Watching a nation fall apart, entertainingly

       "A merica unravelling in different ways."That's how Thom Powers, the documentary programmer for the Toronto International Film Festival,put it. It was Tuesday night, six days into the 34th edition of this annual cinematic convocation, and Powers had just bluntly identified a trend that had become apparent from my sampling of more than two dozen fiction and nonfiction movies laden with doomsday predictions, conspiracy theories (and facts), grim statistics, alarming charts,dire projections and shrieking, whimpering and failing men and women.
       During its 10 days, this sprawling,homey event takes over Toronto,attracting locals as well as journalists and industry insiders from around the world. This is where professional festivalgoers catch up on films they missed at Cannes and Venice and preview scores of other new titles.
       It's where George Clooney (here with Up in the Air and Men Who Stare at Goats ) and Oprah Winfrey (fronting for the Sundance hit Precious: Based on the Novel 'Push' by Sapphire ) sell the celebrity goods, giving journalists 10 minutes of face time and sidelined fans high-wattage smiles. It's also where Werner Herzog unveiled one of the best movies of his career (Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans ) and one of the worst (My Son,My Son, What Have Ye Done?).Trying to locate an overarching theme in a festival as large as Toronto - this year, there are 335 movies from 65 countries - is usually either an exercise in futility or a critical contrivance. Even so, Powers had acknowledged something that was difficult to avoid and not just among the documentaries: Along with the rest of the world, film-makers are casting a hard, sober, often alarmed eye at the US.
       These days even a documentary about bees and beekeeping skews apocalyptic:Witness Colony , an examination of what's been labelled colony collapse disorder,the mysterious phenomenon that has,over the past few frightening years, wiped out about a third of the US honeybee population.
       Backed with Irish money (we liked it,a producer explained),Colony was jointly directed by Carter Gunn (the Irishman who edited it) and Ross McDonnell (the US man who shot its pretty digital images). Working under the obvious influence of Errol Morris - notable in their attention to beauty, interview style and even pacing - they shift seamlessly from macro-images of the swarming bees to close-ups of their fretting keepers who are struggling with the devastation,including one large California family that is unwisely compared to a hive. Although they could have dug deeper and incorporated more of a global perspective (colony collapse disorder reaches to Europe), their movie constitutes a satisfying addition to the blooming, buzzing field of social issue documentary.
       Rather less happy is Michael Moore's latest,Capitalism: A Love Story , a soft look at our hard times that opens on Wednesday in the US. Off screen, at least, Moore was in fine form at his premiere last week, fielding questions from the volubly adoring audience and joking about the less welcome critical reception he expects back home. He also introduced some striking steelworkers and reminded Powers to tell us that Capitalism is eligible for an award from Cadillac, a festival sponsor.(Cadillac, of course, is owned by General Motors,whose former chief executive Roger Smith was the subject of Moore's Roger & Me .)I kept wondering how the award fits in with GM's restructuring plan.
       More bad news was delivered in the far more elegantly structured if not unproblematic documentary Collapse ,from Chris Smith. A US film-maker who occasionally delves into fiction (The Pool and so forth), Smith trains his intelligent, focused attention on just one man in this compelling curiosity: Michael C. Ruppert, who discourses or, more precisely, disgorges, on everything from the intrigues of Dick Cheney to the dangers of corn.
       In a different age Ruppert, a chain smoker with the crumpled face and wary gaze of the cop he once was, might have alarmed and entertained from the Speakers' Corner in Hyde Park in London,famed for prophets and fools. Now he spreads the gloom via (of course) his blog fromthewilderness.com.
       For much of Collapse Ruppert sits in a wooden chair in an anonymous brickface room and talks and talks and talks,very much a man cinematically and existentially alone.
       He derives much of his information from news reports, which he combs through to uncover what he believes to be the truth. Although some of what he says sounds reasonable (his harangue about declining petroleum reserves, for one), I wish Smith, who never appears on screen but whose presence is felt in all his film-making choices, had approached his subject more aggressively.
       As in any large festival, the fiction titles ranged far and wide across genres and themes, with a familiar smattering of downer dramas and melancholic melodramas.
