When it opens December 20th, Denzel Washington’s ANTWONE FISHER will quickly assume the status of a commercial and critical hit -- trust me.

The Fox Searchlight people did nothing to help me get into last night’s 6:30 pm screening at Roy Thomson Hall (I got in only through the kindness and largesse of fellow journalist Henri Behar, who had an extra ticket) and I was frankly ready to encounter a pretty good, TV-level movie, which is how an exhibitor source recently described it to me, but no, he missed it. It’s an African-American ORDINARY PEOPLE, and it’s going to touch and move everyone of all ages, incomes and racial persuasions.

Smoothly and sensitively directed by Washington and written by Fisher himself (who adapted an early draft of the screenplay into a published autobiography called FINDING FISH), ANTWONE FISHER is a tender, emotionally honest, mostly bullshit-free drama about the healing of a young man with a lot of serious emotional wounds. It has a moderately pat, Hollywood-wholesome feeling here and there, but not enough to capsize the boat.

Mostly, it just works. It's a huggable, affirmative, heal-thyself-and-move-on-with-your-life movie that employs lean, direct writing and earnest, straight-from-the-heart acting to persuade the viewer to believe in the deep-down truth of its story and characters.

Fisher's story has been compressed into what is essentially a two-character piece about therapy and then love between a patient and his psychiatrist. Fisher (superbly played by newcomer Derek Luke) is a parent-less young sailor with major anger problems. He's ordered to see a Navy psychiatrist, Dr. Jerome Davenport (Washington) in order to explore what's underneath the rage and possibly to learn how to manage his temper.

It takes a while (Fisher refuses to talk, at first), but Davenport's influence starts to have a beneficial effect, and a father-son thing (Fisher's dad having been shot to death by a girlfriend when Fisher was an infant) begins to bloom between them. Then a girlfriend (Joy Bryant) joins the picture and brightens Fisher's outlook. The third act is about Fisher, at Davenport's urging, seeking out his long-absent mother in Cleveland and connecting with a houseful of loving in-laws.

Pic concludes with his emotional healing, with Fisher still in the Navy, and doesn't touch upon his Hollywood success story, which started with a job in a gift store on the Sony Pictures lot and then Fisher's being encouraged to write a screenplay based on his life story, which gradually led to Washington's interest in directing the film.

The ORDINARY PEOPLE parallels needn't be absorbed or even considered in order to be touched by ANTWONE FISHER, but they're interesting nonetheless.

Both are first-time directing efforts by popular actors (Washington, Robert Redford) at the top of their game. Both turn on therapy sessions between angry, self-destructive youths (Fisher and Timothy Hutton's Conrad Jarrett) being counseled by frank-talking, father-like therapists (played by Judd Hirsch in the 1980 effort). And both involve overcoming the hurtful influence of wicked-witch mother figures (ORDINARY PEOPLE's Beth, played Mary Tyler Moore, and ANTWONE FISHER's Elaine Pack, played by Yolanda Ross), as well as the young patient's spirit being lifted by a caring girlfriend (Elizabeth McGovern having filled this role in the Redford film).

As a director, Washington shows himself to be a steady, no-frills visual stylist (with the exception of a somewhat lavishly-designed dream sequence in the very beginning) and, like Redford, exceptional at coaxing affecting, believable performances from his cast. First-rate assistance is provided by cinematographer Phillipe Rousselout, who gives the film a warm, attractively lighted atmosphere.

Luke (who came out hopping like an ecstatic grasshopper prior to the film's showing at Roy Thomson Hall when he was introduced by Washington) is a real discovery, making up for his lack of range (he doesn’t quite go to town with the anger side of the role) with sincerity, likeability and good looks. But there isn't a single weak performance in this film, anywhere. Bryant is beautiful and a sensitive emoter to boot, and Ross is especially memorable as Fisher's tyrannical adoptive taskmaster.

I went to the after-party at Il Posto afterwards with Chicago Tribune critic Michael Wilmington, who invited me along, but the look I got from the Fox Searchlight publicist at the door couldn’t have been frostier. I smiled and excused myself from the premises. Somehow, some way, I seem to have gotten myself onto Fox Searchlight's shit list. (Several other journalists, including Roger Ebert, whom I spoke to briefly as he entered the party, were invited.) Or maybe it's the Denzel people I'm not currently popular with….who knows? And no matter. These things pass.

Not Like That

Dylan Kidd and Fernando Meirelles, the respective directors of the justly-praised Toronto Film Festival entries ROGER DODGER and CITY OF GOD, have gathered reputations from the receptions to these films that are seemingly inaccurate and unfair.

One is that Kidd is some kind of literate sexist a la Neil Labute, given the poisonously verbose, woman-hating dialogue Kidd provided for star Campbell Scott. The other is that Meirelles is some kind of Quentin Tarantino acolyte, given the fast and ferocious gunplay that animates much of his film, an epic-styled telling of the lives of several youths involved in the drug trade inside Rio de Janeiro's Cidade de Deus suburb from the late '60s to the early '80s.

The Meirelles rap is ridiculous. The Tarantino style is all about flipness and ironic attitude and filmic references, with the killing sequences delivered energetically but in "quotes," so to speak. The action in CITY OF GOD is almost totally bereft of this. It is based on an exhaustively researched novel by a resident of Cidade de Deus, for one thing, and thereby has the look and feel of something immediate and hand-held. And none of the shooters are self-amused, cock-of-the-walk smart-asses like Samuel L. Jackson in PULP FICTION or Michael Madsen in RESERVOIR DOGS.

