Portman's 'Swan' likely to catch Oscar's eye

Inquirer film critic Steven Rea reports this week from the Toronto International Film Festival. Read his dispatches in the newspaper and on his blog, "On Movies," at www.philly.com/philly/blogs/onmovies.

TORONTO - Polite and civilized, two words that describe bicycling around Toronto, are words you won't be seeing in any description of Black Swan, screened Saturday at the Toronto International Film Festival.

Darren Aronofsky's brilliant, over-the-top psychodrama deals with a New York ballet dancer (Natalie Portman) and the pain (physical, psychic) she endures as she prepares for her star role in a production of Swan Lake.

Intense stuff, and harder to watch than Aronofsky's last one (also at Toronto), The Wrestler. Portman has an Oscar nomination in store.

It's Kind of a Funny Story, which screened Friday, has Keir Gilchrist as a suicidal Brooklyn teen who checks himself into a mental ward full of colorful characters. It's kind of funny, and kind of sweet, and definitely a departure for filmmaking duo Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck (Half Nelson, Sugar).

Biutiful, Alejandro González Iñárritu's haunting, harrowing trip through the black market/illegal immigrant underworld of Barcelona, screened Saturday. Javier Bardem plays a street hustler with a conscience, with kids, and with cancer that's killing him. I talked to Iñárritu on Saturday, and he said Toronto audiences respond to movies the same way that folks get buzzed about rock concerts - the screening becomes an event.

Biutiful is an event, certainly - deep stuff about life, death, love, greed, compassion - and Bardem, who won the best-actor prize at Cannes, should be in line for an Oscar nod, too. I interviewed him on Saturday in the Neil Young Room (!) of the restaurant One in Toronto's five-star Hazelton Hotel. The slick, pricey vibe of the place was in total contrast to the squalor and poverty exhibited in Biutiful, and Bardem talked about the sense of guilt he experienced as he walked through the barrios of Barcelona, a rich, famous movie star "pretending" to be one of the huddled masses. Guilt, maybe, but also incredible empathy - his performance is for real.

Apart from the interviews with Iñárritu and Bardem, Saturday was kind of a letdown. Little White Lies, Guillaume Canet's follow-up to his taut French thriller Tell No One, starts with a jolt, but from there becomes a somewhat comic examination of friendship and marriage among a group of old friends who share a beach house every summer. Marion Cotillard is one of 'em, and Tell No One's Francois Cluzet is another (he plays an uptight hotel manager). It's compelling, but rambling, and the use of vintage American rock on the soundtrack starts to wear.

Passion Play, which screened Saturday, is Mitch Glazer's (ahem) fable about a jazz trumpeter (Mickey Rourke) and the "bird girl" (she has wings) he meets at a carnival in the desert. Megan Fox wears the wings, and the audience thinned out and thinned out until it was as emaciated as a Fashion Week runway model as the jazzy, stylized, how-did-this-get-made movie meandered towards its corny coda.

Married couples and longtime relationships are at the heart of not only Little White Lies, but Woody Allen's You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger and Mike Leigh's Another Year, too. But the strangest thematic thread to emerge in the films seen so far: the ejection of contents of the stomach through the mouth. I've seen four movies in a row now where one of the characters upchucks on camera.

These movies are visceral!