Great White North Shows Its Warmth

O ye hypocrites, scoffers and double-dealers, look on the Toronto International Film Festival and tremble. Bow your heads and wonder at the awesome power of nice.

Other events may have made their mark by being snobbish, elitist, difficult. Not Toronto. Celebrating its 25th anniversary this year and generally considered the top festival in North America and the most important in the world after Cannes, Toronto has become the destination of choice for filmmakers and journalists largely by being appreciative, hospitable and sane. Like the hero of an old-fashioned Hollywood movie, this Dudley Do-Right noncompetitive celebration is the big, square-shouldered, virtuous good guy who ends up with the girl in the final reel.

Just how big? Toronto 2000 is showing 329 films from 56 countries, and while Cannes may show more, most of those are in the for-professionals-only market. Here every film is available to a general public that responds by buying what festival director Piers Handling estimates will be 300,000 tickets by the time things wind down on Saturday. This really can be, as a local alternative paper once headlined, “The Festival That Ate My Eyes.” All this in a city that remains the kind of place where, when Screen Gems executive Valerie Van Galder forgot her cell phone in a taxi a few years back, the cabdriver took messages for her until he was able to return it.

Unlike other locales that get territorial about what they will show, Toronto, which started out calling itself “The Festival of Festivals,” is nice enough not to insist on exclusivity. This year it’s showing the pick of the crop from Cannes (including “Crouching Tiger, Sleeping Dragon” and “Shadow of the Vampire”), Sundance (“Girlfight,” “You Can Count on Me”), Venice (“Before Night Falls”), Telluride (“Aberdeen”) and others. “We’re an inclusive festival,” says Handling. “We never turn our back on any aspect of film.”

What that means is that what’s on view here covers the widest imaginable spectrum, everything from major studio releases like Cameron Crowe’s warm and irresistible “Almost Famous” to the languidly beautiful American independent “George Washington” to the furious, nihilistic “Baise-moi” (being translated as “Rape Me”), a film so violent and graphically sexual it ended up in effect banned from theaters in its native France.

Smaller films, selected with care by a festival that has always been run by cinephiles, continue to be a Toronto trademark, and it is one of the things that attracts acquisition-minded executives like Sony Pictures Classics’ Michael Barker.

“Over the last 20 years, we’ve bought more films out of Toronto than any other festival,” Barker says. “They show so many pictures here, you can find some gems, and some good buys, if you look hard enough. Last year, on Thursday when everyone was leaving, we screened ‘Shower’ and bought the movie.”

This year, among the better small films here seeking either distribution or wider attention (or sometimes both), three of the most involving were:

* “Liam.” The latest from British director Stephen Frears, this is a beautifully made memory piece written by Jimmy McGovern and showing the dire effects economic depression had on a working-class family living in Liverpool in the 1930s. Alternately comic and wrenching but always deeply emotional, it gives us one small boy’s life and times in all their baffling richness and cruel perplexity.

* “The Truth About Tully.” The story of a crucial summer in the life of a farm boy Lothario (Anson Mount) and a girl unlike any he’s met before (Julianne Nicholson). As unhurriedly paced as its rural setting, this is a fine debut for director Hillary Birmingham, a long-time associate of documentarian Barbara Kopple.

* “Keep the River on Your Right: A Modern Cannibal Tale.” A quirky, plucky documentary by the brother-sister team of David Shapiro and Laurie Gwen Shapiro with an irascible protagonist, 78-year-old Tobias Schneebaum. With Schneebaum’s at-times reluctant cooperation, it retraces his journey from painter to hands-on anthropologist, someone who lived with the Asmet of Indonesia and spent seven months with a Peruvian Indian tribe that practiced cannibalism.

Though you might not guess it today, Toronto was a highly unlikely site for such a successful, cosmopolitan $7.4-million festival when it started in 1976 with a budget of $350,000. Known disparagingly as “Toronto the Good,” it was, fest director Handling remembers, “a grayer, more WASP city” when he arrived as a student in the late 1960s. “I was appalled by the parochialism,” he remembers. “It felt like a dead end.”

Today, the city has changed into an alive, multicultural metropolis, and the festival has grown with it, but this was not always an easy process. In fact, when asked about the obstacles Toronto faced in reaching its current status, Handling singles out “the Canadian attitude that ‘it cannot work here.’ The city was not known or recognized as a film center and it was hard for people to see that far down the line.”

Change of Date Made Difference

Several factors contributed to making the Toronto festival what it is today, some logistical, some having to do with the Canadian character and temperament. But the first one to kick in was a simple scheduling change that in its second year moved the event from the middle of October to early in September.

“It was a brilliant, brilliant idea,” says Handling, “because it plugged into the whole notion of more serious fare being released in the fall. It started to position us as a potential launching pad for fall pictures,” a situation that got reinforced when the highly successful “Chariots of Fire” debuted here in 1981 followed by “The Big Chill” in 1983.

