It's rare to see a fly-on-the-wall documentary that's as much fun as Moon Over Broadway, the latest from the team of D.A. Pennebaker and Chris Hegedus (The War Room). A cinema verite Waiting for Guffman, it's a backstage look at the day-by-day, rewrite-by-rewrite creation of a Broadway play, and the fact that the show itself, Moon Over Buffalo, is a musty mediocrity is but the film's most pungent gag.
Orgazmo, the brainchild of Trey Parker (creator of the bad-boy animated series South Park), is a smash-you-in-the-ribs midnight porn farce that assaults you with one stupendously dumb sex joke after another. You'll giggle, and hate yourself every time. And, finally, Nicholas Barker's Unmade Beds is a funny, sad, and, in its quiet way, revolutionary synthesis of documentary and fiction. Four lonely New Yorkers looking for love in the personals "play" themselves in a script written by Barker based on their words. By the end, it's haunting to realize how often they've given voice to something that has fluttered through your own heart.
Let Cannes stake out the Euro-glamour territory. Let Sundance reign when it comes to deals struck by artfully stubbled young men doing serious acquisition business while standing knee-deep in Utah snow. The Toronto International Film Festival prides itself on the range and quality of its slate and on an appreciation of good manners. (I have never met volunteer ticket takers so pleasant.) Toronto, then, was the perfect place to debut The Apostle, a passionate project executive-produced, funded, directed, written by, and starring Robert Duvall as Sonny, a.k.a. E.F., a Pentecostal preacher — a really, complicatedly, intensely devout Christian, not a falsely, gooily, or condescendingly blinkered one. Driven from his Texas church and on the run after his wife's infidelity incited him to violence, a reborn E.F. moves to Louisiana, starts a new church, and continues to put his faith in God. There's a hint of Sling Blade in the fervor, but where Sling Blade's blessed-are-the-slow-witted moral gave me a sugar headache, the understated yet rigorous religious complexity of Duvall's serious movie is exciting.
Come to think of it, the films that moved me most in Toronto were those most understated and apparently matter-of-fact. For one, Afterglow, written and directed by Alan Rudolph, is a mature, offbeat, beautifully made pas de quatre about the intersecting romantic lives of two couples: Nick Nolte and Julie Christie, in full command (Christie is magnificent), play the older duo; Lara Flynn Boyle and Trainspotting's Jonny Lee Miller play their callow counterparts. The film unfolds so casually that the wrenching emotional climax comes as a surprise.
In Henry Fool, deadpan auteur Hal Hartley does Hartley-ish things — there are a lot of random yet inevitable encounters among highly styled characters. But the construct of this limber, clever meditation on fame and friendship is irresistible: A quiet garbageman named Simon Grim (James Urbaniak) meets up with egomaniacal intellectual Henry Fool (Thomas Jay Ryan), who is obsessed with writing his memoirs. The pompous thinker encourages the taciturn trash collector to write as well — and Grim turns out a powerful poem that makes him famous, while Fool's stuff stinks.
