TIFF 2014: Five lessons from this year’s festival

As the final screenings are taken in, coffee cups are discarded and press and industry badges are regretfully removed, the chatter can begin—OK, continue—over what rose, sunk and treaded water at the Toronto International Film Festival this year. As the crucial gathering winds down, the stakes this weekend will be high, particularly for the People’s Choice Award--five of the past six winners have gone on to nab best-picture Oscar nominations. But many trends and contenders have already revealed themselves in the frenzied last 10 days.

What distinguished itself and what dithered? Which movies and actors made an Oscar case and which will be watching the proceedings from home? Here are some of the big takeaways from the madness north of the border.

Do we have a winner? The Academy Award best-picture winner has made its North American debut at Toronto in each of the last seven years. This year it’s… less clear. There was no “12 Years a Slave” or “Slumdog Millionaire,” two movies that rocked Toronto and kept on rocking all the way to the Oscar podium in the past. Instead, films such as “The Imitation Game, “The Theory of Everything” “Wild” and other hopefuls garnered some support, but also had naysayers pointing out reasons they wouldn’t go all the way. Is the best-picture film here--or will later entries like “Fury” or Toronto bypasses like “Birdman” pull out the prize?

Wisdom of crowds. Some of the most well-regarded movies this year at Toronto weren’t the more twee awards entries the festival is well-known for but more solidly crowd-pleasing affairs. Chief among them was “St. Vincent,” in which Bill Murray offers a kind of distillation of all we like about Bill Murray, playing a codger-y Vietnam veteran who forms a friendship with a young boy next door. “Nightcrawler” saw Jake Gyllenhaal as a kind of enjoyable antihero playing an amateur video journalist with a creepy eloquence. And Chris Rock’s “Top Five” and Shawn Levy’s “This Is Where I Leave You” had crowds laughing amid the films’ more serious moments. Decidedly more difficult but making a case for itself as one of the breakouts of the fest anyway is “Time Out of Mind,” an intimate look at a homeless man (Richard Gere) wandering the streets of New York from the indie darling Oren Moverman. The film has yet to nab a distributor, but when it does, expect Gere to be an instant contender for his unshowy and against-type performance.

No performance anxiety. Speaking of performance, the lead actor race, crowded last year, looked like a Ben & Jerry’s on free ice cream day this year. In addition to the British brigade of Benedict Cumberbatch and Eddie Redmayne—who play Alan Turing and Stephen Hawking in “Imitation Game” and “Theory,” respectively--there was Steve Carell and Channing Tatum as eccentric benefactor and workmanlike wrestler, respectively, in “Foxcatcher.” The best actress side looked less deep, dominated by Reese Witherspoon for her role as addict-turned-ironwoman hiker in “Wild” and Felicity Jones for her role as Joan Hawking in “Theory.” Late in the festival, a new contender emerged, as Julianne Moore began gathering raves for the title character in “Still Alice,” a successful Columbia University professor who is hit with the news that she has early-onset Alzheimer’s. Thursday night saw Sony Pictures Classics acquire the film, assuring that a weak field just got much stronger and a shallow race much more competitive.

The biopic is back. After some shaky years for biopics, Toronto was awash in them, and a good variety of them too. It was a year with entries unconventional (complexly structured Brian Wilson tale “Love & Mercy,” with Paul Dano and John Cusack as Wilson), traditionalist (Bobby Fischer story “Pawn Sacrifice,” with Tobey Maguire as the unhinged hero) and awards-buzzy (Turing tale “Imitation Game” and Hawking saga “The Theory of Everything”). Expect many of them to fare better than last year’s big Toronto biopic, “Mandela.”

Suddenly Seymour. With all the splashy awards contenders, documentaries can get lost in the shuffle at Toronto. But the fest’s lineup is always solid, and this year it sparkled with two of the bigger nonfiction finds. In “Tales of the Grim Sleeper,” the provocateur British documentarian Nick Broomfield examines the case of accused Los Angeles serial killer Lonnie Franklin, in a film that had many experts saying is Broomfield’s best in years. Even more unexpectedly, Ethan Hawke stunned moviegoers with his directorial effort “Seymour: An Introduction,” a look at the creative process by way of the thoughtful, critical concert pianist Seymour Bernstein. The film drew moviegoer and critical raves, offering a look at the ineffable origins of art and its relationship to other aspects of human life. Which, it turns out, go on outside a festival.