As Hollywood especially has gotten more set in its ways about when it releases certain kinds of films, Toronto and not Cannes has become the locale of choice to debut the kind of prestige pictures that the studios believe have Oscar potential. “Ultimately, if your movie is really supposed to be in a festival, it’s a great festival to get buzz from,” says DreamWorks’ marketing chief Terry Press, who brought “Antz,” “American Beauty” and “Almost Famous” here. “It’s very hard to damage a movie in Toronto. If the word is bad out of Cannes, you don’t make it; in Toronto you can’t really lose. And if you win, you can win big.”

Aside from “Almost Famous,” the best of the studio releases from the first part of the festival were both comedies. “Best in Show,” directed by Christopher Guest, is another clever and amusing mockumentary from the maker of “This Is Spinal Tap,” and “Waiting for Guffman,” this time about the world of competitive dog shows.

Like “Show,” “State and Main” has a great ensemble cast (Alec Baldwin, Phillip Seymour Hoffman, William H. Macy, Sarah Jessica Parker, Rebecca Pidgeon and others in this case) and an even richer subject: the rolling chaos that takes place when a movie company decides to film in a small New England town. A gleeful, inside piece of work about celebrity, corruption and the movie business, bitingly funny and unexpectedly romantic, it figures to be David Mamet’s most successful writing-directing project when it is released in December.

Both “Best in Show” and “State and Main” were enthusiastically received by Toronto audiences, as was Ed Harris’ directing debut, “Pollock,” a bio-pic about artist Jackson Pollock that features exceptional performances from Harris, Marcia Gay Harden and Amy Madigan. The crowd reaction was not particularly surprising; for quality of the work aside, it’s the generosity of this city’s moviegoers that is the factor almost everyone mentions as the key to this festival’s success.

“The audiences are amazing, they love and appreciate film,” says Screen Gems’ Van Galder, while Sony’s Barker talks of “the spontaneous, responsive audiences. The people who come to that festival are so enthusiastic about film, very spontaneous with a lot of energy.”

A Canadian distributor once said these audiences “will applaud the opening of an envelope,” while an American distributor, Miramax’s Harvey Weinstiein, has been quoted as saying “there have been nights when I’ve thought they were on helium.” And Paul Thomas Anderson, putting a somewhat different spin on things, told one reporter that when “Boogie Nights” played Toronto, it got “just the perfect audience reaction. It was slightly misleading. It led me to believe I had a movie that was going to make $100 million and get standing ovations around the country.”

Toronto audiences have in fact gotten so legendary that this year Canadian filmmaker Don McKellar made what he called “a reverse tribute” to their zealousness in a short film that screened as part of a festival-sponsored series called Preludes. “They lie, they cheat, they claw, they line up for three hours, anything to get into a movie,” his narrator says. “They hide in the washroom stalls, you have to flush them out between shows. Try to hold onto your faith in humanity after that.”

But if cynics like to say that when you come to Toronto you discount the currency and the applause by 30%, there is no doubt that movie-makers and their backers appreciate that enthusiasm enormously, especially when compared to the frequent standoffishness of audiences elsewhere. “I don’t go to film festivals, I only come to the Toronto fest,” Alec Baldwin told the Hollywood Reporter this year. “I don’t even go to the Hamptons International Film Festival, and that’s where I live.”

“Filmmakers are sometimes afraid of festivals; people walk out, there’s bad word of mouth,” explains Van Galder. “When you take a filmmaker up to Toronto, you see a movie in the best possible circumstances.”

Several facets of national and local temperament play into this “everybody goes home a winner” attitude. For one thing, says fest director Handling, audiences here are both “hungry” (this is the No. 3 box-office city in North America) and “curious about other cultures. Because we’re not an imperial center like New York or Los Angeles, by nature we have to be curious.”

Even more important, the Canadian character almost demands this kind of response. “We are good people,” John Stackhouse wrote about his countrymen and -women last week in the Toronto Globe and Mail, “with more humility than the Americans, more decency than most Europeans and broader minds than most Asians.”

Human nature being what it is, not everyone is happy with the way Toronto has turned out at age 25. “There is a growing perception in the industry and the media that the Toronto festival has been hijacked by the major studios,” Brian D. Johnson wrote darkly in his just-published festival history, “Brave Films, Wild Nights.”

Handling, of course, has heard these complaints before and knows, as most observers do, that the reality is that the rising tide of interest in the studio pictures inevitably lifts the boats of the smaller foreign and independent films. He recently was invited to speak to the Canadian Club, a collection of the city’s most powerful citizens, and noticed that “the sense of pride and excitement in that room about the festival was palpable. Here’s the success story, here’s where Toronto is an international player. Here’s where the world comes to us.”