Maladjusted and unusual families were at the heart of the drama at this year's Toronto International Film Festival, writes Michael Dwyer
Dysfunctional American families abounded on screen at the 32nd Toronto International Film Festival. Clearly, any movies dealing with relatively normal, well-adjusted clans are regarded as far less entertaining or dramatically interesting. Film-makers approached the theme with contrasting levels of seriousness and levity, and none more provocatively than in the aptly titled Nothing Is Private.
This is the first feature film directed by Alan Ball, who has an evident preoccupation with probing the dark side of the contemporary family. His Oscar-winning screenplay for American Beauty ripped down the facades of suburbia to reveal a tangled web of adultery, anxieties and voyeurism, and he went on to devise the TV series Six Feet Under, which never shirked challenging story lines.
Ball goes even further in Nothing Is Private, serving up one hot potato after another in a concoction certain to generate controversy and already condemned on Fox News in the US. Based on Alicia Erian's novel Towelhead, it's set in Ball's preferred milieu, inside the closed doors of an anonymous suburban area, this time in Houston, Texas. The movie is unsettling from the outset, when a woman (Maria Bello) discovers that her live-in lover has engaged in highly inappropriate behaviour with her 13-year-old daughter Jasira (Summer Bishil).
She sends Jasira to live with her Lebanese father Rifat (Peter Macdissi) in Houston, where he slaps her face for wearing a short skirt and exposing her midriff. The film is set in 1990, in the build-up to the first Gulf War, and Rifat enthusiastically supports the US against Saddam Hussein. Rifat is too caught up in an affair with a colleague to notice when Jasira becomes sexually involved with the married army reservist (Aaron Eckhart) who lives next door, and with a fellow student (Eugene Jones) who is four years older than her - and to Rifat's horror, black.
Ball eschews any soft options as his film candidly addresses matters from pubescent sexuality to pornography to racism, deliberately unsettling the viewer as he spikes the drama with jet-black humour. He stacks his agenda with an overload of issues and several irrelevant subplots in a movie that exerts a compelling, often creepy fascination.
NANCY OLIVER, A former producer and screenwriter on Six Feet Under, provides the engaging screenplay for the best of the US independent productions showing at Toronto, Lars and the Real Girl. Set in a small town during winter, it features gifted young Canadian actor Ryan Gosling (from Half Nelson) as the painfully shy Lars, who lives in a converted garage next door to his brother (Paul Schneider) and his pregnant wife (Emily Mortimer).
Lars astonishes the couple when he announces that he finally has a girlfriend, Bianca, describing her as a half-Brazilian, half-Danish missionary in a wheelchair. When Lars brings her to dinner, it transpires that she is a life-size doll he ordered over the internet, and not surprisingly, Bianca becomes the talk of the town when Lars brings her to church.
The movie's Australian director, Craig Gillespie, sets up a series of hilariously oddball scenes that had the Toronto audience quaking with laughter, while simultaneously, and with remarkable subtlety, his film gradually takes on a more serious tone. In marked contrast to the self-absorbed characters in Nothing Is Private, Gillespie's excellent film is rooted in compassion and an optimistic view of humanity and community.
Gosling is terrific in a cast that also features Patricia Clarkson as the local doctor who takes an unexpectedly practical approach to Lars and Bianca.
Irish writer-director Terry George, who won the audience award at Toronto three years ago for Hotel Rwanda, introduces two close father-son relationships in Reservation Road, set in a Connecticut town. Then, in a hit-and-run accident, one father, a lawyer Dwight Arno (Mark Ruffalo), kills the 10-year-old son of the other man, college professor Ethan Learner (Joaquin Phoenix).
This sets in motion a taut psychological thriller as Learner becomes obsessed with discovering the identity of the driver, whose ex-wife (Mira Sorvino) happens to be the piano teacher of Learner's daughter. The pressure becomes unbearable for both men - one wracked with grief, the other with guilt - and the relationship between Learner and his wife (Jennifer Connelly) comes under severe strain. The cast delivers strong, committed performances as the drama builds towards an awkward resolution.
