We’re at the TIFF midway point–and this year’s fest schedule seemed more front-loaded with the big releases and star appearances than in the past. Still, there’s what, a gazillion films you can still catch? Here’s a passel more of note. Rampart Since this is a short review, let’s get to the point: Oren Moverman’s Rampart is the most fascinating, ambitious film I’ve seen all year. The Israeli-American Moverman (The Messenger) wrote the screenplay in collaboration with L.A. crime writer James Ellroy (the novel L.A. Confidential) and the two seem to have brought out the best in each other. They’ve done this, ironically enough, while exploring the worst in human behaviour. Woody Harrelson plays Dave “Date Rape” Brown, a hard-living, thoroughly disreputable LAPD officer accused of police brutality during the height of the Rampart Division corruption scandals of 1999. (The nickname comes from an older scandal, in which Dave was accused of the premeditated murder of a serial rapist.) Harrelson is in every scene, and he’s terrific, bringing everything he’s got (and maybe even a little more) to the role. His Dave is a louse, but a highly intelligent one, and deeply charismatic, too. Most of his relationships are with women, and we can see why they’re attracted to him, even against their better judgment. (The film features a whole array of talented actresses, including Anne Heche and Cynthia Nixon as the mothers of Dave’s two children, Robin Wright and Audra McDonald as brief flings, and Sigourney Weaver as an LAPD attorney. All are excellent.) Unlike so many other anti-hero protagonists, Dave is compelling not because of the horrible things he does, but because of his ability to rationalize it all. Dave fancies himself the only one in the law enforcement community who fully “gets it”–gets the politics, gets the post-Rodney King p.c. crap, gets the hypocrisy. And the fascinating thing is that, to a large extent, he’s right. His fatal flaw is that he thinks his knowledge puts him above the whole messed-up system, but instead it ties him all-too-firmly to it. Rampart is huge in scope, featuring incisive looks at modern policing, modern family life, relations between the races and sexes, etc. But in the end, it’s an intense, intimate character study, and one of the best ever made. Sunday, September 18, Ryerson, 3:00 pm. Albert Nobbs Glenn Close reportedly spent more than 15 years trying to get this film off the ground, so it’s all the more disappointing that it doesn’t work better. Close plays the title character, a 19th-century Irish woman who disguises herself as a man in order to work as a butler in a luxury hotel. When the film opens, Nobbs has been disguised for so long that almost no traces of femininity remain. Not much remains of her personality either (assuming she had one), which makes her an ideal manservant: competent, but thoroughly invisible. The plot is set in motion when Nobbs is forced to share her bed with a menial laborer, who quickly uncovers her secret. This whole first act is hopelessly marred by a deeply distracting detail: the laborer is very clearly a woman in disguise as well. This is so obvious to us that we wait for Nobbs to pick up on it (presumably she’d be attuned to such things), but she never does. After what seems like an eternity, the laborer is revealed as actress Janet Mcteer, playing a more well-adjusted lesbian who lives with a girlfriend across town. Nobbs is immediately fascinated by the world this woman opens up to her, and she’s inspired to make a real life for herself as well. Unfortunately, her plan for achieving this is hopelessly out-to-lunch: she aims to woo and marry a young maid at the hotel (Mia Wasikowska) who’s about three decades her junior and who clearly wants nothing to do with him/her. To an extent, we can understand Nobbs’ foolishness–she wants normalcy so badly, and part of her tragedy is that she’s been cut off from life for so long that she barely understands how it works. But the way Close plays her, she isn’t just foolish, she’s a near mental-deficient. Nobbs has all the insight of an embryo, and you wait in vain for someone to shake some sense into her. We’re supposed to be moved and saddened by her naivet, of course, but the character would be both more plausible and more touching if Close conveyed that tiny, buried part of Nobbs that knows all-too-well she’ll never have the life she wants. Saturday, September 17, Ryerson, 9:00 pm. Footnote Fresh subject matter comes along so rarely in movies that you almost give up hoping for it. So when you see a film like Israeli writer-director Joseph Cedar’s Footnote, which has that freshness, it’s elating. The movie opens on the cranky-looking face of Eliezer (Shlomo Bar Aba), an aging professor in Talmudic Studies at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. The old man sits in an auditorium full of tuxedoed academics while his adult son, Uriel (Lior Ashkenaz), also a professor in the department, gets inducted into the Academy. It doesn’t take us long to figure out that old Eliezer has never been inducted, and that he can’t stand watching his son leap ahead of him. From there, we’re plunged into an elaborate comedy of academic and filial resentments, one in which our sympathies shift between father and son repeatedly. The most appealing aspect of the film is its attention to detail regarding the intricacies of academic life and the politics of prize giving. A lengthy mid-film debate over the awarding of the Israel Prize should be dry as dust, but it’s a thrilling sequence. The film’s one big flaw is that Cedar doesn’t trust the strength of his own screenplay and over-directs in an effort to juice it up. Every cut, every music cue, every move of the camera underlines a point that didn’t need underlining. Cedar barely even allows his actors to give performances, positioning them so precisely in the frame that the camera conveys most of the emotion for them. You get the feeling Cedar would use marionettes if he could. Wednesday, September 14, AMC 10, 2:00 pm. The Skin I Live In The recent films of Spanish director Pedro Almodvar–Bad Education, Volver, Broken Embraces–have all begun to blur together for me, so it’s nice to see him aim outside his comfort zone with this loose homage to George Franju’s classic horror film Eyes Without a Face. Antonio Banderas plays Dr. Ledgard, a wealthy plastic surgeon obsessed with perfecting a new skin strengthening therapy. Because this therapy is highly experimental and unlikely to be accepted by the medical establishment (he commits the ethical no-no of combining human and animal skin cells), he works in secret on a strangely compliant young woman named Vera (Elena Anaya) hidden away in his mansion. Banderas is essentially playing a haunted, driven Dr. Frankenstein, and he seems ready to give a real performance, but Almodvar barely shows any interest in the character. Ledgard is missing from the movie for long stretches, and when he is onscreen he’s only there to further the plot. Vera, meanwhile, makes for a compelling camera subject, her buffed, flawless skin both beautiful and eerie to behold. But the character is rather listless (for reasons to be revealed later). To fill the void left by this central duo, Almodvar gives us too many peripheral characters who seem recycled from his other films–a worldly mother-figure housekeeper (Marisa Paredes), a thug dressed in a tiger costume, a callow, pretty young stud, etc. You get the impression Almodvar simply isn’t that interested in his own genre switch, and is taking refuge in his old, well-worn melodramatic fixations. The film becomes more compelling in its final third, when a narrative shift propels us into memorably demented territory, but the twist is belabored and not enough to redeem the lengthy lead-up. Saturday, September 17, TIFF Bell Lightbox 2, 9:30am Scott MacDonald is Toronto Standard’s film critic. __ Brought to you by the Alliance Film, Drive, in theatres September 16th.
