Hello, hosers!

I’m still here in Canada, where a bartender said “we don’t serve that” when I ordered a bourbon the other night. What he meant was, bourbon is an American product, and everyone in this country is boycotting such things as much as they can at the moment. The bartender said it in a joking way, but he meant it, too. I said the usual thing one says when traveling abroad these days—I’m not one of those Americans, I promise—and we had a little laugh about it. Then he gave me the tiniest pour of whiskey you’ve ever seen, because this is Canada. 

The whiskey incident happened on Saturday night, when I met up with some friends to do some chitchatting about what we’d seen thus far and what, if anything, was gonna win those big old Oscar awards. But I couldn’t really focus on that conversation, because I had just come from a dinner during which I talked to my seatmate the entire time. And that seat mate was one Lewis “My Daddy’s in Casper But I Won’t Ghost” Pullman, who is so handsome and charming that it’s probably not even legal in Canada. I won’t divulge what we talked about because I don’t want to jeopardize our impending nuptials, but it was very nice to meet someone whose weird upbringing has not warped them into a gnarled entitlement goblin. He seems like a good guy. Isn’t that nice?

But why am I rambling on about that, when the movies are what’s important. Since last we spoke, I have seen Mike Leigh’s new film, the festival crowd-pleaser I Play Rocky, the Sarah Paulson-starring drama Closing Night, and Prima Facie, the film adaptation of a lauded play. The best of the bunch is, no surprise, Leigh’s Tender Loving Care, another of his carefully observed slice-of-life studies of ordinary people dealing with the extraordinary undulations of life. This one finds the 83-year-old auteur considering the end of things and taking appreciative stock of those around him who are there to help on his journey out of this world. 

The movie is about two social worker friends, Amy (Kate O’Flynn, of Widow’s Bay) and Rosie (Alice Bailey Johnson), who are navigating various romantic woes while Amy looks in on her elderly parents, Geoff (Paul Jesson) and Birdie (Marion Bailey). A thing happens that I won’t divulge here, but while Tender Loving Care does drift into shatteringly sad territory, the overall feel of the film is warmer and more celebratory. It is a grand tribute to the nurturing instinct possessed by so many people, the natural tendency toward compassion that humans perhaps don’t get quite enough credit for these days. It made me weep, but at least some of those tears were happy ones. 

And there’s a cute family connection in the film that I didn’t realize until just now. Marion Bailey is Mike Leigh’s romantic partner, and Bailey Johnson is Bailey’s daughter from her first marriage, though they don’t play mother and child in the film. That adds an extra layer of coziness to the whole thing, the sense that these people are drawing from the very real experiences of caring for one another. There’s no such thing as nepotism in a Mike Leigh film, I’ve decided, not when everyone’s making four dollars to be there. 

So that was a real highlight, though the audience at my screening—a mix of Letterboxd folks and local Boomers—were merely polite in their reaction. I guess they were saving their cheers for I Play Rocky, which world-premiered here over the weekend and has gone over like gangbusters. In many ways, the movie feels like it was specifically engineered to be a TIFF hit. It’s from Peter Farrelly, who premiered Green Book here and solved the problem of racism, and it concerns a widely beloved cultural object (the film Rocky) that is plenty old enough to be a source of intense nostalgia for the elders (and the elders at heart) in the audience. 

I really had zero interest in seeing I Play Rocky, because it looked like corny TIFF bait and because—as I disclosed in these pages a while back, but still inspired shock when I told colleagues here—I have never seen the motion picture Rocky. Boxing movies are not a thing I tend to like, and Rocky in particular seems really grainy and brown and boring. But now I kind of want to see it? Because I Play Rocky is fun and charming, a behind-the-scenes movie that makes a lot of broad, but successful, appeals to what we in the present know about the past. It’s funny when, for instance, characters listen to a sample of Bill Conti’s iconic score and don’t really like it. You know, that sort of joke: oh how naive the people of the past were, having no idea that everything they are working toward is going to become the stuff of legend. There’s a kindness in that kind of reconsideration, I think, a collective spirit of encouragement for, well, stuff that already happened and is fixed in history. 

