Mansfield Park
The first Austen adaptation directed by a woman, Mansfield Park, is the fourth feature film from Patricia Rozema, the adventurous Canadian director of I've Heard the Mermaids Singing and White Room. Determined that her new film would not be "another Jane Austen garden party" dominated by period trappings, Rozema went back to Austen herself as she set about bringing the author's third and most autobiographical novel to the screen.
Realising that she could not hope to capture Mansfield Park in its entirety, Rozema drew on Austen's own letters and journals to infuse the film - and the central character, Fanny Price - with the author's independence of spirit and sly sense of humour, while retaining much of the scintillating dialogue which trips mellifluously off the lips of a fine cast.
Chief among them is the Australian Frances O'Connor, in a radiant portrayal of Fanny Price, who at the age of 10, is taken out of her poverty-stricken Portsmouth home to live with her wealthy relatives, the Bertrams, at Mansfield Park. There Fanny is regarded as an inferior by all but her cousin, Edward (Jonny Lee Miller). He shares her passion for storytelling and admires her "voracious mind". Later, when Fanny attracts the attention of the predatory Henry Crawford (Alessandro Nivola) and his sister, Mary (Embeth Davidtz), her status suddenly changes.
As Rozema's radical yet ultimately felicitous treatment of Austen's novel tackles its themes of repressed passion, class divisions and social hypocrisy, it pinpoints the issue of slavery, noting how the lifestyle of Bertrams has been financed by the blood of slaves in Antigua, and draws Fanny into a confrontation with her uncle, Sir Thomas Bertram, played with oleaginous pomposity by playwright Harold Pinter.
Rozema's film proves as satisfying and accomplished as cinema's other outstanding Austen treatment, Sense and Sensibility, directed by Ang Lee and scripted by its star, Emma Thompson. The gifted and versatile Ang Lee, a Taiwanese film-maker who firmly eschews any predictable paths, preceded Sense and Sensibility with two charming films of Asian family culture clashes in The Wedding Banquet and Eat Drink Man Woman, and followed it with two sturdy American literary adaptations: a riveting film of Rick Moody's The Ice Storm and now Ride with the Devil, based on Daniel Woodrell's 1987 novel, Woe to Live On, set during the American Civil War.
Ride With The Devil
The drama in Ride With The Devil unfolds in 1861, on the Kansas-Missouri border while the official military campaigns are being fought miles away and the pro-Southern Bushwhackers engage in guerrilla warfare on the back roads and across the countryside. Often posing as Union soldiers, these men are mostly young and inexperienced and the focus is on two of them who join the unit led by Black Jack (James Caviezel from The Thin Red Line). One of them, Jake Roedel (Tobey Maguire) is the son of a poor German immigrant and the other, his friend since childhood, Jack Bull Chiles (Skeet Ulrich), son of a Missouri plantation owner. Taking refuge from the harsh winter, the two friends become involved, in turn, with a young widow (played by singer Jewel in a likeable film debut).
The contemporary resonances of this antiwar drama are evident throughout, although never emphasised with any heavy-handedness, and the movie proves as powerful in its superbly staged action sequences as it is touching in its quieter moments, most memorably when Jake, one of the few who is literate, reads aloud a heartwrenching letter from a woman whose sons are caught up in the war. Handsomely photographed by Frederick Elmes and hauntingly scored by Mychael Danna, Ride With The Devil is imbued with the humanity and honesty which are trademarks of Ang Lee's work. Marking yet another bold diversification for him in its subject matter, it achieves a remarkable balance in drawing sympathy for its homicidal characters while never flinching from depicting their horrific actions. Effectively cast as the most dangerous and unhinged of them is the young Irish actor, Jonathan Rhys Meyers. At the film's core is another vivid, apparently effortless performance from Tobey Maguire, one of America's brightest young actors who showed so much promise recently in Pleasantville and Ang Lee's The Ice Storm. Maguire is even more impressive in another literary adaptation screening at Toronto, The Cider House Rules, which features his beautifully nuanced performance at the head of a superlative cast.
The Cider House Rules
This enthralling film is based on the 1985 novel by John Irving whose work has proved problematic for writers attempting to bring it to the screen, and never more so than in the recent, execrable Simon Birch, which was "suggested by" his novel, A Prayer for Owen Meany, and disowned by Irving. One of the keys to the successful transposition from page to screen was Irving's willingness to write the screenplay. Another was the choice of the Swedish film-maker, Lasse Hallstrom, whose best work (My Life as a Dog and What's Eating Gilbert Grape?) astutely observed the trails and turmoil of childhood and growing up.
Tobey Maguire plays Homer Wells, an orphan who is returned by two sets of adoptive parents to St Cloud's orphanage in rural Maine where he is raised by the unorthodox Dr Wilbur Larch (Michael Caine). In his teens Homer is delivering babies at the orphanage - even though he never went to high school, never mind medical school - but he draws the line at assisting Larch in carrying out the abortions which the doctor justifies by saying that otherwise the women would go elsewhere and suffer at the hands of backstreet abortionists.
An eagerness and excitement spreads through the children at the orphanage every time a couple visits, with each child hoping that he or she will be selected. However, when a young air force pilot (Paul Rudd) and his girlfriend (Charlize Theron) come to visit, it is to seek an abortion - and when they leave it is Homer and not one of the younger children they take with them. They get him a job at an orchard and cider brewery where he befriends the black staff, including the foreman (Delroy Lindo) and his daughter (singer Erykah Badu in her acting debut).
