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"Toronto Film Festival: Tuesday, September 9\n\n\u201CELECTION ENVY?\u201D a headline in some Canadian paper wondered yesterday. In case you don\u2019t know, the Other-White-Meat Country is currently ramping up to an election of its own\u2014pitting incumbent Conservative Stephen Harper, who looks like he once played Sandy Duncan\u2019s boyfriend on a forgotten sitcom, against Liberal Stephane Dion, who apparently is not related to Celine. Even here, though, they\u2019d rather talk about ours, which I\u2019m starting to seriously miss myself\u2014the buzz, those punting pundits, the way Cindy McCain looks as if she spends her spare time watching Dynasty reruns and snickering at how much they got wrong. But enough of asking for your pity.\n\nThe box-office jinx on movies that deal with the Iraq war is so notorious by now that Kathryn Bigelow\u2019s terrific The Hurt Locker has all the odds stacked against it for other reasons besides its terrible title. Anyone who\u2019s ever seen Bigelow\u2019s work can probably tell you that protest flicks aren\u2019t her thing. With her old-fashioned belief that the point of action is to expose character, she\u2019s just drawn to hard but flawed people in high-risk situations, and lucky her for stumbling across journalist Mark Boal\u2019s embedded reports on life with an army bomb-disposal squad. There can\u2019t be many jobs more stressful than dismantling IEDs in the streets outside Baghdad\u2019s Green Zone.\n\nJeremy Renner, who in this role is a whiz at treating his own dialogue as a mere impediment to eloquently showing us how masculinity works, plays Sgt. Will James, the new team leader in a three-man unit with just 38 days left to go until their company is rotated back Stateside. As the calendar counts down, we watch them coping with one nerve-wracking crisis after another, from defusing a car bomb to defusing a human one. They\u2019re the go-to guys in an environment where literally anything can explode.\n\nEach episode is a marvel of protracted tension\u2014one sequence of a desert ambush, especially, is about as expertly staged as these things get, with no visual information aside from what the characters themselves can spot\u2014and yet the point is always to peel away another layer of the men\u2019s psychologies. As the nerves of first one and then the other of his teammates (Brian Geraghty and Anthony Mackie, both first-rate) start to fray under the strain, we\u2019re left to ponder the enigma of what makes taciturn solitaries like James seem born for this line of work\u2014even at the price, which they themselves may regret but can\u2019t do much about, of being shut out from what most of the rest of us think makes life worth living.\n\nAt one level, Arnaud Desplechin\u2019s Un Conte de Noel (A Christmas Tale) is J.D. Salinger on steroids, all about a dysfunctional\u2014but musical\u2014upper-bourgeois family in a provincial French city whose members gather for a Yuletide reunion after Maman (Catherine Deneuve) announces she\u2019s about to kick the bucket. But Desplechin is a filmmaker who can reinvent the ordinary, and the movie is a smorgasbord of inventive direction and ensemble acting, full of odd hops and surprise jokes and off-kilter confrontations out of the blue. One standout in the first-rate cast is Desplechin\u2019s favorite actor and the paralyzed antihero of Julian Schnabel\u2019s The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, Matthieu Almaric, who plays the scapegrace son and will be soon coming to a few thousand screens near you as the new Bond villain. The other is (duh) Deneuve, who at 65 has been a movie legend for over four decades and still effortlessly slips into behaving as if she doesn\u2019t know it.\n\nAfter the misfire of Where the Truth Lies, Atom Egoyan is clearly eager to get back in people\u2019s good graces by setting up in business at the old stand, and Adoration is the result. The muddled story of a Middle East-born French teacher (Arsinee Khanjian, aka Mrs. Egoyan) and her disturbed star pupil is an almost puppyishly hopeful blend of contemporary touchstones: not only does Egoyan want say something about Islam vs. the West, but he\u2019s panting to let us know he\u2019s up to speed on today\u2019s hip kids and their Internets. It\u2019s pretty much balderdash, but the whole thing does slide by fairly painlessly.\n\nAmerican Swing is a documentary by Matthew Kaufman and Jon Hart about Plato\u2019s Retreat, New York City\u2019s notorious swingers\u2019 palace back in the anything-goes 1970s, and its nice-Jewish-boy founder, Larry Levenson. Despite the (often none too comely) naked bodies writhing in the grubby period footage, the tone isn\u2019t prurient but touching; the filmmakers are smart enough to recognize that this was essentially Long Island and the Jersey suburbs\u2019 way of clambering aboard the sexual-revolution bandwagon, with chats about carpooling and bar mitzvahs between orgies. Levenson himself, who was driving a cab by the time he died at 62, is pretty touching, too\u2014one more of those pathetic would-be Gatsbys that America\u2019s entrepreneurial culture tosses up like flotsam. If someone doesn\u2019t seize on the doc as material for an acted feature, I\u2019ll be surprised.\n\nLast up today was Religulous, Bill Maher\u2019s satiric doc on the asininity of religion, with Larry Charles\u2014who did Borat\u2014behind the camera. It stays very funny for a good hour or so, as Bill genially spars with all sorts of believers (the beefy congregation at a truckers\u2019 chapel, the amiable dude who plays Jesus at a Bible-oriented theme park). He\u2019s especially charmed, as I was myself, by a couple of cranky priests at the Vatican who share his contempt for fundamentalism. But then, all too predictably, he gets solemn and starts to fight fire and brimstone with fire and brimstone, announcing (from a hilltop!) that we need to \u201Cgrow up\u2014or die\u201D right after he\u2019s attacked the way Christian and Islamic extremists both hunger for Armageddon. When even atheists start warning us about the End Times, you know the virus is catching."^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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