Festival Dispatch: Toronto, Part VI (Dylan and the Dead)

For the last Toronto dispatch, please click [here].

It’s a world where the dead rise, visitors are sold, and privates get exposed. A reckoning, you ask? Yes, but not the biblical sort: The sales of various titles here at the Toronto International Film Festival over the last few days finally brought the relevance of the commercial industry into the arena of this grandiose event. Last night’s Night of the Zombie Movie Purchase found the Weinstein Company snatching up George A. Romero’s Diary of the Dead (a reasonably competent entry in the genre considering its crappy Blair Witch Project formulation). Overture Films grabbed Tom McCarthy’s tame but sincere immigration drama The Visitor, and, while many of us were still reeling from the unkempt mess of socio-political diarrhea smeared across its bloated execution, Warner Independent bought “Six Feet Under” writer Alan Ball’s directorial debut Nothing is Private.

The last purchase feels both inevitable and appalling. Isolate the worst moments in Crash, American Beauty, and any other ensemble drama that obviates its simple deconstructions of social mores and biases, toss in a smidgen of pedophilia and cook the thing to circa 1991. Voila! Nothing is Private puree.

I’m less bothered by the movie’s messy arrangement of stereotypical characters than by its needlessly discomfiting plot. A girl of Persian descent moves to Texas to live with her strict father. Her prepubescent horniness leads to a number of bizarre sexual encounters, including a borderline viewer-degrading scene during which a neighbor/army reservist played by Aaron Eckhart rapes her. Actually, make that TWO scenes.

Now, I’m not going to blame anyone for liking this movie. Yet. After sitting through an hour and a half of its two hour running time, I started to feel empathy for the characters, if only because their actions are consistent from screen to screen, and some bad shit goes down that deserves some justice. But, goddamn, Ball’s perspective on budding sexual curiosity makes Welcome to the Dollhouse look like Barney.

Furthermore, the script has a propensity for building up to gross visceral sequences (like the main character getting a period while her strict conservative father won’t let her wear a tampon), as though the overarching concept for the story was to construct literal gag reels. I suspect that even Farrelly Brothers would’ve made it much subtler.

It occurred to me, near the end of Private, that the only way to really read the movie as though it contains any valid insight is to consider everything—I mean, EVERYTHING—as symbolism (characters, situation, and so on). Like, you know, maybe it’s all about American insecurities and cultural barriers and shit like that bubbling to the surface and coming of age at the end of the millennium...ergh. That pseudo-critical analysis requires a bit too much bending over backwards, and I suspect that most audiences don’t go the movies for yoga practice.

Fortunately for my eyes, I also caught what turned out to be two of my favorite films in the line up here at TIFF yesterday: John Sayles’ gorgeous and entertaining period piece Honeydrippers and Todd Haynes’ Bob Dylan-deconstruction I’m Not There. In Sayles’ film, an ailing black community in 1950 Alabama gets a boost from the blues in a conclusive performance that aims to redeem the career of a club owner (Danny Glover). Haynes’ movie has seven characters portraying Dylan at different stages of his life, showcasing his transient sources of identity and submission to the whims of his current political climate. There’s barely any symbolism in Sayles’ movie: it’s a fantastic confrontation of racial tensions and a general yearning to demolish cultural elitism through art. Haynes’ movie is obviously fraught with symbolism, but tenderly motivated: One character points out that the musician’s initial skill was “applying traditional forms to contemporary concerns,” although Dylan himself (played by Heath Ledger) later claims that “there are no politics. [Just] signs.” But in Nothing is Private, the signs are all headed one way: a dead fucking end.

I’m pressed for time today; stay tuned for an updated list of critical takes on everything I’ve seen so far. For now, if you’ve just shown up, please take a look at [my last dispatch].