Balancing the Surreal On and Off the Screen

The movies went on, after a day’s delay, but the feeling was anything but business-as-usual at the film festival here as filmmakers, actors, publicists and journalists grappled with the surreal mixture of make-believe entertainment and real-world tragedy.

The terrorist attacks left hundreds here frantically trying to reach friends and relatives in New York and figure out a way to get back home, buying train tickets and renting cars for the 12-hour drive back to the city.

Most filmgoers found out about the World Trade Center disaster on Tuesday morning. Screenings were stopped, the news was delivered by trembling publicists, and for awhile the films resumed. Finally, around midday, they were shut down entirely, as were all festival conferences and related activities.

Throughout the day there was speculation that Toronto Film Festival Director Piers Handling would cancel the rest of the festival, meaning the last half of the 10-day affair would be washed out. Some people felt it was disrespectful to celebrate, promote, and sell movies under the circumstances. Others thought that with the airlines shut down, prints wouldnt arrive in time (in fact, only a dozen or so were not on hand) and neither would the talent.

Those directors and actors who were here seemed to hole up in their rooms, and their personal publicists notified everyone that they wouldn’t be doing interviews. In a rare show of restraint, the press took no for an answer.

Handling said he reached his decision after consulting with corporate sponsors, salespeople, and the international array of filmmakers assembled here, all of whom obviously have a financial interest in the festival. But the bottom line seemed to be that this is a public event, not a market or a press junket, and it would be a disservice to those who bought tickets to unilaterally cancel it. And so he didn’t although those associated with such hot-button movies as “The Believer,” the scorching Sundance winner about a Jewish neo-Nazi, were given the option of bowing out.

It turned out that on Wednesday “The Believer” was pulled, along with “Pinero,” at the behest of its director, Leon Ichaso, who felt the story of a drug-addicted New York poet was a too dark, given the situation.

Meanwhile, the show went on, though in a very subdued manner. Publicity firms were shelling out money to house and feed talent that wasn’t even being used. Festival screenings were heavily attended, though it seemed audiences’ hearts weren’t in it, at least on the basis of their tepid response to Nicole Holofcener’s lovely, quirky little film “Lovely & Amazing,” which deserved better.

However, Handling viewed the healthy attendance as a vindication for their decision to continue the festival. “No one has said to me that we should have canceled,” he said Wednesday. “I’ve been doing introductions (to films) and walked the streets. I’m not hiding. And they’ll tell me what they think.”

Until the unthinkable happened, Toronto had been purring along. Among the movies here certain to make a splash in the coming months are the Hughes’ brothers brilliantly grisly “From Hell,” about Jack the Ripper and starring Johnny Depp and Heather Graham; Danis Tanovic’s “No Man’s Land,” a startlingly satiric look at the Bosnian conflict; and the Saturday night closing night film (assuming there is a closing night) Ray Lawrence’s “Lantana,” a masterly blending of murder and marriage.

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Most of the other movies, however uneven, featured some terrific performances, both solo and ensemble. “Thirteen Conversations About One Thing,” with Matthew McConaughey, Alan Arkin, Amy Irving, and John Turturro, fit into the latter group. It’s about a group of disparate people living in New York who are all in one way or another searching for happiness. Director Jill Sprecher based one of the central events in this movie on something that happened to her.

“A while ago I was mugged in New York and had to have brain surgery,” she said matter-of-factly at a press conference. “That was the beginning of a very bad year for me.”

A surreal suburban bookend to “Thirteen Conversations” is Rose Troche’s “The Safety of Objects,” with Dermot Mulroney, Glenn Close, and Patricia Clarkson, in which the characters are stuck in their jobs, grief, guilt, boring marriage and messy divorces. Troche has had to fight off comparisons to such essays in suburban family dysfunction as “The Ice Storm” and “American Beauty.”

“I think it’s a little lazy,” she said of this kind of thinking. “Lazy is easy. Most of us had a suburban experience. Its amazing to me that when you set a movie in the suburbs it becomes a certain kind of movie.” Then, clearly irritated with the marketing and categorizing of everything, she picked up a box of nutritional supplements for women that the hotel had thoughtfully provided and said, “Why does this have to look like a tampon container?”

Easily the best of the ensemble pieces was Mira Nair’s “Monsoon Wedding,” which recently won the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival. It’s a celebration and a gentle satire of the new India and the old India--the India of cell phones, assimilated relatives living abroad and Bollywood musicals, and the old verities of arranged marriages, blackouts and barely controlled chaos. One early reviewer of the film compared the seemingly effortless interweaving stories of the wedding guests to the work of Robert Altman. The bride is having an affair with a married man, her cousin has a dark secret, her brother may be gay, her father is cash-strapped, and so on.

A couple of young actors did themselves proud here in roles that are not especially attractive. Billy Crudup gives a brave performance as an addled family man “running toward himself,” as director Bart Freundlich put it, in “World Traveler.” He abandons wife and child, drinks excessively, and beds a series of women, all without begging for audience sympathy.

Joaquin Phoenix gives a breezy, charmingly offhand turn in Gregor Jordan’s rowdy service comedy “Buffalo Soldiers,” also starring Ed Harris and Scott Glenn. He plays an Army clerk stationed on a base in Germany just as the Berlin Wall is coming down. In the grand tradition of Sergeant Bilko, he thumbs his nose at the military while stealing from it and selling the goods on the black market. As Phoenix noted delightfully, his character makes no moral distinction between peddling stolen cleaning fluid and cooking up heroin.

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Phoenix, who had co-starring roles in such films as “Gladiator,” and “Quills,” said in an interview that he was “aware” of the fact that, for the first time in his career, he was carrying a film, but added, “I recognize the danger in thinking too much of those things. If I thought about it, I would lock up. This was the most fun time I’ve had as an actor.”

Finally, there was a quartet of lovely performances from Glenn Close (as a grieving mother in “The Safety of Objects”), Stockard Channing (as a brittle businesswoman in Patrick Stettner’s “The Business of Strangers”), Helen Mirren (as a grieving widow in Fred Schepsi’s “Last Orders”), and Sissy Spacek (as another grieving mom, in Todd Field’s “In the Bedroom.”).

Each of these women, all very different, have something in common, something that Spacek tried to grasp after watching Close at a press conference on the hotel television.

“It was like she was this Buddha,” Spacek said. “You knew that she knew more than anyone on the panel. And she was so quiet and reserved and looked so serene. Everybody else looked like they knew everything and were talking. She knew so much that she didn’t have to talk about what she knew.”

It’s a kind of grace these old pros have, which is a rare sight, here at this suddenly diminished festival, or anywhere.