2005 will go down in the Toronto International Film Festival's history as the year when the movies got a little crappier and the celebrities got a little crabbier. With Ed Harris flinging drinking glasses at the wall, Cameron Diaz snapping at photogs, and Keanu Reeves seeming like he'd rather be anywhere else, the mood at this year's fest was often less than festive. But their lack of patience can be partially understood, what with the barrage of ridiculous questions being thrown at them daily, and the poorer quality of the movies this year. Debacles like Cameron Crowe's Elizabethtown (already being edited down after tremendously bad buzz) and Guy Ritchie's Revolver (which nobody liked except for the types who only see one or two movies there while they prowl for celebs) left many scratching their heads. Is this the type of stuff necessary to a prestigious North American festival? It left many wondering if some of these people should be pulled out from under the red carpet.


But the great thing about this particular festival is that it is what you make of it. With over 300 movies screening, you can finagle pretty much anything into an itinerary, and contrary to the festival's insistence that everything is sold out, there were empty seats at every single movie I attended. Even Ang Lee's Brokeback Mountain, which was one of the most buzzed-about movies at the festival, especially after its Venice Golden Lion victory (which led director Lee to board a plane back to Venice after arriving in Toronto, only to return again for its second public screening). And the win was well-deserved. Easily the best non-documentary film I saw at the festival, Lee beautifully adapts Annie Proulx's short story about two men (Heath Ledger and Jake Gyllenhaal) who meet as ranch hands in Wyoming and carry on a decades-long love affair that remains a secret to the world at large, even after they have married and had children. Lee can switch genres with modulated ease and Brokeback Mountain is so tastefully appointed I can't imagine anyone objecting to it. And the movie has undeniable staying power, with its haunting lament for the repressed and lovesick, embodied especially in Ledger's revelatory portrayal of the more withdrawn of the duo. His performance is so lived-in and sorrowful, you'll swear you've never seen this actor before in your life.

From the vistas of Wyoming to the mimed plantations of Alabama, Lars von Trier continues his American trilogy with Manderlay, the unfairly dismissed follow-up to his blazingly original Dogville. It does not have his previous film's boldness or sense of event, but it is a very worthy extension of the ideas he presented in Dogville. Taking its heroine Grace, played this round by the game and intriguing Bryce Dallas Howard (still no match for Nicole Kidman), to a post-slavery house in the South, where she begins to impose her value system on the locals, it is too brimming with thought to easily brush aside. It's impossible to say it isn't made by one of the world's most continually fascinating auteurs, someone you never have to worry about selling out.

Another cinema bad boy, Abel Ferrara, has less success tackling a big theme, religious faith in our apocalyptic times, in Mary, a thoroughly ambitious but seriously muddled passion play. There's a wealth of dynamic story threads here, and that's just the problem. For an 83-minute movie, it's simply too scattered, and doesn't properly utilize a lot of its good cast, save for Matthew Modine, who remarkably continues to land choice parts even though he is among the most obvious of living film actors.

Political fervor also fueled some other entries, including the deliriously strange, pretty wretched, but unmissable Sorry, Haters, a first film from director Jeff Stanzler. A paranoid New York version of Michael Mann's Collateral, Robin Wright Penn (terrific here) plays a batty fare who takes an unassuming Arab cabbie (director Abdellatif Kechiche) on the nightmare of his life. The movie keeps raising the stakes of credibility before culminating in the most hilarious denouement this side of a Farrelly Brothers comedy. Except it's meant to be serious...I think. Even so, it's a sunny picnic next to Thom Fitzgerald's heavy-handed 3 Needles, an elegy for Africa's HIV-ravaged masses, who are cared for by three well-meaning nuns (Chloe Sevigny, Olympia Dukakis, Sandra Oh). Into this already unnecessary narrative, the film splices in the story of a Canadian porn star (Shawn Ashmore) hiding his positive status from his co-stars and family (including mom Stockard Channing, who sounds Quebec-ese by way of Zsa Zsa Gabor). It never breaks out of tract, and goes on for an eternity. And Dukakis's lilting narration sounds more attuned to Desperate Housewives than a dead-serious and often unremittingly ugly drama.

