 This year’s festival was distinguished by several very good foreign scripts, a number of overrated and over-hyped North American films and more than the usual festival buzz about political goings on south of the border, thanks to the impending presidential election in November. | |  | The Downfall | Two of the most impressive features and tightest, most original screenplays for films that debuted at this year’s festival were both German entries. Der Untergang (The Downfall) directed by Oliver Hirschbiegel and produced and written by Bernd Eichinger, depicts the capitulation of Adolf Hitler (played by Bruno Ganz) and dramatically documents the final days of the Third Reich and what is left of der Führer’s remaining loyal generals and inner circle of political allies as Hitler’s bunker is besieged by invading Russian troops.
The diary of Hitler’s secretary, Traudl Junge (Alexandra Maria Lara) as well as German historian, Joachim Fest's book, The Downfall: Hitler and The End of The Third Reich, largely informed Eichinger’s research and work on the script. Eichinger’s screenplay and Ganz’s Hitler create a documentary-like effect that had audiences on the edge of their seats and almost feeling empathy for the tyrannical maniac who was largely responsible for the death of 50 million people between 1939 and 1945.
Almost, but not quite.
The film does put a human face on someone who is generally written off as evil incarnate and this is the most amazing and disturbing thing about this movie, it makes the viewer realize Hitler was just another guy, despotic, delusional, psychopathological, hysterical and just plain nuts, but human nonetheless. He was one of us. As impalpable as that is, Der Untergang makes it dramatically but accurately clear this was the case and this is the script and the movie’s most stunning accomplishment.
The execution of the film is pretty much flawless in its dramatic intensity and interpersonal development, not to mention the portrayal of der Führer and Eva Braun. I told Bernd Eichinger that I was reminded by his film that the hardest thing for me to accept about the Holocaust, as a Jew, as much as the devastation of European Jewry, is the fact this was perpetrated by not a monster or a demon or an alien, but by a member of the human race.
“That’s an interesting point," Eichinger said, “but it wasn’t only Hitler. All of his personnel in the concentration camps, they were all families, they were all human beings, then after their shift they went home and played with their children and had chamber music at home and then the next morning they went back to the concentration camp and carried on in the most horrible ways and they were all human beings!”
This is exactly what Der Untergang makes so dramatically and undeniably evident; that, more than a study of how flawed and deranged the Nazi leadership and its supporters were, the events of that period were an indictment of the entire human race itself, not one very flawed individual.
The ramifications of this, historically and philosophically, are rarely considered. But as the former Harvard philosophy professor, Robert Nozick said, “Humanity (after the Holocaust) has lost its claim to continue.” | |  | | | Modigliani, directed and written by Mick Davis and starring Andy Garcia as the tormented, alcoholic genius painter who—along with Picasso, Rivera, Stein, Cocteau and others in Paris in 1919—defined art, letters and culture for generations to come. Produced by Philippe Martinez of Bauer Martinez Studios, Modigliani succeeds because it deals with a very dysfunctional artistic genius in a way that preserves and emphasizes the triumph of art over life, as well as the exuberance and joy of Paris in 1919.
Martinez said it is a myth that audiences are not ready for this kind of autobiographical, highbrow story. “Distributors are very cautious about this kind of art house movie,” Martinez said. “But that’s ridiculous because it’s all about education,” referring to the fact that the more distributors and others in the industry know about the potential market for these films and the inherent dramatic intensity and very real substance of the stories themselves, the more they will realize that they are very timely.
Before Davis got the project greenlit by Bauer Martinez Studios, he heard there were other Modigliani scripts floating around, and that was after he had been gestating the project for 10 years.
I asked Mick if that discouraged him or made him consider abandoning the project altogether. “No,” he said, “that kind of motivates me. I’m very motivated; very stubborn, very Capricorn. I don’t give up. I never had the luxury to stop and take stock of where I’m at and think ‘this is great, I’m going to be the fatted calf’' and everything. I can’t do that. I need to keep moving. It’s that constant fear of not accomplishing what I feel inside which motivates me. So when I heard there were other (Modigliani) scripts out there, it made me want to write it even better, make it a better draft and get it done before everybody else.”
Davis, thanks to backing by Philippe Martinez, did beat out the competitors and the integrity of the script is due, in large part, to Mick’s idea about what is important in terms of the elements producers are always conscious of when a writer or director pitches a project.
“If you want to tell a story, that’s where it begins for me,” Davis told scr(i)pt. “It doesn’t begin with ‘Well, we’ve got an actor who is huge and will open the movie and we’ve got money so do you have something for us?’ That’s the cart before the horse. I think we should always stay honest to the script and everyone else should be shaped to that. That often goes in reverse with a lot of the studios and that’s why they go down the toilet, most of them because they’re shaped according to what the actors want or what the budget is or how the studio wants to sell the movie so they cut it according to what the marketing guys tell them. So you have to always go back to the script. Always go back to the story.” | |  | | | Kinsey, Bill Condon’s look at the life and work of Alfred Kinsey -- whose 1948 Sexual Behavior in the Human Male made it okay to do something other than missionary work in the bedroom -- was the best North American offering at this year’s festival. Liam Neeson delivers a very convincing portrayal of Kinsey and his passionate commitment to take the shame and blame out of sex and make it something that could be enjoyed as much as his entomological subjects enjoyed it. Again, the script was meticulously researched but the characterization of Kinsey and the supporting cast was also painstakingly developed in terms of the multi-layered personality of the main character as well as his students and family.
