TORONTO (AP) – The opening days of the Toronto International Film Festival saw a trio of tragicomedies combine humor with pain, often with mixed results.
The balancing act can be precarious. For every “Terms of Endearment,” there are countless others like “Patch Adams.” Comedy and drama often mingle in the best of films, but for the lion’s share of movies, the two are kept apart, on different sides of the theater aisle.
Some filmmakers, like Noah Baumbach, regularly fuse both elements seamlessly. His “While We’re Young,” which premiered at TIFF to largely glowing reviews on Saturday night, stars Ben Stiller (known to many for his out-and-out comedies like “Zoolander” and “Tropic Thunder”) and Naomi Watts as a Manhattan couple in their 40s caught between having a baby and staying young.
Only able to summon two emotions – “wistful and disdainful,” he says – Stiller’s character befriends a youthful 25-year-old hipster (Adam Driver). The generational divide is comic just as it is pitifully depressing.
But negotiating such terrain can be particularly difficult in a film aiming for a wide audience. Three notable fall releases – “St. Vincent,” ”This Is Where I Leave You” and “The Judge” – that debuted in Toronto, all try to pluck heart strings while hitting funny bones, too.