43rd Toronto International Film Festival Coverage: Day Six
Tuesday, September 11th, 2018 by Ian Evans
Green Book courtesy of TIFF.
This morning, I had the opportunity to screen Driven, Nick Hamm’s look at the downfall of car-maker John DeLorean through the eyes of his hapless schmuck of a neighbour, Jim Hoffman (Jason Sudeikis).
Hoffman is the sort of guy who doesn’t succeed at life but gets by, content to be the object of scorn and derision as long as it results in him doing a little bit better today than he did yesterday. A pilot working on the wrong side of the law, Hoffman turns into an FBI informant when he gets caught smuggling a huge amount of cocaine. Though Hoffman hasn’t been too productive working for the Feds, his luck is about to change. Moved into a new community, Hoffman discovers his neighbour is none other than John DeLorean (Lee Pace), the whiz from GM who is now working on his legendary gull-wing car. He’s all high class parties, while Hoffman is low rent but the pair strike up an uneven friendship. When DeLorean’s company suffers serious cash flow problems, Hoffman’s drug connections might solve DeLorean’s woes and give the FBI one hell of a drug war trophy.
Sudeikis has made a career out of playing hapless schmucks, but this one comes with a more serious bent. His happy-go-lucky loser is the perfect foil to Pace’s reserved, dignified but fatally arrogant DeLorean. Though Driven won’t set any theatrical box office records, the film is worth taking a look at if you see it pop up on your favourite streaming service.
Roy Thomson Hall played host to the gala premiere of Peter Farrelly’s Green Book. Viggo Mortensen plays a working-class bouncer hired by a classical pianist (Mahershala Ali) to chauffeur him across the American South in the Sixties. Based on the real-life story of musician Don Shirley, it examines the brutal segregation of the South as two men from different worlds learn to get along. Mortensen, who’s a regular visitor to the Festival, said he likes TIFF because it’s not an award-driven festival and the people who were inside the cinema for the gala were people who lined up because they were interested in seeing the film.
Later on in the evening, RTH was rocked by the screaming fans for the Indian film Manmarziyaan (Husband Material). Taapsee Pannu plays a free-spirited young woman who falls for an impulsive and exciting man (Vicky Kaushal). When her parents try to pressure her into a matchmaker’s arranged marriage, she has to decide if that man (Abhishek Bachchan) is what he seems or whether either of her choices are actually husband material. Kaushal told the press that he was moved by the reception the cast was given.
Meanwhile, over at the VISA Screening Room at the Princess of Wales Theatre, fans were able to see Wash Westmoreland’s Colette. Keira Knightley plays the true-life Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette, an actress, journalist and novelist, whose first four novels (the Claudine stories) were published under her husband Willy’s (Dominc West) pen name. As she becomes involved in the Paris social scene, she explores her sexuality and pushes gender boundaries. Her husband is up for it at first but is also jealous and protective of the income she generates for him, even locking her in a room until she produces enough pages to satisfy him. Knightley said she had fun playing her because “she was a real maverick, a trailblazer. She lived her life the way she wanted to.”
The PoW also played host to Joel Edgerton’s Boy Erased. The film stars Lucas Hedges as Jared, whose middle-class Arkansas existence – good grades, basketball, chaste girlfriend – is disrupted when he’s outed and his parents (Nicole Kidman and Russell Crowe) send him off to a church-sponsored “conversion therapy” camp. While there, he encounters nothing but bigotry and bullying. Edgerton said that he read Garrard Conley’s memoir and couldn’t stop thinking about his story and the confusion within his family. Edgerton said he immediately took steps to start translating it into a film.