Toronto Dispatch. 8.

Looking back at the Toronto International Film Festival, which ended Saturday night, I'm thinking first of the films that I missed. Thank You for Smoking, Jason Reitman's satire, stirred the muddled mix of freedom, hypocrisy and greed. The Korean film Sa-Kwa, and its reportedly bravura performance by Moon So-ri, was another that I didn't see. Put Danis Tanovic's L'Enfer on the same list.

Now for what I did see at the end of an event that was less front-loaded than I had expected.

Mrs. Harris's Tragic Accident

There's a well-known line from Karl Marx that just about everyone has heard. History repeats itself: first as tragedy, then as farce. This is a good enough description for what has happened to the story of Jean Harris's murder of the Scarsdale Diet doctor Herman Tarnower in 1980.

First, while the seats in the jury section were still warm, five weeks after the guilty verdict, we had the 1981 made-for-TV melodrama The People vs. Jean Harris, which had the trial transcript as a screenplay. 25 years later, we have Mrs. Harris, a revisionist melodrama based on a journalist's book that gives credence to Harris's contention that the murder was really a botched suicide. That "tragic accident" claim still seems preposterous. The solemn movie that it inspired is a campy guilty pleasure, enjoyable as only unintentional humor can be. There's even a role for Ellen Burstyn, who played Harris back in 1982.

There must be plenty of people out there who don't remember Jean Harris, or who are just too young to know who she was and what the fuss was all about. In March 1980, Harris, then the headmistress of the hyper-exclusive Madeira School in Washington DC, drove through the rain to the home of her former fiancée Herman Tarnower outside New York City. She had been involved with him for 16 years. The cardiologist was a star, thanks to his best-selling "Scarsdale Diet." It was a pre-Atkins blockbuster, the diet world's flavor of the month, but a profitable one nonetheless.

Tarnower is said to have been a nasty man - he got rich from sucking up to wealthy patients. He was envied for his money and for his equine endowments below the belt. He flaunted it all.

The film reminds us - as if we needed to be reminded - that money can indeed work wonders. Somehow the bald cardiologist (Ben Kingsley) who kept a room of hunting trophies charmed Jean Harris (Annette Bening), a bored divorcee raising two boys on a teacher's salary, when they met at a dinner party. (The bald leading the bored?) He proposed marriage to her with a $10,000 ring - he'd be paying that today for sushi for the two of them. When she asked him to set a date, he withdrew the proposal, but let her keep the ring. He then took up with his secretary, the ex-wife of a Scarsdale florist. Harris hated the new concubine (Chloë Sevigny) as much as she still loved Tarnower.

On March 10, Harris arrived at Tarnower's home in Purchase, New York - to kill herself, she said. Instead, Tarnower ended up dead from five bullets. At her trial, a haughty Harris delighted the tabloids with her story of a botched suicide. (I still remember the joke that the Scarsdale Diet was taken off the market by the FDA because it had too high a lead content. There was another one about Jean Harris's suicide attempt in prison - she shot a matron and two guards.) Needless to say, the jury didn't believe her and their verdict was upheld on two higher levels. Maybe that's why OJ never argued suicide.

In prison, the former teacher taught prisoners to read and write until Mario Cuomo gave her clemency in 1992. That's the side of Jean Harris that we see in this adaptation - smart and witty, but flawed with the obsession to seek love from a man who will never give it to her; not the jealous cast-off with a gun intent on revenge. (After all, this is the festival that revisited the crimes of In Cold Blood in Capote.) In Mrs. Harris, Tarnower spots the bored divorcee who fled Grosse Pointe at a dinner party and the violins start playing - literally. "What were they thinking?" you ask yourself.

It seems that director Phyllis Nagy was struggling to compress Shana Alexander's expansive book (Very Much a Lady), with Harris's self-destructive search for a stern father at its center, into less than two hours. In the film there isn't much room to breathe. Bening, with almost no make-up, throws fits and breaks a lot of dishes - Kingsley frowns and glares.

There is one thing I do like about this film, which would probably have been better as a documentary that accommodated the fullness of the portrait of Harris that we get from Alexander (whose social and psychological investigation of a murder, we should note, follows a path cleared by Truman Capote.) There isn't a likeable character in it (even though Harris was intended by Alexander in her 1983 book to be sympathetic), and certainly neither Bening nor Kingsley play characters you'll like or even side with. I suppose it takes a certain kind of courage to retell a once-familiar story and then fail to produce anyone who brings new clarity to it. Does anyone now believe that Jean Harris really intended to kill herself? Does anyone care?

