Toronto Dispatch. 3.

The Toronto International Film Festival has the broadest range of Canadian films that any non-Canadian is likely to have access to at any time of year. Few visitors take advantage of that opportunity - it's their loss. Monkey Warfare by Reg Harkema returns us to a theme that's at the center of the doc The US vs John Lennon: the price paid for radical political action. Here we're not dealing with a witty songwriting legend and martyr who was on the humane side of the battle over war and peace. In this Canadian drama, two former radicals (Don McKellar, Tracy Wright) have sentenced themselves to a life on the extreme margins of society for a firebombing back in the glory days. Now they're scavenging furniture, toys and anything that they can sell from the garbage cans of Toronto, addicted to the pot-smoking that numbs them every night, always looking back to see if the cops are following them.

Aging, anonymous and just a few dollars above homelessness, they're still smug about their politics until Susan, a pert dope dealer, replaces their old one whom the police have nabbed, and a new generation with its own self-destructive rejection of the mainstream enters the picture to scorn the tired couple's counterculture as "hippie shit."

The generation gap on the margins, often hilarious as the skanky characters scrape by on weed and trash gleanings, gets a lift from a production design that piles on details of desperate slackerdom. McKellar's Fu Manchu moustache makes him look like Bucky Phillips, the fugitive cop-killer in western New York State whom cops arrested a few days ago. Tracy Wright plays her role with a haggardness of someone who's been on the lam so long she can't remember much about the politics that got her there.

Pain is always a helpful ingredient for humor, and there's plenty of it here in hellish no-budget Bohemia, with zinger lines in Harkema's script to bring you along. No nostalgia, no sentimentality.

Toronto has always been a forum for the grand historical docudrama, usually tending toward the politically correct. Two this year deal with Africa. The Last King of Scotland, directed by Kevin Macdonald, adapts the novel of the same name about a young Scottish doctor who journeys to Uganda to avoid the life of his father and becomes an adviser to the dictator Idi Amin Dada after a chance encounter with the mercurial and brutal tyrant. Forest Whitaker plays Amin as a vain pompous ruler with an ego to match his huge frame. James McAvoy is the young doctor who falls into the depraved and decadent life at Amin's grotesque court and takes stock of what he's done only when it's too late.

Dramas like The Last King of Scotland (a terrible title that tells you nothing about the subject of the film) face the same risks that documentaries do. They are often overtaken by events, forgotten as history moves on inevitably to newer and greater tragedies. Amin, who ruled Uganda from 1971 to 1979 after shooting his way into power with British acquiescence, if not support, was a bit like the Osama bin Laden of his day: the murderous dictator who embodied everything in a villain that everyone could hate. In Amin's case, it wasn't militant ascetic Islam, but lavish proto-Babylonian excess, cannibalism, and pompous moralistic rhetoric. In his day, he was certainly hyped by the US as a monster, but also viewed as a curiosity in the doc General Idi Amin Dada by Barbet Schroeder. There were early Saturday Night Live skits about him. Whitaker's Amin, a character who defies any notion of overplaying, is sometimes terrifying, but still smaller, just a threat to his own population. These days, the AIDS epidemic is killing Ugandans more systematically than Amin ever did. Across the border in either Congo or Sudan, innocent people are being slaughtered even faster.

South Africa under apartheid is the horror that frames Catch a Fire, Phillip Noyce's look at a black man led by unbearable circumstances to become a militant for the African National Congress. Thanks to nuanced acting and a true story that resists formulizing, it's surprisingly un-didactic, as it traces an ordinary man's treatment at the hands of the police - from harassment, to persecution, to torture. The film also succeeds at what hasn't been shown before, the sophisticated workings of the South African secret police at the time, complete with Black informers who were essential to the perpetuation of white rule. Derek Luke plays Patrick Chamusso, who transforms from a middle class refinery foreman to a terrorist in response to the brutality he endures. Tim Robbins plays the steely Afrikaner agent who makes his life miserable. The film is more of a thriller than a hagiography. Chamusso's life, with two families, was too complicated for that. Despite a celebratory ending, Noyce avoids the kind of triumphalism that seems to come with these kinds of projects. Let's hope Catch a Fire finds more of an audience than there was for Stander, the underappreciated 2003 thriller (and another true story) about a South African policeman who turns against the regime and robs banks.

All the King's Men was supposed to be in theaters a year ago. It makes its world premiere in Toronto, with Sean Penn as Governor Willie Stark, the Louisiana politician modeled after Huey Long who turns from populist to demagogue - never too long a journey in the best of times. It's the second adaptation of the 1946 novel by Robert Penn Warren, an American classic if there ever was one. When you answer why Columbia held the film back for a year, you can then explain why it was made in the first place.

This monotonous and ponderous film violates what should be an important rule - never undertake the adaptation of a major literary work if you're only being driven there by your own ambition, and definitely don't do it because you think your star in this "serious" project will appeal to Academy voters. You'll be judged against another author's creation that's far greater than what you're likely to produce. In this case, Penn talks corn-pone class consciousness, but never captures the warmth that charms the voters into electing you. This is why potentates like Huey Long and buzzards like Strom Thurmond stayed in office for so long. They didn't just emerge from smoke-filled rooms like Minerva from the head of Zeus. The larger problem with the film is the directing. Steve Zaillian makes pre-Katrina Louisiana look as grey as New England, and he makes the shameless circus of Cajun politics as dull as dust. An ensemble cast with Anthony Hopkins, Jude Law, Kate Winslet and Patricia Clarkson doesn't save the movie from the swamp of its own making. Classics like the novel All the King's Men are on the shelf for a reason. They've stood the test of time. We go back to them again and again, for entertainment and for insight about ourselves. This screen version, which was in the drawer for a year, will be headed right back there. For a better bet on Lousiana, see Spike Lee's When the Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts.

Posted by dwhudson at September 10, 2006 6:09 AM