To judge by the opening weekend's screenings, the increased scale of the popular Toronto International Film Festival has not been allowed to interfere with its role as a showcase for innovative smaller-budget movies, writes MICHAEL DWYER,Film Correspondent
NOW IN ITS 33rd year, Toronto International Film Festival was conceived as a festival for the people rather than as an industry- dominated event such as Cannes. It was designed to give the hugely enthusiastic Toronto cinema-going audience an opportunity to see the award-winners and critical hits from the major international film festivals, chiefly Cannes, Venice and Berlin. Now Toronto has eclipsed all those others, with the arguable exception of Cannes, and attracts more famous actors and directors than any other film festival, to the delight of the Torontonians turning out in vast numbers morning, noon and night.
Guests over the opening weekend this year included Liam Neeson, Laura Linney, Antonio Banderas, Keira Knightley, Ralph Fiennes, Viggo Mortensen, Ed Harris, Renee Zellweger, Jeremy Irons, Anne Hathaway, Julianne Moore, Gael García Bernal, Mark Ruffalo, Adrien Brody, Ricky Gervais, Claire Danes, Zac Efron - and Brad Pitt, who brought downtown Toronto to a standstill as he signed autographs for half an hour on his way up the red carpet.
Unlike Cannes, Venice and Berlin, Toronto is not driven by juries and trophies, and its principal prize is the Audience Award, this year sponsored by Cadillac, which has one of its sleek vehicles, emblazoned with the slogan "official ride of the festival", parked prominently outside the Sutton Place Hotel, the headquarters for the festival's media and industry delegates.
The downside of the festival's soaring success is the sheer quantity of what's on show: 249 feature films spread across 10 days (of which 116 are world premieres), plus 63 shorts. Allowing two hours for each feature film, one would need at least 50 hours a day without sleep to catch everything on the programme. Given such an impossibility, it helps to have seen the hot films from Cannes and a number of European productions already released in Ireland.
While the Toronto programme is awash with new work from established directors producing, as ever and unsurprisingly, decidedly mixed results, everybody - audiences, critics and especially distributors and exhibitors - hopes for and seeks out the discoveries that have become a feature of Toronto down the years: the refreshing, smaller-budget movies that appeal across the board and become break-out hits, such as Junoat last year's festival. There have been quite a few already.
THE OUTSTANDING MOVIE among all the world premieres over the opening weekend has been English director Danny Boyle's exhilarating Slumdog Millionaire. It opens in Mumbai in 2006, when the teenaged Jamal (the excellent Dev Patel) is one question away from winning the jackpot of 20 million rupees on the Indian version of Who Wants to be a Millionaire? (Celador, the UK company that devised that international TV phenomenon, is one of the movie's producers). Suspicions are raised by the show's vain, patronising presenter because of the uneducated young man's impoverished background. As the investigation proceeds, Jamal explains how he learned each of the answers through his youthful experiences, living on the streets with his canny older brother. This is a cue for flashbacks, ranging from the boys witnessing their mother's murder during a violent attack on Muslims, to being groomed as beggars by adults so unscrupulous that they will gouge out a child's eyes to increase his earning potential.
The movie's central structural device seems contrived at first, and almost queasily reminiscent of the folksy old spoken hit single, Deck of Cards, in which a soldier charged with being disrespectful in church, outlines how each playing card symbolises his religious beliefs. In the artfully plotted screenplay by Simon Beaufoy, formerly best known for writing The Full Monty, Jamal's explanations prove "bizarrely plausible", as one character describes them, and the movie exerts such a compelling hold that it defies cynicism.
This hard-edged but vibrant and affecting tale is assembled with social concern, emotional depth and an infectious energy by Boyle (director of Trainspottingand 28 Days Later) at the peak of his form, and propelled by an exuberant music soundtrack all the way to a memorable finale.
Jonathan Demme, the Oscar-winning director of The Silence of the Lambs, skilfully navigates the audience through a rollercoaster of emotions in his bittersweet Rachel Getting Married. Rosemarie DeWitt is radiant as the bride-to-be whose precision-planned wedding at the family home in Connecticut is threatened with disarray when her volatile sister Kym (Anne Hathaway) returns from rehab for the event.
Still riddled with guilt over a fatal accident when she was aged 16 and stoned at the wheel of a car, Kym seems permanently on edge, even though she's "nine months clean", and she puts everyone else on edge as the wedding day arrives. That atmosphere is heightened in Declan Quinn's prowling handheld camera-work. Hathaway could well figure in next spring's Oscar nominations for her revelatory performance, as should Debra Winger in her welcome comeback as Kym and Rachel's mother, and Jenny Lumet (daughter of director Sidney) for her acutely perceptive screenplay.