Michael Caine could well be Oscar-bound for the quirky, concerned and morphine-addicted Dr Larch, and Tobey Maguire well deserves to join him on the list of next spring's nominees. The cast also notably includes Jane Alexander, Kate Nelligan, Kathy Baker, Kieran Culkin and rapper Heavy D.
This poignant Dickensian drama is shot through with an endearingly offbeat sense of humour as it follows the initially naive and idealistic Homer Wells on an eventful journey of coming-of-age and self-discovery. It is rendered deeply affecting under the direction of Lasse Hallstrom, back at the peak of his form after a few forgettable recent movies, and it is shot by Oliver Stapleton in subdued tones which reflect its mood.
Snow Falling On Cedars
Much the most striking feature of Snow Falling on Cedars is the stunning desaturated widescreen imagery achieved by Robert Richardson, Oliver Stone's regular lighting cameraman and an Oscar-winner for his work on JFK. If there is any justice Richardson has to be among the nominees again next spring, but his is likely to be the only nomination for an otherwise disappointing film.
Based on the 1995 bestseller by David Guterson, the movie marks the American debut of Australian film-maker Scott Hicks, who took Toronto by storm a few years ago with his breakthrough movie, Shine. His new film opens on deliberately blurred images of a fisherman's death. It is not clear how it happened; nonetheless, it leads to a young Japanese-American being charged with murder.
The setting is the 1950s on an island in the Pacific north-west where wartime tensions linger and racial tensions are heightened during the trial of the Japanese-American man when the anniversary of Pearl Harbour dawns. Ethan Hawke plays Ishmael, the reporter covering the trial and the former teenage sweetheart of the accused's wife (Youki Kudoh). Max von Sydow does a scene-stealing turn as the eccentric defence counsel, with James Rebhorn well cast as his opposite number on the prosecution and the always reliable James Cromwell as the no-nonsense judge.
Unfortunately, the screenplay by Ron Bass and Scott Hicks clutters potentially interesting material in the convoluted structure and in its withholding of crucial evidence from the principal characters until well after the movie has shown its hand to the audience. Its secondary theme of the treatment of the island's Japanese population during the war seems a flimsy and underdeveloped sideshow compared with Alan Parker's deeper treatment of a similar theme in Come See the Paradise.
Sweet And Lowdown
Ethan Hawke, who is merely stolid in the lead role in Snow Falling On Cedars, turned up for an early morning press show in Toronto last week to check out the rather more striking performance of his wife, Uma Thurman, in what is, happily, an annual event - the new movie from the prolific Woody Allen. Unwittingly, Allen jumps aboard the currently fashionable bandwagon for mockumentaries with Sweet and Lowdown, but then, he was doing it all years ago in gems such as Zelig and Broadway Danny Rose.
The movie unites Allen's key creative passions, movies and jazz music, in one film, which is shaped as a faux documentary on an allegedly brilliant jazz guitarist, Emmett Ray, who, the opening titles inform us, recorded several classics on the RCA Victor label in the 1930s and purportedly was regarded as second only to Django Reinhart in his heyday. The putative status of Ray is embellished by on-screen contributions from Nat Hentoff, Douglas McGrath and Woody Allen.
Played with terrific panache by Sean Penn, with the cheesiest of grins and sleaziest of moustaches, Ray is revealed as an outrageously vain and self-deluding character who drops women as casually as he picks them up and tries to justify his behaviour by putting it down to the artistic temperament. And his idea of a night out is take a woman down to the local rubbish pit for shooting at rats. When one date complains, he protests, "Well, I brought sandwiches!"
Unexpectedly, Ray softens a little when he falls for a mute, sweet-natured laundry worker engagingly played by Samantha Morton, the young English actress discovered in Under the Skin. Thurman plays a woman who later enters his life and cheats on him with a gangster played by Anthony LaPaglia.
Although it suffers from an abrupt shift of narrative and tone in its later stages, Sweet and Lowdown finds Woody Allen on spirited form. He has established an easy target for humour in the definitive jerk that is Emmet Ray, and he milks those opportunities, sometimes uproariously - as when Ray devises a ridiculously elaborate new way stage entrance. The cast also includes Gretchen Mol and director John Waters, and given the context, the soundtrack is strewn with more jazz classics than even Woody could normally cram in.
Jesus' Son
Samantha Morton impressively featured in another American comedy at Toronto, Jesus' Son, directed by Alison Maclean, the New Zealander whose first feature, Crush, was selected for competition at Cannes six years ago. Her new movie, based on the eponymous collection of short stories by Denis Johnson, is an intense and edgy serious comedy set among drifters and junkies in early 1970s small-town America.
A refreshingly relaxed Billy Crudup appealingly plays the rootless, essentially innocent FH who has a propensity for doing the wrong thing and being in the wrong place, as he ambles stoned and bemused through life. Morton plays the fiery young heroin addict with whom he gets caught up.
Although the material is over-stretched and Maclean is too often tempted to dwell on superfluous incident, there is an engagingly diverting quality about her film as it amusingly cuts back and forward, sometimes stopping a scene dead mid-way and promising to pick it up later, while FH continues to stumble his way towards a possible redemption. The cast also includes Holly Hunter, Dennis Hopper, Will Patton and Greg Germann (from Ally McBeal), and the soundtrack is chock full of well-chosen hit-singles of the period.