Oh, hello.

There comes a time in every person’s life when one must leave Toronto. Some poor souls, like doomed J.T. Yorke, leave it in a most dramatic and final fashion. Others, like me, simply hop aboard a propeller-ed aircraft and zip over to Newark. I am always a little sad to leave Toronto, as it is the second and last stop on my annual fall film festival pilgrimage (I’m not counting the New York Film Festival, because that happens where I live) and thus my return home means that all the initial excitement of the season has passed. This year, I feared I would be glummer than usual, because Venice was a little disappointing and some of the early stuff I saw in Toronto did not give me hope for the future of the film business. But the good things were mostly waiting for the end of my trip; when they arrived, I breathed a big, happy sigh of relief.

Well, the Mike Leigh movie, Tender Loving Care, has already helped cure some of my festival blues. But then, a few days later, it was joined by Elsinore and Possible Love, two stunners of differing shape that delivered beyond expectations. 

I had been skeptical of Elsinore, because too often biopics are starchy and tedious, and I’ve never been quite fully aboard the Andrew Scott love train. I had heard wonderful things about his performance—in which he plays the actor Ian Charleson as he endeavors to play Hamlet at the National Theatre while dying from AIDS complications—but might he be wonderful in an otherwise stodgy, Judy-esque star vehicle?

Turns out, no. Scott is terrific in a movie that, on the whole, is thoughtful and wrenching, a vivid period piece about an actor’s curtain call, and a beautiful tribute to the theater folk who supported so many men who were otherwise pariahs in the world. There has been some criticism about the movie’s heavy reliance on montage, but I think director Simon Stone effectively employs that device to capture a heady mood of creative ecstasy and the sense that reality is bending as Charleson reels toward the end of things. 

Reading some of the negative takes on the film, it began to seem that some people have simply become knee-jerk resistant to sentimentality, to big emotion expressed on film without any irony or self-aware restraint. It’s easy to feel cooler or smarter than movies that are so earnest; dismissing them signifies a certain sophistication, I guess. Obviously there are valid critiques of Elsinore, but some of the negative reactions out of Telluride and Toronto were instead snide and haughty and—yes I’m going to say it—felt the teensiest bit anti-gay. In a deeply subconscious way, at least. Plenty of gay people rejected the movie too, mind you, but that’s because a lot of gay people reject anything about other gay people. Though, ugh, that’s a topic for another day; I’ll write longer about where I think Elsinore sits in gay culture when the movie is released. 

Look, I know it’s also possible that everyone is arguing against the movie in good faith and that I’m merely coming up with excuses for why I’m an easily manipulated sap. But I really do think there’s genuine artistry in Elsinore, beyond Scott’s staggering performance. His enormous work is the main selling point, though, and while I’m not one hundred percent convinced that he’s got the Oscar sewn up as some are saying, his odds are very, very good. One gets the sense that maybe the Academy would like to make a little history this year, and giving best actor to an out gay man for the first time ever would certainly accomplish that. (Spacey et al. don’t count because they weren’t out at the time of their win.)