Midway into the Toronto International Film Festival, when I'd already sat through my share of show-off American grunge, deepthink Iranian allegory, and bad films by directors who used to be great, I went to see a movie called My Best Fiend. It's a documentary by the legendary German filmmaker Werner Herzog that looks back, in a disarmingly funny and personal way, on his relationship with Klaus Kinski, the raging genius demento who starred in half a dozen Herzog films, notably Aguirre, the Wrath of God (1972).
We see clips of Kinski throwing mad-dog tantrums on the set, relaxing with a smile, and hectoring a German audience in a deranged one-man stage show known as The Jesus Tour (from what we see, it looks more like The Hitler's Id Tour). Kinski, with his pop-eyed Wagnerian swagger, is fascinating in a way that only a scrupulously rehearsed monomaniac can be. It occurred to me that where people at film festivals used to watch Herzog masterpieces, they now watch movies about actors who starred in Herzog masterpieces. Reality has moved center stage, displacing the lure of the imagination itself.
This, it appears, is happening in movie culture everywhere. The most riveting feature I saw in Toronto, for instance, was Boys Don't Cry, a meticulous true-life drama that traces the tragedy of Teena Brandon (the extraordinary Hilary Swank), a gangly troublemaker who, in the early '90s, drifted into rural Nebraska, trimmed back her hair, and successfully passed herself off as a young man. In the movie, Brandon, looking like an emaciated Matt Damon, roughhouses like a stoner jock and wins a girlfriend (whom she cautiously seduces), only to seal her doom in the eyes of a society that likes its sex roles straight and narrow. The director, Kimberly Peirce, works at a level of naturalistic purity and force that recalls the Gus Van Sant of Drugstore Cowboy.
Another instance of reality trumping fiction is Errol Morris' docu-mystery Mr. Death: The Rise and Fall of Fred A. Leuchter, Jr., the first truly great film from the creator of Fast, Cheap & Out of Control. It's a portrait of a weaselly, officious Massachusetts engineer who became an architect of prison death machines and was then commissioned, by a Holocaust denier, to conduct a ''scientific'' study of the gas chambers at Auschwitz. The result is a chillingly memorable X-ray view of the American bureaucratic soul.
Hoping to witness an artistic comeback, I went in to see Gregory's Two Girls, Bill Forsyth's sequel to his 1980 charmer Gregory's Girl, with John Gordon Sinclair, now 35ish and jowly, as a Scottish high school teacher who haplessly chases one of his students and generally behaves like he needs to get a life, if not a straitjacket. Unfortunately, this stilted mutt of a movie feels like Forsyth's final confession of artistic impotence. Another faded '80s minimalist, Jim Jarmusch, offered Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai, starring Forest Whitaker as a very dour lone-wolf hitman. The movie lacks even Jarmusch's distinctive rhythms; it's thin, meandering, and arbitrarily fixated on race.
