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North stars
From Upriver to Sideways, new directions at the Toronto Film Festival
BY GERALD PEARY

The George W. campaign has proved impervious to the Michael Moore ridicule of Fahrenheit 9/11. Can a Bush second term be stopped in a different way, by a stalwart, inspiring homage to the glories of John Kerry? Anyone whose vision was blighted by those swiftboat ads should take a long look at George Butler’s Going Upriver: The Long War of John Kerry, which premiered last week at the Toronto International Film Festival and opens in Boston next Friday (October 1). Butler is a 30-year friend of our Massachusetts junior senator, and their closeness opens him up to a Kerry we’d all like to see now: a clear-thinking and eloquent idealist who takes seriously, and to heart, the valiant call of John F. Kennedy to "ask what you can do for your country." Or at least, Kerry did during the era of this movie, his Vietnam years, in battle and afterward back home as a spokesman for Vietnam Veterans Against the War.

"I’m not going to see another tired Kerry campaign film," a Democrat critic friend said at Toronto. Wrong! Going Upriver is informative (and uplifting!) even for know-all partisans of Kerry, and it could be a conversion experience for those who doubt his heroism in Vietnam, his leadership, or his patriotism. Among the film’s true believers is Jeff Dowd, the Abbie Hoffman–like PR troubleshooter for American indies whom the Coens used as the model for Jeff Bridges’s "The Dude" in The Big Lebowski. Before Toronto, Dowd had been taking the movie around to test groups of potential voters. "At the end of screenings, we asked those who called themselves ‘undecided’ how they’d vote," the Dude told me. "Ninety per cent of them were now voting for Kerry."

The best film I saw at Toronto? Alexander Payne’s Sideways, his masterly comedy follow-up to Election and About Schmidt and by far the best film of 2004. (It’ll open in Boston October 20.) It’s a buddy-buddy road movie in which two late-30ish friends tool the California highways for a few days of celebrating before one of them gets married. Miles (Paul Giamatti) is a bitterly divorced public-school teacher who gets his pleasures from obsessing about, and partaking of, the finest California wines. Jack (Thomas Haden Church) is an affable but irresponsible fading TV actor who utilizes his last unmarried week to screw around with any woman he sees.

It’s a very odd couple. Miles, neurotic and pessimistic, unable to let go of his ex-wife, terrified of new emotional relationships, and fearful that the novel he wrote will not be published. Jack is a bubbleheaded philistine without the slightest qualms about cheating on his future wife. They ride around, and they meet women, and the romances that ensue are both screwball hilarious and truly touching, so funny, so awkward, so bittersweet. I was hardly alone among the swept-away at Toronto. Gorgeously written by Payne and his perennial co-scenarist, Jim Taylor, and beautifully (and modestly) directed, Sideways made me coo with pleasure, a jubilant answer to this critic’s ever-fainter plea for greatness from today’s Hollywood cinema. The wonderfully mismatched Giamatti and Church recall Jack Lemmon and Tony Curtis bouncing about in Some Like It Hot. Indeed, Sideways is the equivalent of a grand Billy Wilder romantic comedy.

This was a year of explicit art-house sex at Toronto, with X-films from A-list directors including England’s Michael Winterbottom (Nine Songs), France’s Catherine Breillat (L’anatomie de l’enfers), and Sweden’s Lukas Moodysson (A Hole in My Heart). This reviewer stayed native by sexual-slumming with our own Eros-obsessed James Toback (The Pick-Up Artist, Two Girls and a Guy, etc.). I even hitched a limousine ride with Toback, whom I’d hung with in Cambridge when he made Harvard Man. He and I were off for a Toronto screening of When Will I Be Loved, which stars Neve Campbell as (seminal Toback) a filthy-rich, bosom-baring, bi-sexual minx.

As we rode, Toback, who’s famously uncensored in his comments, praised Campbell’s performance, starting with her opening nude shower scene, in which she masturbates with her bare rump to the audience: "Oh, the muscular contractions of the calves, the thighs, the ass, the back, so very beautiful that this incredible graceful actress has such deft control!" An Oscar, maybe? "There is no way in 2004 that any young actress can come close to Neve’s performance." What about a Best Picture nomination? "I live in the real world; it will not happen. The odds are against bold, provocative films. But it would be nice to be recognized."

I recognize When Will I Be Loved as an entertaining time at the cinema, with a delicious cameo by the filmmaker’s off-screen pal Mike Tyson and a droll turn by Toback in which he parodies himself as a philosophizing professor whose lofty rhetoric, aimed at women, disguises a dripping "Will-you-fuck-me?" subtext. The sexy, double-cross noir story, filled with glitzy people doing venal things to a soundtrack of classic music, reminded me of the glory days of 1970s 35mm hardcore, The Opening of Misty Beethoven and beyond, when money was spent on production values and glamorous-looking performers and even on developing a script.