The kid they got to play a young Sylvester Stallone, Anthony Ippolito, does a pretty good impression of one of the 20th century’s weirder celebrities, even if the portraiture is all very soft-focus and kind. We see basically no darkness in this version of Stallone, save for a tunnel-vision ambition that alienates his then-wife—but, oh right, he’s handsomely rewarded for that ambition in the end. People want that sort of hagiography, though: the crowds in Toronto have gone absolutely nuts for I Play Rocky, and I’d have to assume that it’s a strong contender for the People’s Choice Award. That said, I’ve heard that the first screening of The Debut (on Sunday night) was a near-orgiastic experience, the film lovers of Canada’s biggest city losing their shit en masse. I’m seeing that one tonight, and will report back about whether a second screening has a similarly ecstatic vibe. 

While there was spontaneous applause at a moment in Prima Facie—adapted from the one-woman play of the same name—it felt a little forced, like a sign lit up at the Roy Thomson Hall (my least favorite venue here, by a lot) telling audience members to react to a big speech. The play did a little of that too, resorting to speechifying at the end, but the movie does even more of it. Perhaps because the central power of the play is lost when you add other characters and make it a more traditionally linear story. Why they bothered to adapt it this way at all, when the whole reason the play was so massive was because it was staggering to watch one person (Jodie Comer, in specific) talk for 100 minutes straight, is a mystery. 

Cynthia Erivo leads the film, and she’s fine. There’s a woodenness there, though, and I can’t quite tell if that’s because the character is weirdly underwritten in this version, or if the flatness that has plagued a lot of Erivo’s past film performances is causing trouble yet again. It might be both? Whatever is going on, I don’t think that Erivo will factor into the awards race this year; the movie needed to go over a lot better than it did on Sunday night—especially with Julianne Moore making people lose their minds at a different theater a few blocks away. 

I don’t think Sarah Paulson will be chasing her first nomination either, as her film, the melodrama Closing Night, was tepidly received on Saturday. Directed by the actor Cody Fern, Closing Night is at times a clunky Almodóvar riff (particularly on his one English-language feature The Room Next Door) and at others a more grounded movie about a fractured family. Fern can’t really decide on a consistent tone, so the movie bounces between what could almost be called camp and a more lo-fi naturalism. There’s a lot of whiplash happening in the movie, which is overstuffed with plot and hinges on a central lie that really makes no sense at all.

That said, if you loved Sarah Paulson in her Broadway play Appropriate, you’ll like her here. She’s basically doing a version of that same weary irascibility, playing a famous actor who must rely on her estranged family when she receives a shocking, and grim, medical diagnosis. Naomi Watts plays her sister, and though some friends here think she’s awful in the movie, I kinda liked her. I’ve long been rooting for Watts, I guess, and was heartened to see her getting good, well-received material recently in Capote vs. the Swans and, yes, Love Story (in which she played Jackie O.) I like what she does in Closing Night too, even if she’s the one saddled with the creakiest plot mechanism. 

But a couple of fun performances (plus Dianne Wiest hamming it up) aren’t enough to rescue Fern’s turgid effort from ruin. The movie is trying to do a lot but is instead—or because of all that straining effort—curiously inert. One watches the movie and hopes that everyone enjoyed their acting exercise, because that’s about all this movie is good for, I’m afraid.

Okay, sorry to cut things off so bluntly but I have to go see Elsinore and, I’m assuming, cry my face off. I’ll be back to you on Wednesday with a writeup of that and The Debut. It’s a big day here in Cabbagetown. (Well, to be honest, I’m a few neighborhoods away from Cabbagetown, but isn’t it fun that there’s a Cabbagetown here?)