Toronto Dispatch: Three Burials; Little Fish; War Within

Cate Blanchett in Little Fish
Our 14th film of the festival and first of the day was North Country from Niki Caro, director of Whale Rider. This is the film chronicling the early 90's landmark sexual harassment suit from women working at a mining site in northern Minnesota. Charlize Theron is fantastic here, playing a very thick-skinned women who's put up with a lot in her life ,but refuses to take any more after her new mining job is able to help her give her and her children every modest thing they could ask for. I found it a very powerful film and would be interested in knowing just how much detailed in the film actually happened to Therons' real-life counterpart. The film is quite strong in all areas, especially its supporting cast.

Following North Country we went to see The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada, the directorial debut from Tommy Lee Jones. Unfortunately no one was on hand to introduce the film, so just the piracy note and then straight into the screening. I'm not sure what to think of this film, though I am fond of Jones' character, Pete Perkins, as well as Melquiades who spends a very short amount of overall time on the screen. I bought into their relationship and Pete's motivation to carry out his friend’s final wishes. However, overall I feel the film is a little long in the tooth and repetitive, and could probably have been more successful as an episode of Walker, Texas Ranger or something than a feature length film.

 
After that screening we had a break in our schedule and walked over to the box office to sort out Friday, on which we only have 1 screening scheduled. However, seeing that Little Fish was available, we rushed our way down to the theatre. Unfortunately I think our time would have been better spent wandering about downtown, maybe getting a decent sit-down meal rather than another eat-while-walking one so familiar to us during the festival. Little Fish is an extremely slow film that spends a lot of time on redundant character development and by the time it begins to get interesting it's over. Cate Blanchett's talents (as Tracy Heart, a recovered drug abuser) are grossly underutilized here, as are Hugo Weaving's. As Lionel, a drug abusing bygone star footballer, he probably turns in the best performance, though the character is in a drug induced stupor the entire time, so there's little range to it and not really enough to cling on to. Overall the film does a good job of showing Tracy’s strength over temptation and desire to get her life straight and the inverse of Lionel always saying he will, but never really trying, just falling deeper and deeper. But as I say, the pacing is quite slow. 

Our final film of the day was The War Within. This is a film follows a Pakistani man (Hassan, played by Ayad Akhtar, also a co-writer with the director) as he’s captured by “western intelligence” and meets Khalid, both of whom are sent back to Pakistan where Hassan is then recruited by "The Brotherhood" of which Khalid is already a member. Hassan is then worn down to become a terrorist. They’re then both sent to New York City where Hassan stays with an old friend Sayeed (Firdous Bamji) as he awaits and struggles with the deed that will be assigned to him. The director, Joseph Castelo, says the film is neutral, which I agree to some extent. However there definitely seems to be a slant towards the “Americans Made Them” mentality on the birth of a terrorist. Still, we see Hassan rejecting Western Culture while Khalid starts to absorb it. Though the film follows Hassan primarily, it’s a little interesting to see how they both handle things in the context of their characters. However, overall the film is quite slow and the performances are rather thin. This is one of the HDNet films that is to undergo their simultaneous distribution plan of Theatre/DVD/HDNet, so if this film does interest you, I recommend seeking the cheapest way to see it. This isn’t a bad film, but it’s not really a good one either. Good concept, though.