On the Scene at Toronto: Emilio Estevez's 'Bobby' and more

It’s the last working day of the festival, my kidneys are failing, and there was a moment there, a terrifying moment, when I thought I’d never see a good movie again. I sat through the Netflix-bought mini-doc The Prisoner, or How I Planned to Kill Tony Blair, and found it a serviceable portrait (albeit with a kinda low content-to-artifice ratio) of one Iraqi journalist’s Kafka-esque peristalsis through the occupation’s prison system. (As we all might have guessed, that whole torture thing was just the beginning.) Then I endured three mediocre-to-awful pictures in a row:

Bonneville, a lumpy, half-randy retiree road movie starring Jessica Lange, Kathy Bates, and Joan Allen. Hollywood’s hate affair with aging is on painful display in this “warm,” “wacky” “uplifting grief picture.” (I’m quoting from the imagined pitch email.)

Amazing Grace is Michael Apted’s square yet perfectly acceptable BBC telefilm about William Wilberforce (Ioan Gruffudd), architect of slave emancipation within the British Empire. Oh wait... it’s not a telefilm? It’s for... theatrical release? Okay, that’s not so acceptable. This has A&E written all over it. It’s small, it’s pedantic, it’s got some performances it doesn’t deserve (the always soulful Gruffudd, a loose and elusive Rufus Sewell as abolitionist firebrand Thomas Clarkson, and Michael Gambon as MP Charles Fox) – 'nuff said.

And then there’s Emilio Estevez’s Bobby, or what my editor referred to as It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad Assassination. Packed to the gills with celebrities (Lindsay Lohan and Elijah Wood, pictured, plus Helen Hunt, Ashton Kutcher, Laurence Fishburne, Freddy Rodriguez, Anthony Hopkins, Demi Moore, and William H. Macy), Bobby appears to have been written after pounding back a stack of West Wing DVDs and chasing it with The Passion of the Christ. The story, such as it is, presents a laughable schematic cross-section of American society circa 1968: The terrarium for this menagerie is the Ambassador Hotel on the day of Robert Kennedy’s assassination. What ensues is gooey, overscored, treacle-streaked religiosity for depressed Democrats, and a fine argument for stripping celebrities of their voting rights. There were times when the sheer, screaming sixth-grade reading level of the dialogue made me wonder if I was watching some sort of covert Republican propaganda film. I’d recommend it for toddlers, but I worry they might be too advanced for it.

How fortunate, then, that I caught The Fall before the day closed out. It’s a film by Tarsem, the much-maligned (by me, among others) director of The Cell. For the mono-monikered commercial stylist, it’s been six featureless years since that Lopez-flavored paintbomb exploded in theaters, and he’s back in high color -- and this time around he brought along some good storytelling techniques. In a SoCal hospital in the 1920s, an injured stuntman (Lee Pace) and Alexandria, a 6-year-old Indian fruit picker (the preternaturally adorable Catinca Untaru), bond in the oddest way imaginable: He tells her ripping tales of adventure in exchange for the morphine pills she steals from the dispensary. Unbeknownst to his innocent young friend, the stuntman’s trying to kill himself -- a broken heart is his real affliction. But his hastily improvised “epic,” as eagerly consumed by Alexandria, takes on an importance he can’t begin to fathom. The Fall isn’t precision-tuned as a narrative, but its towering, total-art visuals (the globetrotting cinematography makes you feel like you’ve sleepwalked into the pages of National Geographic) are backed by a beating heart. I’ll admit, I got a little rheumy. Then again, after nine days of undiluted film festivity, it doesn’t take much. Hum the Shawshank music and I puddle. One more dispatch later today, people, and I’m out...