TIFF 08 - $9.99

Immediately after the screening, star Geoffrey Rush was on stage to answer questions, along with the writer and director. When asked about his choice to play an Angelic Hobo in $9.99 (pronounced "nine dollars ninety-nine" by its creators), Rush mentioned the sordid pleasure he took participating in a film with "puppets having sex". And although anyone who saw Team America wouldn't necessarily consider it a novelty per se, director Tatia Rosenthal's substantive approach to stop-motion love-making does lend the concept some much needed gravitas.

Rush is a bit player here, despite his character's long, gnarly fingers dipping into every tangled plotline -- the inexorable hand of Fate, or God, or Whatever -- pushing each character toward happiness or despair... and in some cases both. His hobo wanders in and out of the film's Sydney apartment building, bumming cigarettes, spewing expletives, and stirring up the lives of its unhappy residents, often via disturbingly violent means, and almost always without any general sense of plan or meaning.

I don't normally give plot synopses, because the films I see are fairly mainstream, but we made a concerted effort to pick (mostly) smaller features at TIFF, because the bigger films (like Burn After Reading) will be coming to a Theater Near Me in the next couple months, so why fly to Canada to watch 'em? Because of this, I kinda see the need to provide a little context. So I guess I'll refer you to the official description over at the TIFF website.

Right around the time young Dave Peck receives his copy of "How to Swim like a Dolphin", the various plot threads begin to pull tight, and a tapestry of lives that seemed only tangentially related begins to emerge. Each character, like each of us, is earnestly and constantly seeking love, acceptance, and happiness -- though of course these things are not always connected. When they are, however (as in Lenny's bizarre desire to physically change himself to please a woman), we are presented with stirring and powerful metaphors that challenge our own moralities even as they reinforce our expectations. Is it really okay for him to embrace his desire to literally ruin himself for the sake of love? It's a silly notion, but it lays bare the underlying truth: we often expect our lovers to change, much as they expect it of us. And while most of us (certainly I) see this as negative, we're asked to allow Lenny's happiness to supersede our own hard-coded notions of good and bad, right and wrong.

Ultimately, it's a story about finding your own path to joy -- and while you could take away a Religious Message if you wanted to, the concepts of God, Fate, and Angels are really just a loose covering for something far more humanistic: the interrelatedness of all things; the way each of our actions affect others on and on down through the history of the entire species. The way love and optimism find us in the places we least suspect. And that's not a novelty either; it's the Experience Homo Sapiens. But here, in this marvelous stop-motion film, bits of clay and wire are allowed to represent the core, most powerful facets of our lives and emotions, and to give us the chance to look at ourselves as simply bits of flesh and bone, hurtling through time and space, together.