Reading through my full-length reviews of upcoming films
that have played at this year’s Toronto International Film Festival might give
one the impression that everything has been sunshine and roses in this lovely
Canadian city. Of course, that’s impossible. Not everything can provoke like “Nocturnal
Animals,” move like “Moonlight,” resonate like “Loving,” or flat out shock like
“The Handmaiden” (my four favorites so far). There are high-profile
disappointments every year at TIFF, and few of them this year have been more
high-profile or more disappointing than Ewan McGregor’s “American Pastoral,” a shockingly ineffective adaptation of the
Pulitzer Prize-winning novel by Philip Roth. A new film by J.A. Bayona
disappoints less but still misses the mark, while the latest from Terrence
Malick will have its fans, but I’m more in the middle of those in town who have
argued its brilliance versus its pretensions.

Let’s start with McGregor, who mistakenly chose to direct
this Roth adaptation in his first venture behind the camera. To say that he can’t
quite wrap his arms around the themes and scope of the source material would be
a massive understatement; one can see the film getting away from him from the
very beginning and he never gets it back. McGregor and writer John Romano can’t
bring urgency or depth to this story of the dissolution of the “perfect American
family” and what it says about the concept of that very institution. It is a
film that goes through the motions, hitting key plot events with gusto but
failing to give any of them depth of character or purpose.

McGregor stars as Seymour “The Swede” Levov, one of those
All-American boys who narrator David Strathairn characterizes as someone who
everyone thought the world would just open up to while America lived up to the
potential of the Baby Boomer generation. Levov married a beauty pageant queen
(Jennifer Connelly), took over the successful family business, and had a lovely
daughter named Merry. Everything looked like it would play out like the classic
American dream, until America started changing in front of him. Merry (played
by Dakota Fanning as a young woman) becomes obsessed with protesting the
Vietnam War and fighting for Civil Rights. She sees her perfect father and mother
as icons of a country she hates. And when Merry takes violent action, she
essentially destroys her father’s life as well, leading him down an obsessive
path to try to save a daughter who doesn’t really want to be saved.

McGregor’s heart is in the right place and he gives a
typically strong performance, but he can’t quite draw the same from the rest of
his cast. Connelly and Fanning are ineffective, partially because of the
overall weaknesses of the film, but also because at least this version of the source
material has no idea what to do with its female characters. I’m not even sure
whose story this is. On paper, the way that the American dream devolved into international
signs of American failure can be thematically explored through Roth’s trademark
gifts—sentence structure, vocabulary, omniscient
commentary, etc. With film, it takes a confident writer
and director to make the written word into an equally effective visual story.
This was likely just too much of a challenge for a first-time director of any kind,
not just McGregor, and one wishes a veteran had taken a stab at it, or that everyone just
realized that some books truly are
unfilmable.

Speaking of flawed adaptation, that brings us to J.A. Bayona’s
“A Monster Calls,” based on the book
by Patrick Ness that’s essentially about how we deal with the pain of loss,
especially when we know it’s coming. Lewis MacDougall stars as Conor O’Malley,
a young man whose mother (Felicity Jones) is going to die. She has terminal
cancer, and poor Connor is in those horrible days in which plans have to be made
about what will happen when his mother is gone. It looks like he’s going to live
with his grandmother (Sigourney Weaver), but the two of them simply don’t get
along, and he longs to be with his father (Toby Kebbell), who is now in the
states.

Out of nowhere, and not unlike magical creatures in films
like “The BFG” and “Pete’s Dragon,” Connor makes a new friend, although this one
is loud, terrifying and aggressive. Connor essentially watches a large tree on
the horizon, one near a church and a cemetery, come to life and march toward
his bedroom window. With glowing, red eyes and the booming voice of Liam
Neeson, the monster informs Conor that he will tell the boy three stories,
after which Connor has to tell him a fourth. Bayona uses animation to visualize
the stories, and, of course, each tale teaches Connor a
lesson about how to deal with the darkness of his current reality.

And there’s no mistaking exactly
what those stories teach Connor. In fact, the monster explains each of them when
they’re done, and then re-explains them later, and it’s this approach that’s at
the core of my problems with “A Monster Calls,” a well-intentioned film that
too often tells people what to feel instead of just letting them feel for
themselves. The sound design and effects are impressive, but I so wanted
something open to interpretation or that I could respond to
emotionally without being told how to as it unfolded. Great children’s fairy
tales, like “Pan’s Labyrinth” for example, make us feel like travelers on the journey with the characters, and it is by being co-partners in
that trip that allows it to feel personal. It’s that depth, subtlety and human
touch that’s missing here.

Which brings us to Terrence Malick’s divisive “Voyage of Time: Life’s Journey,” an
experimental film that the masterful filmmaker has been working on for years.
The suddenly-prolific Malick (two films in one year!) explores the very
formation of the universe from the nothing of an empty space to the formative
days of life to mankind. Think a 90-minute version of the sequence in “The Tree of
Life” that serves a similar purpose, this one with narration by Cate Blanchett.
It’s a film that fits snugly into Malick’s continued exploration into nothing less
than the meaning of existence and our place within it. His films, especially
the last three, have been searches for meaning, working more in philosophical
terms than literal ones. For the record, as I think it’s kind of important when
discussing a filmmaker like Malick to know if you’re on the auteur’s
wavelength, I’m a fan of every film he’s ever made, even the recent ones, and
consider “Tree of Life” the best film of the current decade.

Having said that, my “yeah, it’s OK” response to “Voyage of
Time” could be seen as damning criticism. It’s an ambitious venture, but I much
prefer when Malick works a symbolic narrative into his increasingly
philosophical filmmaking. It’s also a film that really plays into criticisms of
Malick—there are shots of wheat fields and Blanchett repeatedly addresses “Mother”
in her poetic narration—and I wish the director had decided to release it entirely
narration-free. It’s a visual experience designed to work in different ways
from a traditional film. To that end, I admire it, even if I’m not sure I
ever need to see it again.

Brian Tallerico

Brian Tallerico is the Managing Editor of RogerEbert.com, and also covers television, film, Blu-ray, and video games. He is also a writer for Vulture, The Playlist, The New York Times, and GQ, and the President of the Chicago Film Critics Association.

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