Toronto Dispatch. 3.

I haven't seen much horror at the Toronto International Film Festival this year, but I can recommend Stuck by Stuart Gordon, a dark tale of an accident gone awry - if that's not a conceptual oxymoron. A nursing home aid, driving home drunk and zonked on pills, gets distracted by her cell phone and hits a homeless man who goes head-first through her windshield and just stays there, bleeding and groaning, pleading for help. That's why they call it Stuck. Instead of reporting the accident - she's expecting a promotion at work and needs a raise desperately - she drives home and tries to make it all go away. As Richard Nixon and many others eventually learn, the cover-up can be a lot worse than the crime.

Now, the accident that inspired Stuck actually happened. About five years ago in Fort Worth, Texas, a "caregiver" from a local nursing home did hit a homeless man and drove him back to her house with his body halfway through the shattered windshield. The man begged to be treated at a hospital and bled to death after three days when the driver failed to help him. The driver, who made the mistake of talking about the accident which no one had witnessed, is now serving a 50-year term in a Texas prison. You might say she's gotten off light, considering that Texas executes far more prisoners than any other state in the nation.

I won't give away how Stuck ends, but it begins with Brandi (Mena Suvari) on the way home to her bad-ass boyfriend, Rashid (Russell Hornsby); the man she hits is newly-evicted Tom (Stephen Rea), who is crossing the street with a shopping cart in the middle of the night after a cop has just rousted him off the park bench where he was sleeping. It's the old comedy of errors scenario. It seems so obvious that Brandi won't be able to get away with getting rid of a living bleeding body, yet she tries just the same, enlisting dope-dealer Rashid, who turns out to be a lot less ballsy than he would like you to think.

The script by John Strysik is the classic story of an innocent person who becomes a criminal by trying to hide the truth and avoiding responsibility for her actions. There's also a socio-economic side to this movie that Marxist critics would love. Tom, the victim, is also a victim of downsizing. Jobless, he's evicted from his rented room, and he heads out, clothes in a shopping cart, for an appointment at an employment agency with an application that he's told to mail in. The police throw him out of a "public" park, and that's when Brandi thunders into him and he vaults into her car. Bloody Rea should get an Oscar nomination for his role as a half-dead man oozing all over the screen, that is if Stuck - below the commercial radar screen at this festival - gets a distributor and a release.

Brandi represents the plight of a desperately underpaid worker who picks up on a hint of an opportunity that might mean a chance of getting just slightly less underpaid. Holding onto that hope, she fears it will be pre-empted by a police report and a dead or dying victim. She does the selfish thing, and her gamble is Stuart Gordon's movie, shot in St. John, New Brunswick, in the late autumn chill that Russell Hornsby, who plays Rashid, described last night in the post-screening Q&A as "colder than a well-digger's ass." When an immigrant boy from the Spanish-speaking family next door hears Tom moaning and finds his bleeding body in Brandi's garage, he and his mother want to call for help, but his father forces them to keep quiet. Calling the cops would put the undocumented family in danger. There are always plenty of reasons for doing the wrong thing, and the wrong thing drives this movie.

Stuck is grim, but not as grim as the story that inspired it; it helps to have a taste for black humor to be laughing as the audience did when Tom was struggling to pull a window-wiper blade out of his gut. The screening that I attended was at midnight, and the auditorium at Ryerson University is at the edge of one of Toronto's skid rows, a place where a homeless man with too much to drink could easily wander into the path of a distracted motorist.

Back to the immigrant theme for a moment. In The Visitor by Tom McCarthy, a Waspy professor from Connecticut finds that a foreign couple, in the US illegally and victims of an illegal rental scam, is living in his Manhattan apartment. Rather than see them on the street looking for a place to sleep, the professor lets them stay. When the young Syrian man, a drummer, is stopped at a subway turnstile, he ends up in an immigration jail and is then deported. McCarthy's film is not a political tract, but essentially a story about a widower who seems to be on the verge of a new experience in life after his chance meeting with the couple. The film does make the clear point, though, that many immigrants in the city of the Statue of Liberty are one encounter away from losing their homes, their jobs and their rights.

In Stuck, you can lose a lot more. After the film last night, Stuart Gordon reminded the audience that someone is hit by an automobile in the US every seven minutes. (People at the Toronto Festival tend to forget that they're not actually in America for the time being.) Gordon had some advice: drive fast, and you might be fortunate enough to make it home in six minutes.

Posted by dwhudson at September 11, 2007 1:59 AM