Toronto Film Festival: Stephen Hawking, Jon Stewart and (mostly) true stories
OK, time for some truthtelling. Or maybe not.
The title 'Based on a true story' starts a lot of movies these days, particularly the sort of awards-seeking ones that often fill up Toronto film festival schedules.
'Mr. Turner,' 'The Imitation Game,' 'Wild' and 'Foxcatcher' - all sprang from real events, and all will probably end up figuring in my list of the best films I saw here. More on that later.
But first, my last triple-feature of the fest, three movies which all had some grounding in real events.
Far and away the best was 'The Theory of Everything,' an excellent biographical film about the life of physicist Stephen Hawking. It begins with him as an antic and mischievous student at Cambridge, follows him through his first innovations in theoretical physics, and then watches as he marries, starts a family and struggles with professional stresses and personal doubts.
Oh and along the way - very early on in the film, in fact - he's diagnosed with a progressive, incapacitating disease.
But the very fine thing about the film - apart from an award-worthy performance by Eddie Redmayne - is that the disease is not the point. This is a film about one man's struggle to escape the surly bonds of earth, through the power of his mind alone - and Hawkins' disability neither defines nor deifies him. We all have limitations, the film suggests, and sometimes physical ones are merely the most apparent.
Far less successful is 'Rosewater,' Jon Stewart's much anticipated feature-film debut as a director. It's the story of Maziar Bahari, an Iranian-Canadian journalist who was arrested in 2009 by Tehran authorities on suspicion of being a spy. Stewart's interest in - and guilt about - the story is obvious: Bahari had just appeared on his show, and it was partly the Iranian government's absolute inability to understand American satire that helped land the man in jail.
Gael Garcia Bernal is fine as Bahari (although it will be interesting to see if Stewart's non-Persian casting choice gets the same criticism that greeted Ridley Scott's putting Caucasians in his Moses movie). Some of Stewart's natural writing talent shows through, too, particularly during an interrogation in which, making up stories to placate his interrogator, Bahari talks about that erotic paradise known as Fort Lee.
But too much of the film - with the ghosts of Bahari's father and sister coming to visit him in his cell - feels like a staged play, and the film seems oddly dated; at a time when other journalists are being beheaded, how compelling is the story of one who was arrested? It's a well-intentioned movie, but I fear any rave reviews its gets are going to be based more on politics and personality than on its actual power and artistry.
Finally comes 'The Face of an Angel,' the latest from the indefatigable Michael Winterbottom (who really works too much, and not always at the top of his game). This film's based on the lurid Amanda Knox case, in which Knox, an American student, was accused of murdering her roommate in Italy. Although the names have been changed, the details of the crime remain the same and the film is dedicated to the memory of the victim, Meredith Kercher.
What Winterbottom is really interested in, though, is everything but the truth (which the script basically shrugs its shoulders at and declares 'unknowable.') And so the story spins off in any number of different directions and briefly considered themes - the tabloidization of the news, 'la dolce vita,' innocence, decadence and even Dante's 'The Divine Comedy.'
The movie is, frankly, a mess and a repetitive one (how many bad dreams can one character have?), lightened only by Cara Delevingne's appearance as a carefree British student. Delevingne's mostly been a fixture in fashion spreads and gossip pages up until now, but she has an interestingly expressive face and an uninhibited ease in front of the camera; she can't save the film, but she's clearly the most interesting thing in it.
And that brings another year at Toronto (almost) to a close; as per my usual custom, I'll try to squeeze one more movie in tomorrow, in between my hotel checkout and flight home. Watch this space Sunday for my final story, in which I try to make sense of the films I saw this year, and point you towards the must-see ones headed toward theaters - and, just maybe, the Oscars.
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