For whatever reason the MPRM people did nothing during TIFF to encourage my interest in John Cameron Mitchell‘s Rabbit Hole (not a single invite, appeal, cajoling…nothing), so I missed last Monday night’s premiere and party and everything else. Thanks, guys! But I caught up with it this afternoon, and it’s not half bad. A bit more than that actually. It isn’t quite A-plus or A but a solid A-minus, and it may begin to penetrate as a Best Picture contender down the road.

It also contains Nicole Kidman‘s best acting in a long while (and I didn’t have a single thought about her facial work). Aaron Eckhart, as her emotionally subdued if not submerged husband, runs with his best part since his nice biker guy in Erin Brockovich.

Rabbit Hole is a restrained/contained middle-class grief drama in the vein of Ordinary People (i.e., dead son), and yes, it does seem curious (although perfectly fine and allowable) that Mitchell has made such a quietly effective MOR drama without so much as an allusion to wang sandwiches or semen facials or that line of country.

David Lindsay-Abaire‘s screenplay (based on his play) never lays it on too thick, but doesn’t hold back too much either. It’s a process drama about keeping the trauma buried or at least suppressed, and about how it comes out anyway — a little hostility here and there, odd alliances and connections, a little hash smoking (a la American Beauty), stabs at organized grief therapy, questions of whether to keep or get rid of the son’s toys. It finally explodes in a bracing argument scene between Kidman and Eckhart, and then it subsides again and comes back and loop-dee-loops and finally settles down into a kind of acceptance between them. Not a peace treaty as much as an understanding that overt hostilities will cease.

A few people applauded at the end of this afternoon’s press screening. I haven’t heard any clapping at all at any TIFF press screenings so far, so this probably means something.

There’s a wonderful scene in which a Kidman disses a group-therapy couple who’ve also lost a child. They’re sharing the notion that God has a plan and He needed their child so he could have an extra angel in heaven, blah blah, and Kidman just shoots that shit down like Sgt. York. Perfect

The only jarring element in the whole enterprise is the casting of the chubby, big-boned, dark-haired Tammy Blanchard as Kidman’s sister. They don’t just look like they couldn’t be sisters or cousins — Blanchard doesn’t look like she’s from Kidman’s genetic family. She might as well be Aborigine for all the lack of resemblance. The only explanation (and if it was offered I apologize for missing it) is that Blanchard was adopted or sired by a different dad than Kidman’s. Their mother is played by the always spot-on Dianne Weist.

Is Rabbit Hole a Best Picture contender? With ten nominations, yeah. Any film that inspires critics to clap has a shot in this game. So I think it’s in there. It’s a very decently made film that, the Blanchard casting aside, never gets anything wrong, and gets a lot of things right. It’s not in the class of The Social Network or Black Swan or Let Me In or Biutiful, but it’s a well honed, entirely respectable, honestly affecting drama.

Sandra Oh gives a fine performance (her best since Sideways) also as a divorcee whom Eckhardt develops a certain interest in.

John Madden‘s The Debt, which I bailed on at the 40 minute mark, had, by the time I left, administered several self-inflicted wounds. Bruises, scratches, cuts, scrapes — they kept coming non-stop. The biggest wince was realizing early on that all the actors — principally Sam Worthington, Helen Mirren, Tom Wilkinson, Ciaran Hinds, Jessica Chastain, Martin Csokas — had been urged to “act.” There wasn’t a moment in the portion that I watched in which they didn’t seem to be (a) speaking lines and (b) using every thespian trick in the book to let us know how their characters are feeling. There’s nothing that kills a movie faster than this.

I especially hate it when actors exchange ominous “looks” in a scene. Looks in which actor says to another, “Are you sensing the same vibe I’m sensing?” Or “I’m getting concerned about how things are going — how about you?” Scenes in which an actor conveys his/her feelings about another by looking at them longingly or angrily or coldly or playfully are, for me, mute nostril agony.

