..Gary Dretzka
..Noah Forrest
..Leonard Klady
..R.J. Matson
..David Poland
..Douglas Pratt
..Ray Pride
..Michael Wilmington

22 Weeks To Go: Post-Toronto Edition
The Year Of “Where Do
I Go From Here?”

This time of year – a little earlier usually, though its happening late because its been so hard to define – we in the predictions game are always looking for what this might be “The Year Of.”

Iraq was a hot topic going into the early fall festivals… and then, one by one, the movies died or at least went comatose when put in front of audiences.  Rendition, In The Valley of Elah, Redacted, and a parade of docs that nobody much cared about.  (For some reason, Battle For Haditha didn’t play Telluride, even though it is easily the best of the Iraq features to date… and without a movie star, it didn’t get the media attention it deserved in Toronto. Likewise the best Rwanda feature to date, Roger Spottiswoode’s Shake Hands With The Devil.)

But a theme started to emerge at Telluride… The Year Of The Bad/Dead Parent.  Into The Wild, The Savages, Margot At The Wedding, When Was The Last Time You Saw Your Father, Rails & Ties, and Jar City all seemed to be speaking to some similar issues or self-identity as connected to parents and parenting, whether the parents were in the room or not.

Toronto moved things a step further.  Get over the parents (though Toronto threw another bad parent onto the fire with Reservation Road)… what is it to be a responsible adult in 2007?  No Country For Old Men, The Brave One, Michael Clayton, and Boy A were amongst them.  And what about the search, through comedy, for a moral – not political – choice for a pregnant teen in Juno (one of the movies featuring not only a good parent, but the rarest thing in movies, a kind step-parent)?  There was The Orphanage, a thriller about a woman coming to peace with a level of guilt that she had managed to push down for decades.  Lars & The Real Girl has a young man going through a difficult process in order to find himself and his manhood for the first time in his life.  There is no film more in discussion of identity than Todd Haynes’ I’m Not There.  Persepolis is a journey of a young Iranian into a full maturity, just as Brick Road is about an Indian immigrant to England seeking the same.  And controversial as it is, Alan Ball’s Nothing Is Private challenges audiences to consider their feelings about maturity and morality. 

It would be easy to shrug this notion off and say, “every movie is about seeking insight.”  And you would be right on the surface level.  But what really struck me about this year’s line-up is that these are not love stories (at least not with a second person).  And these films are not seeking an easy answer that makes it comfortable for the audience.  The dead parent films end, obviously, with death.  And what I think you may have heard as resistance to some of the other films is a mark of fine work aesthetically, but ambivalence emotionally.  The question for many of these films is just how much wreckage you can deal with, as an audience, and still think the light found at the end of the tunnel is a “happy ending.”

Even two of the films that are getting love as ripping good yarns - Atonement and Before The Devil Knows You’re Dead – are stories that really challenge you to walk out of the theater smiling about anything but the quality of the films themselves.

Of course the downside of all this introspection is that the movies tend to be rather dark and weighty.  And the lesson of all the Iraq films in Toronto?  No one really wants to worry about that mess so much.  Sorry.  I guess there is a reason why filmmakers didn’t make films about wars during wars in the past, other than self-censorship.  It’s all the more fascinating when we are just now seeing the best Rwanda feature and a parade of films around Klaus Barbie.

The odd thing is that we really are now around a half dozen movies away from all the likely contenders being seen, at least by the media.  The two big dogs – Charlie Wilson’s War and Sweeney Todd – are both unseen.  There Will Be Blood and Lions for Lambs are the two indie mysteries.  And Beowulf is the mega-movie that could be more than expected.  Denzel in American Gangster may face competition from Denzel Washington the director/star of The Great Debaters, which Harvey Weinstein is pushing to get ready in time for the last awards push in late November. 

Yet, it still feels like we have barely started to figure out who the most serious contenders really are.  And I think that has a lot to do with the unusual circumstance of having a lot of good movies that will, it seems, actually be defined by audiences in a meaningful way.  If there were six or seven realistic Best Picture contenders as voting closed last January, this year, there could well be a full dozen. 

A movie like The Brave One, which I quite like, has already died the death of a weak opening.  For a movie that felt commercial, this sin is simply too great to overcome, even if a greater sense of positively started to congeal around the film.  On the other hand, Michael Clayton has a much lower commercial bar to leap over… not quite indie level, but $30 million or $40 million starts to look like it is worth considering.  Same studio, I know… but that is how the awards game crumbles.

The other nice thing about Toronto is that you can get your Column A, Column B favorites.  For instance, the score of Lust, Caution should be nominated, as should Janusz Kominski for The Diving Bell & The Butterfly.  Diablo Cody and Nancy Oliver are looking like likely Oscar nominees… and Ms. Cody could well be the first Oscar screenplay nominee to end up with a Playboy spread (not some weird fantasy… take a glance at her blog and find out for yourself).  And who can pick between all the frickin’ Phillip Seymour Hoffman performances?  (I say The Savages, but would not discount the Lumet and Universal smells possibilities in Supporting for Charlie Wilson’s War.) 

One major oddity is that no docs or foreign language films have emerged as “must nominate” films either.  There are some really fine ones and Persepolis got the French nod and could heat up in a hurry, but it still doesn’t feel locked in to much more than a nod.

And so it goes. 

The real column starts counting down in just a few weeks.  We’ll get our first Gurus read even sooner.  In an odd way, it’s kind of exciting… after last year turned into a horse race after Dreamgirls missed the gate, this year should make last year look non-competitive.  Remember, neither Crash nor The Departed seemed likely to be nominated, much less win, when they were launched.  So maybe there is hope for all of this to be more than just a lot of boring hype.  You go, bald guy.

The Chart
The Pre-Toronto Chart - September 6, 2007
The First Chart - June 21, 2007

- Email David Poland