TIFF ’21 Capsule Reviews, Round Nine

By Jim Slotek, Linda Barnard, Thom Ernst, Karen Gordon, Kim Hughes, Liam Lacey, and Bonnie Laufer

It’s curtains, baby! The 46th annual Toronto International Film Festival draws to a close today. So much great content and whoosh! It’s gone. In the final hours, let Original-Cin guide you toward best bets. Be sure to see previous days for a full complement of capsule reviews.

The Survivor

The Survivor (Gala Presentations)

Sat, Sept 18, 5 pm, digital TIFF Bell Lightbox.

Barry Levinson is not a fancy director, but he is an adept storyteller. And this is a hell of a story, and a brutal one at that. Ben Foster stars as the real-life boxer Harry Haft, who learned his skill as an inmate at Auschwitz, forced to fight fellow prisoners to survive (the losers are immediately shot). He becomes so good at this form of survival that to fight him is a death sentence that he must willfully impose. That story is juxtaposed against his life in America, where fellow Jews despise him after his fame grows (his big break is a fight against undefeated Rocky Marciano) and his past becomes known. Billy Magnussen is the friendly face of evil as the SS officer who trains Harry (and becomes rich betting on him), and Danny DeVito has a short but impactful role as one of Marciano’s trainers who breaks ranks to help a fellow Jew survive a fight he can’t win. JS

The Humans (Special Presentations)

Sat, Sept 18, 1 pm, digital TIFF Bell Lightbox

For better or worse, families become their own cultures with their own rituals, beliefs, inter-relationships, and myths. As such, big occasions can be both comforting and terrifying. Stephen Karam makes his feature film directorial debut with the adaptation of his Tony Award–winning play, The Humans. The Blake family (mom, dad, grandmother, and sister) come together at Thanksgiving at the apartment of the youngest sister and her boyfriend, who have just moved into their first place together.

And what an apartment: peeling paint, an electric system that plunges them into darkness at random. It’s also in a rough part of town that flooded, worrying fretful and anxious dad. The apartment’s flaws are mirrored in the issues of each character. There’s much love here, but it’s been a rough year, especially for the parents, and as the evening unfolds, secrets come tumbling out. Adapting plays to the screen isn’t always successful but Karam has made an excellent translation here, keeping the conversational tone casual, even as tensions mount. And he’s assisted by an excellent cast including Richard Jenkins, Jayne Houdyshell, Steven Yeun, as well as Beanie Feldstein and Amy Schumer who are revelations in these dramatic roles. KG

One Second (Gala Presentations)

Sat. Sept 18, 4:30 pm, Roy Thomson Hall; Sat, Sept 18, 6 pm, Visa Screening Room at the Princess of Wales Theatre; Sat, Sept 18, 7 pm, digital TIFF Bell Lightbox.

The Chinese director Zhang Yimou — a leading figure in Chinese art-house cinema through the 1980s and 1990s with such memorable female-centric dramas as Raise the Red Lantern and The Story of Qiu Ju — has in the past couple of decades been known for pricey blockbusters (Hero, Curse of the Golden Flower, The Great Wall). His new film, One Second is an agreeable return to more personal cinema in a dramedy about a surrogate father-daughter relationship and celebration of cinema. The film begins as escaped prisoner (Zhang Yi) arrives late for a village film screening, anxious to see a brief clip of his estranged teenage daughter on a recent newsreel that is touring Gansu province. When he misses the event, he plans to catch it the next night at another village but sees a rough-looking teenage girl, ‘Orphan’ Liu, run off with the film canister.

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After the two battle for control of the canister on a road trip through the night-time desert, they form a kind of thieves’ alliance, but they’re not the only ones who work well together. Under the supervision of an unflappable projectionist known as Mr. Movie (Fan Wei), the entire village turns into an ad hoc film preservation team when the film reels become damaged and tangled. One Second takes place during the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976) and was originally withdrawn from 2019’s Berlin Film Festival by Chinese authorities who demanded edits and reshoots. It’s unclear what offences were expunged, but the political prisoners, goon soldiers, and brain-washing propaganda films remain. LL

I’m Your Man

I’m Your Man (Special Presentations)

Sat, Sept 18, 3 pm digital TIFF Bell Lightbox.