Rachel's groom is a successful black musician based in Hawaii (played by Tunde Adebimpe), and the guests and performers at the extended wedding celebrations provide an intoxicating, ethnically diverse mix of musical entertainment that spans the genres and includes the director's son, Brooklyn Demme, on electric guitar for a hard-rock rendition of Here Comes the Bride. The music in its own right would have made this wedding too good to miss, whatever reservations one might have about sharing the same space as the dysfunctional family at the movie's centre.
The problems of young love are treated with wit and sensitivity in Peter Sollett's endearing Nick Norah's Infinite Playlist, already tagged as this year's Juno, not least because it features the wonderfully natural Michael Cera (from Junoand Superbad). He plays Nick, a shy, uptight New Jersey teenager who plays in a rock band with his two gay best friends (Rafi Gavron and Aaron Yoo). Heartbroken that his selfish girlfriend has dropped him, Nick awkwardly finds himself thrown together with the much more confident Norah (Kat Dennings) over an eventful night in New York, with wildly funny consequences.
The mood is altogether darker, yet ultimately hopeful, in veteran Swedish director Jan Troell's compelling marital drama, Everlasting Moments, set among a struggling family in early 20th-century Malmö. Maria Heiskanen is riveting as Maria, the hard-working, caring mother of an ever-growing family while her violent, irresponsible husband (Mikael Persbrandt) squanders his earnings on booze.
Winning a box camera in a lottery provides a partial lease of life for Maria when a local photographer guides and encourages her in taking pictures, much to the disgust of her sneering, patriarchal spouse in this captivating family saga that spans 21 years with the accumulating power of a masterly director at work.
French director Claire Denis is on unusually mellow form for 35 Rhums( 35 Shots of Rum), a low-key picture observing the relationships between disparate neighbours in a suburban Paris apartment building. They include a lonely train driver (Alex Decas) and his devoted daughter (Mati Diop) who works in a record store, a middle-aged taxi driver (Nicole Dogue) and a restless young man (Grégoire Colin). This tender film is infused with honesty and humanity.
Brothers Joel and Ethan Coen follow their gripping, Oscar-winning No Country for Old Menwith a zany screwball comedy in Burn After Reading, incurring the wrath of critics who expect and demand something more substantial from the Coens every time.
The amusingly convoluted storyline involves John Malkovich as a pompous former CIA analyst whose tell-all memoir is stored on a computer disc he accidentally leaves behind at a Washington DC gym.
Tilda Swinton plays his brusquely business-like wife who's having an affair with an inveterate adulterer (George Clooney). Frances McDormand features as a middle-aged gym employee distracted by her online search for a man in her life. And in a delightfully goofy performance, Brad Pitt plays her dim-witted, gum-chewing colleague, who finds the lost disc. This boisterous comedy has the air of a thoroughly entertaining house party where the company is consistently engaging as one moves from one room to another.
THERE WERE MANY walkouts within the first hour during the Toronto press screening of Spike Lee's ambitious second World War epic, Miracle at St Anna, which sets out to redress cinema's tendency to downplay or ignore the participation of black US soldiers in that war. Those who left early missed the movie's strongest segment in the final half-hour, a sustained, expertly staged battle sequence in Tuscany.
Getting to that point is laborious and increasingly more boring, though, in a plodding film unwisely over-stretched to close on three hours, bogged down by scenes that seem quite superfluous and by a framing device set in 1983 New York that feels awkwardly manufactured. Lee's film pales in comparison with the award-winning 2006 movie, Indigènes( Days of Glory), which was much more sharply focused and dramatically effective in illustrating the significant role of Moroccan and Algerian soldiers fighting with the French forces during the same war.
Passchendaele, the Canadian film that opened Toronto this year, is set during the first World War and is just as disappointing as Spike Lee's war epic. Writer-director Paul Gross takes the leading role of a square-jawed, shellshocked sergeant who returns home in 1917 to Calgary - the camera caresses its gorgeous natural landscapes like a tourism commercial - and falls for a nurse whose asthmatic young brother is humiliated into enlisting.
The battle scenes and the period production design are impressive, but the movie is archly scripted and stiffly staged. However, its firmly anti-war message took on a particular poignancy on the festival's opening day, which began early that morning with widespread media reports that another three young Canadian soldiers had been killed in Afghanistan.
• Michael Dwyer continues his reports from Toronto International Film Festival in The Ticketin The Irish Timeson Friday
