Toronto festival buzz or bust?

Movies: TIFF 16 – First Looks

Jay Stone checks out a handful of the early buzz-makers at the Toronto International Film Festival, and keeps it real and offers this tip “longer is not always better”

By Jay Stone

TORONTO — Two things about a film festival are buzz (what is everyone talking about?) and more importantly, time (how long to I have to spend so that I can talk about it too?) After all, if life were eternal, you wouldn’t worry about it. Indeed, if life were eternal, you could afford to go to see a German movie called Toni Erdmann. But more about that later.

First the buzz. Well, actually, first the fact that the escalator at the downtown theatre where Toronto International Film Festival screenings are held for the press was broken on opening day. Thus, you walk up 105 stairs (by my count) before you can even join the crowds. In film-going — as in film directing, they tell me — the knees go first.

We’re here to sample three movies on our first day, all of them well over two hours long and one of them edging precariously close to three. Time is an interesting aspect of cinema — the way it is compressed or elongated by film-makers who are trying to excite us or lull us into calmness — but it’s also a key part of being in the audience. It’s one thing to piss away 90 minutes on a so-so movie, but quite another to lose a full one-eighth of one’s quickly dwindling ration of days on Earth.

Bravely onward, though, into Manchester By The Sea, a drama by writer-director Kenneth Lonergan, who’s You Can Count On Me was such a moving and unexpected examination of family. There’s more of that here. Casey Affleck stars as Lee, a handyman at a Boston apartment building, who has to return to his hometown of Manchester when his brother dies of a heart attack. There he reunites with a favourite nephew and an ex-wife (Michelle Williams) with whom he shares a troubled past.

It’s 136 minutes long, but that doesn’t seem a second too much. It’s beautifully understated and moving in the best, most elusive way. Lonergan never lingers too long on a scene, or leans to heavily on a point: we are drawn in almost in passing as a group of feisty, quarrelsome characters deal with the unsolvable crises of life itself. It was two and a quarter hours that made me feel I was living a fuller life.

A quick stop for a $3 muffin, and we’re off to American Honey, a fraught road trip from the British director Andrea Arnold (Red Road.) Clocking in at 158 minutes — just a few ticks under three hours, if you’re keeping score at home — it’s a deeply American tale of a teenage girl named Star (Sasha Lane, who reminded me very much, in her exotic prettiness, of Gael Garcia Bernal) who runs away from an abusive life of dumpster-diving to join a troupe of raucous, rap-loving dope-smokers who drive around middle American selling magazines door–to-door.

Made in documentary fashion, if is fascinating in the way a bad car accident slows up traffic on the interstate. Star falls in love with dangerous bad boy Jake (Shia LaBoeuf), but there’s a wide cast of characters all scrambling and lying their way past the nation’s front porches. The highlight is a scene when Star takes off with three older men in Texas who are dressed in identical jeans, white shirts and cowboy hats, all headed to a memorable barbecue.

It’s a picaresque that goes on maybe half an hour past its ability to say something fresh, but you do get a frightening (and very loud) portrait of bad choices. Speaking of which, it turns out that a movie theatre isn’t the best place to order a bagel and cream cheese for lunch.

And so to Toni Erdmann by German director Maren Ade, which emerged from the Cannes film festival with delirious reviews that manifested themselves as five-star recommendations in the Toronto media. Two people at a film critics’ party the night before the TIFF opening assured me that it was the greatest 162-minute German art film of the season, if not the year.

I found it to be 120 minutes I’ll never get back again (I left with 42 minutes to go in the kind of forlorn face-saving that some stock market investors exercise when they realize that their friend’s hot tip has become an irredeemable penny stock.) It’s about an old, retired jokester (Peter Simonischek) who follows his troubled businesswoman daughter (Sandra Huller) to Romania to insinuate himself into her life and, essentially, heckle.

None of what was on screen — the father’s practical jokes, the daughter’s baffling and distasteful sex life — was recognizable human behavior, and on top of that, the father wore a ridiculous disguise (a fright wig and false teeth) that looked like something early Jerry Lewis might have employed to create a comical character. It was filled with surprises, as advertised, but so is food poisoning. For the record, a quite sizeable crowd laughed, albeit with rather dutiful abandon.

Thus do seven hours and change pass, not that I’m complaining. In fact, I’m just looking at the schedule here. Foreign Body sounds interesting. It’s 92 minutes long.