       (I'm dysfunctional, you're dysfunctional, we're all dysfunctional!) In Love and Other Impossible Pursuits Don Roos attempts, with mixed results, to show what a real family looks like, much as he did in the more successful Happy Endings . Although he tries hard to create a sense of actual if cosseted Manhattan life - gustily insisting for instance that his star Natalie Portman, as a grieving mother, remain unlikable - Roos overworks his material into a sudsy pulp.Most of the characters might be in need of therapy, but Roos' screenplay has already been therapeuticised, with every angle, emotion, feeling spelled out.
       It's not immediately clear what ails Ryan Bingham ( Clooney) in Up in the Air , about a lone wolf who tirelessly crisscrosses the country firing employees for cowardly or indifferent bosses. Based on the Walter Kirn novel of the same title and smoothly directed by Jason Reitman (Juno and Thank You for Smoking ),Up in the Air starts as a comedy only to metamorphose into tragedy as this one-dimensional corporate assassin makes a mid-life run for happiness with another high flier (Vera Farmiga, a charmed match for Clooney).
       Over a meet-and-greet dinner Reitman explained that one of his inspirations was Shampoo , Robert Towne and Hal Ashby's 1975 masterpiece about a Beverly Hills hairdresser that ends on a similarly ambiguous image of terminal aloneness.
       Reitman doesn't reach the sublime heights of Shampoo or tap into the haunted US soul as deeply as About Schmidt , which limned comparable terrain. But he's taken significant steps forward with Up in the Air and without the self-conscious cutesy dialogue of Diablo Cody, who wrote Juno . Ms Cody,meanwhile, fizzled early at the festival with Jennifer's Body , a horror throwaway starring Megan Fox as a cannibalistic hottie.
       Like the pitiful stick figures who inhabit Life During Wartime , Todd Solondz's hateful, would-be comedy, the middleclass characters in Jennifer's Body are nothing more than fodder for the filmmakers, which wouldn't be such a problem if all the bile and cheap laughs in both movies were accompanied by ideas,politics, a little heart, anything.
       Among the worthier titles that will or should be coming to a cinema or cable channel near you are films such as City of Life and Death , a fictional re-creation of the Japanese conquest of Nanking in 1937. Directed by Lu Chuan (Mountain Patrol: Kekexili ), one of the most talented Chinese film-makers to emerge in recent years, and shot in widescreen black and white,City of Life and Death opens just as the Japanese overrun Nanking.
       What follows is a phantasmagoric vision in which decapitated heads swing from ropes like pendulums in front of mountains of rubble and billowing smoke. Lu smartly toggles between the prisoners and their captors, a strategy that helps humanise the invaders, giving a face to evil.
       My favourite discovery at Toronto,however, is the deliriously unhinged Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans ,which was met with laughter and audible gasps during its initial press screening.Although it bears some resemblance to the original Bad Lieutenant , Abel Ferrara's 1992 grungy classic about a drug-addled cop, Herzog's redo is its own beast.Nicolas Cage, delivering his loosest,twitchiest, most furiously engaged performance since Vampire's Kiss (1988),in which he swallowed a cockroach for his art, plays the title character, a detective who's badder and madder than most.
       Written by William Finkelstein, a veteran television writer (L.A. Law ), the plot hinges on familiar dirty business (a multiple murder, drug deals) that becomes increasingly irrelevant as the mood and film-making heat up.
       In this brightly lighted nightmare, a post-Katrina New Orleans that might have been conceived by Hieronymus Bosch but could come to the screen only through the feverish imaginings of Herzog, a dead man's soul dances near his body and googly-eyed iguanas trade seemingly knowing looks with the popeyed lieutenant.
       To watch Cage melt with pleasure as he lights up his "lucky crack pipe" or seize up with spasmodic giggles, is to understand that Herzog has again found a performer as committed to representing unspeakable human will as Klaus Kinski,the star of Herzog masterworks like Aguirre, the Wrath of God . Here Cage and Herzog take you into a hell that leads straight to movie heaven.