Juvenile delinquency also got a workout in Alberto Rodriguez's taut 7 Virgins, a tale of a wayward teen on a 48-hour pass from juvie who spends his downtime reconnecting with old friends and creating havoc on the working-class town of Seville. It is a cautionary tale, but not terribly preachy, though so many buildings and items are vandalized in the picture, you're amazed anything is left standing by the end of it. Imagine a sensation-less Larry Clark movie, and you'd pretty much have it. Speaking of Clark, he was here too, with his newest Wassup Rockers, a minor return to form after credibility-stretching exercises in excess. Chronicling the layabout days of a motley group of barrio Los Angelenos heavily into skateboarding and punk rock, it has shards of sensitivity and humor that feels authentic, not prefabricated. But not to worry, there is Clarkish glee in certain scenes (a drunken Beverly Hills socialite's freakish, watery demise is a howler), but shockingly, no visible sex or rampant nudity.


But not to worry, you can see plenty of skin in The Notorious Bettie Page, Mary Harron's playful examination of the 1950s pin-up who sent crotches soaring even in a relatively puritanical time. There isn't much of a reason for this movie's existence, and Page is as opaque a woman after the film as before it, but Harron is a genuine filmmaker. The film is terrifically assembled, colorful, and often refreshingly to the point, and Gretchen Mol is an inspired choice for the lead. Page's desire to break free from the fringes into something more mainstream seems ideal for Mol, who is as fetching as anyone could hope for, and seems truly liberated being nude, which is essential for this movie to work at all. And there's more breasts and even male genitals in Clement Virgo's Lie With Me, the Canadian filmmaker's bid to redo Last Tango in Paris, even though it is closer to Emmanuelle in Rio. While confidently directed and containing fragments of interesting sexual exploration, the movie is never that frankly erotic; when you boil it down, it's really Michael Winterbottom's 9 Songs without the songs.

There were also the baffling messes, by filmmakers you would think should know better. Vincent Ward entranced audiences in 1993 with his rhapsodic romantic drama Map of the Human Heart, but will simply bore them with River Queen, a historical pageant centering on the Maori's tumultuous relationship with white settlers in the 1800s. A beleaguered production (lead Samantha Morton apparently was instrumental in firing director Ward, which sent the New Zealand film world into a fit) and it shows, with so much cutting it would leave Edward Scissorhands's blades dulled for life. There are flashes of Ward's visual prowess, but the story is wretchedly hackneyed. And in taking on the musical, John Turturro flops with Romance & Cigarettes which must contain the year's greatest cast (James Gandolfini, Susan Sarandon, Kate Winslet, Steve Buscemi, Christopher Walken, Mary-Louise Parker, Elaine Stritch—and that's just for starters!). But Turturro doesn't know how to use any of them, except as dirty-mouthed embouchures of vulgarity, and the musical sequences have zero snap. Weirdly, though, the cast is still pretty good here, with Sarandon and Winslet giving it their all, and Stritch has a delicious cameo (the one she should have had in Monster-in-Law, which was so stupid an enterprise I wondered if those "filmmakers" even knew who she was).

The worst entries, though (and probably the two worst ever in this festival), were actually made by previous collaborators. Keith Fulton and Louis Pepe chronicled the disastrous filming and undoing of Terry Gilliam's dream project Don Quixote in the engaging documentary Lost in La Mancha in 2003. Now all parties proceed to make moviegoing hell with their latest work. I found out after I saw Brothers of the Head that it was an adaptation of a cult novel by Brian Aldiss, and that made me despise it even more as it has no sense of the texture that Aldiss's book must've had. Siamese twins become rock stars…and do drugs…and then die. Seriously folks, that's the story. Pointless to the point of teeth-gritting, this smug mockumentary is like Hedwig and the Angry Inch crossed with This Is Spinal Tap if the music was shitty in both, the actors all stunk, and neither had any rhyme or reason for existence. What Keith Fulton and Louis Pepe sought out to achieve here is unfathomable; it's one of those movies where it feels like the same three scenes play out for 90 minutes. And Terry Gilliam truly wants us all to feel his wrath with the audience-less Tideland, a grisly fairy tale gone rancid. Now, here is a movie that makes everyone wish they were a shifty film producer, just so they could tell Gilliam personally that they would never invest a red cent in it. Grotesque to the breaking point and beyond and back again, and dreadful in ways movies may not have invented yet, the movie is really just a patented "fuck you" to people who won't let Gilliam make his mammothly expensive cinematic tomes. In the future, please leave us out of your whining, Mr. Gilliam.

