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"FacebookPinterest\n\n Man, did everybody else bail ahead of dutiful little me. By Thursday morning, so far as the festival's formerly mobbed haunts were concerned, Toronto was a ghost town. If there were more than 40 people on hand at what passed for the morning's big movie\u2014Bruce Beresford's Peace, Love and Misunderstanding, starring Jane Fonda and Catherine Keener\u2014 they must have been hiding under the seats, a wise move in any case. But I didn't care.\n\n Nor did I feel any guilt about exiting Peace, Love and Misunderstanding long before it ended, assuming it ever did. That wasn't because this unwitting, Woodstock-set commercial for the relative bliss of Alzheimer's\u2014with Fonda playing Grandma Counterculture to uptight daughter Keener and her kids\u2014might as well be called On Golden Pot. It wasn't even because I'd already seen Keener do her snippy-but-woebegone act in a lemon called The Oranges earlier in the week, and even longtime fans like me are about ready to wave the white flag. (If you've ever valued Keener's intelligence, watching her loosen up by singing \"The Weight\" alongside a twinkly Jeffrey Dean Morgan as Fonda shimmies can almost turn you suicidal.) Those would have been good reasons to split early, understand. They just didn't happen to be mine. Nothing was going to get between me and my Johnnie To fix.\n\n In case you don't know\u2014and too many of you probably don't\u2014To is probably the greatest cops-and-robbers filmmaker alive. The most prolific, too: He not infrequently turns out two or even three features a year, and I haven't seen more than a handful of them. Yet. While they aren't all equal in quality\u2014you kidding?\u2014his wit, kinetic storytelling chops and gift for eye-popping set pieces he treats as no big deal have never once let me down. \n\n By some yardsticks, To's new one, Life Without Principle, doesn't even rate among his very best. In voltage, though not incisiveness, it comes up short against not only the doomy grandeur of 2006's Exiled (To's version of The Wild Bunch) but the wildness of 2007's Mad Detective (his version of Dirty Harry). On its own terms, though, it's the nearest thing to a perfect movie I saw at this year's festival. So there, Alexander Payne, Steve McQueen, Lars von Trier, et al\u2014whose own films, if you've been keeping tabs on this blog, I didn't exactly despise. Well, except for some of et al's.\n\n One advantage of To's reputation is that by now his audience will gladly sit still for almost any kind of set-up. They know they'll be rewarded with superior action sequences, mordant dramatic ironies, or both. Yet the set-ups are where he does some of his most interesting work. That's because\u2014though he's a born entertainer\u2014he's got a more adventurous mind than his better-known Hong Kong colleague John Woo, from his taste for character-based humor and penchant for cynical social observation to his fondness for spinning his stories off from topical phenomena.\n\n This time out, the backdrop for his usual collision of cops, crooks, and innocent-or-are-they civilians is the world financial crisis. Just treating it as an occasion for skullduggery\u2014To doesn't do big statements, at least as most moviegoers recognize them\u2014ends up making the movie more sardonically apt at an allegorical level than a self-conscious allegory would be. Among other nifty bits, the newspaper-reading cool with which he turns the international fallout from Greece's economic meltdown into a plot point doesn't just make Oliver Stone look like a blowhard. It makes him look like a klutz.\n\n The joke of Life Without Principle is that most of the characters are working for amoral enterprises\u2014whether that means mob rackets or banking\u2014in a spirit of personal probity that goes haywire when temptation looms. A timid investment counselor sees her opportunity to swipe $5 mil when one of her clients turns up dead; the loyal gangland lieutenant who turns out to have been the hitman\u2014and who's never dreamed of cheating his boss\u2014ends up hooked on playing the market with the botched job's ill-gotten gains. Even the upright police detective whose investigation of yet another murder bookends the movie isn't immune, since his wife takes a plunge on a costly apartment that threatens to bankrupt them once the stock ticker nosedives again.\n\n If the movie belabored its portrait of a society going off its meds, it would be as heavy-handed as one of Stone's, but it isn't. Instead, Life Without Principle feels almost tossed off, though it isn't that, either: just as light on its feet as a musical. You can't tell for the life of you if To even takes the material all that seriously\u2014at least in my experience, this brainy man never takes any material entirely seriously\u2014or is just keeping himself amused, and that's all to the good. Not only is his nonchalance the opposite of Nicolas Winding Refn's vacuous portentousness, but in terms of pure craft\u2014construction, economy, nuance, like that\u2014there's more going on in any given scene of this movie than there is in all of Drive. It's much funnier, too. Bless you, Johnnie To, for letting me leave Toronto with a junkie's beatific smile on my face."^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.gq.com/story/tom-carson-toronto-film-festival-peace-love-understanding-life-without-principle>