Toronto Dispatch. 1.

The Toronto International Film Festival opens tonight with a gala presentation of Water, by the Indian-Canadian director Deepa Mehta. Toronto is the foremost event of its kind in North America, and has been as far back as I can remember. I've been coming for 15 years now. The range is global, no surprise for a festival that shows more than 250 features, and it extends in all sorts of directions - being close to the US, but well outside, surely helps. And, for better or worse, unless you work in a Canadian film lab, you won't see so many Canadian films anywhere else.

The Festival used to call itself "the festival of festivals." It's discarded that name as the event has stressed film premieres, but it remains a filter for films that have been seen at festivals for a year.

To its credit, Toronto has no central competition, no Golden Maple Leaf or Hockey Puck - perhaps it's the aversion to glam that the Scots brought with them to Canada centuries ago. Since there's no big contest here, there's also no race by the hype media to predict a winner. That's a wonderful relief, and the effect is that attention is spread around a wide range of deserving movies. (There are, however, FIPRESCI prizes and a Canadian competition, as well as an audience award.)

Also, the audience is special in Toronto. Cinemas are huge - and full for most screenings. Every film seems to have its public, an astounding (and enviable) situation that I hope to explore.

If you're looking for themes in a festival this size, you can find any and almost all of them - political and personal, epic and intimate, refined and lowbrow, literary and cartoonish. Yet one theme that seems to dominate Toronto this year is the adaptation of novels to film. And these are among some of the most anticipated. A Cock and Bull Story is Michael Winterbottom's screen version of Tristram Shandy, the 17th century novel by Laurence Sterne. Roman Polanski has directed an adaptation of Oliver Twist. (He does know something about children, after all. [Ouch... ed.]) Ang Lee's Brokeback Mountain adapts a story by Annie Proulx. There is yet another screen version of Pride and Prejudice, this one with Keira Knightley and Judi Dench. Shopgirl is Steve Martin's adaptation (directed by Anand Tucker) of his own novella of the same name. There is also Beowulf & Grendel, an Icelandic adaptation of Beowulf, directed by Sturla Gunnarsson and produced by Fridrik Thor Fridriksson.

This year Toronto also presents a number of films dealing with art and artists, most of them documentaries. Sydney Pollack's documentary on Frank Gehry will premiere here on Saturday. Pollock is the first major Hollywood director in many years to make a film about an artist. He also spent more time on this film - some five years - than on any other film in his career, a career which includes They Shoot Horses, Don't They?, Tootsie, Out of Africa, Jeremiah Johnson and Havana. He has known Gehry for years. By coincidence, Gehry, who was born in Toronto, is also now at work on a new addition for the Art Gallery of Ontario.

A Conversation with Basquiat, by Tamra Davis (whose longer doc, Twelve Disciples of Nelson Mandela is in the program), is also on the bill. Davis talked to the already successful Jean Michel Basquiat when he was 25. Somehow the film, only 21 minutes, took a long time to complete; I'm not sure why. It could be a fresh perspective, given the Schnabel melodrama and the mythic martyrology surrounding Basquiat recently revived by the traveling exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum and the Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA) in Los Angeles.

Matthew Barney's new film, the near-silent Drawing Restraint 9, with a soundtrack by Björk, makes its North American premiere in Toronto next week. The limited dialogue is in Japanese.

Another offering is one which has been seen at many festivals already, The Devil and Daniel Johnston, by Jeff Feuerzeig, is about another self-taught/untaught/"primitive" songwriter/painter now living in the protection of his parents in Austin, Texas. Regardless, Johnston's fans are as loyal as the fans of an earlier generation are to Brian Wilson. Johnston's paintings are now selling well in Europe and the US. Maybe he'll crack the Canadian market now. He performed when the film premiered at Sundance. Will he show up here?

The festival will also show Stranded in Canton, a very rarely seen film from 1974 by the photographer William Eggleston, who is considered the father/godfather of contemporary color photography. Perhaps this is a chance to look at the relationship between moving pictures and still photography. The public screening of the film in Toronto will be hosted by the filmmaker Michael Almereyda, whose new documentary, William Eggleston in the Real World, also showing in Toronto, is just opening in New York.

But before I deal with art and other films in a day or two, back to the novels. I've done my own extremely limited sampling, having just seen two films that adapted novels, each in its own loose way.

I suppose any adaptation of In Cold Blood has to be loose, because Truman Capote's characterization of the book as a non-fiction novel is nothing if not loose. Capote sounds like it would be another bio-drama, but it focuses entirely on Capote's 1965 saga about the murder of a farm family in western Kansas by two drifters. In Cold Blood was his last book - and it broke his spirit, if this film is to be believed - although Capote lived until 1984. As we've come to expect from Philip Seymour Hoffman in the lead, this is a persuasive Capote - nuanced and stylish, another role that expands Hoffman's range and shows his acting versatility.

Directed by Bennett Miller, Capote is the literary version of the backstage drama. It opens as a boozy Capote reads the newspaper account of the killings in 1959. We follow him to Kansas, and eventually to what appears to be a relationship of confidence with one of the killers, an abused and vulnerable Perry Smith (Clifton Collins Jr). Capote finds the two young men a lawyer to plead their cases, but only up to a point. Ultimately his loyalty is to the story that became In Cold Blood.

Did Capote betray the young killer by revealing his story and being true to journalism? That's what you're left to ponder. The film raises another problem. In Cold Blood took journalism an important step beyond where it had been at the time, by allowing a writer like Capote to expand the journalistic coverage of an event and the people involved in it to a length that did justice to complexity of the crime. Capote knew you just couldn't fit all that richness into one article, not even in the New Yorker. (We certainly know that now, as so many journalists write books to tell stories they can't really tell in their newspapers.) But in the process of adapting the story behind the story to the screen, the process of expansion is reversed, and a richly detailed factual story becomes an outline. I worry about that necessary compression, in which the facts become bare bones, and Capote's character and his journey through the story are what matter. I felt that it was too compressed, the way Capote must have felt when he tried distilling all those characters and landscape and complexity into a single magazine article. But that's drama, my friends tell me, and there's a real dramatic power in Hoffman's performance, but I just hope that the younger members of the audience who may not know In Cold Blood will be drawn to the book.

Everything Is Illuminated, another ambitious book, confronts the aftermath of the Holocaust as a character searches for his Jewish family's history in a rural Ukraine that now has no Jews, unless you count the mass graves. The original 2002 novel by Jonathan Safran Foer is adapted and directed by the actor Liev Schreiber. There's a lot of humor that might rub you the wrong way in this story (not exactly the stuff of Holocaust tales), as a nerdy young American takes a clinical approach to saving remnants of his grandfather's history in plastic bags. Even funnier is today's Ukraine, where kids dress and dance in hip hop clothes and speak longingly of American pop culture in absurd anti-idiomatic English. The quirky film avoids sanctimony most of the time, and doesn't shirk from finding a common ground for memories of horror and the everyday life of scarcity in which some Ukrainians become small-minded, greedy and laughable. It gets most of the way there, thanks to Eugene Hutz as the young English-impaired Ukrainian guide, Alex, who takes buttoned-down Elijah Wood to what turns out to be sacred ground. Don't look for anything too reverent here. In any case, as with every film in Toronto, there's an audience for this one.

More to come.

Posted by dwhudson at September 8, 2005 2:33 PM