There's always a moment at the annual TIFF party thrown by the Hollywood Foreign Press Association and InStyle magazine at the Windsor Arms Hotel when the A-listers come out from behind their banquettes and mingle in the middle of the room. You have to watch for it, because the second they arrive, the stars are hustled into cloister-like booths where they remain, unapproachably talking to their cast mates and retinues, for a long time. The coming out, the group hobnob, can happen at any time, and it doesn't last long. But for those scant 20 or 30 minutes, fans in attendance can muse, "So this is what movie heaven looks like." This past Tuesday night, it happened again.
The international stars came in first: Sophie Okonedo, the regally stunning British actress ( Hotel Rwanda) who's at TIFF with The Secret Life of Bees, exited a black SUV to a storm of flashbulbs and photographers yowling, "Sooow-fee! Sooow-fee!" the way Marlon Brando howled for Stella. Newly-minted movie stars Dev Patel and Freida Pinto, who play lovers in Danny Boyle's warmly received Slumdog Millionaire, bopped around beaming at everyone and everything.
The Iranian beauty Shohreh Aghdashloo ( House of Sand and Fog, American Dreamz), here with the harrowing film The Stoning of Soraya M - based on the true story of a woman stoned to death in 1986 Iran - elegantly worked the room with the film's co-screenwriter, Betsy Giffen Nowrasteh.
"Unlike my character in Sand and Fog [who was subservient to her husband] in this film I fight back," Aghdashloo told me. She knows from fighting: She's been banned from Iran for 30 years. "Yes, I have been condemned to be stoned there for many things, including sharing a bed in Sand and Fog with Ben Kingsley, a man who is not my husband," she said calmly. No wonder she called being in The Sisterhood of the Travelling Pants 2 "a warm breeze. I was sunning in Santorini with those lovely, wonderful actresses, when I am usually sobbing and suffering."
Sir Ben himself was in a banquette across the room, necking with his wife. It was a year ago to the day, and in almost the same booth, that he told me he'd just been married. Guess the honeymoon continues. Kingsley, who's here promoting the U.K./Canada co-production Fifty Dead Men Walking, slipped out before the big mingle, and alas, took his adorable co-star Jim Sturgess ( Across the Universe) with him. There was Sturgess, lounging fetchingly against a pillar, a mini-burger in one hand and a drink in the other. There I was, angling in for a chat. But whoops, there was Kingsley, shaking a warning finger in Sturgess's face.
"What's that about?" I asked.
"Because he knows if I don't leave now, I'll stay here all night and get very, very drunk," Sturgess said, smiling. He left.
Ethan Hawke spent the evening in a booth occupied by the stars of The Brothers Bloom, Mark Ruffalo, Adrien Brody and Rachel Weisz. Ruffalo is this year's TIFF iron man: He also stars in Blindness, and he's Hawke's co-star in What Doesn't Kill You. He's been the highlight of this year's press conferences, climbing into Brody's lap during Tuesday's Bloom presser and tearing up in Wednesday's with Hawke. But he's delightfully modest.
"I just saw The Brothers Bloom for the first time, at the public premiere. I'll never do that again," Ruffalo told me. "I keep thinking one day I'll get used to seeing myself on screen, but I never do. It's brutal."
Tim Robbins was in the next booth over, celebrating his film The Lucky Ones, a lovely character study that - for once - deserves the sobriquet. He plays an Iraq war vet who is sent home with a back injury and finds his home much changed. He takes off on an impromptu road trip with two other soldiers (Rachel McAdams and Michael Pena), both of whom have leg injuries. Robbins knew how to play a back injury; he'd suffered years of back problems, now healed.
"But you know what happened to me?" he asked me. "Right before I came to Chicago to start the movie, I was playing hockey, and this guy who was coming full speed at me tripped and rammed his helmet into my knee. I had this terrible MCL tear, I could hardly walk. But I couldn't have a leg injury in the film; everyone else had those. So I had to figure out a way to walk so that it looked like it was my back."
Talk about battered and bruised - I looked up, and there was Mickey Rourke. His film The Wrestler, directed by Darren Aronofsky ( Requiem for a Dream), not only won the Golden Lion in Venice this week and is a top contender for the TIFF audience prize, it's also the first acting job Rourke has had in a long, long time. His face and his voice have been roughed up since his debut in Diner, but he's still the same wild man.
"It's great that I'm finally getting talked about for something other than coming out a nightclub with two girls," he said. "No one would hire me. It was hard. And then out of the blue I ran into Darren, who gave me this." Does that accidental meeting make Rourke feel like the stars aligned for him? "I'm not thinking those kind of thoughts tonight," he said. "I'm just thinking about this." He shook his cocktail glass, and grinned.
And then there it was, the moment of mingle: The Brothers Bloom stars talking to The Wrestler people (because, of course, Aronofsky is married to Weisz); Joseph Gordon-Levitt, in town with Spike Lee's film, Miracle at St. Anna, talking to everyone; Cameron Bailey, TIFF's co-director, talking to Jodie Markell, the only first-time director in this year's Gala series, about her film The Loss of a Teardrop Diamond - whose script, by Tennessee Williams, she found in a book, intact but never produced.
"The description of the film in the [TIFF]catalogue made me cry," Markell said, "because it really gets it, it really conveys what we were trying to do." She teared up again as she said it, which was moving, because beyond all the hoopla, that's what TIFF should do: curate and showcase films that should be seen.
The Hollywood hype machine was bigger than ever here this year. There were more studio junkets operating outside the purview of TIFF - but piggybacking onto its lustre - which sucked away more of the stars' interview time and prevented local and international media from having the access we deserve. There were more times this year when interviews we did get were cut short - the promised 20 minutes abruptly shrinking to 15 or 10. One publicist tried to convince me I could get a page-long story from a seven-minute interview (I declined). Another said, "I can't give you 15 minutes, I'll give you 12." Twelve! Haggling over three minutes! But by Tuesday night, most of those junketeers were gone, and the folks in the big mingle represented the kind of smaller, more artistically ambitious movies that, to my mind, form the backbone of TIFF, and really deserve to be here.
At 1 a.m., Patel and Pinto, the first to arrive, were still going strong, chatting happily about how it would be so great if they could make movie after movie together and become their generation's Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan. "I just had my picture taken with Paris Hilton," Patel declared. "It's so surreal, especially for a kid like me, 17, from Harrow." Dappled by the lights that streamed down through strings of crystal beads, he shook his head. "I never want to go home."
Johanna Schneller