Category: TIFF

The Squid And The Whale (USA, director Noah Baumbach): This film contained the best ensemble acting I’ve seen this year. Based on the autobiographical experiences of writer and director Baumbach (co-writer of Wes Anderson’s The Life Aquatic – Anderson serves as producer on this film), The Squid And The Whale is about the family dynamics of a family of four going through a divorce in the mid-eighties. Father (Jeff Daniels) is a writer whose best days are behind him, yet he remains an unrepentant snob. Mother (Laura Linney) is also a writer, about to have her first novel published. When her multiple infidelities emerge, the parents decide to divorce. Their sons Walt and Frank are thrown into turmoil. This is not original stuff. But the writing is of such high quality, and the performances so genuine, that I found myself drawn right in.

The film is obviously told from the sons’ perspective. Walt seems to be like his father, snobby and self-righteous, while younger Frank seems more sensitive, though also more self-destructive. Kevin Kline and Phoebe Cates’ son Owen Kline is a revelation in this role. His sister Greta also appears briefly in the film. You might remember these two from The Anniversary Party, but this is really a breakout role for Owen, and I hope he’ll continue acting.

The film makes it painfully aware how people hurt each other when they can’t talk directly about their feelings. Daniels is excellent as a man whose intellectual pride and snobbery hide his deep insecurities and the pain of rejection by his wife. And Laura Linney is able to make even an unsympathetic character a little less blameworthy. The only issues I had the film are probably related to its miniscule budget. The handheld camerawork is often a little bumpy, and the film feels a little unpolished. But after hearing how Baumbach had a 23 day shooting schedule, and took five years to obtain the funding for the film, I have to give him credit for producing a smart and moving piece of cinema.

Just as an aside, I was pleasantly surprised when the end credits rolled that the beautiful titles I’d been noticing were designed by Torontonian Leanne Shapton, who was art director at Saturday Night magazine for a few of its most visually exciting years (circa 2000-2001). I’m glad to see she’s finding new places to bring her great eye for design.

(9/10)

Everything Is Illuminated (USA, director Liev Schreiber): Based upon the acclaimed novel by Jonathan Safron Foer, Everything Is Illuminated is the directorial debut of actor Liev Schreiber. An audacious choice, since the novel is multi-layered and very “meta”, but Schreiber, who also wrote the screenplay, handles the material with ease, for the most part.

Elijah Wood (looking as doll-like as ever, and wearing glasses that magnify his already-huge eyes to make the not-so-subtle point that he is an observer) plays Jonathan, a man obsessed with collecting things from his family’s history. When his grandmother hands him a photograph from 1940 saying, “Your grandfather wanted you to have this,” it sends Jonathan off on a voyage of discovery. The picture is of his grandfather in Ukraine, standing with an unknown woman who, according to his grandmother, saved him from the Nazis, allowing him to escape to America.

Jonathan duly turns up in Ukraine, where he hopes to unravel the mystery of the woman in the photograph. His tour guides turn out to be a little unnerving to the fussy and obsessive vegetarian. His translator Alex is like a Ukrainian version of Sasha Baron-Cohen’s Ali G and Borat characters rolled into one, and is played by newcomer Eugene Hutz, the frontman for the “gypsy punk” band Gogol Bordello, who contribute several songs to the soundtrack. While I thought his accent in the film was just an outrageous parody, during the Q & A, I realized it was actually his real voice (or maybe not. It could be part of the shtick.). Alex’s grandfather, the driver, thinks he is blind and is accompanied everywhere by Sammy Davis Jr. Jr., his “seeing-eye bitch.” Alex’s mangled English leads to many laughs, and the middle section of this road movie is easily the most enjoyable.

Things get a bit more serious when they find the woman in the photograph, but here, in a section of the film called “The Illumination,” I found myself still a little in the dark. Perhaps in ironing out a few of the book’s twists, something was lost, but I found the “mystery” either confusing or not so mysterious, and actually felt a little unsatisfied by the end.

However, the film is shot and edited beautifully, the acting is fine, and the directing sure-handed. Schreiber admitted that the stuff in the book that he left out of the film was the stuff that attracted him to the idea in the first place. Which is an odd thing to say, really. The book contains an imagined history of the shtetl where Jonathan’s grandfather was raised, a place with hundreds of years of history which is wiped out by the Nazis in a few hours. I think this background would have given the film the weight it needed at the end of the journey. Without that ballast, the film floats away a bit.

Nevertheless, this is an assured debut from Schreiber, and I look forward to seeing what he chooses for his next project.

Gogol Bordello Web Site: http://www.gogolbordello.com

(8/10)

The Heart Of The Game (USA, director Ward Serrill): A documentary about high-school basketball that took seven years to make, this film will be compared to Steve James’s Hoop Dreams, which is a high compliment indeed. But the films are different.