In Before the Devil Knows You're Dead, two amoral brothers (Philip Seymour Hoffman and Ethan Hawke) are both so desperate for money that they conspire to rob the jewellery store owned by their elderly parents (Albert Finney and Rosemary Harris). What they have imagined is a perfect crime goes disastrously wrong and leads to tragic consequences that tear the family apart.
Kelly Masterson's clever screenplay replays the crucial events, reviewing them from different perspectives and treating what might have been a conventional thriller with depth and insight. In his most satisfying film for many years, 83-year-old director Sidney Lumet, who made his cinema debut 50 years ago with 12 Angry Men, elicits intriguingly complex performances from his well-chosen cast.
The sisters at the centre of Margot at the Wedding have not spoken in two years and they unsuccessfully attempt to put their mutual bitterness behind them when short-story writer Margot (Nicole Kidman) returns to the family home for the wedding of her sister Pauline (Jennifer Jason Leigh) to a failed musician (Jack Black). Tensions crackle as soon as Margot arrives with her adolescent son, and these are further fuelled by Pauline's aggressive neighbours and an arrogant, adulterous novelist (Ciaran Hinds).
Writer-director Noah Baumbach mines this ripe territory for dark comedy but falls some way short of his deft achievement on his previous film, The Squid and the Whale, which was sharper in wit and focus. His mean-spirited new film is populated by such unsympathetic characters that it is easy to understand and accept their dislike for each other, but hard to care for what happens to any of them.
The Jane Austen Book Club is the polar opposite, being eager to please and viewing its characters through a rose-tinted lens. Marking an undistinguished directing debut for screenwriter Robin Swicord, it throws together six characters - one for each of Austen's novels - in a Sacramento book club.
Five are women dealing with personal problems: a six-time divorcee (Kathy Baker); a woman (Amy Brenneman) whose husband (Jimmy Smits) leaves her after 32 years; their lesbian daughter (Maggie Grace) who's in a difficult relationship; a dog breeder (Maria Bello) who leads a lonely life; and a prim teacher (Emily Blunt) who is unhappily married to a football fanatic (Marc Blucas) who thinks Austen is the capital of Texas.
Played by Hugh Dancy, the only male in the group is a young computers expert who knows little more about Austen and prefers the science fiction of Ursula K Le Guin. Whatever initial promise this material shows is soon squandered in a succession of unlikely narrative contrivances, as the book club turns into a support group and the women are guided through life by asking themselves, "What would Jane do?" - which is heavy-handedly spelled out on a traffic signal when the teacher is about to have an affair with a student (Kevin Zegers).
THE THIRD MOVIE in recent months with an unplanned pregnancy as its turning point - after Waitress and Knocked Up - Juno sparkles with wit and warmth as it charts the experiences of Juno MacGuff (Ellen Page), who is 16 when she becomes pregnant after her first sexual experience with a high school classmate (Michael Cera from Superbad). Deciding well in advance to put the baby up for adoption, she seeks out the ideal parents and seems to find them in a childless couple (Jason Bateman and Jennifer Garner) living in suburbia, apparently the definitive residence in movies about dysfunctional families.
Following his assured feature film debut with Thank You For Smoking, Canadian director Jason Reitman nimbly steers the movie through the multiple complications devised in Diablo Cody's fresh, imaginative screenplay, which is strewn with funny one-liners. In the leading role, Page, who was so impressively intense in Hard Candy last year, is vibrant and irresistibly appealing, and the solid supporting cast notably includes Allison Janney and JK Simmons as her parents.
Reitman was pipped by his fellow Canadian, David Cronenberg, for Toronto's most coveted award, the People's Choice, voted for by the audience members, who turned out in their thousands day and night through the festival, which was once again an unqualified success.
