All human life in Toronto

Michael Dwyer gives his verdict on some of the movies that made a splash at the 30th Toronto International Film Festival

Michael Dwyer gives his verdict on some of the movies that made a splash at the 30th Toronto International Film Festival

A man changing sex, a Gulf War veteran cracking up, sex tourists of different genders and generations, the assassination of a politician, an assassin losing his grip, the production of a religious movie, a sadistic employment process, and the journeys of two women from conservative backgrounds to notoriety. All human life was on screen at the 30th Toronto International Film Festival, and these were just some of the themes covered over the final days of the stimulating and wide-ranging event. While most of those movies were firmly rooted in realism, it was notable that the films featuring fictional scenarios proved more compelling than the factually based pictures.

Having won an Emmy award last Sunday as frazzled mother-of-four Lynette Scavo in Desperate Housewives, Felicity Huffman well deserves an Oscar nomination next January for her adventurous and touching portrayal of a man who desperately wants to be a woman in the ambiguously titled serious comedy, Transamerica.

She plays Stanley, who now prefers to be known as Bree, and is holding down two jobs in Los Angeles to pay for the final stages in "sexual reassignment surgery". With just days to go to the operation, he gets a call saying a 17-year-old boy, Toby (Kevin Zegers), has been arrested in New York and is claiming to be his son.

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Coincidentally, this theme - of fathers seeking out lost sons, and sons finding lost fathers - has been one of the preoccupations in movies this year and was to the forefront of several films showcased at Cannes in May: Broken Flowers, Don't Come Knockin', The King, L'Enfant. In Transamerica it transpires that Toby is the product of Stanley's sole heterosexual experience back in his college days, and he reluctantly goes east to bail him out.

Although he objects to Toby's behaviour - his grammar, smoking, cocaine-snorting, and street hustling to make ends meet - Stanley/Bree eventually agrees to bring Toby with him to Los Angeles. The screenplay takes on the form of a classic road movie in that it becomes a journey on which they discover themselves and each other, and they encounter diverse characters along the way - partying Dallas transsexuals, a kindly Native American (Graham Greene) who takes a shine to Bree, and Bree's mother (Fionnula Flanagan), who is aghast at the change in her Stanley but thrilled to find she has a grandson in Toby.

The first feature film from writer- director Duncan Tucker, Transamerica is a fresh, imaginative spin on a familiar genre. It is as often poignant as it is uproariously funny, as Bree struggles to conceal her true identity from Toby, and the route to that inevitable revelation is inventively plotted.

The interplay between the two principal characters is enhanced by the performances of Zegers, a highly promising young actor, and Huffman, wonderfully subtle in a role that so easily could have been overplayed.

Her Desperate Housewives co-star, Eva Longoria, and Six Feet Under regular Freddy Rodriguez play a young Los Angeles couple whose relationship comes under severe strain as he falls deeper under the bad influence of his best friend, a volatile Gulf War veteran (Christian Bale), in Harsh Times, the accomplished first feature directed by Training Day screenwriter David Ayer.

In yet another vigorous stretch as an actor, Bale indelibly etches his character as a man coiled up with frustration that is released in increasingly violent outbursts, and Rodriguez is consistently engaging as the conflicted conscience of Ayer's gritty, hard-edged drama that commendably eschews any false sense of hope in its uncompromising conclusion.

Nor does French director Laurent Cantet pull any punches in Heading South (Vers le Sud), which is as thoughtful and challenging as his earlier Time Out (L'emploi du Temps), in which a middle-aged businessman concocts an elaborate scheme to conceal his newly unemployed status from his family. Cantet's latest film deals with sex tourists in late 1970s Haiti, but this story's sexual predators do not conform to the stereotype of seedy old men.

They are, in fact, well-to-do middle-aged women jealously competing for the paid sexual favours of a handsome 18-year-old beach boy. The movie directly addresses both the nature of this exploitation and the intense sexual satisfaction it provides. Situating the simmering drama against the corruption and intimidation of the infamous "Baby Doc" Duvalier dictatorship, Cantet's fine film features outstanding performances from Charlotte Rampling and Karen Young as the most sexually demanding - and needy - of the visiting women.

Played by Jay Hernandez and Derek Richardson, the sex tourists in Hostel are US college students revelling in sex and drugs over a summer holiday in Europe when they hear about the unlimited sexual prospects available at a hostel-cum-spa outside Bratislava. What they don't know is the terrible fate that awaits them in this nervy, slickly orchestrated horror movie made with true genre panache by Eli Roth, the writer-director of Cabin Fever.

