In Toronto, Movies Seeking Joy, Feminist Fury and Making Sense of a Tumultuous World

A festival like Toronto is the place to take the pulse of the state of film, where artists of the filmed medium put their hearts on display, share what’s on their minds. From what I can tell their minds are in turmoil and their hearts are breaking.

As for women, whose voices and performances are sometimes second thoughts, they are angry and unafraid to show it, whether in Marielle Heller’s “Nightbitch” starring a feral Amy Adams battling her own resentment over caring for her adorable toddler; to “The Assessment” starring Elizabeth Olson and Alicia Vikander by director Fleur Fortune, whose bleak view of maternity in an authoritarian future reflects fears over continuity of the human race.

But first, the joy.

David Gordon Green’s “Nutcrackers,” literally sings with a hokey sort of family, farm and fraternal happiness. The director lately known for horror (“The Exorcist: Believer” and “Halloween” series) has had enough of the darkness. Instead he frolics with four real-life young brothers –Homer, Ulysses, Atlas and Arlo Janson – on a farm in Ohio. Orphaned but more focused on planning mischief with their pigs, mud and a visitor’s Porsche, they torture and then embrace their uncle (Ben Stiller) in a movie that critics agreed tugged at the heartstrings. 

At the premiere, Green confessed he needed a moment of joy.

“I was looking for lightness,” he said at the Q&A. “We’re in a comedic drought… and I was trying to find my own creative instinct.”

Stiller, too, said the script drew him back to acting, after his work directing the dystopian series “Severance.” “It was intuition,” he said after the screening. “I wanted to make this movie, I wanted to meet these kids.” He added: “We need more movies like this.”

Likewise, Jason Reitman’s “Saturday Night” – while many years in the making – burst into the festival with the kinetic, joyful energy of young comedians reliving the start of comedy history in the first season of “Saturday Night Live.”

The movie features a sprawling cast reprising the great John Belushi, Dan Aykroyd, Gilda Radner and, of course, the still-“SNL”-boss Lorne Michaels. Reitman called the extraordinary effort “controlled chaos.”

“Surrender,” was his advice as we tried to settle the group of actors – Dylan O’Brien, Rachel Sennott, Cory Michael Smith, Ella Hunt, Gabriel Labelle, Lamorne Morris – for an interview at TheWrap studio.

TheWrap’s Steve Pond noted something similar in his awards analysis of the festival: “Maybe there’s something in the air in this divisive, dark time; maybe filmmakers are gravitating toward lighter material coming out of the pandemic and the Hollywood strikes and global unrest and a slumping movie business.”

On the flip side, there were many movies embracing the fears. We’ve become accustomed to seeing the dystopian views but they are becoming darker, more urgent and more … normalized.

Notably, Mike Flanagan’s “Life of Chuck,” based on a Stephen King novel, takes us to the end of the world and then backwards to current times and before that. The blandly grinning face of Tom Hiddleston as “Chuck,” who ominously appears everywhere as a sign of The End, is just plain creepy. But Chuck Krantz the character – which Hiddleston embraces with joy and pathos – is a reminder of the normalcy we crave.

Ron Howard’s “Eden” reaches back in time for similar themes, in this case after World War I, as Europe faces the rise of fascism, to a remote Galapagos island where a few random people seek escape. This movie also seems underpinned by an everpresent awareness of the potential ending of everything as we know it; democracy undermined by looming forces that may end a couple of centuries of free society, and spread destruction.

These worries are clearly on the minds of our filmmakers at a time when many are preoccupied by fears for our democracy and the consequences of technology as it visibly impacts traditional community and emphasizes our political division.

Finally, the stories starring women at the festival feature a series of internal dialogues and struggles as women cope with their personal frustration. These movies feature particularly fierce performances from Marianne Jean-Baptiste, Amy Adams and Demi Moore.

In Mike Leigh’s “Hard Truths,” Jean-Baptiste is a woman angry at the world. In “Nightbitch,” Amy Adams is angry about what a woman gives up in choosing to be a mother. In “The Substance,” Demi Moore transforms into an actual ogre as she paradoxically seeks to maintain her youthful beauty. In “The Room Next Door,” Tilda Swinton’s fatally ill character struggles to choose the manner and moment of her death. In the masterful “Emilia Perez,” the title character transitions from Mexican drug lord to soigne woman in Switzerland and still rages internally over the loss of her children.

From the deep yearnings for motherhood (“The Assessment”), to the anger over the demands of motherhood that no one warns you about (“Nightbitch”), from the uncompromising demands of society on female beauty (“The Substance”), to the punishing indignities of life that lead to a constant state of anger, resentment and self-loathing (“Hard Truth”), the themes intersect.

These are character studies in many cases, but they are also larger statements on the predicament of women across the world, across the board.

Amy Adams at the opening screening of “Nightbitch” looked to all the world like the very image of placid, composed womanhood, but she and author Rachel Yoder and writer/director Marielle Heller agreed in the after-screening Q&A that the commonality of women’s experiences amounts to the things that often go unsaid about motherhood. In the film, Adams’ character – just “Mother” – actually transforms into a dog who runs wild through the neighborhood in a desperate prison break from the world of motherhood that she chose.

But talking about fierce, Mikey Madison practically stole the festival in Sean Baker’s “Anora” (which previously won the Palme d’Or in Cannes) playing an erotic dancer who takes on a Russian billionaire and his set of crony-thugs, after she marries his son over a Vegas weekend.

Anora – “my name is Ani,” she insists – is a diminutive sex worker not to be trifled with. She kicks, screams, bites and thrashes her way to demand respect and recognition in a world of heavyset men with lots of money.

Oh, and did I mention? It’s a comedy.

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