(originally
published in The Outreach Connection
in October 1999)
This is the fourth
of Jack Hughes’ reports from the 1999 Toronto International Film Festival.
Breakfast of Champions (Alan Rudolph)
Impossible to
imagine many people actually liking this hyperactive version of Kurt Vonnegut’s
novel about the impossible strains of latter-day consumption-crazed America
(it’s already been and gone from commercial release), although Nick Nolte’s
performance as a cracked cross-dresser almost redeems the whole thing. Bruce
Willis, though, in the central role, is as flat as the cardboard cutouts of him
that pop up in every other scene (as with so much about this film, it’s hard to
tell how deliberate that is). The film is seeped in tacky, garish imagery,
reminiscent of Fear and Loathing in Las
Vegas (although the characters aren’t on acid exactly): it’s a strange,
hermetic construct – not wacky enough to be interesting on its own terms, but
not sufficiently relevant to perform as satire (particularly as the ending is
more a surrender than a conclusion). It does generate a strange sense of
alienation and longing, and some of Rudolph’s visual tricks are giddily
entertaining in the manner of a Monty Python cartoon insert: one suspects the
film’s nutty messiness is more or less what was intended, but it’s hard to
celebrate that kind of success.
Guinevere (Audrey Wells)
This sensitive drama
of a young woman’s affair with a much older photographer effectively explores
the problematic nature for a woman of finding one’s identity and maturity
through a relationship which inherently seems weighted towards the egotistical
gratification of the male. Sarah Polley and Stephen Rea make intriguing
partners in what develops into a subtle power game, even if the conception of
Rea’s character tends a bit too much toward conventional, self-possessed
charismatic distance. The film’s side-excursions into satire (mainly through
pot-shots at Polley’s constipated family of lawyers) are most successful; in
the end, the film allows Rea a measure of indulgence in his grandiose fantasy,
but makes that enjoyment explicitly a gift that lies under Polley’s control –
one might have a satisfying sexual-politics-oriented debate about whether this
is a satisfying arrival point (I think it’s passable).
Women talking Dirty (Coky Giedroyc)
An undistinguished
piece of festival schedule-padding that although not the worst film I saw at
the festival was the one that left my head feeling the emptiest. Two women in
picturesque Edinburgh go through an unremarkable succession of romantic ups and
downs; one (Helena Bonham Carter) is tediously quirky, the other (Gina McKee)
is low-key and mopey. There’s an icky secret that injects some fire into the
latter stages, but so little happens through vast stretches of the film that I
defy anyone not to get distracted by McKee’s quite pretty apartment and to
drift off into thinking about home decorating (great purple couch). The themes,
of course, involve female self-determination and life-balance issues (the same
issues currently dealt with more effectively in Guinevere and Tumbleweeds
and, I’m sure, numerous others). There’s not much dirty talk, which is a
further disadvantage. The film is so undistinctive that it plays Patsy Cline’s
“Crazy” over one sequence. Elton John was one of the producers. Can’t think of
anything else to say about it.
Tumbleweeds (Gavin O’Connor)
A film that,
compared with the above, evidences vastly superior insight and finesse in
dealing with broadly similar concerns. Janet McTeer (in an excellent, wide-ranging performance)
plays a four-times-married woman whose response to romantic letdowns is always
to move along, with her 10-year-old daughter in tow. The film is fundamentally
familiar in its exploration of how a woman asserts her self-determination and
independence when drawn as a matter of emotional and sexual practicality into
relationships with men (none of whom, as luck would have it, are much good);
it’s an older, blue-collar version of Guinevere,
given additional resonance by the contrast with the daughter’s budding maturity
and the well-caught texture of the small-town Northern Californian
surroundings. Any film that can cast the great and weird Michael J. Pollard as
an office manager without losing its grip on plausibility has confidence to
burn; director O’Connor seems to have a perfect sense for where quirkiness and
realism most profitably intersect, and creates a rich, resonant film.
Onegin (Martha Fiennes)
An oddly somber, if
not depressing, choice as the closing night gala, this tragic story of a
nobleman who spurns an offered love then later seeks to reclaim it is
dramatically rather inert and thematically unexceptional. Ralph Fiennes rises
well to the challenge of Onegin, conveying the character’s shift from arrogance
to desolation (his motives remain undramatized in some key respects, but the
film is comfortable with its own mystery). Liv Tyler is also as good as she’s
ever been. The film’s brooding atmosphere is sometimes highly effective (such
as in an almost unbearably tense duel sequence); sometimes on the strained
side, with the sound design introducing an almost otherworldly element into its
dramatization of disengagement and decay. Its measured eeriness is never dull,
but the attention given to the film may be a counterproductive case of overselling
– there’s a severe limit to how much hype this modest work can carry.
Mumford (Lawrence Kasdan)
Already in
commercial release, this gentle film about the attainment of unobtrusive
stability has a style that almost expresses its theme too well – it’s so polite
and pleasant as to almost melt away before your very eyes. Loren Dean plays a
psychologist called Mumford, practicing in the small town of Mumford (neatly
summarizing the theme of assimilation), who achieves success and local
popularity more through sympathetic listening and empathy than through clinical
technique – no surprise then, that he’s not a psychologist at all, but just a
man trying to escape the mistakes of his past. Dean’s undemonstrative
performance is oddly suited to a movie that’s clearly conservative, if not
regressive, in its distrust of pace, ambition and big business (Ted Danson has
a wonderful cameo as the embodiment of all these evils). In many ways the movie
seems merely trite and naïve, hardly funny at all even though it’s being sold
as a comedy, and yet it’s certainly coherent and assured – it’s as if Kasdan
had been making the same basic movie for years and has thus attained a comfortable,
almost effortless autopilot; a strange effect given that this hasn’t in fact been Kasdan’s career.
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