Unlike most I don’t immediately default to Charly when I think of Cliff Robertson, who died yesterday at age 88. I think instead of his performance as Higgins, the cynical CIA official in Three Days of the Condor (’75). Or his hammer-like performance as Joe Cantwell, the sanctimonious, Richard Nixon-esque presidential candidate in The Best Man (’64).

Charly is an agreeable, sweetly touching drama, and Robertson played a mentally challenged man with care and sensitivity. But gentle sentiment never ages well. For me something more interesting came out when Robertson played shits.

Christopher Plummer‘s beguiling performance in Mike Mills‘ Beginners (i.e., a 70ish dad who decides to come out and live his waning years as a gay man) has looked like a strong contender for Best Supporting Actor Oscar all along. But after seeing Plummer charm and electrify and ham it up and speechify in gloriously boozy Shakespearean fashion in Barrymore, which I saw a couple of hours ago at the Bell Lightbox, I’m all but convinced he has the Oscar in the bag.

Christopher Plummer during a post-screening interview with director Atom Egoyan following this afternoon’s screening of Barrymore.

As long as the Academy sees this low-budgeted Canadian film, that is. Once they all see it, the game will be pretty much over. Because Plummer isn’t just portraying the late John Barrymore, and is so doing reanimating all the flamboyance and lamentations and exaltations of a once-great actor’s career in his last year of life, he’s also playing, in a sense, himself. There are, after all, certain parallels.

Add this performance to Beginners plus Plummer’s turn in David Fincher‘s The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo, and he’s going to be awfully heard to beat.

Barrymore basically captures (and visually enhances to some extent) the stage show that Plummer performed in New York and Stratford in the mid ’90s, and lately performed again in Toronto earlier this year.

Consider this excerpt from Ben Brantley‘s N.Y. Times review of the stage show, called “A Dazzler of a Drink, Full of Gab and Grief“:

“The standup breakdown has become a reigning form in the theater of dead celebrities in recent years. Whether the focus is Truman Capote or Maria Callas, it allows its subjects to spin off witty anecdotes about glamorous lives while occasionally erupting into tormented cries showing the crippled soul beneath the tinsel. It’s like being seated next to a chatty trophy star at a dinner party with conveniently reduced potential for embarrassment.

”Barrymore is definitely part of this somewhat shameless tradition. And the actor in his waning years, a pathological specimen of self-parody, would seem to be an especially shameless subject. But under the assured, appropriately theatrical direction of Gene Saks, Mr. Plummer emerges as far more than the ”clown prince,” as Barrymore here describes himself with sour disgust, of America’s royal family of actors.

“What he achieves instead is the sense of a man whose vertiginous highs and lows were born of the same knot of impulses: a toxic mix of arrogance, insecurity, raw terror, the attention span of a 2-year-old and an insatiable appetite for the pleasures of the flesh. Mr. Luce, to his credit, has not given Barrymore a moment of revelation in which he untangles these elements. And Mr. Plummer seems to live intimately with all of them at once.”

The sidewalk sunlight was hell — I felt like Lawrence of Arabia‘s Gasim baking in the Nefud desert — as I stood for 90 minutes on King Street yesterday. I was a rush line to get into a public screening of Barrymore. I was sweating and melting, and I was beginning to smell like a gym towel on top of that. I will never again suffer like this in order to get into a TIFF public screening.

The Sony buffet for junket whores journalists (myself included) doing Moneyball and The Ides of March interviews, taken yesterday morning inside the Ritz Carlton 2nd-floor lobby.

Posted/tweeted today around 6:30 pm Eastern by Moneyball costar Jonah Hill. These guys have real chemistry in Bennett Miller’s film. it’s not bromance chemistry but a kind of yin-yang thing — Pitt gets into Hill’s face, asks him a blunt question, Hill hesitates and gives him the answer Pitt wants to hear. They do this over and over. It’s great.

Moneyball costars Jonah Hill, Brad Pitt — shot either today or yesterday inside Toronto’s Ritz Carlton.

If my Bennett Miller interview comes off on schedule (i.e., five minutes from now), I’ll be able to catch a 12:15 pm screening of Gareth Huw Evans and Iko Uwais‘ The Raid, which had its Toronto Film festival debut on Thursday night. A Twitchfilm post called it “a bad-ass fusion of Die Hard and Assault On Precinct 13 with a body count that would make John Woo blush as the bullets, blades, sticks, elbows and feet get flying early and never let up.”

A tip of the hat to Fox Searchlight for acquiring Steve McQueen‘s NC-17 Shame. As I more or less said in my Telluride review, it’s hard to like Shame as you’re watching it (because it’s so friggin’ bleak) but it’s all but impossible to not think about it, a lot, after it’s over. It might become a modest commercial hit (maybe0, but the Academy blue-hairs are going to blow this movie off so fast your head will spin. Nonetheless, any distributor that puts cash on the barrelhead for a bona fide art film has my admiration.

Another quote from my Telluride Shame review: “This is what an art film does — it just stands its ground and refuses to do anything you might want it to do.”

At last night’s Ides of March party Phillip Seymour Hoffman — a.k.a. “Philly” — insisted that Paul Thomas Anderson‘s The Master, which he just finished filming, is “not a Scientology film.” But I’ve read an early draft and it seems to be about a Scientology-like cult, i said to him. And I’ve read about the parallels. “I don’t know what you’ve heard and what script you’ve read,” Hoffman replied. “Trust me, it’s not about Scientology.”

Maybe not specifically or literally, but there are just too many proofs and indications that The Master (or whatever it’s eventually going to be called) is at least about a cult with a charismatic L. Ron Hubbard-type leader that could be seen as a metaphor for Scientology. At least that. Read this February 2010 Playlist analysis and tell me it’s not that. And that Hoffman’s denial isn’t perhaps a little too definitive.

I’m on my way to an Ides of March party that starts at 7 pm and then another one for the Weinstein Co.’s The Artist, but I have to at least paste a couple of tweets about Gerado Naranjo‘s Miss Bala, which I missed in Cannes but finally saw today. Tweet #1: “If Michelangelo Antonioni had made a movie about a Mexican beauty queen grappling with drug gangsters, the result might have been Miss Bala.” Tweet #2: “Naranjo has totally ignored the chaotic action aesthetic of Michael Bay & acolytes, and delivered an action thriller with a truly elegant visual style. Long shots and almost no cut-cut-cut-cuting.”