The Circuit

In the short walk from the Varsity screening venue to the main industry hub of Sutton Place, there are six towering cranes on every side.  Toronto seems to be booming.  It's the fifth largest city is North America, it's one of the most livable, it's diverse, it's got a low crime rate, and it's expensive.  It's like New York, but with better hot dogs.  It's a manageable, pleasant city for this film festival, the first major one of the season, and a first look at what the next year on the circuit brings.

It brings war.  A lot of it.  The festival schedule is packed with war films - docs and narratives.  At a dinner party for "Body of War," Ellen Spiro and Phil Donahue's doc on Iraq war veteran Tomas Young (pictured below with Donahue), pre-dinner speeches were passionate about "the failure of this country's press" to expose "this government's lies."  It was Donahue's wife, Marlo Thomas, who stood up to offer the much-needed correction.  We weren't in that country.  We were in Canada.

Toronto doesn't have the Iraq war like New York does.  The city feels slightly emotionally distant from it.  Among the U.S. press and industry - so saturated with war media back home - it is a strange feeling to be here.  Add to that a dizzying amount of war films, and, as Variety put it earlier, an aimless fatigue sets in.  Where there should be outrage and discussion born from one or two great Iraq war films, instead there is exhaustion.  It's not the festival's fault.  Primarily, it's the baggage Americans carried over the border with them, getting heavier this week with General Petraeus' contention that the Iraqi police should be completely dismantled and rebuilt.  And heavier still on how that figures into troop reductions.  Obama will state later today that there should be a complete troop withdrawal by next year.  But his majority Democrats blew a chance to bring the issue forward when the war funding bill was recently passed without much of a fight.

For the film industry, this war fatigue was evident in Telluride just weeks ago.  The extremely negative reactions to De Palma's "Redacted" added to the gushing love for "Juno" and even "The Savages."  In Toronto, the collective chorus from "Rendition," "Battle for Haditha," "In the Valley of Elah," "Body of War," "Heavy Metal Baghdad," and "Captain Mike Across America," is failing to catch.  Instead, the naked knives of Cronenberg's "Eastern Promises" caught a wave of buzz, as did the gems like "Lars and the Real Girl," "The Visitor," "Chop Shop," and "Honeydripper."

Fest goers were warned of this fatigue in advance.  Remarked one journalist: "In terms of the tone of the films, I think that Noah [Cowan] did a decent job of preparing people for that... when he talked about the seriousness, the politics and the rigor that would be required to deal with all of these movies."

But as we roll into the festival's last days, a coherent, unique perspective of America's single most important dilemma has yet to be found.  And people are looking for it.  Instead they got too many voices, each one drowning the other out. 

Just like home.