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Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF) Diary #2

Daniel Joyaux
Marriage Story

The first Saturday, Sunday, and Monday of TIFF, days three-through-five, are typically when the biggest premieres happen. And true to form, of the 8 ½ films I saw on these three days—I sadly snoozed through much of The Truth—I’m very comfortable calling two of them capital-G Great and three others varying degrees of great. As many as six or seven of the films below could end up contending for major Oscars, so there’s a lot to write about here. 

Here’s what I saw on days three through five: 

Bad Education: TIFF premiere, directed by Cory Finley

A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood: TIFF premiere, directed by Marielle Heller

Ford v Ferrari: Telluride premiere, directed by James Mangold

How to Build a Girl: TIFF premiere, directed by Coky Giedroyc

Jojo Rabbit: TIFF premiere, directed by Taika Waititi

Knives Out: TIFF premiere, directed by Rian Johnson

The Lighthouse: Cannes FIPRESCI winner, directed by Robert Eggers

Marriage Story: Venice premiere, directed by Noah Baumbach

The Truth: Venice premiere, directed by Hirokazu Kore-eda

FOUR BEST FILMS:

Over a brisk and deeply absorbing 136 minutes, Marriage Story just gets everything right. Every moment of tension and conflict, every moment of introspection, every character beat. It absolutely nails the takeoff and the landing. (The opening three minutes of the film are so good that they were literally used as the trailer.) Deep empathy and understanding is shown to both sides. There are at least three different heartbreaking monologues that never once feel stagey or contrived. 

Some movies effectively wreck you, and other movies effectively lift you up from being wrecked. Few movies do both, let alone do them this well. A masterclass of writing, acting, and staging, I’m confident in saying Marriage Story is a movie that will be watched, taught, and discussed for decades. 

This may seem strange, but while watching the excellent Knives Out I found myself thinking about something I read a few years ago on Dirty Dancing. It was by Hadley Freeman, in a book on the lessons of ‘80s movies called Life Moves Pretty Fast. The screenwriter of Dirty Dancing told Freeman that her goal was to write a movie that no one would ever describe as being about abortion, but where abortion was so integral and so woven into the plot that a studio could never take those elements out of the film. 

Rian Johnson does something very similar. Though this point has been revealed by others on Twitter, I’m hesitant to spoil, so I’ll be a bit cryptic here. Although Knives Out is a classic Agatha Christie–like whodunnit, the intricacies of the plot seamlessly hinge on a major social issue of the moment, and this issue is so skillfully integrated into every aspect of the film that it never could have been extricated, no matter how hard a studio might have tried. 

Anyway, everything about this film is wonderful. The ensemble cast is in top form, the dialogue and banter is snappy, the characters are perfectly wrought, the production design is lovely, the plot is twisty and comes together perfectly, and it all wraps up with one of the best songs from the best Rolling Stones album, Exile on Main St. 

One of two things seems destined to happen with this film: either it’ll prove why Hollywood should still throw real money behind making original stories, or it’ll prove why Hollywood should abandon original stories completely. Because Ford v Ferrari is great, and reviews are near-unanimous on that point. It’s exciting as hell, it’s anchored by a killer performance by arguably our greatest working actor, it has bankable movie stars, it should have a wide demographic appeal, it’s a feel-good story about the triumph of American ingenuity and ambition, and it’s coming out just before a holiday when families go to movies together. 

In other words, if this movie can’t do well at the box office, then Hollywood should probably just give up on making non-franchise films. And that will certainly be the takeaway for many studio executives if this fails to turn a tidy profit. But Ford v Ferrari has everything going for it. It’s so perfectly engineered to be a hit that maybe it actually can be. And there’s no way it can get First Man-ed (i.e. harpooned by bullshit claims of being anti-American that emanate from right-wing media). 

In the year of our lord 2019, Ford v Ferrari feels like the Hollywood rubicon that we’ve known was coming for a while. There’s no film I’d feel more comfortable heaving that burden on, no film more poised to rise to the challenge. But I’m still nervous as hell. People, go see this movie. 

In a brilliant screenwriting decision, A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood is actually not a movie about Mr. Rogers. Instead it’s a movie about a journalist writing a profile of Mr. Rogers, and how just being in the orbit of Fred Rogers changes the way this journalist looks at and deals with a simmering, decades-long confrontation with his own father. 

