October, 2005 - Nr. 10
2005 Toronto Film Festival reviews
by Randy Spires
Of the movies I saw at the 2005 Toronto International Film Festival, the most powerful was The Last Hangman, a British docudrama about the last man to hold the post of chief hangman of England in the decades before capital punishment was banned.
Of course there were other good films, such as the elegant Proof, now in commercial release. It stars Sir Anthony Hopkins and Gwyneth Paltrow, both of whom deliver excellent performances. The film was based on a play by David Auburn and just goes to show that good writing and well-turned phrases still matter in intelligent dramas.
Then there is In the Heart of the Game, a documentary about a Seattle high school girls’ basketball team. This will be theatrically released sometime in 2006, and after that will likely make it to the TV screen. Before you see it, try imagining what you would do if your coach told you to see yourself as a tropical storm. This, of course, happened long before Katrina, Rita, or even Andrew.
Metal: A Headbanger’s Journey, directed by Sam Dunn, Scott McFadyen, and Jessica Joy Wise, is narrated by Sam Dunn. He approaches the material from the perspective of both a fan and an anthropologist. One can appreciate the music, as I do, without much liking the sexist, devil-worshipping lyrics. But most performers see their costumes and lyrics as theatre, symbolic of working-class discontent and rebellion, not genuine allegiance to evil.
The exception to this seems to be Norwegian Death Metal, a sub-genre few of us outside of the heavy metal subculture have ever heard of. Certain Norwegian Death Metal performers take their Antichristian sentiments seriously and have even burned down churches.
Thank goodness they are an exception, for heavy metal has a substantial worldwide following, even though that following exists largely outside the radar of the mainstream.
Director Dunn came to metal as a 14-year-old living in Victoria, British Columbia. And while he discusses the early actual metal bands, he says little about their derivation, which is from the acid rock of the ’60s.
For another perspective on this musical genre, take a peek at Penelope Spheeris’s documentary The Decline of Western Civilization: Part 2, The Metal Years, which came out in the early ’90s. It’s heartbreaking and hilarious at the same time.
We Feed the World is an Austrian documentary about food production around the globe. It was directed by Erwin Wagenhofer.
Images of what feels like a whole landfill site of day-old bread being discarded in Geneva contrast with those of starving peasants in northern Brazil -- peasants, by the way, who have been pushed off the land by industrial farmers eager to grow soybeans for the huge and lucrative European market. The soy is mostly used to feed livestock.
This is a revelation for those of us who have been born and raised in North America. Here we have enough land to grow our own soybeans.
Not only are Brazilians being displaced by European commercial interests; so are Africans. In southern Spain, itself an economically depressed region, thousands of hectares of greenhouses produce an abundance of vegetables at prices so low that they can be exported to Africa where they still cost less than home-grown produce. African farmers who cannot compete become displaced and impoverished. A few ‘lucky’ get to travel to Spain to work in the greenhouses at of course pitifully low wages, far from their families and away from their cultures.
One cannot talk about feeding the world without discussing genetically modified foods, the patenting of genotypes, and the elimination of plant varieties. Even an official pioneer, a major developer and distributor of GM seeds, recognizes that Western agriculture is being messed up by this phenomenon.
At least this fellow, Karl Otrok, has a certain remorse about the situation. Not so Peter Brabeck-Letmatat, CEO of the giant Nestlé Corporation. He thinks people ought to stop complaining about his company’s activities: ‘We have never had it so good.’ ‘We’ seems to encompass the industrialized West, not the rest of the hungry planet. And even in the West there are pockets of extreme deprivation.
It’s not only big corporations that face criticism in this film. Government policies, including subsidies to EU agriculture, and even scientists whose objectivity seems to be compromised by their political ideologies, come under fire. One particularly smart and diligent French fisherman debunks both scientific blind spots and the lackadaisical enforcement of regulations that would preserve fish stocks and the small boats which catch amounts low enough to ensure that species regenerate year after year.
We Feed the World doesn’t offer any ideas on how we can change things for the better. It just demonstrates some of the problems that need addressing. It’s up to us viewers to decide what to do next.
But money equals power, and those who have it want to keep it. They will use every means at their disposal to influence the public and the politicians. One way is to develop PR campaigns of all sorts which are combinations of disingenuous stunts or persuasive distractions. Another is by lobbying politicians.
Thank You for Smoking is about one such flimflam man, a lobbyist for the tobacco industry. He is an electrifying manipulator of both language and concepts. He can make the most awful ideas seem reasonable. Worse still, he seems to be training his son to be just like him. In the face of such smooth chicanery, how can serious-minded people such as those who made We Feed the World get through to the public. It’s a tough challenge.
The script of Thank You for Smoking is intelligent, both funny and frightening. As master manipulator Nick Taylor, Aaron Eckhart is brilliant, making his character both likable and despicable.
Death from starvation takes a relatively long time. Death from tobacco is even longer and slower. By contrast, death by hanging is short if not particularly sweet.
In The Last Hangman, Timothy Spall (the photographer brother in Secrets and Lies) plays Albert Pierrepoint (pronounced peer-pont), a hangman working for the British Government. It’s a family tradition: both Pierrepoint’s father and uncle had done so before him.
Security and privacy are tight. No one knows who the executioners are. Albert doesn’t even tell his wife, Anne (Juliet Stevenson). But she is intelligent and persistent. After a few years she figures out what he’s doing on his frequent trips out of town. She deals with this knowledge by repressing it, as if not acknowledging or talking about it will make it more bearable. Besides, she, like most other people of that time (1930s), probably supported capital punishment as a necessary evil to protect society and exact justice.
When not away toiling for His Majesty, Albert was a simple working man, delivering groceries for a living and spending most evenings drinking beer and singing with friends in the local pub.
Hanging, if done well, is not as easy or simple job as would first appear. The person’s weight had to be estimated, as well as the strength of the neck, so that the right amount of rope is employed. Pierrepoint prided himself on his mastery of his craft and how quickly and painlessly each inmate died.
So good was his work, he was appointed to hang those sentenced to death at the Nuremburg trials after World War II. There again, he felt he was just doing his duty, especially when he was snarled at by at least one unrecalcitrant convict. What bothered him was the large numbers of people he had to execute: thirteen alone on one woeful day.
But even then he insisted, as he always did, that the dead had paid their price and their bodies were to be treated with respect.
Being in the public eye was the last thing he wanted. But press coverage of these executions made it inevitable. To some people he became a hero for meting out justice. Others were appalled at his role and harassed him and his wife, demonstrating angrily at their doorstep.
That may have prodded some reevaluation of his work. But the real turning point came when he encountered every executioner’s worst nightmare. One time he showed up at a prison expecting to do a routine procedure only to discover that the man he was about to kill was one of his best pub friends. This was a man, mind you, guilty of stalking and murdering his ex-girlfriend.
The hanging scenes are visually circumspect, but the loud clanging of the release lever over and over again is soul-shattering even if one were convinced that these culprits probably deserved all the punishment they got and more. The film may turn some people against capital punishment or it may just make others queasy at even considering the question.
All told, Albert Pierrepoint hanged over five hundred people before finding an excuse to resign. In the end, the old hangman himself came out against capital punishment. See this film when it comes out, but be prepared to lose some sleep.