As so often before, I ask the question: why doesn’t Toback make, as he could, a true breakthrough porno movie? Couldn’t torchy Campbell be the XXX-equivalent to Misty Beethoven’s immortal Constance Money?

Few critics at Toronto, what with five new movies a day to see, could afford the time (three hours and 40 minutes) for the newly restored director’s cut of Michael Cimino’s 1980 Heaven’s Gate. I did catch the engrossing documentary accompaniment, Michael Epstein’s 78-minute Final Cut: The Making and Unmaking of Heaven’s Gate. Here was the legendary story of how Cimino, hubris-driven after The Deer Hunter, went millions of dollars over budget, in the process driving United Artists toward bankruptcy. Epstein has superb interviews with still-in-shock UA executives and with actors Kris Kristofferson and Brad Dourif.

And Cimino? "Michael declined," Epstein explained. "I don’t think he has a lot of trust and faith [in the media’s] telling his story. From a directing point, I was pleased in a way that I didn’t have to tackle Michael: it gave me space. He would have liked a film only about the artistic greatness of his film." Does Epstein agree with those who think Heaven’s Gate was, the first time around, unfairly buried by hostile, negative reviews? "Heaven’s Gate is very different in its rhythms. It doesn’t try to be a video game. If you go with its rhythms, it’s quite a ride. Michael became a fall guy. If Heaven’s Gate came to America made by Bertolucci or Visconti, it would have been hailed as a masterpiece."

Elsewhere at Toronto:

Touch the Sound. German filmmaker Thomas Riedelsheimer’s follow-up to his beloved Rivers and Tides is to my eyes a far more humane and less smugly pompous work. I’ll take almost-deaf percussionist Evelyn Glennie, this film’s effervescent heroine, over Rivers and Tides’ sanctimonious Andy Goldsworthy. Riedelsheimer follows Glennie around the world as she plays pick-up percussion and also makes an avant-garde CD with amiable musician’s musician Fred Frith.

Childstar. A smart, ambitious second feature by Canadian screenwriter (Thirty-Two Short Films About Glenn Gould) and actor (Highway 61, Exotica, etc.) Don McKellar, Childstar was the most underrated and misunderstood film of Toronto 2004, being saddled with dismissive reviews in both the local and the international press. Here’s a movie both intensely personal and provokingly political, a sardonic tale from just outside the US borders about being stepped on by American imperialism wearing the feel-good face of Hollywood. This film concerns a runaway LA studio action picture being shot in Toronto to take advantage of the lower-valued Canadian dollar. McKellar plays a version of himself: a Canadian intellectual who is hired by, pulled about by, and somewhat seduced by the American production — they’ve got the cash! — while he clings to his æsthetic integrity by forging tiny experimental movies. Maybe it helps to know McKellar off screen, as I do, and be aware that for years he’s resisted lucrative offers to go to Hollywood.

The face of American arrogance in Childstar? The title character, a teen kid from the USA who, starring in the movie-within-a-movie as the American president’s gun-toting son, treats everyone about the production (hired Canadians) like immigrant underlings. McKellar cast a Canadian, Mark Rendall, in the role. "When Mark first interviewed," McKellar said at a press conference, "I thought he was too nice, not tough enough, not convincing as a prick or an American."

The Merchant of Venice. Director Michael Radford leaves in the anti-Semitic lines but tries to contextualize them in the first filming ever of the Bard’s most controversial play. Al Pacino struggles a bit with a Jewish accent, but in the end he succeeds as an underplayed Shylock.

Hotel Rwanda. Winner of Toronto’s Audience Award is Terry George’s sometimes stirring, sometimes overdone historical drama about Paul Rusesabagina (Don Cheadle), who saved hundreds of Tutsis from murderous Hutus during the 1994 Rwanda holocaust.

Ray. Taylor Hackford’s film bio of Ray Charles is overlong and conventionally told. But Jamie Foxx, so cab-driver good in Collateral, excels for the second time in 2004, as a living, breathing, and even soul-singing Charles.

Palindromes. A perversely religious and almost anti-abortion movie from the always odd Todd Solondz (Welcome to the Dollhouse, Happiness) in which a young girl, played in each scene by a different actress, travels through a world of cruelties, many occurring in suburban New Jersey. Sometimes confusing and offputting, other times provocative and powerful, Palindromes would probably be a lot more meaningful on a second viewing.


Issue Date: September 24 - 30, 2004
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