The kids are all right, or are they? There were plenty of movies about teenagers, or in the case of Michael Cuesta's Twelve and Holding, damn close enough. I was a big fan of L.I.E. years back. His new one is less satisfying but still solid. Espousing the idea that kids are more like adults than ever, the movie shows a community patching things up after a 12-year-old boy perishes in a treehouse fire, and its effect on three very different children, one of whom is the boy's twin brother. Contrived and too silly at times, the direction remains steady, and the young cast isn't bad, and Jeremy Renner is wonderful in a supporting part as an object of affection for one of them, a bespectacled borderline priss played charmingly by Zoe Weizenbaum. Mike Mills's Thumbsucker is a rather empty mélange of Donnie Darko and its ilk, but persuasively acted by Tilda Swinton and magnificent newcomer Lou Pucci, who has the same boyish gleam and guile that marked the young Leonardo DiCaprio. The best of them, though, is Noah Baumbach's The Squid and the Whale, which gives Jeff Daniels the greatest role of his career as a harried father immersed in a messy divorce from his wife (Laura Linney) and the two young boys (Jesse Eisenberg and Owen Kline) caught in the middle of it. Baumbach really knows the power of a word but also a gesture, and the movie contains lots of off-color dialogue that, while being clever, also has the rub of observation as well.


Michael Winterbottom's Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story might be a bit too clever, not to mention jarringly brief, but this behind-the-scenes look at the filming of the unfilmable novel is cheeky enough to be more than agreeable. Winterbottom is one of the world's most versatile filmmakers, and comedy becomes him, but it's the dynamic cast that puts it over, including director's muse Steve Coogan, Rob Brydon, Shirley Henderson and the game Gillian Anderson, sharply sending herself up.

On the Oscar front, you can pretty much add Joaquin Phoenix and Reese Witherspoon to this year's can't-miss nominees for playing Johnny Cash and June Carter in Walk the Line, this year's bid to duplicate Ray's successes of 2004. And the blueprints aren't that different, trouncing out a lot of the standard musical biopic devices we've all grown tired of. But James Mangold's film is a little more relaxed than Taylor Hackford's thuddingly transparent effort, and less egregious, and gives the two leads solid work. Phoenix is admirable as Cash, though the movie (like Ray) never gives you much of a sense of why he's utterly revered, but this is Witherspoon's show all the way. Finally returning to her roots as a real film actress, she steals the picture with her buoyant, measured portrayal of June, who thankfully isn't the long-suffering wife (that role is taken, rather obnoxiously, by actress Ginnifer Goodwin), but a worthy adversary for Cash. And her singing voice is truly lovely as well, whereas Phoenix's is merely serviceable. A lot of people are going to fall in love with her again, except this time it will be more than warranted.

Lastly, there are the documentaries, which seem to be gaining in momentum at the festival with every year as they become more and more widely seen. Gary Tarn's Black Sun is a kind of anti-doc documentary, a bold experiment that eschews the talking-heads style for a more ethereal one. Narrated by its central subject, a painter-filmmaker whose life is drastically changed when a mugging leaves him sightless for life, Tarn uses real-life imagery ranging from the obscure to the specific, and never once do you see the subject, which adds to its mysterious allure. It's a gamble of a project, but it completely works. And the belle of the festival was Doug Block's 51 Birch Street, a thorough, inspiring look at the unveiling of family secrets. Block, a New York-based filmmaker, manages to make poignant statements about aging, marriage, nostalgia and therapy while concentrating on the central tale of his father's remarriage to a former secretary a mere three months after his wife's sudden death. The movie constantly keeps springing surprises as he and his siblings uncover information about the parents' marriage, but the movie is never coy or falsely self-important. Without overreaching or containing the disingenuous ardor of some recent documentaries, it has simplicity in spades, which makes the journey that much more rewarding. Even packing up and high-tailing it out of Canada, it lingered in my memory, and left the hope that maybe some of next year's films would do the same.

When scurrying about film festivals, even non-juried ones like the Toronto International Film Festival, it's best to keep your eyes on the prize. For most, at least on the industry side, this means the much-buzzed dealmakers that will compose the bulk of the holiday prestige fare. For others, it's a search for the small, unheralded work from the far corners of the globe. The Toronto festival, now in its 30th year, was pronounced midway through the week by one local paper as the most influential film festival on the planet. Truthfully, it's massive enough to cover both camps, and then some.

