At the 2003 Toronto Film Festival, the movies that started small loom large.
Over caviar and a fine bottle of vodka, director Lars von Trier flashes his prankster's smile at countryman Jørgen Leth, his austere mentor and comic foil, in The Five Obstructions, one of the highlights at the recent 28th Toronto International Film Festival. Perched comfortably in his office at Zentropa Productions in Denmark, von Trier is about to send Leth on another of five far-flung missions to remake his 1967 short The Perfect Human, which von Trier calls "a little gem that we're now going to ruin." For each version, von Trier dreams up a sinister new set of Dogme-style "obstructions," challenges designed to trip Leth up. In the first one, for example, no edit can last longer than 12 frames (half a second); in another, Leth has to shoot on location in "the most miserable place on Earth."
The sparring sessions between von Trier and Leth are uproariously funny, but more gratifying still are Leth's wily counterpunches, as each new remake slips creatively around its "obstructions." (It's telling that the only time Leth stumbles comes when von Trier curses him with the ultimate imposition: complete creative freedom.) With The Five Obstructions, von Trier has made the best conceivable argument for his fading Dogme movement, proving that artistry thrives on resistance, because the things filmmakers cannot do invariably lead them to a fresh set of possibilities.
In this spirit, many of the festival's best films were expanding visions, breaking out like flowers through cracks in the pavement. Not least among them is von Trier's audacious three-hour opus Dogville, which takes place entirely on a barely appointed stage, with chalk outlines denoting the houses and streets in a small Rocky Mountain town. A wicked subversion of Thornton Wilder's All-American classic Our Town (by way of The Sims), the film shows how the democratic ideals of a "decent," God-fearing community can run against the corrupting influence of human nature. As an outsider seeking refuge from murderous gangsters, Nicole Kidman carries von Trier's potent allegory for the immigrant experience, playing a woman driven into labor with no hope of social advancement, victimized by greed, exploitation, and moral hypocrisy. All in plain sight, too. Take away the gimmickry and hype that surrounds–and is perpetuated by–von Trier, and he's a peerless dramatist, with a sadist's knack for locating his characters' (and audience's) soft spots to provoke a singular emotional experience.
Dogville's whiff of anti-Americanism brought out the inner patriot of a few prominent U.S. critics at Cannes, but the broad label doesn't do justice to the scope of von Trier's film, which could just as easily be read as a religious parable or an anti-Western. Such easy assumptions have long tagged former Secretary Of Defense Robert McNamara, who was once vilified as the chief architect of the Vietnam War, and whose 1995 memoir In Retrospect was generally considered an apology for that war. As director Errol Morris argues in The Fog Of War, a probing and virtuosic documentary built around an interview with McNamara, neither assessment quite tells the truth. Though slippery and elusive by nature, McNamara is never exactly evasive; he genuinely wants to come to terms with his actions and explain the thinking behind his decisions. Where he falls short of contrition, he leaves behind justification, as well. For his part, Morris uses McNamara's involvement in three major conflicts to examine the larger issues of war and foreign policy in the 20th century, offering clear, dispiriting evidence that history is doomed to repeat itself. (One choice McNamara line, recorded before the war in Iraq, drew applause from the Toronto audience: "If we can't persuade nations of comparable values of the rightness of our cause, then we'd better reexamine our reasoning.")
The poisonous influence of American policies, at home and abroad, turned out to be a running theme in this year's stellar documentary slate. Foremost among the entries was The Revolution Will Not Be Televised, a riveting piece of agitprop that provides ringside seats to the failed coup attempt on Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez in April 2002. In Caracas to shoot a profile on the controversial leader for Irish television, directors Kim Bartley and Donnacha O'Briain found themselves in the middle of the action, as the moneyed Old Guard used its privately owned media companies to bamboozle the people and overthrow a democratically elected leader. Though Bartley and O'Briain don't find a smoking gun, they imply that the CIA and the Bush Administration had a clear interest in orchestrating the coup, given the leftist Chavez's intent to redistribute wealth in the world's fourth largest oil-producing nation.
The inequities of the free-market system, so crudely trumpeted by the major media companies in Revolution, are ripe for subversion from within. The Yes Men, a new documentary from American Movie's Chris Smith and Sarah Price, follows a troupe of anti-globalization activists who pestered the World Trade Organization by mounting a parody web site (gatt.org) and posing as WTO spokesmen at a few speaking events and on television. Their Swiftian interpretations of WTO policies are daring and funny: One speech about solving third-world hunger by making McDonald's hamburgers out of filtered first-world waste is a particular highlight. These stunts are thrillingly audacious, though the documentary itself amounts to little more than a promotional video, with none of the careful portraiture that distinguishes Smith's other work.
