From Gitai’s J’accuse to Schreiber’s hero, ‘chosen’ films in Toronto
At the 40th annual international film festival, a fiery denunciation of Israel’s PM as ‘art,’ a disappointing Jake Gyllenhaal, and an off-beat Israeli documentary
TORONTO — With his new film “Rabin, The Last Day,” iconoclastic Israeli director Amos Gitai has done all but run up to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and shouted “J’accuse!” The man behind difficult, artistic and oftentimes critical films such as “Kippur” and “Kadosh” isn’t going for subtlety here. This new movie (financed primarily with French money) is one of many at the 40th annual Toronto International Film Festival that will be of interest to Jewish audiences, but surely wins the top prize for being incendiary.
Slow and deliberate, “Rabin, The Last Day” opens with an interview with Shimon Peres, taking us back to the days of Oslo, the “verbal violence” he and Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin faced and the culture of sedition that was prevalent among the opposition in 1995. Protesting settlers called Rabin a Nazi and they paraded a threatening casket at a rally.
After this discussion we cut to documentary footage from the night of Rabin’s murder, which slowly blends into traditional “movie” scenes of the race to the hospital and the arrest and processing of Yigal Amir.
“Rabin, The Last Day” doesn’t really have a traditional beginning/middle/end or main characters. It creates a pastiche by dipping backward and forward in time, showing the mindset of violent extremists, followed by the investigators essentially shrugging off these wider implications as not relevant to their case.
Eventually, Gitai twists the knife, showing how involved Netanyahu was in the movement
Interwoven with fictional scenes where right-wing groups talk themselves into a lather about Rabin’s secret plan to destroy Zionism, there is more documentary footage. Eventually, Gitai twists the knife, showing how involved Netanyahu was in the movement. If you buy that this culture intentionally instigated the assassination, Gitai’s film, which employs some slow, hazy, dreamlike sequences, concludes that Netanyahu is morally culpable.
It’s pretty strong meat, and it’s going to get many people talking. But maybe not as many as you might think.
Gitai is, at times, his own worst enemy. If his intention was to cause international furor, he didn’t quite go about it the right way. The movie is patient, not rabble-rousing. There are quiet passages and intentionally dull scenes as people read court documents. This is not Oliver Stone’s “JFK.” It is, God help us, art.
On to a much more uplifting subject, there’s Ido Haar’s documentary “Thru You Princess,” which details the fascinating work of an Israeli musician/composer/magician named Kutiman. Living on a kibbutz in the Negev, this pot-smoking 21st Century hippie spends all day and night searching the Internet for tiny pieces of an enormous puzzle that’s growing inside his head. His finished productions are complex, elaborate musical pieces composed of performances uploaded by unaware individuals on YouTube.
“Thru You Princess” shows what happens when Kutiman picks a New Orleans-based African-American nurse (Princess Shaw) as his new muse. This strong, buoyant personality, who has lived in hardship her entire life, is constantly self-chronicling to a tiny audience of friends. But in Princess Shaw, Kutiman recognizes true talent. The way the documentary plays out involves more than one “Catfish”-like ruse, but when Princess Shaw, who can’t afford her car payments, eventually becomes a star in Israel and performs at the Habima Theater, it’s nothing short of a triumph.
Alas, no such triumph at TIFF this year for one of our favorite Jewish actors, Jake Gyllenhaal. He was here with the opening night film, “Demolition,” and man is it a stinker.
It concerns a husband whose wife dies in an auto accident and then goes “all wacky” until he finally learns how to cry. Its far-fetched premise has Gyllenhaal writing angry letters to the customer service rep at a vending machine company because his bag of peanut M&Ms got stuck. Wouldn’t you know the woman on the other end (Naomi Watts) is a) gorgeous b) lonely and c) lives nearby. Their relationship gets even quirkier when her young son starts palling around with Gyllenhaal, who likes to express himself by smashing things.
“Demolition” is the type of would-be prestige movie that Hollywood puts out swapping out actual human behavior with something big, dramatic and weird in the hopes audiences will respond. I responded, all right. With jeers and raspberries!
Luckily, Liev Schreiber gives a performance that might rank as the most Good For The Jews role of 2015. “Spotlight” is a terrific and engrossing look at the editorial offices at the Boston Globe as they exposed the Catholic child abuse scandals in 2001 and 2002.
Schreiber plays Marty Baron, a Jewish outsider who comes in to town and, with a clear eye, decides to get his team to start working on the story. The movie doesn’t make too much of a big deal out of Baron’s Jewishness. It’s more that any community that has been living with an obvious problem for so long needs an outsider to hold up a mirror.
But, the fact that this movie – which is an absolute lock for multiple Academy Awards – happens to show us a Jewish hero doesn’t exactly hurt!