German filmmaker Maria Schrader’s thought-provoking tale of a researcher who is manipulated into beta-testing a romance-minded robot is, cleverly, more about us than it is about AIs. The android Tom (Downton Abbey’s Dan Stevens, speaking German with a British accent) is an enthusiastic sponge, learning off the human behaviours and responses that Alma (Maren Eggert) at first stubbornly refuses to provide. But as time goes on, she has positive second thoughts about having a companion who can’t help but respond to her every need. The question of whether this is ultimately a good thing hovers over the movie, but Stevens’ Tom soon becomes the most sympathetic character in the film, notwithstanding his insect-like tics and lack of blinking (giving him, say, three blinks every 10 seconds would be an easy engineering fix, but it might make us forget he’s not real). JS

A Hero (Special Events)

Sat, Sept 18, 7 pm, TIFF Bell Lightbox, 7 pm.

Iranian director Asghar Farhadi (A Separation, The Salesman) finds another story of an ordinary man victimized by social forces beyond his control. Out on leave from debtor’s prison in his hometown of Shiraz, the shy, naive Rahim (Amir Jadidi) — a single father who had been swindled by a business partner — returns a lost purse after plotting with his girlfriend to sell it but opting to do the right thing. When the image-conscious prison officials hear about the case of the Good Samaritan prisoner, they bring in the media to amplify the story. A charity group decides to give Rahim an award, and he basks in the unexpected positive attention. But Rahim’s creditor, his former brother-in-law, plants seeds of doubt, and a potential new employer keeps asking pointedly hostile questions. Farhadi shows his mastery of classic storytelling here with this tale of sudden fame and shame, though he keeps his foot heavy on the pedal, and Rahim’s maze of frustrations gets repetitive, both for him and the audience. LL

Silent Night

Silent Night (Gala Presentations)

Sat, Sept 18, 4 pm, digital TIFF Bell Lightbox.

It’s not the end of the world if there’s no sticky toffee pudding for Christmas dinner. Except it is, as Camille Griffin makes her directing debut with a sharply observed black comedy about a final gathering 24 hours before the globe is due to be blanketed by a life-snuffing toxic eruption. As if Christmas entertaining wasn’t stressful enough. A houseful of friends and family gather at a sprawling English country house, all aware the end is nigh. May as well enjoy a final meal and some fun before lights out. Nell (Keira Knightley) and Simon (Matthew Goode) are hosting. Their precocious son Art (the director’s son Roman Griffin Davis of Jojo Rabbit, joined onscreen by his twin brothers playing his competitive siblings) nervously doomscrolls reports of mass extinction and makes the most of Nell’s ruling that swearing is OK on the final evening. The pending end is human-caused but none of these privileged souls are accepting the blame, not when there are presents to open, bottles of fizz to be emptied, and secrets spilled.

The large cast is terrific, especially Lucy Punch (Hot Fuzz), Kirby Howell-Baptiste, Annabelle Wallis, and newcomer Davida McKenzie (sister of Thomasin) as detested odd duck Kitty. Things start out quite jolly with an edge of mania before descending into dark places. With several reminders of Don McKellar’s brilliant Last Night, there is some genuine poignancy at work here. Knightley throws off her fuzzy Love Actually sweater to dive into a new seasonal movie, one where love is still on the menu, even if it’s served with a side of regret, bitterness, and anger. LB

The Good House (Gala Presentations)

Sat, Sept 18, 11 am, TIFF Bell Lightbox; Sat, Sept 18, 5 pm, digital TIFF Bell Lightbox.

Those ambivalent towards Sigourney Weaver will want to give The Good House a pass. She’s in every frame. But few do posh and acerbic quite so well. Weaver plays a Merlot-drenched real estate agent in a tiny, tony Massachusetts heritage town where rivalries simmer and bourgie Bostonians angling for a waterfront view are gentrifying everything. But that’s just so much plot. The real story is Weaver’s Hildy Good striving, clumsily and reluctantly, for sobriety while her dependent family members toggle between casting judgment and asking for handouts. Meanwhile, Hildy and former flame Frank (Kevin Kline miscast here as a yokel who buys property like a hedge fund manager) seem destined to reconnect… if only Hildy can get out her own way. How one feels about The Good House might also depend on how one feels about Weaver continually breaking the fourth wall to speak directly to the camera. I liked that a lot (see acerbic, above), but I could see it driving some people bonkers. Still, as my esteemed colleague Karen Gordon noted of the film, “It’s good to see a movie about a woman at a later stage of life who is treated as a whole person, and not the sum of the cliches of aging.” KH