And I think it should be carved in stone that you can never have an older actor or actress be portrayed in a younger incarnation by another younger actor/actress, or vice versa. It never works, and always kills the movie in question. In this film — a thriller about three young Israeli Mossad agents who captured an Adolph Eichmann-like Nazi war criminal in mid 60s East Berlin, and their older selves dealing with lingering consequences — we are asked to believe the following pairs: (a) Worthington aging into Hinds — ridiculous, absurd; (b) Chastain aging into Mirren — laughable, in a pig’s eye; and (c) the 44 year-old Csokas, speaking with his usual bizarre New Zealand-by-way-of-Hungary accent, aging 40 years hence into the 61 year-old Wilkinson, his speech patterns utterly devoid of the Csokas patois.

I felt angry and insulted. My feelings wouldn’t have been any different if Madden had come up to where I was sitting during the showing and urinated on my leg. There’s no getting over this aspect. It alone kills The Debt, although there were may other assists in this regard. I could describe four or five others but I’d just be describing variations on the same sprawling green lawn composed of identical blades of shit grass.

I meant to link to David Poland‘s 9.9 review of Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu‘s Biutiful last week, but better late than never. And he’s right on in saying that Inarritu has “probably done the best work of his career here. He’s finally abandoned the triptych.

“So even though Javier Bardem‘s character is still engaged in multiple stories, the film feels whole. It’s the beginning, middle, and end of the story of this piece of this man’s life. And in just weeks of time on screen, there is a real arc…and it doesn’t feel forced.

“There is still plenty of pain and, yes, urine in the film. But unlike previous efforts, it never feels like a stunt or an intentional test of the audience’s tolerance. It feels almost like a documentary about one man — a unique man, allowing for metaphor — and what he might do when faced with singular circumstances after a life of turmoil.

“As a new father, the movie is often brutal, even at its kindest. Futility is a big theme. And the children in the film, including the big one inside Bardem, are endangered repeatedly. But the film allows no easy judgments. There is no black or white. Just a life of gray.

“Personally, just the grime of the walls, floors, everything was hard to watch. And I’m not a neat freak. But the idea of living in that dirty way, and of not really having a choice, was painful. Some days are better that others in that world, but at best, there will always be a grim coat of muck lingering on the surface. Horrifying. And real.

“But there is no denying the beauty, the craftsmanship (a visual theme that is defined late in the movie shows up very early on in very subtle ways…watch the mirrors), and the great passionate storytelling that permeates every scene.

“Consider buckling up and seeing this one in a theater where you can’t hide when it hurts. And it will hurt. You don’t have to love the pain, but you certainly have to respect it.”

I decided to catch an 11 am public screening of John Madden‘s Israeli Mossad guilt thriller The Debt, so I waited in front of Toronto’s Elgin for nearly a half-hour in hopes of finding one of the film’s publicists and mooching a free ticket. The nearby TIFF volunteer waited 25-plus minutes to inform that talent (i.e., Helen Mirren, Tom Wilkinson, Sam Worthington) wasn’t expected. And therefore no publicist. So I paid $15 Canadian bills for admission and it’s now about to begin.

And here’s John Madden arriving onstage and offering remarks. So the volunteer gave me a bum steer. Thanks.

Today’s films include Richard Ayoade‘s Submarine, Adam Wingard‘s A Horrible Way To Die, John Madden‘s The Debt, Tom Tykwer‘s Three, John Cameron Mitchell‘s Rabbit Hole, Justin Lerner‘s Girlfriend and perhaps a peek-in revisiting of Alex Gibney‘s Client 9: The Rise and Fall of Eliot Spitzer. Of these seven, I may see three. I’m blowing off The Promise: The Making of Darkness on the Edge of Town (i.e., the Bruce Springsteen doc) as it’ll be on cable fairly soon.

Three exceptional DVD Beaver captures from Criterion’s The Thin Red Line Bluray, available (a) 13 days hence, (b) a week from Tuesday, and/or (c) 9.28.