Serrill began following the girls’ basketball team at Seattle’s Roosevelt High School when they hired a new coach, tax law professor Bill Resler. Not expected to make much of an impact, Resler proceeded to build a powerhouse in his first year at the job. An eccentric but effective motivator, he chose a different “theme” for his team each year: Pack of Wolves, Pride of Lions, Tropical Storm, and then whipped his players into a frenzy. His motivational skills and his ruthless physical workouts gave the team the confidence and endurance to beat their opponents, even when they were bigger, taller, or more talented.

In his second year at the job, he noticed a young freshman by the name of Darnelia Russell. She stood out for a number of reasons. She had been an outstanding basketball player at her middle school. And she was black. At Roosevelt, in a privileged suburb of Seattle, black students were a minority, unlike at inner-city schools like arch-rival Garfield. In fact, when he tried to recruit her for his team, she rebuffed him at first, admitting to her friends that she wasn’t used to being around so many white people. Her presence at Roosevelt was the combined idea of her middle school coach and her mother, who wanted to keep her out of trouble and make sure she got an excellent education.

Her arrival helps Resler build Roosevelt into a city dynasty and a threat at the state championships. But there are ups and downs. And if you wonder why the film took seven years to make, Serrill admitted that he just filmed everything and waited for the story to emerge.

Although the film touches on a few issues of race and class, Serrill says he wanted to make it more about the basketball, and there are generous clips of games, even from major network coverage. Although it give the film much of its energy, I felt myself wishing there were a few more interviews with players, especially Darnelia, who emerges as a central character in the story. We never really get to know her as anything other than a great basketball player.

That being said, it’s a documentary about sports, so I’m predisposed to like it. There is real drama and excitement, both on and off the court, and it’s also good to see the contribution of people like Bill Resler recognized, a good man who is instilling not just a love of winning, but of playing, and living. As the credits rolled, it was endearing to see that a few of the songs were actually composed and played by Resler, on guitar and vocals, with director Serrill on harmonica. I’m giving this 8.5, even though my graphic doesn’t show half-points.

Film’s Web Site: http://www.heartofthegame.org

(8.5/10)

Bubble (USA, director Steven Soderbergh): Not quite sure how to write about this one. Bubble feels like a bit of an exercise for Soderbergh. First of all, it was shot in HD (high-definition) digital video, and this makes the visuals incredibly crisp. Secondly, it was filmed on location in a small Ohio town with a completely amateur cast. The script felt mostly improvised or situational, and actual dialogue is quite sparse.

This is a small and quiet film in which large themes play out over 90 minutes. The pace is very deliberate, and the atmosphere incredibly claustrophobic. The overriding theme for me seemed to be isolation and it was almost physically painful watching some of the characters go about their daily routines or listening to them try to connect with each other. These are people who seem completely inarticulate and unable to express their feelings. There is a sort of love triangle, and a murder, but that’s about all I can say.

Though the mannered acting and slow pace threw me off at first, once I got used to it, I appreciated the film a lot more. This is one of Soderbergh’s more experimental films, and he admitted after the screening that it would be “polarizing” for audiences. While the film is not entirely successful, I’m glad a director of his stature is still taking risks.

(7/10)

October 17, 1961 (Nuit Noire) (France, director Alain Tasma): Another gut-wrenching portrayal of some of the shameful events perpetrated during the Algerian war, this film is an important document of the legacy of French colonialism.

On the night of October 17, 1961, more than 20,000 Algerians gathered in Paris for a peaceful demonstration against French rule of their homeland. It wasn’t entirely spontaneous. In fact, the FLN (the main group advocating for Algerian independence) required all Algerian men to participate. It was to be a show of solidarity to bolster the ongoing negotiations between the FLN and the French government. Instead, it turned into a massacre. The police were already living in a climate of fear and repressed anger due to the ongoing campaign of random assassinations of police officers. And the police leadership were eager for a crackdown to avoid further humiliation. As the demonstrators gathered in various districts, police immediately moved in to arrest thousands, and after some confusing reports of being fired upon, themselves fired upon and then charged the crowds. There is no official report on the number of dead, but it was somewhere between 50 and 200. More than 40 years later, there has never been an official acknowledgement of the events of that night.

Noted television director Alain Tasma spent two years gathering evidence and reconstructing the events leading up to the massacre, and he presents a straightforward account that manages to capture the rising tension keenly. The film is a sort of parallel to the events portrayed in the classic film The Battle of Algiers, and Tasma owes a lot to the techniques and pacing of that forty-year-old masterpiece. With the exception of that film, most “issue” films rarely rise above their sense of moral outrage, and October 17, 1961 (more evocatively entitled “Nuit Noire” in its native France) is not a masterpiece. But it does capture the feeling of a time not so long ago, a feeling which is eerily present again in the rising Islamophobia of many Western democracies.

(8/10)