Toronto's book on the Oscars: Biopics
The Hollywood Reporter. By Gregg Kilday
September 24, 2004

Launching a successful Oscar bid at the Toronto International Film Festival is akin to kicking a 60-yard field goal to win a tie game. It can be done, but, to switch sports metaphors, it's no slam dunk.

DreamWorks' "American Beauty," which picked up the Peoples Choice Award at the 1999 Toronto fest and went on to score five Oscars, including best picture, is the exception that proves the rule.

More often, Toronto's vast playing field of dozens of competing films and hundreds of competing journalists, all contributing to an echo chamber of buzz and counter-buzz, can thwart a movie's Oscar aspirations as happened last year in the case of Miramax Films' "The Human Stain."

But this year -- based on dispatches from Toronto, conversations with the marketers backing individual films and the impressions of onlookers back in L.A. -- Toronto neither crowned a definitive Oscar front-runner nor up-ended the chances for a dozen or more Oscar wannabe's.

If anything, its limelight shown most brightly on individual performances than it did on any of the surrounding films.

Two actors emerged out of the fest as virtual shoo-ins for best actor nominations: Jamie Foxx, who already raised his profile this year as the abducted cabbie in "Collateral," garnered raves for his spot-on performance as the late Ray Charles in Universal Pictures' "Ray," while Javier Bardem, a best actor nominee for 2000's "Before Night Falls," earned applause for his based-on-a-true-story portrayal of a quadriplegic fighting for the right to die in Fine Line Features' "The Sea Inside."…

For bio-pics must answer to a number of judgments that fictional narratives aren't asked to meet. Movies like "Ray" and "Kinsey" along with Kevin Spacey's "Beyond the Sea," in which the director/actor looks back at Bobby Darin's career, and Walter Salles' "The Motorcycle Diaries," in which Gael Garcia Bernal plays the young Che Guevara, all bear the added burden of living up to the historical record -- as well as moviegoers' subjective reactions to the personalities being biographied.

Toss in Kevin Kline's song-and-dance act as Cole Porter in the already released "De-Lovely," Johnny Depp's performance as playwright J.M. Barrie in "Finding Neverland" (which was introduced to appreciative critics at Telluride and Venice) and Leonardo DiCaprio's upcoming turn as Howard Hughes in "The Aviator" and Colin Farrell's as Alexander the Great in "Alexander," and the Oscar race is likely to turn into an ongoing seminar on the uses, and abuses, of real-life figures in popular films.
And as all the arguments over the veracity of movies like 2001's "A Beautiful Mind" proved, that can make for a contentious Oscar season.