It is the morning Tuesday September 13, and we are now halfway through the 2016 edition of the Toronto International Film Festival. How are you doing?
Me, I’m holding up. I have interviewed Shailene Woodley and the Blair Witch people and Maren Ade. I have cursed the lookie-loos cluttering up Festival Street, which remains the dumbest thing TIFF has ever dreamed up – a four-day traffic disruption so Cottonelle can hand out squares of toilet paper to passersby on a Friday night. I so badly wanted that to be a comment on Tom Ford’s risible Nocturnal Animals, which actually includes a scene of Aaron Taylor-Johnson on a toilet – so daring! – but that movie didn’t premiere until Sunday.
I had a drink with Catherine Keener at a Mongrel Media dinner and saw Michael Shannon in an elevator at the Shangri-La hotel. He was wearing sunglasses and jean shorts. I love Michael Shannon.
Mostly, though, I’ve been watching movies. (How many? My 41st capsule review – for Werner Herzog’s Salt And Fire – should be online by the time you read this, and I’ll be filing more today.) And watching movies at this year’s TIFF has been its own challenge, because most of the press screenings are held at the Scotiabank Theatre, and the goddamn escalators are falling apart.
This is not one of those “oh, poor me, I have to climb stairs” things. I spend most of my life sitting on my ass I take the stairs at the Scotiabank even when the escalators are working. But the Scotiabank is a very large megaplex, and when the escalators are not working that means thousands of people must use those stairs, and some of them are rushing, and some of them are not in the best of shape.
(On Saturday, when both the up and down escalators were out of service and it was crushingly humid, I was genuinely worried that someone would collapse after rushing in from the outside because he or she was running late for a screening. And what if someone slipped on the way down? That’s a cascade waiting to happen.)
But no one stroked out or died, and on Sunday morning both the up and down escalator were working. By Sunday evening, the up escalator was out of service again, but it was working again Monday. To live is to hope, and all that.
Because the duty of every journalist attending TIFF is to suss out trends and themes in this year’s festival, the trauma of the Scotiabank escalators will feature in dozens of wrap pieces come the weekend I’m just getting ahead of it here. As far as trends in the movies themselves, well, I’ve noticed one or two things.
If you read my Midnight Madness cover story earlier this month, you’ll know that this year’s horror films reach back to the past in clever new ways: Adam Wingard and Simon Barrett play on the themes and tropes of The Blair Witch Project in their hyper-sequel Blair Witch, for example, and Sadako Vs. Kayako mashes up the Ring and Grudge mythologies to pit their ghosts against one another.
In a similar fashion, Nacho Vigalondo’s Colossal inverts the giant-monster genre by directly linking its Seoul-stomping kaiju to the personal turmoil of two alcoholics (Anne Hathaway and Jason Sudeikis) in a small American town we’re all monsters when we drink.
Deconstruction is everywhere: Denis Villeneuve’s Arrival – starring Amy Adams and Jeremy Renner as a linguist and a physicist tasked with communicating with incomprehensible extraterrestrials – is a serious movie about first contact that’s also about the challenge of making a serious movie about first contact. (It’s one of the best films I’ve seen this year.)
And Damien Chazelle’s La La Land – the one where Ryan Gosling and Emma Stone sing and dance their way through a stylized Los Angeles – is a full-on studio musical that acknowledges how the public’s tastes are changing and makes a plea for the shared experience of music, theatre and cinema. It’s also one of the best films I’ve seen this year.
Barry Jenkins’s Moonlight is another of this year’s best films, following a Miami kid through a decade or so of his life in three distinct movements, each featuring a different actor in the role but creating a continuum of character. Jenkins, who last came to TIFF in 2008 with the slight but charming Medicine For Melancholy, takes small moments and building them into something magnificent, showing us a child in search of a father figure, a teenager in search of armour and a man so trapped inside that armour that he can’t see a way out.
I’ve already heard it called “the black Boyhood”, and I can see how someone could think that, but Moonlight is something different, and something great.
Moonlight is also coming up in a lot of TIFF conversations this week because Nate Parker’s The Birth Of A Nation, well, isn’t. At least, not as a movie people are talking about it, but they’re talking about it in the frame of trouble, both because of Parker’s terrible handling of the revelation of a rape charge in his past and because the movie is getting mixed-to-bad reviews here after wowing Sundance.
That is itself not a new phenomenon plenty of movies come blazing out of Sundance in January to fizzle in the fall. (I blame the altitude people are more likely to go wild for just-okay fare like Happy, Texas or Little Miss Sunshine or Me And Earl And The Dying Girl when they’re a little oxygen-deprived.) But the awards cycle is a merciless beast, and it’s starting to look like its distributor might be seeing Moonlight as the logical replacement for The Birth Of A Nation on various ballots: it’s a genuinely artful, truly original work, and both critics and audiences are getting behind it in a really powerful way. If La La Land doesn’t win the People’s Choice Award this year – which seems an impossible proposal – then Moonlight just might.
Oh, there’s one other thing I’ve noticed. A couple of films focus on the struggles of racially mixed couples to overcome prejudice in eras of intolerance – and while that’s nothing new for a film festival this year we’re seeing that story told in more innovative ways.
Jeff Nichols’s Loving turns the decade-long court battle of Richard and Mildred Loving to have their marriage recognized in West Virginia into a drama about a couple forced to endure years of stress and anxiety by an unjust, openly racist law they don’t want to make history, they just want to make a home for themselves and their children, and Joel Edgerton and Ruth Negga are really good at showing just how exhausting the process is on their characters.
Amma Asante’s A United Kingdom tries something similar with her characters – African king Seretse Khama and his English bride Ruth Williams, played by David Oyelowo and Rosamund Pike. They’re brave in public and absolutely terrified in private, so in love with one another that the thought of being separated is unbearable.
Vulnerability is a tactic we rarely see in movies like these – usually it’s racist taunts, noble suffering, yadda yadda yadda, justice is done – but Nichols and Asante trusted that audiences will be ready for a more dimensional treatment of this material. I’m really glad they did. These are movies worth dashing up the Scotiabank stairs to see.
Get more TIFF 2016 here.
normw@nowtoronto.com | @normwilner