If pressed, I'd likely have claimed allegiance to the latter camp, window-shopping for undiscovered gems inside the 1,200-seat display cases on Yonge Street. If there was anything, though, that bore the mark of a conflict diamond, it was to be found in events that transpired just a week prior to the beginning of this year's festival. Even up to the day I was leaving for Canada, my thoughts were completely occupied on the catastrophe in New Orleans, so much so that I found it difficult to fall into the rhythm that first day. This is the way those at the 2001 festival must have fest when the collapse of the Twin Towers bisected that year's gala into two disparate historical eras: pre-9/11 and post-9/11.



I wasn't alone in thinking of these things. Taiwanese director Stanley Kwan introduced his new film Everlasting Regret with an invocation of the disaster in New Orleans. Opening with a title card that reads, "When your city is no longer your city, the right man can be the wrong choice," Regret is the tale of a woman who stays behind in Shanghai while her family and loved ones flee to Taiwan in the wake of the Cultural Revolution. With a coltish star turn by Hong Kong pop sensation Sammi Cheng, a wistful tone and tastefully deployed slow motion, it's a tender tale of a city lost to memory.



As it happens, the theme of being "left behind" made itself evident in many of the festival's choices, both good and bad. Neil Jordan (The Good Thief) premiered his latest feature, Breakfast on Pluto, an aimless, unfunny would-be picaresque that follows the gender-bending Patricia "Kitten" Brady, played with the camp-meter turned up to 11 by a swishy Cillian Murphy. Murphy's St. Kitty, afraid of being left alone by the sodden blokes s/he encounters, frets and pouts upon the stage of her/his own devising. Jordan never engages the material beyond the surface level, and at the expense of actual pacing, throws in offhanded references to the escalating Troubles in Northern Ireland now and again.



On the other hand, the very best film I saw during the festival drew upon its characters' complex relationship to how history was forming itself around them. Philippe Garrel's Regular Lovers depicted the events of the student uprising in Paris in May of 1968 as a moment out of time, after which the lives of its young ensemble cast would never be the same. Conceived as a sort of "after the revolution" response to Bertolucci's The Dreamers—one scene features a character turning to the camera at precisely the moment she mentions his Before the Revolution—the film opens on the barricades, but only takes off as a story after the auto strikes have been negotiated and the students have gone back to school. Garrel examines the romantic ideals of youth and their eventual subsumption into the current of mainstream society, though, to his credit, he never vilifies the older generation. Hopefully, the film's 16mm black-and-white aesthetic palette and three-hour runtime won't prevent people from giving themselves over to its rewards.



Generational frisson was also on display in Noah Baumbach's autobiographical The Squid and the Whale. Set in ritzy Park Slope, Brooklyn, in the mid-'80s, it charts the dissolution of an intellectual marriage, and finds the two young sons each siding with a separate parent. Baumbach's Kicking and Screaming set the template for a certain type of hilarious, hyper-literate vitriol; this is his portrait of the artist as an even younger man. It's worth mentioning that this project predates his recent collaboration with Wes Anderson, but it still registers as a tighter, edgier version of The Royal Tenenbaums, with a terrific turn by Jeff Bridges as the arrogant, eloquent paterfamilias.



An even more destructive nuclear family crumbles away in Terry Gilliam's latest film. Fresh from his middling, Brothers Weinstein production of The Brothers Grimm, Gilliam was in town to drum up support for Tideland. Unfortunately, due to some negative word of mouth and a healthy number of screening walk-outs—the film is about a young girl who retreats into a fantasy world after the deaths of her junkie parents—it looks like he'll have his work cut out for him. And while it's a fascinating piece of work, moving skillfully between icky creep-out moments and darling childhood whimsy, there's no denying it may be too dark to be a kids' movie and too lovingly fantastic for the midnight madness crowd.



Tideland wasn't the only film to feature skillfully employed tonal shifts. Larry Clark's latest feature, the oddly titled Wassup Rockers, opens in familiar territory, with leering footage of a pack of young Hispanic skaters who clash with blacks in South Central L.A. The film would be a documentary if its segments weren't so obviously (and poorly) staged. I am constitutionally wary of Clark's tactics, and was on walk-out alert for the first half-hour or so, but before long the film switches gears and follows the boys to Beverly Hills, where they skate and get harassed by cops and rich people. It's ultimately a warm portrait of a sadly under-represented group, and well worth taking a chance on.



