Back to the Future
Though the star-struck citizens of Toronto didn’t mind, there was heard a lot of grumbling last week at the Toronto Film Festival about how this venerable showcase for world cinema has been turned into a mere stepping stone for the Hollywood studios’ Oscar campaigns. With the likes of Jodie Foster, Brad Pitt, Keira Knightley, George Clooney and Tommy Lee Jones parading down Bloor Street, one could be forgiven for mistaking North America’s most influential film festival for an out-of-town Hollywood press junket.
It’s true that for a member of the press it was harder than ever to pursue hidden foreign gems such as the charming Israeli comedy “The Band’s Visit” or Mexican visionary Carlos Reygadas’s mesmerizing, demanding “Silent Light,” about adultery and transcendence in a Mennonite community. The pressure was to keep up with the fall’s major prestige items, such as “Atonement” or Ang Lee’s Chinese-language potboiler “Lust, Caution” or the Coen brothers‘ riveting film noir “No Country for Old Men,” their best film in ages.
The spirit of Terry Malick (”Badlands,” “Days of Heaven”) hovers over “The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford,” a poetic, melancholy, leisurely reverie on the last years of the legendary outlaw’s life. Brad Pitt is terrific as the manic Jesse, alternately charming and paranoid, and Casey Affleck superbly creepy as the callow Judas who grabs fame with a bullet. New Zealand-born writer-director Andrew Dominik’s uncompromising, ’70s-style Western, like Penn’s sprawling odyssey, turns its back on the fast-cutting, action-dominated style in current fashion.
Though it courts tedium at times, it’s clearly the work of an immensely talented filmmaker. Much more audience-friendly but equally indebted to the ’70s (think of such paranoid thrillers as “The Parallax View”) is Tony Gilroy’s dense, gripping anticorporate thriller “Michael Clayton,” with George Clooney as a law firm “fixer” attempting to staunch a corporate scandal, and risking his life in the process. Coproducer Clooney, who has often proclaimed his love for ’70s American films, seems determined to revive the socially conscious genre movies of that era.
Tags: brad pitt, brother, ford, hollywood, zeal