If the goal of this year’s Toronto International Film Festival is to introduce a lot of the films that will be competing for awards for the next seven months, the jury is still out after the first four days of the 10-day fest.
If the goal is to welcome back audiences and give them a chance to celebrate crowd-pleasing cinema in the kind of communal environment that’s been missing for most of the last two years, the verdict is in and the goal has been achieved.
In the course of 24 hours on two blocks of downtown Toronto’s entertainment district on Friday, three packed houses — no social distancing and few masks — played host to, in chronological order:
• An opening-night midnight screening of “Weird: The Al Yankovic Story,” a ridiculous but uproarious and good-natured mock rock doc that christened the majestic Royal Alexandra Theatre as a new TIFF venue and brought together the biggest, most exuberant and most raucous crowd the Roku release will probably ever see.
• A Friday evening premiere for Gina Prince-Bythewood’s Sony release “The Woman King,” which happens to be both a thoroughly successful action movie and a monument to the empowerment of Black women, and which both thrilled and moved much of the crowd at the huge Roy Thomson Hall.
• A late Friday night debut for “Bros,” Nicholas Stoller and Billy Eichner’s gay rom-com from Universal that got a roaring standing ovation partly because it’s a landmark in major-studio, mainstream LGBTQ+ entertainment and partly because it’s just damn funny.
And that was just a one-day stretch, which was followed by the enormously successful back-to-back premieres of Rian Johnson’s “Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery” and Steven Spielberg’s “The Fabelmans” on Saturday, both of which found the directors coming onstage to celebrate the TIFF experience. “First, I’m going to say I’m really glad we came to Toronto!” said Spielberg, who’s been making movies for more than 50 years but said he’d never before brought a film to the festival.
The lack of social distancing and the paucity of masks may have repercussions down the road, but it gave the festival’s first few days an exuberance that was sorely missed in 2021, when a scaled-down TIFF was a little depressing except when you were able to lose yourself in the films. (The previous year, the festival had been all-virtual, apart from some special screenings for locals only.)
People came to this year’s festival badly wanting to celebrate, and so far the fest seems programmed to let them do just that, with an unexpectedly large number of mainstream crowd-pleasers screening in prime slots over the first four days. If we can ignore the Oscar race for a little bit longer, this year’s festival is definitely giving us a brutally competitive race for the TIFF audience award, which could plausibly go to almost any of this weekend’s big premieres.
Of course, the personality of a year at Toronto is not formed wholly by the most commercial entries, even if those seem to have seized most of the attention in the early going. But TIFF has also seen smaller films get attention, including Elegance Bratton’s “The Inspection” (Jeremy Pope as a gay Black teenager who joins the Marines), Lila Neugebauer’s “Causeway” (with deeply understated performances by Jennifer Lawrence and Brian Tyree Henry) and Danish writer-director Tobias Lindholm’s “The Good Nurse” (more great performances from Jessica Chastain and Eddie Redmayne). Plus some killer (in some cases literally) black comedies, including Mark Mylod’s “The Menu” (a very twisted comedy about food, art death and Ralph Fiennes’ state-of-the-art imperious glowering), Zachary Wigon’s “Sanctuary” (a deliciously nasty two-hander with Christopher Abbott as a rich guy inheriting his father’s company and Margaret Qualley as the dominatrix who’s always a couple of steps ahead of him) and Tim Story’s “The Blackening” (a twist on the horror movie trope that says the Black characters are killed off first).
On the documentary side, always a highlight at TIFF, Gabriela Cowperthwaite’s “The Grab” was an opening-night shocker in the way it followed (and assisted) investigative journalists in uncovering shadowy global schemes to control the food supply in the future; Tamana Ayazi and Marcel Mettelsiefen’s “In Her Hands” had uncommonly deep access to the last female mayor in Afghanistan during the Taliban takeover; and Sacha Jenkins’ “Louis Armstrong’s Black & Blues” tackled the life and work of the protean jazz pioneer and managed to get across all of his contradictions.
Still to come at TIFF are the movies that have premiered at other festivals but that will play in Toronto at the end of the first weekend; that number began with Darren Aronofsky’s gloriously harrowing “The Whale,” which received an enormous and lengthy ovation on Sunday afternoon. It will also include Martin McDonagh’s “The Banshees of Inisherin,” Sam Mendes’ “The Empire of Light” and Sarah Polley’s provocative “Women Talking.”
No doubt the TIFF slate will go a long way toward filling the 2022 awards roster, but the Oscar handicapping feels a little premature at this point. For now, the Toronto International Film Festival seems to be about having fun at the movies. And after the last couple of years we’ve all been through, there’s nothing wrong with that.
