This time last year, everyone who had attended the Toronto film festival could rest smug in the knowledge that they knew what would win the best picture Oscar. They knew because they’d been at, or heard about, the premiere of 12 Years a Slave: the whole auditorium weeping and whooping, a mass baptism of tears for a movie there was no way voters could reject. As we stumbled from our seats, words seemed thin, tweets yet thinner. When the man next to me finally spoke, it was to say he was going home to place a bet on Slave taking the top prize. I thought he meant it rhetorically. I’m the poorer for it.
Toronto has unbeatable credentials when it comes to launching Academy award winners – seven of the top prize winners over the past decade premiered in Canada. This year, following a quietish Cannes and a pretty muted Venice, hopes were high that Toronto would open the doors on a stable full of contenders. What we got was no clear frontrunner, a half-dozen very strong ponies and a handful of dead horses, flogged hard.
That said, some certs in acting categories did emerge. Eddie Redmayne is worth a flutter for best actor, likewise Julianne Moore for best actress. Both were superb in movies that provoked especially visceral reactions from the famously feeling (gasps, wails, yelps) festival audience. Redmayne was the most revelatory: who knew he was quite so much more than a pout? As Stephen Hawking in The Theory of Everything, he metamorphosed into a kind of trapped insect: splayed and buckled, a text-book inhabitation of character, rather than an impersonation. Julianne Moore was less of a shock – everyone knows the girl can act – but her turn as a linguistics professor diagnosed with early-onset Alzheimer’s in Still Alice was a body-blow performance.
Both movies were emblematic of two trends at Toronto, which divided neatly down gender lines. There was the tale of the brilliant genius who must grapple personal demons to advance the world’s store of knowledge. Alongside Hawking was Benedict Cumberbatch’s Alan Turing in The Imitation Game: a biopic perhaps better loved by the American critics than Brits. Stylistically as well as narratively, it played to the gallery, hammering home its three-point manifesto (winner of the war, inventor of computers, gay icon) with something approaching repetitive strain injury.
Other brilliant yet troubled souls enjoying the biopic treatment at the 39th festival were the Beach Boys’ Brian Wilson in Love and Mercy (Paul Dano as a youngster, John Cusack old, neither sufficiently shaking off their own shtick) and Bobby Fischer in Pawn Sacrifice, which advanced the thought that Fischer might have been justified in his cold war paranoia, and also that Tobey Maguire doesn’t quite have the chops to play the best chess player ever.
For the women, however, suffering was enough. Some were permitted to pull through, once they’d bucked up a bit; others weren’t so lucky. Jennifer Aniston gamely scraped off the makeup and stuck on some scars to play a car crash victim suffering chronic back pain in Cake. She was fine, exactingly bad-tempered, yet the film crumbled around her – a vehicle, not a viable ride. Other women’s trouble pictures included a bipolar Kristen Wiig in Welcome to Me and Kate Winslet’s traumatised horticulturist, finding solace in perennials in Alan Rickman’s A Little Chaos. Second Coming introduced us to a woman trying to break news of her immaculate conception to husband Idris Elba, plus coping with visions of a nasty flood in the bathroom. Reese Witherspoon hiked off her promiscuity in Wild, while Miss Julie – a ferociously unlikable Jessica Chastain – took yet more drastic action after accidentally going to bed with Colin Farrell.
What’s curious about looking back at film festivals with hindsight is not how disparate the movies are, how hard it is to find a common thread, but rather the opposite. Some movies are so similar as to feel like twins. Opening-nighter The Judge and ensemble comedy This Is Where I Leave You were blood brothers; bittersweet stories of divorcing middle-aged men returning to the family home following the death of a parent. Both men crash in a scuzzy spare room full of memories, reconcile themselves to their families, to good old small town values and to the childhood love they left behind. Both also featured Dax Shepherd and both were pretty iffy.
There were a couple of homelessness movies too: Richard Gere raiding the bins in Time Out of Mind and Paul Bettany’s directorial debut, Shelter, in which his wife Jennifer Connolly plays a down-and-out junkie so eager for a fix she resorts to her groin in search of a good vein.
