psychological drama, The Book of Revelation, is aptly anti-erotic, given that its theme is the abduction of a ballet dancer who is subjected to rape and sexual humiliation. The twist is that the dancer is male and his abductors are women. Played by Tom Long, he finds himself incapable of expressing the details of his traumatic experience in a film that's as bold and confrontational as Head On, the previous picture from writer-director Ana Kokkinos.

Monsoon Wedding director Mira Nair continues to pursue her interest in contemporary Indian identity in the acutely observed and thoroughly engaging serious comedy, The Namesake, based on the novel by Jhumpa Lahiri, who has a cameo role. It spans three decades from the 1970s, when a young bride (Tabu) leaves the warmth of family life in Calcutta for the lonely, unfamiliar surroundings of New York. The dramatic focus eventually shifts to her son (Kal Penn), who has assimilated the American way and has to choose between his devoted white lover and a confident young woman who shares his Indian heritage. Penn reveals a depth and maturity untapped in the silly comedy, Harold & Kumar Get the Munchies.

Ethan Hawke's second film as a director (after the pretentious Chelsea Walls) is the relationship drama, The Hottest State, based on his semi-autobiographical novel of a young Texan (Mark Webber) who moves to New York to further his acting ambitions. He falls for an attractive singer-songwriter (Catalina Sandino Moreno), but their affair becomes fraught with problems. Hawke features as the actor's father in this rambling, all-too-loquacious movie.

BY CONTRAST, Infamous sparkles with the bitchy wit of its subject, Truman Capote (Toby Jones), before it turns deeply serious in tone as Capote is drawn to Perry Smith (Daniel Craig), one of the two Kansas killers who became the subject of his innovative non-fiction novel, In Cold Blood. This is the second movie in a year to cover the same scenario, following Capote, for which Philip Seymour Hoffman won the best actor Oscar this year.

Directed by Douglas McGrath, whose screenplay is based on George Plimpton's book on Capote, Infamous is bolstered by a particularly strong cast that also includes Sandra Bullock (never better) as novelist Harper Lee, Jeff Daniels as the Kansas district attorney, Sigourney Weaver as New York socialite Babe Paley, and in a singing cameo, Gwyneth Paltrow as Peggy Lee.

Although McGrath's film is the equal of the earlier Capote in many respects, and there is no denying the fascination exerted by the story it tells, it inevitably suffers from a sense of deja vu. Unfamiliar English actor Jones uncannily captures Capote's personality, appearance and distinctively fey speaking voice. In one of the funniest scenes, he calls the district attorney's office in Kansas and the receptionist tells him the DA doesn't take calls from strange women. To which he protests, "I'm not strange!"