Vying with several heavyweight adaptations, the less vaunted 'Sideways' sparkled in Toronto, writes Michael Dwyer
The diverse sources for the many literary and theatrical adaptations unveiled at the 29th Toronto International Film Festival included William Shakespeare, Oscar Wilde, Somerset Maugham and Ian McEwan, but none of those screen treatments could match the wit, insight and zest of Alexander Payne's movie, Sideways, which is based on a novel by Rex Pickett. Having toiled on various unfilmed screenplays before writing an Oscar-winning short in 1999, Pickett received over 30 rejection letters for an earlier attempt at a novel before Sideways found a publisher.
Edgily played by American Splendor star Paul Giamatti, Miles, the pivotal character in Sideways, has much in common with his creator, Pickett, being divorced, a wine connoisseur and a writer whose hopes of finding a publisher for a long-in-gestation novel are fading. Miles has agreed to be best man at the wedding of his best friend Jack (Thomas Haden Church), a minor actor, and with a week to go before the ceremony, they take a trip to the vineyards of the Santa Ynez Valley in California.
Miles is appalled at Jack's philistine approach to wine - he even chews gum at a tasting - and at Jack's agenda for philandering in the week before he weds, and their journey brings them into close contact with two smart women (Virginia Madsen and Sandra Oh) who know a lot about men and about wine. Adapting Pickett's novel with his regular collaborator Jim Taylor, Payne - who directed Election and About Schmidt - has fashioned another literate, sharply observed and dryly humorous picture of self-discovery that is a pleasure to savour from beginning to end.
The two men at the centre of Enduring Love, playwright Joe Penhall's adaptation of the 1997 novel by Ian McEwan, are social opposites whose lives become entangled when they both happen to witness a hot-air balloon accident that claims the life of a doctor who tries to rescue the boy on board. Joe (Daniel Craig) is a college lecturer who wants to get on with his life and his relationship with the sculptor (Samantha Morton) he intends to marry, but he finds himself stalked by another witness, the dishevelled Jed (Rhys Ifans), who persists in reminding him of the accident. The unsettling consequences are dexterously handled by versatile director Roger Michell in a film charged by fine performances.
Although there have been many television treatments of The Merchant of Venice in recent years, it had not been filmed for the cinema since 1922 until Il Postino director Michael Radford tackled Shakespeare's work in an essentially faithful new version. To address the play's anti-Semitism, the film opens with captions outlining the social status of Jews in 16th century Italy, and this is succinctly illustrated in an early scene where Antonio (Jeremy Irons) resists an approach from Shylock (Al Pacino) by spitting in his face. We know that the tables will be turned when Shylock later insists on claiming his pound of flesh. Irons is on strong form in this well-mounted production, as is Pacino, even if he tends to overplay some of his earlier scenes.
IRONS MERELY HAS to be urbane and mildly lecherous in Being Julia, Istvan Szabo's disappointingly rote movie based on Somerset Maugham's novella, Theatre, which is enlivened by a spirited performance from Annette Bening as Julia Lambert, a successful 1930s London stage actress who chews up the scenery for the movie's extended finale. That is the most satisfying sequence in a rather pedestrian exercise charting Julia's ill-advised affair with an ambitious and cunning young American seducer (Shaun Evans); perhaps because he was English in the original novella, his nationality is gratingly underlined with lines such as "Gee, that's swell."
Mike Barker's rudimentary Oscar Wilde adaptation, A Good Woman, transposes Lady Windermere's Fan to the Amalfi coast of Italy in the 1930s and turns several key characters into Americans. A miscast Helen Hunt plays the golden-tressed gold-digger, Mrs Erlynne, while Scarlett Johansson seems similarly ill at ease as her future nemesis, the young bride, Meg Windermere. While the movie retains Wilde's sparkling epigrams, it feels curiously flat and crucially lacking in energy and rhythm.
Yet another spin on relationships between older women and younger men, P.S. - the second feature from Roger Dodger director Dylan Kidd - is based on a novel by Helen Schulman, who adapted it for the screen with Kidd. The material is relatively slender in this serious comedy, albeit peppered with some punchy dialogue, and it gains immeasurably from wise casting: Laura Linney as an insecure 39-year-old university admissions officer, Topher Grace as the cocky young student with whom she embarks on an affair, Marcia Gay Harden as her untrustworthy best friend, and Gabriel Byrne as Linney's ex-husband, who admits to a long history of sex addiction.
ITALIAN WRITER-DIRECTOR Gianni Amelio admits to taking major dramatic liberties in turning Giuseppe Pontiggia's novel, Born Twice, into the movie that is Le Chiavi di Casa (The House Keys) - compressing the 30 years covered by the novel into just a week, for example - while remaining respectful and true to the essence of the book. Kim Rossi Stuart expressively plays Gianni, a young man who walked out on his baby son, Andrea, after learning the child had "problems" and finally meets him 15 years later when he takes the boy - played by Andrea Rossi, who himself is disabled - to a Berlin hospital for rehabilitation exercises. This is a moving but honest and unsentimental drama that never shirks from the difficult questions it raises, and it also features a fine performance from Charlotte Rampling.
The storyline for Les Choristes is described as an original screenplay, although there is a distinct whiff of déja vu about it. The setting is provincial France in 1949, when a well-intentioned new teacher takes up a post at a school for delinquent boys, refuses to conform to the institution's harsh regime and introduces the boys to the freedom and joy of music. So far, so familiar, but writer-director Christophe Barratier, making an impressive feature film début, eschews all the easy options offered by that scenario, and the result is irresistibly charming and buoyed by delightfully natural performances. The film has been a huge box-office success in France, where it has been chosen as the country's Oscar entry for next spring.
We have learned to expect the unexpected from David O. Russell, the bright writer-director of Spanking the Monkey, Flirting With Disaster and Three Kings, and he delivers another disarmingly offbeat original in I Huckabees. JasonSchwartzman plays Albert, an environmental activist and poet who consults Vivian and Bernard Jaffe (Lily Tomlin and Dustin Hoffman), a married couple self-described as "existential detectives".
The protagonists also include Jude Law as a self-obsessed executive climbing the corporate ladder in a retail superstore named Huckabees, Naomi Watts as his supermodel girlfriend, Mark Wahlberg as a soul-searching firefighter, singer Shania Twain as herself, and Isabelle Huppert as a brusque French philosopher who is the arch-rival of the Jaffes. While the narrative is sprawling and laden with coincidences, the movie is replete with entertaining surreal humour and driven at a satisfyingly brisk pace by an eclectic ensemble cast that performs with gusto.