The two comedies – the two really good ones, anyway – riffed off movies themselves. Top Five wrapped a conventional romcom in meta-paper, with Chris Rock as an Eddie Murphy-type A-lister struggling to shake off a dumb franchise past (bear cop movies) by making a 12 Years a Slave-style drama about the Haitian genocide. Noah Baumbach’s While We’re Young, meanwhile, starred Ben Stiller and Adam Driver as documentarians who strike up a friendship across the generations, but find their bond frayed by their different conceptions of authenticity.
Baumbach’s film, half hipster lampoon, half Woody Allen homage (as, in fact, was Top Five), also directly engaged with the one topic which seemed common to almost all movies at Tiff: the risks posed by the internet to meaningful interaction. In Jason Reitman’s Men, Women & Children, all generations are digi-addicts, their sex lives screwed up by unrealistic expectations and the ease of cheating. While We’re Young suggests there’s more of a divide: fortysomething Stiller and wife Naomi Watts are hooked on devices, scanning Netflix constantly in a desperate quest for something to watch, but Driver and his wife are loft-dwelling neo-luddites who play board games, listen to vinyl and don’t reach for Google every time they forget an actor’s name.
Still Alice and The Theory of Everything, however, struck discordant notes amid the scepticism. In the former, Moore’s character uses her iPhone to try and keep her memory loss at bay; even when that’s impossible, that she has a store of memories with her at all times changes the game. Hawking, of course, would have been unable to communicate vocally at all were it not through the advances in tech.
And as for the Toronto audience? Well, they voted with their fingers. If Slave had screened this year, that premiere would have been all but live-tweeted. If there’s one thing the festival-goers are even more passionate about than watching movies, it’s telling you about them. As soon as the credits would start to roll on any screening, the cinema would light up like Christmas, a hundred excited smartphones twinkling in the dark.
Tiff bits: the best of Toronto
Best day Bill Murray Day is not an official fixture in the Canadian calendar, but a celebration of the actor organised by the festival involving screenings of Stripes, Ghostbusters and Murray’s new movie St Vincent. There were also costume competitions and a Q&A with the man himself, resplendent in crown and sash. But it will perhaps be most memorable for the electric storm and torrential floods that raged all evening. If ever there was a man whose popularity might make God jealous, Murray is he.
Best practice Toronto is the politest festival. Its staff are delightful and its 2,800 volunteers a miracle of tolerance and consideration. The delegates, meanwhile, are not. Dealing with irate sponsors who can’t get into a screening quick enough, or the slavering stampede of hacks desperate for a free sarnie, is a feat deserving of the big-screen treatment in itself.
Best stamina There’s no obvious winner for the coveted audience award at the time of going to press but the vague favourite seems to be Whiplash, a low-budget comedy drama about a terrifying drum teacher (JK Simmons) and his prodigious pupil (Miles Teller). The ecstatic finale is thought to be tipping the balance – people must post their ticket stubs in a box held out at the exits if they want to vote for a film, and people are leaving that one on a real high.
Best press conference There was a strange dearth of questions for the assembled celebrities – Jane Fonda, Jason Bateman, Tina Fey – at the press conference for This Is Where I Leave You. So it was thrown open to the panel themselves, and the baton taken up by Dax Shepherd, who quizzed Fonda and Bateman about sex and then a journalist about her outfit (in particular, whether it was flammable).
Best retch Toronto is a highbrow fest. But the two biggest laughs came from gross-out moments to make Judd Apatow jealous. The first was the sight of a post-coital bed in Top Five; the revolting punchline to a long night involving Chris Rock, Cedric the Entertainer and a couple of prostitutes. The second was at a shamanic healing evening in While We’re Young, and involved Adam Driver and friends throwing up into kitchenware to purge their souls. Sophistication is one thing. But sometimes you just want to watch Ben Stiller vomit into a colander. CS
Interviews from Toronto
Liv Ullmann on Miss Julie … and Donald Trump
Jon Stewart on Rosewater and torture
Six things we learned from Toronto 2014
Salma Hayek on The Prophet
James Franco on The Sound and the Fury
Reviews from Toronto
Top Five
Still Alice
Big Game
Good Kill
A Little Chaos
Tusk
Shelter
Pawn Sacrifice
Cake
The Sound and the Fury
The Equalizer
Wild
The Imitation Game
Love and Mercy
The Face of an Angel
This is Where I Leave You
The Duke of Burgundy
The Reach
St Vincent
The Drop
While We’re Young
Men, Women & Children
Nightcrawler
Eden
Madame Bovary
The Riot Club
The Judge
