Julius Caesar used to urge his troops to hurry slowly. It’s not bad advice for one dealing with the opening weekend of the Toronto International Film Festival, which can be overwhelming in its choice of big movies. If you’re not careful, you can run yourself ragged and still feel you’re missing out.

The two hottest tickets were for films that proved challenging in profoundly different ways: **Paul Thomas Anderson’**s The Master and a new adaptation of Anna Karenina starring Keira Knightley.

For the general public, Anna Karenina (which officially opens in November) was clearly the picture to see. On Friday night, I was one of the crowd waiting for 40 minutes in a line that stretched around the corner for two and a half blocks. By the time they finally reached their seats, the audience was ready to whoop for Knightley, Jude Law (who plays Anna’s husband), Aaron Taylor-Johnson (who plays Anna’s lover, Count Vronsky), and director Joe Wright. Which is precisely what it did when these luminaries came out onstage before the show. The place was churning with excitement.

They didn’t quite get what they expected. You see, Wright’s version of Tolstoy’s novel is not one of those old-school adaptations you see on PBS, or even a conventionally modern take like Wright’s jaunty Pride & Prejudice. It’s theatrical to a degree that recalls Baz Luhrmann. The story literally begins on a stage, and nearly all the sequences with the Russian aristocrats (Anna, Vronsky, et al.) take place in deliberately artificial surroundings, presumably to accentuate the artificiality of aristocratic life under the czars. A moving train is represented by an electric train; snow is falling paper; and when people move around at parties the whole scene is as elaborately choreographed as a musical. This is an extremely daring thing to do, and **Tom Stoppard’**s script manages to get a remarkable amount of stuff into 130 minutes. Indeed, I found myself admiring Wright and Stoppard’s refusal to serve up the same tired old style of literary adaptation.

But by about halfway through, I kept wishing Wright had made an old-fashioned one. Once you’ve adjusted to the great stylistic flourish of the thing, the movie starts feeling a bit airless and hermetic, like you’re trapped in a gigantic snow globe—almost the opposite of the Olympian expansiveness that makes Tolstoy great. More distressingly, you’re struck that the movie doesn’t really have enough emotion—a problem for the tragic story of a woman who destroys her life for a love that violates the unwritten rules of society.

You can’t really blame the actors. Knightley gives her all, yet doesn’t exude the sense of tragedy that you found in Greta Garbo’s classic Anna, and Jude Law is really great at the cuckolded Karenin—it’s the best and most touching performance in the film. And several of the side performances are amusing—**Ruth Wilson’**s Princess Betsy, who hides her cunning under silliness, **Olivia Williams’**s amoral Countess Vronskaya, and **Matthew MacFadyen’**s bluffly comical Oblonsky. Sadly, Taylor-Johnson simply doesn’t cut it as Vronsky—he’s no more than a handsome hologram‚ and his performance throws everything off. This is not a man a wife and mother would throw away her life for. You keep waiting for the big passions that Luhrmann found in Romeo + Juliet and Moulin Rouge!.


I’m not sure that the larger audience will be any more sympathetic to **Paul Thomas Anderson’**s The Master—it’s more masterful than lovable—yet this is a movie that all serious filmgoers will have to see. It’s a brilliant, jagged, perplexing piece of work that will divide audiences but also get them talking. It was the movie here that critics most anticipated; The Weinstein Company had been holding tiny spot screenings over the last month or so, and this whetted the appetite of every single person who hadn’t been invited.

You could write many thousands of words (and they will be written) about the film, which opens Friday. The first thing to say is that it is most assuredly not the thing that most people think is—an exposé of Scientology. Instead, it’s essentially a pas de deux between an L. Ron Hubbard–type thinker/messiah (Philip Seymour Hoffman) in early fifties America and a drunken ex-sailor (Joaquin Phoenix), who becomes the Great Man’s acolyte, protector, and nemesis. With a résumé that includes Boogie Nights, Punch-Drunk Love, and There Will Be Blood, Anderson is the most gifted and daring filmmaker of his generation, and as you might expect, The Master does not yield its mysteries easily. Exquisitely shot from beginning to end, this is a movie that works at several different levels: You can see it as a tale about a father and son, about Prospero and Caliban, about a nonsexual love affair, about the split nature of the psyche, even about two clashing acting styles. Even as Hoffman appears to be channeling an Old Hollywood brand of screen-acting (he recalls Orson Welles), Phoenix’s Method-style performance towers above anything else I’ve seen this year. Whether he’s seducing a young woman in a department store, trashing a prison cell or dashing headlong through a field, Phoenix is passionate, physical, violent, riveting. Over the years, his face has taken on a strange, compelling beauty that he and Anderson make haunting.

I could go on and on, but I don’t want to cheat you of its enigmas. Suffice it to say that a couple of days ago, I was talking to Jacques Audiard, the great French director who made Rust and Bone with Marion Cotillard. He and his team had just seen The Master and found it brilliant and mesmerizing.

“It is not perfect,” he told me, “but it is magnificent.” So saying, he put his hand over his heart and clutched the movie to his body in an imaginary embrace.

People were dreaming of a different kind of embrace as they stood outside a Yorkville brasserie, which was hosting a dinner for Sony Pictures Classics. I knew that Gael García Bernal was there, and so was that retired 007, Pierce Brosnan, and I’d heard rumors that Johnny Depp might turn up. But still I was surprised that so many teenage girls were crowded outside the place; cameras in hand, they stood there chattering for hours. Why? Turns out that one of the guests at the dinner was Zac Efron, who may not be a heartthrob for me, but what do I know?

Well, I know enough that, when you have a chance to talk to Brosnan, Pierce Brosnan, you grab it. In person, he’s possessed of a charm with a slight whiff of the Irish tough (perhaps from being well-known for so long). He seemed pleased to talk to somebody who’d seen him play someone other than Remington Steele or James Bond. When I mentioned that in the movie The Matador, he’d uttered a line shockingly hilarious in its filthiness, he smiled and then, without my telling him what it was, promptly quoted it to me. “A good line,” he said happily.

As the guests began leaving the dinner, the crowd outside the brasserie got more and more revved up at the thought of seeing Efron.

“I’m not him,” I laughed, pushing my way through the eager throng. “I’m not him.”

When I finally escaped the scrum, a pleasant-looking young man in his 20s called out to me, “Sir?”

“Yes?” I said.

“Is he really in there?”


“Thank God,” he replied and gestured at his girlfriend. “She won’t let us leave until she sees him.”