Patterns emerge at film festivals, and the opening night of Toronto 2024 might suggest there’s something wrong with the men of America. Whether it’s a boxer brutally abusing his body, a game show contestant trying to save his family, or a real estate mogul learning what matters to him, these three films from the first night of “the fest of fests” this year have an unusual common DNA. However, outside of troubled male protagonists, they’re remarkably different in tone, indicating the breadth of programming at the fest. Sadly, none of them really work, even if one puts up a good fight.
The best of the trio is “The Cut,” a boxing movie that’s not really about boxing. Unlike most movies about the sweet science, this drama by Sean Ellis is more about preparing for the fight than the battle itself. Orlando Bloom stars as a retired boxer (never named) who lost a major bout a decade ago, now running a gym with his wife Caitlin (an excellent Caitriona Balfe of “Belfast” fame), where he’s forced to deal with the young contenders who treat him disrespectfully. He battles serious demons from his past, played out in black-and-white flashbacks of him living in his car with his mother (Clare Dunne), who resorts to sex work to feed her boy, and then much worse. Tracing the trauma of a man who uses and abuses his body for profit to a mother who arguably did the same is an interesting dramatic idea. The Boxer doesn’t value his physical self. That will be a problem.
When an opportunity presents itself to take a title fight in Vegas, Bloom’s pugilist jumps at the chance to have one last shot at glory. The problem? He needs to cut over thirty pounds in a week to even qualify. Initial efforts don’t seem to produce enough results, so he turns to a specialist in this kind of thing named Boz (John Turturro), who warns the Boxer that “there is no ripcord” once they commit to cutting weight. It will be much more than just dieting and working out. Some of the most interesting material here is about every gram that they try to take off, including sweat techniques, bloodletting, and illegal drugs. It does not look fun.
Bloom gives a physically committed performance, but the always great Turturro pretty much walks away with the movie as a man who sees people as nothing more than poker chips – something to play with (and possibly lose) to the house. He conveys the spirit of a man who has been broken by life and so doesn’t hesitate to break others for his own success. It’s a vicious turn in a movie that ultimately doesn’t quite add up to enough, especially when Balfe walks out for too long in the final act. See it for the cast, especially the three leads, but it’s more of a technical knockout than a stunning victory.
At least “The Cut” has a POV and something to say about how trauma can lead to physical self-hatred. My issue with Samir Oliveros’ remarkably frustrating “The Luckiest Man in America” is that it has nothing to say whatsoever. In telling this strange-but-true story, Oliveros goes for kooky instead of enlightening and then doesn’t even land that tone. It ends in a scene that serves as a perfect distillation of this movie’s distinct lack of identity. It doesn’t know what it’s about or who it’s for.
Paul Walter Hauser is solid as Michael Larson, an ice cream truck driver who has auditioned for the hit ‘80s game show “Press Your Luck” … well, sorta. He actually stole someone else’s audition, bypassing part of the process that might have vetted this oddball a little better. Co-creator Bill Carruthers (David Strathairn) decides to take a chance on Larson, despite the protests of the casting director (Shamier Anderson), and the majority of “The Luckiest Man in America” plays out on a day in game show history that changed the form forever.
Before you can say, “No Whammies,” Michael has broken the show’s record, and he’s heading even higher. Scenes in which Carruthers and his team, including host Peter Tomarken (a great Walton Goggins), try to figure out how to deal with Michael—should they accuse him of cheating or just go for the ride—are interesting on a procedural level. But Oliveros never stays with them long enough and can’t find consistent characters in the backroom.
He makes out a bit better on stage with Hauser, who paints Michael as a desperate soul trying to reach for the stars to repair his broken family. But even Hauser gets lost in a movie that loses steam at about the hour mark as characters behave inconsistently and the writers start to play with what really happened—a scene in which Michael stumbles onto a talk show set to exposit about what he’s been up to is atrocious. Oliveros is lucky that he got people as talented as Hauser, Goggins, Strathairn, and Anderson to play his game because otherwise, this would have been a complete disaster.
There’s a certain degree of casting luck that barely holds some of David Gordon Green’s “Nutcrackers” together at times too, but this one falls apart the most of the three. The director of the recent “Halloween” and “The Exorcist” reboots introduced his film on Opening Night by name-dropping “Uncle Buck” and “Bad News Bears,” and one can easily see the DNA of both films in here. But it’s a deeply frustrating film, constantly pushing away what it does well to hit sitcom road markers along the way. It should have trusted its very simple, effective premise instead.
Ben Stiller plays Michael, a Chicago real estate developer who has driven his yellow Ferrari to The Middle of Nowhere, Ohio, where his recently deceased sister and brother-in-law were raising their four boys well off the grid. The kids, played by four real-life brothers, have been on their own, and Michael is forced into a reluctant father figure role for these four home-schooled troublemakers. As he tries simply to get a phone signal to close a deal back in the Windy City, the kids teach him a valuable lesson about what truly matters.
When the kids are allowed to be kids, “Nutcrackers” works well enough. There’s something in what feels like joyous improvisations of childhood cast against Stiller’s familiar neurotic screen persona. It’s a classic “city slicker” vs. “country kids” set-up. But there’s just not enough of it. Green and writer Leland Douglas are constantly going back to the sitcom trope well in a bizarrely overstuffed narrative, whether it’s an encounter with a rich local (Toby Huss) who Michael hopes will take the kids or a local woman (Edi Patterson) who seems to be interested in them just for the government check that comes with each kid. There are too few scenes of Michael growing attached to the kids, so it doesn’t seem like Michael falls for the boys or becomes accustomed to fatherhood so much as he runs out of options. A truly weird way to tell this story.