Another directorial gearshift was undertaken by Tsai Ming-Liang, the Taiwanese filmmaker whose long-running Lee Kang-Sheng cycle continues unabated with The Wayward Cloud. The film finds Tsai taking some big chances. For starters, his reliably slack main character has found work in porn, and the film opens with him fingering a watermelon that his co-star clutches between her thighs. As if that weren't enough, Tsai indulges in some actual human connection, in the return of Lu Hsiao-Ling, last seen leaving for Paris in What Time is it There?. Her reunion with Lee spawns a delightful scene, inspired by Annie Hall, in which they must capture a gang of crabs that have unleashed themselves in the kitchen. But the real change here is the introduction of musical numbers. Few directors possess as recognizable a style as Tsai: Those who are aware of it may find the inclusion of colorfully choreographed pop songs—one is even played out in fast-motion—a fascinating, if distracting, diversion.



South Korean director Im Sang-Soo's controversial film The President's Last Bang oscillates between dramatic procedural and pitch-black comedy, telling the story of the 1979 assassination of corrupt sex-fiend dictator Park Chung-hee. It's a thrilling tale and Im (A Good Lawyer's Wife) gives it the full range of his talents, but it was overshadowed in my memory by the very next film I watched, Sympathy for Lady Vengeance, by Im's countryman Park Chanwook. The final chapter in a revenge trilogy that began with 2002's Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance and found crossover success in last year's Oldboy, Sympathy for Lady Vengeance is a tour de force, centered around Lee Geum-Ja, who's released from a Korean women's correctional facility after 13 years of wrongful imprisonment. We learn that she was framed for the kidnapping of a young boy, and now she is out for revenge. She sets off in pursuit of Mr. Baek (Oldboy's Choi Min-Sik) and "gets bloody satisfied," to use the parlance of Kill Bill, to which Lady Vengeance is being compared. But in the final two reels, in which Lee assembles the grieving parents of a series of murdered children, the film pulls back to mount an astonishing re-framing of the concept of vengeance, of the deeper meaning of an eye for an eye. This retroactively alters the perspective of the movie up to that point, and the effect is all the more powerful for it. In this respect, Sympathy for Lady Vengeance can be read as a sort of sequel to Dogville.



Which brings me, ahem, to the official sequel to Dogville: Manderlay. With Nicole Kidman's departure, a shockingly self-assured Bryce Dallas Howard ably steps into the role of Grace, who has come upon the eponymous, run-down estate in Alabama en route from the Rocky Mountains. There she finds a fully operational slave plantation, some 70 years after the institution's supposed eradication. The death of Lauren Bacall's matriarch inspires Grace to intervene on behalf of the denizen's of the dilapidated slave quarters just beyond the white cotton-fields. (As in Dogville, Manderlay plays out on a massive, empty soundstage, but the floors are painted white to reflect one of the South's most devastating legacies.) Howard's Grace is not the same victimized innocent that Kidman played; instead she summons up a suffragette's righteous anger, though her attempts to deliver a rudimentary democratic system to Manderlay have predictably mixed results.

If Manderlay is less devastating than its predecessor, it is because of a broader comic tone, which in Dogville was mainly relegated to John Hurt's wry narration. But like the citizens of The President's Last Bang after the death of their leader, and the young romantics in Regular Lovers who must reckon with the gradual deflation of their revolutionary ideals, Manderlay is about the human need to restructure allegiance amid the shifting tide of authority, and how people often choose to recapitulate the bonds of their own captivity. (Richard Fariña's famous line "Been down so long it looks like up to me" would make an apt subtitle for this movie.) Von Trier ends the second installment of his America trilogy in precisely the way he ended the first: With a procession of heart-breaking images depicting America's impoverished, criminal treatment of blacks throughout its history, set to David Bowie's "Young Americans." Like Dogville, the shift from minimal exercise in allegory to sociological testament is overwhelming, and it's made more so by the sad parade of negligence that one could see along the Gulf Coast anytime the television was on over the past two weeks. One of the knocks that I've heard against Manderlay is that it works less effectively as a parable, since it collides too easily with the region's history. Tell that to those who've been left behind.