A notably uneven day towards the end of the festival, with earnest yet overlong racing pictures, a finely crafted black comedy, and a turkey that annoyed the heck out of me. Here are the films I saw at TIFF on September 17th:
Drifter
Drifter is two movies competing for the spotlight, and only one is any good. The first is an immensely sincere, charming sports drama; the second is an overwrought and horribly generic crime thriller. Every time Drifter veers into the second lane, the film crawls to a halt.
It's a passion project for director and star Sung Kang, best known for his part in the Fast & Furious franchise, and Drifter wears its heart on its sleeve. For all its faults, this is such a passionate and deeply earnest production that I wanted it to succeed, even as it kept stumbling over itself.
Kang plays Tree, a janitor working at the racetrack of a nothing town somewhere in Barstow, California. He's blind in one eye, yet possesses an immense talent for drift racing, which he practises in his spare time with his personally tuned car, Lola. At night, he runs drugs for a local gangster, who holds the entire town in his iron grip. Tree has no family, and his only friends own the local repair shop, though he keeps even them at a distance.
Kang is terrific as the downtrodden man looking to make something of himself. It's a very Rocky-coded performance in a movie that borrows liberally from that sporting icon, but it works. Here's a man who's taken so many kicks in his life he's perpetually wound up and ready to fight. Kindness is an alien concept to him, and when he encounters it, he can't help but recoil.
When Tree finally gets a chance to race, he finds an unexpected ally in Bennet (Michael Nehring), an aging manager whose dreams died with his daughter. Together, they may have a shot at something akin to redemption.
This part of Drifter is conventional, but effective. It hits all the trademarks of the underdog sports movie, and everything works. The drama is moving, the performances are good, and the race sequences are some of the best I've ever seen. If this were all Drifter had to offer, it would be a wonderful, small movie worth mentioning alongside Rocky.
But then there's the other half of Drifter, where Tree has to contend with the local gangster, which adds almost an hour extra to the runtime. These scenes do nothing for the film, and every time this particular plot shows up, I found myself rolling my eyes. By the end, the two storylines actively fight against each other, as if the film had two different edits nobody squared away into one unified whole.
There's a great film buried somewhere in this version of Drifter, and I genuinely hope it comes out one day. This is a beautifully shot, passionately made film with a lot to love. But it's also an unfinished, oddly disjointed mess with a narrative that stops and stutters like a car pumped with bad gas.
2/5 stars.
Back in Black
Back in Black is a very dry, very funny comedy that's a little too long and aimless, but so charmingly cast I didn't mind the missteps. Its secret weapon is the fantastic Ella Ballentine, who plays the silent and taciturn Sam. She's the granddaughter of Clyde (Christopher Walken) and Autumn (Jane Curtin), the proprietors of a family funeral home fallen on hard times.
They've got a very particular problem: nobody is dying. People are healthy, they use seatbelts, and medical care works. "We had a virus that was supposed to be the best thing to happen to this industry, and nobody could go out!" Clyde proclaims early on, and it's a great litmus test if you're on the same wavelength as the film. If a pitch-black COVID joke doesn't do it for you, chances are nothing else will, either.
To save their family, Sam has the morbid idea to help death along a bit. Nothing fancy, just a few screws loose here and there, and maybe gravity will do the rest. Things escalate, but rarely in foreseeable ways, and even the slow sheriff eventually starts to smell a rat.
There are a few too many twists and turns, and some of the gags lose their punch as a result. Luckily, a couple of the long shots are so good and so well-timed, they make up for the misses. Ballentine is hysterical as the impishly dedicated Sam, and she finds immense humor in stillness. Just watch how much she can do with a simple glance or an upturned brow. It's a tremendous comedic performance that makes the entire film.
Back in Black won't be for everyone. It reminds me of the scene in Birdcage, where Gene Hackman drones on about the trees in New Hampshire. The humor is dry, intentionally drawn out, and requires you to go with it for the whole ride. If the sight of Christopher Walken deadpanning "Jesus fucked us!" in a funeral home gets a chuckle, chances are you'll have as good a time as I did.
4/5 stars.
Up Against It
If you look up the word "misguided" in the dictionary, you'll find a picture of Up Against It, a film so adrift you want to call for a search party. After all, what else can you call a romantic comedy with hefty amounts of slapstick and vomit gags that's also the story of a young girl getting life-threatening leukemia?
Here, it's 14-year-old Rose (Eden Hamilton), daughter of the viciously awful Álvaro (Antonio Banderas) and Saffron (Eva Birthistle), who discovers her childhood cancer has returned with a vengeance. The doctors say there's only one solution: Rose needs stem cell transplants, and quickly. But the only way to find a suitable donor is for Álvaro and Saffron to make another baby. Except they're in new relationships, and very much divorced. Or are they?
For two hours, we follow the will-they-won't-they dance with plot twists so bereft of surprises they make the word obvious feel small. Each cast member acts like they're in a different production, and the entire film feels stitched together from six different TV pilots. In one scene, the doctors bleakly intone that Eden will die if she doesn't get the morally questionable treatment. It's the moment where the film could defy the odds and do something new and interesting with the material. After all, TIFF already has an example of this in Trash Mountain, which handled black comedy as a coping mechanism with great care and poignancy.
Instead, the dialog breaks down into discount-store Richard Curtis banter, playing like a hobbyist theater production of Who's on First. Before the scene is out, Banderas has offered his new wife as tribute, there's a joke that divorce causes cancer, and a hint that perhaps something good can come out of their child being terminally ill.
Yeah, it's that kind of movie. An immoral, ugly, insipidly written mess that uses the looming death of a child as an excuse for the direst romcom clichés, lazy drama, and one of the most bafflingly stupid climaxes I've seen this year.
Reader, I enjoy trash. I have no qualms about black comedy or unsavory subject matter. All I ask is that the filmmakers themselves have good taste. There is no evidence of that here, not even by accident.
1/5 stars.
Check out my coverage from day seven here:
Joonatan Itkonen
