Perhaps it was the comical red-carpet arrival on the back of a wooden cart. Or maybe it was the unexpected projector meltdown, followed by hours of crowd-pleasing chaos within the auditorium. Or it could have been the broad toilet gags, the witty one-liners and the acutely observed satire in the film itself. But somehow, and against all expectations, Sacha Baron Cohen’s savagely funny Borat movie (official title Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan) has become the defining film of the 31st Toronto Film Festival, which ends on Saturday.
Baron Cohen’s scabrous mockumentary, which is also playing at next month’s 50th Times bfi London Film Festival, admittedly had an inglorious start — its opening night premiere was scuppered by technical problems (“Borat” himself even took to the stage, but to no avail). And yet within 24 hours the successfully rescreened movie, about a bumbling Kazak reporter’s road trip across America, was already being pronounced, by critics and industry honchos alike, as a monstrous hit and the unofficial festival champion.
Of course, it wasn’t supposed to be like this. Toronto has increasingly become a promotional platform for Hollywood studios keen to display their serious “Oscar-friendly” winter fare — previous years have included Crash, Brokeback Mountain and Capote.
This year, however, the sheer glutinous quantity of Tinseltown blow-ins was overwhelming. It was impossible, for instance, not to walk past the lobby of the anonymous-looking Sutton Place Hotel on Bay Street without tripping over the likes of Russell Crowe, Brad Pitt, Jude Law and Sean Penn. It was harder still to interview the Brokeback star Heath Ledger in a quiet downtown restaurant without being distracted by the bizarre sight of Jennifer Lopez and her husband Marc Anthony settling in to a TV interview right behind him.
And then there are the Hollywood-style parties too, all over town, at a punishing rate of four or five a night. It’s a genuine test of shoe leather, taxi fare and liver strength to go from champagne with Forest Whitaker to beer with Zach Braff to whisky shots with Jeff Goldblum, all in the space of four hours and 26 blocks. And yet the celebrity wattage is crucial to the media hype surrounding the headlining movies, because in many cases the films themselves simply weren’t up to the job.
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Steven Zaillian’s much-vaunted remake of the 1949 classic All the King’s Men, for one, was a howling disappointment. The film, top-heavy with Oscar hitters, features Sean Penn as the fictitious Governor of Louisiana Willie Stark. Willie’s soft-spoken majordomo is a former journalist, Jack Burden (Jude Law), a man still tragically obsessed with his childhood sweetheart Anne Stanton (Kate Winslet). Throughout the film Penn makes pugnacious screen-chewing speeches while Law moons about, staring guiltily at a bored-looking Winslet (who, elsewhere in the fest, in the superlative thirtysomething drama Little Children, gives a career-high turn). The film is ultimately self-satisfied and hollow. There were four walk-outs in my row alone.
The Russell Crowe comedy (yes, you heard right!) A Good Year was a fraction better. This innocuous adaptation of Peter Mayle’s bestseller, about a bloodless city trader who finds emotional sustenance in the vineyards of Provence, depicts women as ditzy lust objects, features a memorable slapstick tennis match and hints at a lighter side to Crowe’s screen persona. It was not, though, as one Indian journalist gushed to Crowe, in the middle of a back-slapping press conference, “a wonderful, wonderful film. Thank you so much for making it!”
Otherwise, typically, it was up to the supporting players to deliver true cinematic urgency. Film Four’s Idi Amin biopic The Last King of Scotland, also showing next month at the London Film Festival, is flawlessly precise screen storytelling. Here Forest Whitaker finally gets a chance to dispel his gentle-giant image with a terrifyingly charismatic performance as the friendly dictator with a passion for Scottish culture and mass murder. Amin’s convincing friendship with a young Scottish doctor, Nicholas Garrigan (James McAvoy), forms the emotional backbone of the movie. There is a gruesome final-reel atrocity, however, that some viewers found objectionable.
Equally difficult to watch is the sight of Christian Bale wasting away on camera in Werner Herzog’s harrowing Rescue Dawn. The movie, a feature adaptation of Herzog’s own 1997 documentary Little Dieter Needs to Fly, is the gruelling survival story of a single-minded soldier and PoW Dieter Dengler (Bale) during the Vietnam War. The parallels with the current war in Iraq are telling, and the performance from Bale — unflappably upbeat and quirky in the face of certain death — is genuinely Oscar-worthy.
The war in Iraq and the War on Terror popped up, naturally, all over the festival. It was there in the provocatively titled but ultimately straightforward documentary The Prisoner: Or How I Planned to Kill Tony Blair, about an Iraqi photographer wrongfully imprisoned in Abu Ghraib on a fabricated Blair-assassination charge. It was at the heart of the surprisingly gripping Dixie Chicks documentary Shut Up and Sing, which intimately follows the chart-topping girl band during the three rough-and-tumble years since they denounced President Bush on a London stage and subsequently aroused the wrath of their heartland following.
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Iraq, too, was never far from the mind of the blockbusting documentarian Michael Moore, who made a triumphant return to public life at the festival highlight, An Evening with Michael Moore. The new-look Moore, minus 60lb (23kg, with another 60lb to go, apparently), was in fighting form.
He showed clips from his work in progress Sicko, about the iniquities of the US health system. He made a public plea for the world’s media to leave Tom Cruise alone (“Of course he’s a little bit crazy! He’s an actor! Give the guy a break!”). And he fulminated against the ineptitude of the current American Administration, yelling: “In the same amount of time it took us to defeat the Nazis and the Japanese, we haven’t even been able to secure the road from the airport to downtown Baghdad! It’s f****** insane!”
The greatest deconstruction of the contemporary American psyche, however, was left to Baron Cohen’s Borat. The character, though never explicitly stated, is implicitly a Muslim (he’s from a largely Muslim country and his behaviour at an evangelical church later in the movie suggests that he has very little knowledge of Jesus).
In one standout scene at a Midwestern rodeo he is treated to a genocidal rant on the evil nature of Muslims by a Stetson-wearing rodeo boss, after which Borat takes to the centre of the arena and effortlessly whips the crowd up into a nationalistic frenzy. “May George Bush drink the blood of every man, woman and child in Iraq!” he yells to the whooping, cheering, throng. The scene ends, naturally, in disaster when Borat openly ridicules the Star Spangled Banner, but for one brief moment it managed to scale sublime comic heights.
Think about it. A Jewish comedian (Baron Cohen), impersonating a Muslim in order to ridicule the tenets of Islamaphobia and the genocidal undercurrents in right-wing Christianity? And toilet jokes too? What more can you ask from your comedy?