Unsafe in Any Clothing

Unsatisfying dramatically in a different way was The Notorious Bettie Page, the bio-pic about the model who posed in bathing suits and leather bondage outfits in the 1950s. She branded the semi-nude photo that now seems as tame as the Edsel; it's hard to believe that these were viewed as sacrilegious, but they sure were, by the same kind of moralizing figures who find sin whenever they need to. If we're to believe the story, Bettie (Gretchen Mol) was a trusting good-hearted soul who retained her Pollyanna-ish faith in humankind, even after a miserable marriage to the high school football player sweetheart who roughed her up. Her spirits also survive a gang rape, although that does get her out of Nashville.

Once she's in New York, the cameras start rolling, as Bettie poses, first for rooms of paying voyeurs, and gradually for businesses that serve the perennial market for titillation, which was just emerging as a commercial market at the time. Eventually the moral police target the photographers, and Bettie, literally stigmatized as the poster child of sin, finds God.

Bettie Page tells its story with costumes, sets and a look of buttoned-up rectitude with more than a hint of the tawdriness that squints in the light of propriety. The production design that unfolds like a slide show is the film's greatest strength (production design was another trend or theme in Toronto), although Gretchen Mol's performance as Bettie also stood out, perhaps because it's so much a part of that production design.

As a story, Bettie Page is a different kind of period film, a "Perils of Pauline" series of outfits and encounters that evokes the earliest days of screen melodrama. Despite the style, we never get too deep into this. Like adventure stories, it's enough here to see Bettie fighting off cads and cops and repeating the mantra that the pictures are fun and nothing to be afraid of. I can't believe that there isn't a whole lot more to the story.

Twist Down

I was hoping to find much more in Roman Polanski's version of Oliver Twist. I'm a Polanski fan and, of course, he wasn't there to defend his Euro-production of the Dickens classic. Still, like so many period films in Toronto (and pretty much everywhere else), it got a lot of the details right - down to the buttons and hats and filthy streets - but it had the generic feel of a spectacle that was paying this year's mortgage without any raw emotion to get in the way. Hey, Roman Polanski has bills to pay like the rest of us. But if his name hadn't been attached to the movie, you would have never guessed that he'd had a role in making it.

The Enemy Within

If raw emotion was what you were looking for, The War Within, directed by Joseph Castelo, may have been one of the films for the moment - a thriller with no stars, but a brain. It presents a scenario that's quite plausible, especially after the London subway bombings. After 9/11, the hand-wringing question that you tended to hear over and over again was, "Why do they hate us?" Here's why. A Pakistani engineer is seized in Paris, transported to Pakistan and tortured on suspicion of belonging to a terrorist group - and the brutal experience turns him into just that, a suicide bomber. The tension is built around a visit to New York, where an old friend and his Americanized family are trying to get along without making too much of the fears and slurs about Islam that are a growing part of daily life. It's as real as the metal detectors you walk through every day.

A Maysles Film Not To Miss

Another film that got far less attention than it deserved was Meet Marlon Brando, the rarely seen documentary by Albert and David Maysles about a press junket for the now-forgotten 1965 film, Code Name: Morituri. Maysles showed the Brando documentary as part of a program at which he also showed clips from a new autobiographical film, Handheld and From the Heart.

The Brando we see from 40 years ago is even-tempered as he endures interview after interview at a hotel in New York, where these press junkets tend to happen, even today. The same kinds of press blitzes took up huge areas in Toronto during the festival. With all due respect to my colleagues whose interviews I overheard, things haven't changed too much from the inanities of the mid-1960s. I'm not sure that today's clothes are better, either.

The camera barely moves as Brando answers questions from interviewers who have a minute or two with him, but call him "Marlon." And Brando is performing, not just as a celebrity but also as a face already iconized as Stanley Kowalski and Julius Caesar. Albert Maysles's camera is right there. The interviewers are also part of the formula - they come in various types. There are the men in their 50s - we used to call them hacks - who affect a familiarity with "Marlon" and try to spar with him when Brando dares to deflect a dumb question. Some try to ask him about American Indians, a cause of his back then. Brando sees that there is no point in talking about anything serious. Every time he's irked, it shows in his face. We forget that Albert Maysles, a cameraman, gave the film a cameraman's look.

Another type is the journalistic starlet, shivering in the presence of a movie star, who struggles to complete a sentence or two. Here Brando himself is shaken, sometimes by the beauty of the girl next to him asking inane questions (a former Miss USA), sometimes by the fact that a model of twenty has been hired as a journalist. He's incredulous that these innocents can call themselves journalists. But then again, this really isn't journalism. It just takes up most of the newspaper.

The film struck me as a work of conceptual art, a sort of tape loop, with variations - a different face next to Brando, a slightly different expression on his face as he listens to slightly different banalities, each one like a Marilyn or Jackie portrait. It's the kind of film Andy Warhol should have been making then, the kind of film that young filmmakers now should know.

Posted by dwhudson at September 20, 2005 11:25 AM