Blessedly free of any politicking, which has enraged some moralists and social critics, Gus Van Sant's Palme d'Or-winning Elephant presents an uninflected meditation on high-school life during the day of a Columbine-esque massacre. Few cultural events have been seized upon so opportunistically by pundits and politicians on both ends of the spectrum, so Van Sant seizes it back, creating a beautiful monument to the students' existence, in all its splendor and terror. As in their natural companion piece Gerry, Van Sant and cinematographer Harris Savides create gorgeous spaces that allow viewers the freedom to reflect without imposing any point of view. And bonus points for the ingenious structure: The moment when time doubles back on itself, suddenly thrusting the audience toward the main event, might have been the festival's most unsettlingly exhilarating moment.
Just as Van Sant sacrifices character development for the bigger picture, maverick director Robert Altman perversely defies every convention of the backstage musical in The Company, an inspired, harmonious collaboration with the Joffrey Ballet of Chicago. In Altman's hands, what might have been a vanity project for dancer/star Neve Campbell turns into a warm, incisive behind-the-scenes look at a ballet company, complete with a handful of breathtaking standalone dance sequences. The few remaining glimmers of melodrama, such as Campbell's sweet romance with a young line cook (James Franco), are relegated to the margins. (Nicest touch: When a dancer is injured, he or she is simply replaced by an understudy. No tears, no diva meltdowns, nothing.)
George Hickenlooper's funny, heartbreaking documentary Mayor Of The Sunset Strip provided the Toronto festival with a sorely needed enduring character: Rodney Bingenheimer, a Zelig-like L.A. gadfly (and Davy Jones stand-in) who attached himself to seemingly every major musical talent that ever reached the city limits. In spite of his gnomish presence, Bingenheimer's mere association with rock stars earned him a notorious amount of groupie action in the late '60s and '70s, though Hickenlooper (Hearts Of Darkness) uncovers the sadder truths of residing on the fringes of celebrity. Rousing and generous entertainment, with a terrific soundtrack to boot, Mayor Of The Sunset Strip still heads insistently into darker territory, leading to a final question from Hickenlooper that's wrenching in its directness.
Joining Bingenheimer in marginalization, actor Scott Caan's breathlessly assured directorial debut Dallas 362 was relegated to the closing days of a top-loaded festival, when most of the press corps had already packed its bags. Who could have guessed that a slot-filler by Caan–better known as Sonny Corleone's bulky, affable chip-off-the-block–would turn out to be such a thrilling discovery? Though the story sounds like a hackneyed cross between Mean Streets (with Caan and Shawn Hatosy as low-level L.A. palookas who collect money and start bar fights) and Good Will Hunting (with a bemused Jeff Goldblum as Hatosy's therapist), Caan tweaks nearly every scene in an unexpected direction. Add to that a flavorful music selection, diamond-sharp cutting, and some of the funniest dumb-guy dialogue in memory, and Caan emerges as a real talent to watch.
But as much as his thuggish image gives Dallas 362 an uphill battle to distribution, Caan can at least be grateful not to be named Vincent Gallo, who served his minimalist road movie The Brown Bunny to another pack of wolves after it was tagged the worst film ever to screen in Cannes. Slashed by 30 minutes since its disastrous unveiling, the wounded duck stars writer-director-photographer-composer-caterer-whatever Gallo as a motorcycle racer driving cross-country in a bug-flecked van to visit his true love, played by Chloë Sevigny. Not nearly the calamity advertised–though not a misunderstood masterpiece, either–The Brown Bunny works best as a finely textured, Two Lane Blacktop-style travelogue, with plaintive songs placed over a diverse picture of the American landscape. Only when Gallo reaches his destination (and receives a notorious reward for his troubles) does the film become an embarrassment, revealing itself as a pale rehash of his man-child routine from Buffalo '66. Still, those writing it off as a vain indulgence fail to acknowledge Gallo's intense vulnerability in those final scenes with Sevigny. He's terrible, but deeply exposed.
With The Brown Bunny failing to live up to its anti-hype, the true scandal of the festival turned out to be Twentynine Palms, French director Bruno Dumont's understandably (if unfairly) reviled follow-up to 1999's surprise Cannes winner L'Humanité. For a mesmerizing 105 minutes, Dumont wanders the gorgeous California topography of the title, following a bickering couple (David Wissak and Yekaterina Golubeva) whose hot-and-cold relationship leads to sniping one minute, animalistic sex the next. The languorous goings-on come to an end in shocking fashion, as it turns out that Dumont was building to something after all. Not to all tastes, Twentynine Palms worked a special mojo on the audience, whose collective enmity grew by the minute until exploding into full-blown antagonism in the final reel. In the film's last public screening at the venerated Uptown Theater, scheduled for demolition later this year, the festival's famously genteel patrons were the first to lower the wrecking ball.