Thanks to the ongoing writers and actors strikes in Hollywood, this year the celebrity factor was dialed way down. Yes, Sean Penn and Dakota Johnson showed up for the Canadian premiere of their erotically charged chamber piece, “Daddio.” And Sylvester Stallone was on hand, not only for the world premiere of the Netflix documentary “Sly,” but also for an exhibition of his paintings at the TIFF Bell Lightbox theater, which played host to an adoring — and endearing — conversation with the actor on Friday. (Some productions were granted interim agreements by the Writers Guild of America and the Screen Actors Guild-American Federation of Television and Radio Artists, allowing their members to make promotional appearances during the strike.)
But for the most part, this year’s TIFF, which wrapped up with awards announced Sunday, was a far more muted affair — meaning that it allowed an exceptionally strong program of films to succeed on merits alone.
One of the strongest examples is this year’s big winner: “American Fiction,” the movie that won TIFF’s coveted audience award on Sunday. Adapted by first-time filmmaker Cord Jefferson from Percival Everett’s novel “Erasure,” the mordant, generous-hearted satire about race, identity, code-switching and White liberal hypocrisy strikes a perfect balance of warm humor and bracing honesty. (The TIFF audience award is known as a harbinger of good things to come at Oscar time: Such recent best pictures as “Nomadland,” “Green Book” and “12 Years a Slave” were all audience award winners.)
Another buzzy audience favorite, “The Holdovers,” was a runner-up for the award. Alexander Payne’s tenderly funny portrait of an angst-ridden teenager and his grouchy teacher at a boys’ boarding school in the 1970s reunites Payne with his “Sideways” star Paul Giamatti with touchingly appealing results. (The film will hit theaters in late October to early November.)
Both “American Fiction” and “The Holdovers” emerged as favorites early in the festival, as did “Hit Man,” Richard Linklater’s wickedly dark comedy, which features Glen Powell as a mild-mannered college professor who becomes an undercover cop-slash-assassin.
Powell’s performance was revelatory for an actor who took every advantage of being center stage. That can also be said for “American Fiction” star Jeffrey Wright, who plays a novelist and teacher in a long-overdue star turn that, with luck, will garner attention during awards season. TIFF, which comes on the heels of festivals in Venice and Telluride, marks the unofficial start of that dizzyingly aspirational time of year, which, if the SAG-AFTRA strike continues, will look decidedly unlike its predecessors; in Toronto, the stirring biopics “Rustin” (Nov. 3), starring Colman Domingo as civil rights activist Bayard Rustin, and “Nyad” (Oct. 20), starring Annette Bening as long-distance swimmer Diana Nyad and Jodie Foster as Nyad’s friend and coach Bonnie Stoll, were clearly poised to go the distance when it comes to acting nominations.
As undeniably powerful as those performances were, some of the most compelling films at TIFF went one step further, celebrating and often playfully interrogating the notion of performance itself. In “Dream Scenario” (Nov. 10), Nicolas Cage proves just as game playing a professor (academics are apparently this year’s go-to protagonists) who inexplicably starts to show up in strangers’ dreams, a setup that gives filmmaker Kristoffer Borgli a chance to stage all manners of wildly improbable set pieces choreographed around his amusingly deadpan leading man. In “Wildcat,” Ethan Hawke directs his daughter Maya Hawke in a narrative about the novelist Flannery O’Connor — not only as the author, but also as an imagined player in her own stories, staged with ruthless wit and Southern gothic luridness. And Powell, who until now was best known for playing opposite Tom Cruise in last year’s “Top Gun: Maverick,” clearly has a blast channeling his co-star’s cocky bravado throughout “Hit Man,” in which he dons outlandish disguises and personae to catch people in the act of engaging a killer for hire. The result — described by Linklater at a public screening as a “sexy-couple dark romantic comedy date movie” — is indeed all of that, wrapped inside a smartly entertaining deconstruction of one of cinema’s most shopworn tropes.
As of this writing, both “Wildcat” and “Hit Man” were available for acquisition, and they were in good company: Some of the best-received films at this year’s TIFF arrived without distributors, including Christy Hall’s unsettling but compulsively watchable “Daddio”; “Green Border,” Agnieszka Holland’s harrowing drama about refugees enduring unspeakable cruelty as they are shunted between Poland and Belarus; and Azazel Jacobs’s “His Three Daughters.” An exquisitely calibrated domestic drama starring Carrie Coon, Elizabeth Olsen and Natasha Lyonne as sisters caring for a father in hospice, Jacobs’s quiet but potent barnburner turned out to be one of the most impressive films of an already impressive slate.
Not surprisingly for a film about death, “His Three Daughters” addresses rue and regret, themes that thread through several films, serving as a reminder that many of these projects were conceived during the pandemic. Perhaps for that reason, they often reflected on the creative process itself. Ava DuVernay’s “Origin,” adapted from Isabel Wilkerson’s 2020 book, “Caste,” received three ovations when it screened here on Wednesday, in part because of the bold swing the filmmaker took with the material. Rather than deliver a dry, documentarylike recap of Wilkerson’s prodigiously researched history of arbitrary social hierarchies, DuVernay chose to make Wilkerson a character and dramatize the theoretical breakthrough that made it possible for her to reframe race through the transnational and timeless concept of caste.
Played in “Origin” by Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor, Wilkerson struggles through crushing grief — brought on by the killing of Trayvon Martin, and the loss of three close family members — to achieve intellectual and personal catharsis. In “Flipside,” Chris Wilcha’s high-spirited but deceptively profound documentary about his years-long case of auteur’s block, the journey might have looked quirkier, but the stakes were no less serious — especially when it came to overcoming internal and external obstacles to produce something meaningful and, just maybe, transformative. How fitting, then, that TIFF closed with “Sly” (Nov. 3), Thom Zimny’s observant, densely layered portrait of the action star who so perfectly embodies defiance, perseverance and self-creation. Those were the dominating principles at this year’s TIFF in movies that, with few stars on hand, eloquently spoke for themselves.