Unsettling for very different reasons, Argentine director Macelo Pineyro's The Gronholm Method plays sadistically with the minds of its central characters, seven applicants for a high-level post at a multinational corporation in Madrid. Or should that be six, given an early suggestion that one of them may be a management plant? Anti-globalisation protests take place on the streets outside the locked office where competitive executives are put through an elimination process that is altogether nastier than a TV reality show such as Big Brother. The movie's stage origins are transparent, but all the more effectively so in capturing the claustrophobic confines of a compelling movie that's just as cynical as the corporate exercise it depicts.

Edison, the US thriller chosen to close the Toronto festival at the weekend, is, unfortunately, merely cynical - or maybe just naive - in its rehash of tired movie cliches. Set in a fictional US city named Edison, where the crime rate has collapsed in recent years, it features Justin Timberlake in a blankly inexpressive acting debut as a dogged young free-sheet journalist intent on unravelling and exposing a stinking web of police corruption. The cast also includes Morgan Freeman, Kevin Spacey, Dylan McDermott, LL Cool J, Cary Elwes, Piper Perabo and John Heard, but most have little to do but overact - Heard, in particular, chews the scenery bare - in a movie enlivened only by a couple of decently organised action sequences and sunk by rafts of risible dialogue. What's most puzzling is that such an implausible picture of newspaper reporters could emanate from a former journalist, writer-director, David J Burke.

Abel Ferrara's new film, Mary, operates from another unlikely premise, that a sombre, serious TV show dealing with religious matters would be a nightly media sensation in the US. Forest Whitaker impassively plays the show's presenter, who is enjoying the new trappings of fame. One of his guests is an egomaniac film director (Matthew Modine) cashing in on the huge success of The Passion of the Christ by making a religious drama in which the director himself gets to play Jesus, and by whipping up a controversy to boost its box-office. Juliette Binoche is woefully under-used as the actress supposedly transformed by playing Mary Magdalene in Ferrara's muddled attempt at provocation.

Introducing The Notorious Bettie Page at its Toronto premiere, writer-director Mary Harron said she has been working on the project for 12 years, during which she produced two children and directed two notable movies, I Shot Andy Warhol and American Psycho. Her new film portrays Page as a victim of incestuous sexual abuse in childhood and a physically abusive husband in her late teens. Moving from Nashville to New York in the 1950s with dreams of a movie career, she became a minor celebrity as a bondage model in coy fetishist magazinessubjected to a US Senate investigation.

Beyond capturing Gretchen Mol's heroically uninhibited performance as Page, this meandering, repetitive movie fails to explain Harron's fascination with her subject. Page, who is still alive, refused to co-operate with the project, just as Jean Harris declined to be involved with Mrs Harris, which is from the same producers as Harron's film, beyond taking a phone call from Annette Bening, who plays her in the movie. Written and directed by Phyllis Nagy with a jarring awkwardness of tone and structure, the movie sustains interest only through the commendably committed performances of Ben Kingsley as Herman Tanower, the cardiologist who devised the Scarsdale diet and is depicted as a callously self-gratifying womaniser, and Bening as the sophisticated but emotionally brittle schoolteacher who loved him for 15 years and was convicted of his murder in 1980.

The title of Dutch director Theo van Gogh's final film, 06/05, refers to the date in 2002 when the controversial right-wing and openly gay politician, Pim Fortuyn, who was leading in the pre-election polls, was shot dead outside a TV station in Hilversum. The movie employs archival footage within a tangled and demanding hypothetical plot that explores the killing and its aftermath. The thriller takes on a chilling resonance given that, just 30 months after that assassination, van Gogh himself was murdered on a street in Amsterdam.

The role of Julian Noble, the professional hit-man at the centre of The Matador - or "facilitator of fatalities", as he describes himself - is played for laughs and with tongue admirably in cheek by Pierce Brosnan. Noble is jaded and losing his touch when, on an assignment in Mexico City, he encounters a US businessman (Greg Kinnear) longing for a break. That chance meeting changes both their lives in director Richard Shepard's spirited, briskly paced yarn, featuring Brosnan in the wittiest, most self-effacing performance of his career. Wearing a moustache that would be more appropriate on a 1970s porn star, he shrugs off a compliment about his appearance with the line "I look like a Bangkok hooker on a Sunday morning, after the navy's left town". In another scene, as he strides nonchalantly in black Speedos and leather boots through a busy hotel lobby, Brosnan puts his James Bond days firmly and finally behind him.