After two consecutive years experiencing the organized chaos of the Toronto International Film Festival, it’s become clear to me that the image TIFF strives to achieve in the critical conversation is often at odds with what the festival actually represents to the casual attendee – namely someone like me, who sees it as a fun distraction to close out the final days of summer before the school year begins again.
TIFF seems to be an organization unduly concerned with curating an air of prestige and exclusivity that non-press viewers – and particularly someone college-aged – couldn't care less about. Most of us are there simply to get a jump on the year’s most buzz worthy films and maybe do a little star-spotting on the side; it's always cool to come back to campus and brag about casually bumping into Miles Teller, or how you saw what's sure to be one of the year's biggest hits long before it opens at the Century 12 in Evanston. But the road to even getting some of these movies screened can be thornier and more complex than an uninitiated Wildcat would imagine.
2014 proved to be particularly tumultuous for TIFF and its artistic director, Cameron Bailey. Bailey, perhaps wounded that the Telluride Film Festival stole some of TIFF’s thunder in 2013 by holding certain “sneak previews," recently enacted a more stringent policy barring any films previously shown at Telluride from premiering during the critical first four days of TIFF.
Bailey’s controversial decision essentially forces filmmakers and studios to choose between debuting their work at Toronto or Telluride, with Toronto being the easy choice in many cases, given its wider audience and broader media coverage.
While some might view this move as shrewd, going on the offensive against a festival as laid back and averse to the hype as Telluride left a sour note for me that wasn’t soothed at all by the first film I saw at TIFF 2014: Antoine Fuqua’s revenge thriller The Equalizer (D), the director’s first collaboration with Denzel Washington since 2001’s Training Day.
As the credits rolled on The Equalizer, I vowed never to fall into the trap of believing an older, formerly dignified actor can have a late career revival as an action star. The Liam Neeson vehicle Taken fooled me once back in 2009. However, The Equalizer, devoid of even that film’s brutish style and packed with double the self-righteous stupidity and violence, is an embarrassment for both its director and Washington. It plummets into laughable camp so quickly it’s likely to induce whiplash.
Speaking of whiplash, Damien Chazelle’s sophomore effort Whiplash (A-) served as a nice palette cleanser to The Equalizer; pulsing with more intensity in its portrayal of the embattled relationship between a talented young jazz drummer (Miles Teller) and his psychotic music observatory instructor (J.K. Simmons) than any of the gory executions in Fuqua’s film.
Even those unfamiliar with jazz should be invigorated by Whiplash’s furiously directed musical numbers and the fiery performances behind them. The film makes yet another case for the 27-year-old Teller as Hollywood’s next big thing (he’s a killer drummer to boot), and Simmons, muscular and snappy, spits pure venom as a sneering villain.
Square in the middle of my schedule was Bennett Miller’s much buzzed about Foxcatcher (B), which I found generally par for the course in the director’s oeuvre of true-to-life, emotionally frigid Oscar bait like Capote (2005) and Moneyball (2011). What elevates Foxcatcher above Miller’s past work is the bleak, strange nature of the story it tells, based around the eccentric multi-millionaire John du Pont (Steve Carrell, unrecognizable under a prosthetic nose) and his manipulative relationship with the former Olympic wrestlers and brothers Mark and Dave Schultz (Channing Tatum and Mark Ruffalo).
Continuing my grim streak was The Look of Silence (A-), documentarian Joshua Oppenheimer’s companion piece to his haunting 2012 debut The Act of Killing, which had a special screening and director Q-and-A at Northwestern last November. With The Look of Silence, Oppenheimer once again chronicles the horrors of Indonesia’s largely glossed over mid-1960s genocide in novel fashion, this time by having a member of a victim’s family interview his brother’s unrepentant killers. His documentary proves to be a difficult watch but a necessary one, stomach churning in its further exposure of a buried history of horrific violence and government oppression.
My final night offered the North American premiere of the Belgian film Two Days, One Night (B), Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne’s movingly empathetic if gratingly structured odyssey of a woman, Sandra (Marion Cotillard), desperately trying to keep her job at a solar panel factory. Though the plot sags into a repetitive, predictable pattern as Sandra visits each of her co-workers in an attempt to curry their favor, Cotillard, frail yet forceful, mesmerizes as a depressed working class mother at the end of her rope.
On the whole, I’d place my personal TIFF 2014 lineup a solid tier above last year’s in terms of quality, but the same can’t really be said for the rest of the festival. Outside of some indie bright spots, several TIFF exclusives meant to become big awards draws have proven to be notorious stinkers. No one on campus is going to be talking up something like "Men, Women & Children" this fall.
While this isn’t a result of Bailey’s policy change towards Telluride, it has a chance to color the politics of festival scheduling in future years for the worse. TIFF 2014 didn’t draw any of the exceptional hype Bailey may have hoped to garner in boxing out Telluride, but it did make the behind the scenes maneuvering a lot uglier, something that’d preferably be left out come 2015. No one, and especially not people my age, cares much for the awards hype anyways.