This is probably the Thin Red Line shot that inspired the line “I’ve never met a leaf I didn’t like.” I don’t know who originally said it, but this line stuck in the same way “a movie about cufflinks” stuck to Martin Scorsese‘s The Age of Innocence and “a movie about a man walking through the woods” stuck to Anthony Minghella‘s Cold Mountain.

(a) “Polls say we’ll be throwing the Democrats out in November and bringing back the Republicans. Which is like hearing the words Abbott & Costello Meet Frankenstein and saying ‘I’ll take Frankenstein'”; (b) “Not all the troops exiting Iraq are coming home. Some are going to Afghanistan in order to fight those who attacked us on 9.11, who are now in Pakistan. It’s all perfectly logical if you just don’t think about it.”

Phillip Kaufman‘s Invasion of the Body Snatchers (’78), a new Bluray of which came out yesterday, didn’t work at all as a metaphor for what was happening in the culture 32 years ago, and therefore didn’t seem like quite the right thing. Creeping conformity wasn’t an issue for anyone I knew in the late ’70s, or at least not on the level that applied when Don Siegel‘s original came out in 1956.

Which is why, for me, the Siegel still resonates. The Kaufman version is an eerie, well made, grippingly acted thriller — it’s a higher-grade thing than the Siegel — but if Martian invaders were to take over the world and issue an edict stating that no one will ever be permitted to watch it ever again, I wouldn’t be happy — but I wouldn’t be devastated either.

I did two interviews after returning from New York around 10:30 am or so — Black Swan director Darren Aronofsky at 12:30 pm, and then Let Me In director Matt Reeves at 2:30 pm. I love both these guys and especially their films, but interviews are killers. They eat your schedule and vaccum your day up — they just take everything. And then I tried and failed to upload, convert, edit and post both video files before the 4:45 pm screening of Sarah’s Key that I’ve decided is important. Next comes a Bruce Springsteen-Ed Norton stage interview happening at the Bell Lightbox around 6 pm, and then two parties.

It hasn’t been a productive day. Not every day is. You have to take this in stride. But I need to say for the record that Second Cup’s policy of charging $6 per hour for internet access is a rip. Because it is.

In a recently posted New Yorker profile of Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, Social Network screenwriter Aaron Sorkin tells Juan Antonio Vargas that the film is “a classical story of friendship, loyalty, betrayal, and jealousy.”

Sorkin describes Zuckerberg as a “brilliant guy who’s socially awkward and who’s got his nose up against the window of social life. It would seem he badly wanted to get into one of these final clubs” — one of the exclusive, elite-within-elite party clubs at Harvard.

“In the movie’s opening scene, according to a script that was leaked online, Zuckerberg and his girlfriend, Erica (Rooney Mara), a student at Boston University, sit in a campus bar, exchanging disparaging zingers. (‘You don’t have to study,’ he tells her. ‘How do you know I don’t have to study?’ she asks. ‘Because you go to B.U.!’) Erica takes his hand, stares at him and says, ‘Listen. You’re going to be successful and rich. But you’re going to go through life thinking that girls don’t like you because you’re a tech geek. And I want you to know, from the bottom of my heart, that that won’t be true. It’ll be because you’re an asshole.’

“Sorkin insisted that ‘the movie is not meant as an attack‘ on Zuckerberg. As he described it, however, Zuckerberg ‘spends the first one hour and fifty-five minutes as an antihero and the last five minutes as a tragic hero.’ He added, “I don’t want to be unfair to this young man whom I don’t know, who’s never done anything to me, who doesn’t deserve a punch in the face. I honestly believe that I have not done that.’

“Despite his goal of global openness, however, Zuckerberg remains a wary and private person. He doesn’t like to speak to the press, and he does so rarely. He also doesn’t seem to enjoy the public appearances that are increasingly requested of him. This makes the opening of The Social Network an awkward situation. It will be the introduction that much of the world gets to Zuckerberg.

“Facebook profiles are always something of a performance: you choose the details you want to share and you choose whom you want to share with. Now Zuckerberg, who met with me for several in-person interviews this summer, is confronting something of the opposite: a public exposition of details that he didn’t choose. He does not plan to see the film.”