In Toronto, Jews’ movie debuts earn good reviews
With only a few shandas, the 39th International Film Festival did well by members of the tribe
TORONTO — This week the eyes of the entertainment world looked up from their iPhones for a minute and turned to the shores of Lake Ontario. The 39th annual Toronto International Film Festival proved once again that with enough spit and polish, you can turn a Canadian backwater of nationalized health care and polite behavior into a congested and status-conscious citadel.
In case you haven’t heard, we members of the Jewish faith have recently begun sticking our toes into the movie business, wondering if maybe we’re any good at it. As such, the streets of Toronto were bursting at the seams with Jews, many of whom have good reason to kvell.
A big success was for that nice boy Ben Stiller, who has reteamed with Brooklyn-born film director Noah Baumbach. The pair that made “Greenberg” are back with “While We’re Young,” a very funny but also touching look at what it means to be middle aged in 2014.
Stiller plays a somewhat aimless documentary filmmaker. His best buddy (played by the Beastie Boys’ Adam Horovitz) has just become a father, but he and his wife (Naomi Watts) choose to remain childless. They end up meeting a couple – Adam Driver (not Jewish, even though most people think he is) and Amanda Seyfried – whose youth and ambition have a ripple effect with the older couple.
As you might imagine, things end up going horribly wrong, but they do so in an extremely humorous, and extremely real way. “While We’re Young” was one of the more well-received movies of the fest, proving there’s still an appetite for classic Jewish soul-searching among mainstream audiences.
Jake Gyllenhaal came to Toronto with what might be his best movie ever, “Nightcrawler.” Written and directed by Dan Gilroy (who authored “The Bourne Legacy”) this new one is a Los Angeles-based satire about tabloid media and capitalism exaggerated to its most insane levels.
Gyllenhaal’s character doesn’t behave like a real person – he merely regurgitates business seminar buzzspeak. Desperate for a position with growth, he stumbles upon the scuzzy world of late night videographers that trawl the city streets looking for violent images to sell to television stations.
The result is simultaneously funny and revolting
The movie is simultaneously over-the-top in its cynicism, but also strangely realistic in its look at how we consume certain news images. The result is simultaneously funny and revolting. It’s also a perfect role for Gyllenhaal, who somehow manages to stay sympathetic even when he is behaving like a sociopath.
Andrew Garfield was another young Jewish actor debuting a film with a social conscious. “99 Homes” is a look at the housing bubble in Florida, and I counted roughly 99 times that I sighed oy vey.
Garfield plays a hardworking single father living with his mother who gets royally screwed by the banks and ends up thrown out on the streets. Desperate for a buck, he ends up as the new right-hand man to the same real estate developer who evicted his family (the always great bad guy Michael Shannon).
The end of the movie, written and directed by Columbia University film prof Ramin Bahrani, turns into something of an Econ 101 lesson, but it’s quite remarkable to think that a crisis this major in American society hadn’t yet been put to film.
Leaving Hollywood aside, German filmmaker Christian Petzold brought his new film “Phoenix” to the fest. Based on a novel by Hubert Monteilhet, “Phoenix” tells the strange and devastating story of a Holocaust survivor who returns to Berlin in search of her husband. She was brutally injured in the camps, and has had facial reconstruction surgery. As such, she only kinda-sorta looks like “herself,” if that makes any sense. When she finally sees her husband, his first reaction is relief. With someone who can pass as (what he assumes is) his late wife, they can collect the inheritance she is due.
What follows is a rather heady meditation on identity amid post-war reconstruction. The movie is a little slow, but for those with the patience or predilection to connect with the material, it is an absolutely shattering film. You’ll never see the ending coming. “Phoenix” was, for me, the best foreign-language film at TIFF 2014.
The film makes a good case for Fischer-as-victim — a man with a fragile psyche that was exploited by the government as merely a pawn (!!!!) of Cold War propaganda
Another premiere that I liked even though many of my fellow critics were mixed was “Pawn Sacrifice,” a biopic on the troubled Jewish-American chess genius Bobby Fischer. Wonderfully played by Tobey Maguire, the film hits all the fascinating beats of his life, from growing up in Brooklyn with a leftwing single mother to eventually wandering the globe as an international criminal, espousing hateful anti-Semitic speech.
The film makes a good case for Fischer-as-victim — a man with a fragile psyche that was exploited by the government as merely a pawn (!!!!) of Cold War propaganda. This all comes to a head in the famous 1972 tournament in Iceland against Soviet Grandmaster Boris Spassky (played by Jewish-American Liev Schrieber). Undeniably, this movie (directed by Ed Zwick) is a little hack-y at times, but the story is just so fascinating that it more than makes up for it.
Another mild success was Jon Stewart’s “Rosewater,” a movie which had its world premiere a few days earlier at the Telluride Film Festival. “The Daily Show” host had a specific reason to make this his directorial debut. “Rosewater” tells the story of Maziar Bahari, the Iranian-Canadian journalist who was imprisoned and tortured for four months on accusations of being a western spy.
One of the pieces of “evidence” used against him was his appearance on a clearly satirical “Daily Show” sketch. (I guess the Iranian secret police doesn’t have much of a sense of humor.) The resultant prison drama is good, but not great, which is something of a disappointment considering Stewart’s track record for delivering sharp work. (Though a recent monologue about Gaza was unusually ill-informed.)
So that’s what was Good for the Jews. What about the shandas? I regret to inform you that Shawn Levy’s adaptation of the book “This Is Where I Leave You” is just a parade of poor clichés. The movie is set during a family shiva, in which all the brothers and sisters yell at each other for two hours. Despite good talent like Jason Bateman, Tina Fey, Adam Driver and Jane Fonda (the kids are clearly half-Jewish) the movie just doesn’t connect.
It was two straight hours of being reminded that texting during dinner isn’t polite
Another one that was dubbed a stinker was Adam Sandler’s attempt to seem serious in “The Cobbler.” He plays a Lower East Side shoemaker who has a magical thingamabob in the basement that lets him become clones of any of his clients (e.g. take a walk in their shoes). I didn’t even go see it because so many people told me it was unbelievably awful.
Similarly, I missed Jason Reitman’s “Men Women & Children.” A number of my colleagues told me that it was two straight hours of being reminded that texting during dinner isn’t polite.
Other films to watch out for (though lacking any obvious Jewish connection) include “’71,” a thrilling behind-enemy-lines action picture set in Belfast during The Troubles, and “Duke of Burgundy,” a British avant-garde genre experiment about love, but set among lesbian sadomasochistic butterfly experts. You’ll have to trust me on that one, as it may not be coming to a theater near you.
The Times of Israel Community.