One Week, Seven Days, 33 Films

I forget what I was planning to see that Tuesday night at the Toronto International Film Festival—was it the Hong Kong gangster movie or the Danish comedy-drama about a small-town streaker?—but my plans abruptly changed when word started to trickle in about a film called Stuck. On paper, the movie—based on the real case of a motorist who creamed a pedestrian, then drove home and dithered while the victim lay bleeding on her dashboard—sounds iffy. It has a talented but erratic director (Stuart Gordon, of Re-Animator fame), an odd cast (The Crying Game’s Stephen Rea as the bug on corn-rowed Mena Suvari’s windshield) and a premise better suited to a short than a feature.

But Stuck emerged from the fest’s rowdy Midnight Madness program as a taut, splattery black comedy of callous indifference. It notches up one skillful surprise after another: the hilarious topsy-turvy chemistry between human-doormat Rea and freaked-out Suvari, the juicy twists and embellishments of John Strysik’s script. The very quality that makes Stuck seem fresh—its refusal to fit a neat pigeonhole—probably explains why it has yet to find a distributor, even after a strong showing at the largest and most prestigious film festival in North America.

Toronto has earned a rep as the place where Hollywood dangles its year-end awards bait: prestige pictures such as Chopper director Andrew Dominik’s elegiac Western The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford and Ang Lee’s erotic Shanghai spy drama Lust, Caution. But unheralded finds like Stuck make people rearrange their schedules and chase screenings like elusive butterflies. Last week I spent seven days without success trying to catch a few of these buzz-building films, including Spanish director Jose Luis Guerin’s near-silent Dans la ville de Sylvia and South Korean filmmaker Hur Jin-ho’s Happiness, a romance between two gravely ill lovers.

Not that the awards bait at this year’s TIFF was underwhelming. “I think we’ve just seen this year’s Best Picture,” my bud Noel Murray whispered under the closing credits of Into the Wild, Sean Penn’s version of the Jon Krakauer book about a young outdoorsman’s fatal venture into the Alaskan wilderness. For a film about someone who found the romance of nature brutally unrequited—the doomed Chris McCandless, in Emile Hirsch’s beatific performance, carries more than a hint of Grizzly Man’s foolhardy Timothy Treadwell—Into the Wild evokes the pull of wide open spaces with a passion that, like the hero’s, is no less grand for being borderline crazy.

Better still is No Country for Old Men, a cold-blooded gutbucket noir stretched tight as razor wire by Joel and Ethan Coen, working from Cormac McCarthy’s novel. The book’s pulpy ruthlessness comes off here as savagely unforgiving—crime drama with not just lives but a way of life at stake. It was a delight to watch Josh Brolin, excellent as the movie’s hellbound hero, dust off his laconic cowboy cool again for the Coens’ segment of the above-par anthology film Chacun çon cinema. There, he saunters into an arthouse and takes a gamble on the Turkish drama Climates—a find from TIFF 2006.

The audience prize at TIFF ’07 went to homeland hero David Cronenberg’s Eastern Promises, a vicious, sleekly directed (if shakily written) companion piece to the director’s A History of Violence, with another first-rate Viggo Mortensen performance as a morally conflicted hero with a false face. Surprisingly, it beat out a movie Toronto audiences clasped to their hearts, director Jason Reitman’s Juno. If you can make it without vomiting through an infernally twee first trimester, it becomes a funny, bittersweet character study of a pregnant teen (future star Ellen Page) and the yuppie couple she picks as adoptive parents (Jason Bateman and Jennifer Garner, both first-rate).

A far grimmer consideration of unplanned parenthood, Cristian Mungiu’s stunner 4 Months, 3 Weeks, 2 Days follows two Romanian women in 1985 on a largely real-time quest to procure an abortion—a process, from bartering to soul-scarring aftermath, that Mungiu depicts with harrowing use of limited perspective. Similarly, Chop Shop, by Man Push Cart writer-director Ramin Bahrani, shrinks the world to the view of its main character, a pre-teen Latino hustler working the angles at a shady Queens garage. As with Craig Brewer’s The Poor & Hungry, the chop-shop milieu and asphalt-hard location shooting offset the problem-drama plotting.