Kinsey is a serious, accurate portrayal of a pioneer in what was considered the seamier side of human behavior that goes far beyond the mindless, flesh-besotted dreck that less artful filmmakers usually churn out when they address the subjects of sex and society.
The Sea Inside is a great example of what you can do with a script that is written for no more than a handful of primary characters and a very low budget. Directed by Alejandro Amenábar, Sea is a very sensitive look at a quadriplegic’s attempts to die with dignity despite government intervention. Javier Bardem plays Ramon Sampedro who chose euthanasia after living almost 30 years without any sensation or control of his body below the neck. As much a testament to the inviolability of the spirit as it is a chronicle of the intrusiveness of bureaucracy where it neither is wanted nor belongs, the film is a beautiful choreography of the kindness of strangers, the humbling and instructive power of mortality and the ephemeral value of individual moments compared to the uncertain duration of a lifetime.
Der Neunte Tag (The Ninth Day), directed by Volker Schlöndorff (Tin Drum, Palmetto, The Legend of Ria), is the true story of Abbé Henri Kremer (Ulrich Matthes), a Catholic priest interned in Dachau who is released for nine days, during which time he is to convince the hierarchy in the Church, namely the Bishop of Brussels, that it should cooperate with the Nazis. The film is brilliantly directed but agonizing in its poignant focus on the conflicting interests of moral, spiritual and national interests. The unfolding of events is made all the more tormenting by the fact that the fate of his fellow priests is determined by the action or non-action Kremer takes during his release.
Although lacking the commercial appeal of The Downfall (there are just too many dark, contemplative moments in this film), the theological debate and cathartic conflict between Kremer and UntersturmFührer Gebhardt (August Diehl), the Gestapo officer supervising and prodding him to convince the Bishop to cooperate, makes for very weighty-yet-compelling drama itself.
This film, Der Untergang, The Sea Inside and other foreign offerings provided more soul and substance at the festival, which was littered with the usual amount of self-indulgent, hackneyed fodder every festival has to contend with. These European features provided an emotional and intellectual meeting place for audiences and filmmakers which Schlöndorff told me was, in his opinion, missing from the Toronto Festival as a whole. It was a problem several screenwriters and directors I spoke with agreed had to be fixed if the film festival and others like it hope to be a constructive place for writers and filmmakers to meet and engage in serious discussions about their work and the industry.
“Everything (about the TIFF) is 100 percent positive but the thing that’s lacking is that people don’t get together,” Schlöndorff said. “Everybody is just running around and there is no gathering point in the night time or day time. There are parties galore but there is no place you can go to meet with other filmmakers.”
Schlöndorff’s point is well-taken. He is not the first accomplished filmmaker to point out that the festivals have become too much of a party and not enough of a serious place to watch and discuss filmmaking. It’s symptomatic of the American film industry in general, particularly at festivals in the U.S. and Canada; commerce, partying, networking take precedence over serious discussion of the craft and the meeting of minds eager to engage in dialogue about how to improve the quality and distribution of product.
“For a filmmaker, the joy of the festival is not only to show his movie, for me it is always to meet other filmmakers and to discuss their movies with them,” Schlöndorff added. “It’s always much easier to talk about other peoples’ movies than your own, and I find it enjoyable to discuss and debate with other filmmakers, neither just theirs nor mine, but movies we both saw and it is just not easy to get together here.”
Of course no one ever pretends the Toronto Film Festival, similar to all other festivals, the big, international ones anyway, is not primarily about money. The ‘suits,’ buyers, distributors and others of that ilk, were particularly visible this year. A few of them from HBO even descended on a Friday night Sabbath service under an outdoor tent that was put on by the Jewish Community Centre and the Jewish Film Festival of Toronto. There I was listening to this very pleasant female rabbi say a blessing over the hallah (bread) and candles which was all but drowned out by the audible schmoozing of the suits in the background. Talk about sacrilegious!
“Distributors are like vampires,” Schlöndorff told scr(i)pt. “When there’s a festival they suck the blood out of it and use it as a ramp to promote their movies and the festival, which, is a gathering of filmmakers, is always in danger.”
Then you had the armchair political prognostications that were going on at all of the parties, in all of the hotel lobbies, in all the lines of media and filmmakers waiting to get in to see movies. Even the celebrities threw in their two-cents worth when it came to commenting on the importance of the upcoming election to sane, compassionate filmmakers and other artists who are hoping to beat the Bush out of the White House.
The preponderance of opinion at the festival was that the current administration was making life harder for all those except the minority of privileged conservatives like the yahoo in the oval office. Also that the Republican agenda is making prosperity and security more tenuous at home and abroad.
"I'm a believer that society has to deal with the issue of how this administration oppresses people in (the U.S.) and in other countries,” Sean Penn who was flogging The Assassination of Richard Nixon” said. “If they take away people's hopes and beliefs, (these oppressed people) will do something."
The general consensus at TIFF 29 was that four more years of that myopic, privileged putz in the White House (and that word is kind compared to what I heard celebrities, media and the public call Bush at TIFF) would hurt not only ordinary Americans, the film industry and movie lovers, but that the devastation could provide enough global fodder for disaster films well into the next century.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Jeffrey M. Freedman has been a journalist and screenwriter for over 21 years. His most recent feature script, a period piece about an Italian Baroque composer, is under consideration at several major studios in NYC and L.A. His primary residences are in Toronto and Los Angeles.
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