It’s a hell of a conceit, because it allows the film a laser-focus on exactly why Mr. Rogers mattered, while allowing it to ignore absolutely everything else. We don’t learn any extraneous details about Mr. Rogers’ life—where he went to school, how he met his wife, how he got his start, what his parents did for a living, the names of his kids—because none of that is relevant to this story. The luxury of not being a Mr. Rogers biopic allows the movie to only tell us one thing about Mr. Rogers: why and how he was so deeply important to people. A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood perfectly gets at why Mr. Rogers mattered, and that focus is never diluted. 

FOUR BEST PERFORMANCES:

There’s no way to separate these two remarkable performances, and I refuse the trap of trying to elevate one over the other. They’ll never compete against one another in any awards race, so there will never be any (good) reason to feel forced into picking a favorite. 

There wasn’t a moment in Marriage Story that I didn’t believe what either Driver or ScarJo were saying or emoting. ScarJo has a moving monologue to her lawyer toward the beginning of the film, Driver has a moving musical performance toward the end, and they both just empty everything they have in a centerpiece fight that’s the most powerful lovers’ argument I’ve seen on screen since 2004’s Closer. The scene has the courage to allow the characters to say awful things without the fear of losing audience sympathies, because the actors display such pure, heart-wrenching vulnerability. 

There’s a moment in the film that lasts probably 20 seconds or so where Hanks just silently looks at Matthew Rhys with a knowing expression, and it disarms Rhys to his core. It’s hard to make a moment like that work, and it says a lot about director Marielle Heller that she was willing to go for it. But Hanks is perfect in this moment. It relies not just on his skill, but on the long history the audience shares with him, so that when we get lost in that look, we implicitly feel the trust and care that it conveys. 

I joked on Twitter that Dafoe in The Lighthouse is like if the perfection of Al Pacino in Dog Day Afternoon and the over-the-top caricature of Al Pacino in Scent of a Woman were somehow combined into the same performance. In other words, it’s kind of the culmination of the Willem Dafoe experience. He gives one monologue that actively made the audience start laughing with how long it went on and how deliciously animated and descriptive it was. 

THREE OTHER THINGS I LIKED:

My father, a longtime university administrator, used to have a fridge magnet that said “school politics are so vicious because the stakes are so small.” I was thinking about that while watching Bad Education, which treats it’s school embezzlement scandal as high opera. Hugh Jackman is excellent at conveying the appropriate sleaze and desperation. 

I’m a little lukewarm on Jojo Rabbit overall, though that’s not an issue of tone or appropriateness for me (as it is with many of its critical detractors). I just felt like the story was disjointed. But many parts of the film really worked, and this is especially true of the very end. The last several shots are a true life-affirming moment of joy, set to an utterly perfect music cue. 

I loved being in the trance of this movie. The imagery, the production design, the sound design, and the performances are all hypnotic. I hope it gets some awards attention in the craft categories. 

THREE OTHER THINGS I DISLIKED:

As the main character in the film becomes more successful, she becomes more insufferable. This reaches critical mass for a solid 15 minutes or so toward the end, where the film seems so determined to show us how annoying the character has become that it can’t help turning the film into a bit of a dreadful slog in the process. There are a lot of nice flourishes in the film’s stylistic execution, but parts of the script don’t work at all. 

I spent about ⅔ of the film having little-to-no idea what I was watching, and then the final ⅓ of the film thinking it was so obviously lifted from The Shining that Stephen King might deserve a screenplay credit. So needless to say, the script could have used some work. But everything else about the movie is so absorbing that it barely matters. 

It’s no secret that Marriage Story is largely based on the dissolution of the marriage between writer/director Noah Baumbach and Jennifer Jason Leigh, but there’s one aspect where the Leigh allusion feels a little too much like shots being fired. ScarJo’s character in the film, Nicole, is an actress who became famous for a nude scene she did many years ago in a teen comedy, just like Leigh first became famous with Fast Times at Ridgemont High. But the way Marriage Story repeatedly refers to this fact feels unnecessary. There’s even a part where Laura Dern’s character says that bringing it up is tantamount to slut-shaming, which is exactly what the movie is inadvertently—or perhaps overtly—doing.

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