It's always nice to see old pros given the opportunity to ply their trade in new and revealing ways. Consider a pair of Christophers in films at the Toronto Film Festival.
Christopher Plummer is sublime as the title character in The Imaginarium of Dr. Parnassus, the star-crossed film by Terry Gilliam that is most notable for the death of Heath Ledger during shooting and the scramble by Gilliam to figure out a way to finish the movie without him. As the good doctor, Plummer is limber and versatile, playing drama and physical comedy, bringing to bear the best that his mellifluous voice has to offer.
That voice seems to be ever present this year, at least in the animated realm. He was the villain in Up, the domineering No. 1 in 9 and he'll also be heard here in Toronto in My Dog Tulip.
Plummer most often plays silky villains these days, so getting the chance to play a hero gives him a role that makes much broader demands on his talents -- and he delivers. His performance almost makes the Gilliam film worth seeing -- that and the clever manner in which Gilliam created his own rules of fantasy to explain why Ledger transforms at various points into Johnny Depp, Jude Law and Colin Farrell. Unfortunately, Gilliam's astonishing visual sense can't compensate for a movie that's too short on script and story to pull itself together in the end.
Just as Plummer is the best thing about Gilliam's film, Christopher Lee salvages Danis Tanovic's Triage, a film that proves once more that Colin Farrell is an underrated actor with hit-and-miss taste in scripts. For every In Bruges and The New World, he seems to make a half-dozen duds like Cassandra's Crossing and Miami Vice.
Farrell is outstanding in Triage, a film about the traumatic effects of war on a veteran news photographer. But while he makes us feel this guy's pain, the story itself is clichéd stuff -- right down to the iconoclastic shrink who helps him face his problem.
But the shrink is played by Christopher Lee, with a playful Spanish accent (his character is the grandfather of Farrell's character's wife, who is played by Paz Vega). The grandfather is an 84-year-old a psychiatrist who treated the problems of fascists after Franco fell and who treats Farrell when he develops a psychosomatic inability to walk. Lee's eyes twinkle with mischief, even as he calls Farrell on the phony defenses he hides behind to keep from confronting his real secret (which you'll figure out long before Tanovic reveals it). It's great to see Lee play someone without supernatural powers for a change; he makes this guy the most interesting character in an otherwise predictable film.
Speaking of performances that bowl you over -- I wasn't, but let's -- there are a pair of them in Lee Daniel's shattering Precious (which actually is burdened with the unwieldy title Precious: Based on the Novel Push by Sapphire).
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