TIFF Day 8 – The Wife, Three Christs, Alias Grace

Day 8 of the Toronto International Film Festival saw the return of the multiple theatre premieres, with Wednesday being a fairly light day.  With the festival winding down, and fewer parties to be had and fewer celebs to be seen you’d think crowds would start to dwindle.  However, such wasn’t the case at Thursday’s premieres.

At Roy Thomson Hall there was a sizeable crowd gathered to see the incomparable Glenn Close at the premiere of The Wife.  Directed by Bjorn Runge and based on the novel by Meg Wolitzer, the drama tells the story of Joan (Close) a woman who travels with her husband to Stockholm when he wins the Nobel Prize for literature, only to finally question her life choices of living in his shadow.  The film also stars Annie Starke, who is Close’s daughter (and plays a young Joan in the film).  The mother/daughter duo walked the red carpet together Thursday evening.

The next big premiere of the night was for Three Christs, a film that follows a psychiatrist (Richard Gere) who is treating three schizophrenic patients, each of whom believe they are Jesus Christ.  Based on the book by Milton Rokeach, the film features Peter Dinklage, Walton Goggins (The Hateful Eight) and Bradley Whitford.  While Gere generated his own crowds there were plenty of Game of Thrones fans in the large crowd waiting for Dinklage to appear.  And while he was on the list of confirmed stars prior to the festival, he was unfortunately absent for the red carpet.  He was also absent at the premiere of Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri, in which he has a supporting role (Frances McDormand and Sam Rockwell attended that screening).  Even Whitford, who also appeared earlier in the festival in Brie Larson’s Unicorn Store was not present, much to the disappointment of a few West Wing fans who had photos for him to sign.

Earlier in the week, the Canadians presenting the CBC/Netflix co-production Alias Grace had their press conference but Thursday night was when they actually premiered the first two episodes of the mini-series as part of TIFF’s Primetime programme which centres around serial storytelling.  The programme also had premieres for HBO’s newest The Deuce and Netflix’s drama The Dark.  Acclaimed novelist Margaret Atwood, who wrote the novel on which the series is based, was present for the Alias Grace premiere (wearing one of her grandmother’s dresses from the 1930’s that she revealed on twitter started to fall apart).  Produced and co-written by Sarah Polley (Stories We Tell, Take This Waltz) and starring Sarah Gadon (Maps to the Stars, A Dangerous Method), this premiere definitely had some home town pride (we Canadians are a patriotic crowd).  The series is set to air first in Canada on the CBC September 25th and starts globally on Netflix November 3rd.

The Toronto International Film Festival continues until September 17th and information on all the films as well as tickets for films (through until Sunday!) can be found at tiff.net