"I hate violent movies, and even Tarantino's movies, to be honest," Meirelles told me earlier this week. "Tarantino's violence is done for fun, as a game. Whereas the violence is an inescapable part of the story of CITY OF GOD, and our showing of it is didactic but, at the same time, oblique. We don’t really show very much violence in our film. You can feel it, but we don't show very much."

I sat down with Kidd last weekend in a hotel room, and for what it's worth, he doesn’t seem like a woman-hater. He's a roundish, bald-headed guy with Irish blood and an easygoing, comme ci, comme ca attitude. He's quick and savvy, like anyone talented, but doesn’t seem to have a lot of anger inside.

Kidd acknowledges that Scott's ROGER character is "despicable but smart," and that he wrote him with such intellectual flair because he's a sharp-as-a-tack advertising copy writer, and that's how these guys are. He proclaims, in any event, that he's personally involved "in a very happy relationship" and that he trusts his writing ability will lead him in other directions than just creating spot-on portrayals of brilliant sexist dogs.

Bursts

Patrice Leconte’s L’HOMME DU TRAIN is a philosophically-driven, mild-mannered, platonic love story between two world-weary guys. Jean Rochefort plays the elder of the two, a 70-something retired gent given to melancholy reflections about the life he never had the moxie to live. The other, a taciturn, leather-jacketed bank robber in town for a job, is played by French actor and pop star Johnny Hallyday, whose appeal I've never been able to quite gauge. He's got the weirdest-looking eyes I've ever seen on a two-legged life form, even in a special-effects horror film. He has the cold, watchful eyes of a timber wolf. The film itself is nothing special, but it passes agreeably. Rochefort, probably the most treasured French actor working today, is, as usual, sublime.

Paul Thomas Anderson’s PUNCH DRUNK LOVE is my favorite Adam Sandler film thus far, hands down. It's much subtler, smarter and more stylishly cool than his mass-market comedies, but at the same time doesn’t bail on the bottled-up rage theme that has turned up in nearly every Sandler movie ever released. Sandler plays a quiet, slightly nerdy business owner who suffers from a kind of Tourette's syndrome that manifests in violence against inanimate objects (glass partitions, restaurant bathrooms) rather than the spewing of profanity. There's a bizarre plot element involving the mass purchase of Healthy Choice pudding in order to amass frequent-flier miles that had me rolling in the aisles. (This part of the plot was allegedly inspired by a real guy named David Phillips, who was awarded over a million miles after spending $3000 on pudding.) There's also a love story element with Emily Watson, a phone scam revenge subplot that features the always-excellent Philip Seymour Hoffman, and some nice location photography captured in Honolulu.

Stephen Frears’ DIRTY PRETTY THINGS isn't one of his best (not on the level, say, of THE HIT, BLOODY KIDS or HIGH FIDELITY) but it has a decent script (by Steve Knight), some good acting, and a good amount of intelligence and precision. It's about an illegal Nigerian immigrant (Chewitill Ejiofor) who works as a desk clerk as a London hotel (along with a side gig as a gypsy cab driver) who stumbles across evidence of a bizarre murder. The obtaining of human kidneys from money-starved immigrants is the root of the matter, which is solved in a way I found quite satisfying. AMELIE's Audrey Tatou performs well as a Turkish chambermaid desperate to emigrate to New York City. Sergi Lopez and Sophie Okenedo are the other two stand-outs, respectively as a sleazy hotel manager and a cheery Chinese prostitute.

Shut-Outs

The screening shut-out problem got everyone's attention earlier this week when Roger Ebert and VARIETY critic Todd McCarthy began openly (and, in some local journalists' opinion, a little too stridently) complaining about the difficulty of getting into press/industry screenings. I think they were right to do this. Some kind of system has to be devised next year in which journalists who've traveled thousands of miles and shelled out lots of money to put themselves up be afforded a reasonable chance of being allowed to see the films they need to see.

I couldn't get into two or three myself this week, and it's certainly put a crimp into my schedule knowing I have to be at screening a good 45 minutes before it begins in order to have a decent shot at getting into the theatre. McCarthy told me yesterday he heard of a journalist who arrived at the Varsity cinema complex over an hour before one film was scheduled to unspool, and was nonetheless shut out, due to the scores of industry pass holders who'd lined up before him.

There are something like 2000 people at the festival with industry passes and 500 or thereabouts with press passes, and since most of the theatres seat about 600, any time there's a high-interest, must-see film playing the potential exists for a massive number of shut-outs. The best solution seems to be either for the festival to give priority to press-pass holders up to 15 minutes before a film begins, or to schedule separate screenings for press and industry pass holders.

David Poland has claimed in his column that the Sundance Film Festival is "less accommodating by far" than Toronto, which is hooey if you take the Park City Library screenings out of the equation. Gabrielle Free, who's been handling the press situation for the Toronto Film Festival for eight years, told me Thursday that the proposed press-favoring, 15-minutes-before-a-screening sys tem hasn’t been tried since she's had the job. She added, however, that addressing the problem would be topic #1 when she and festival director Piers Handling evaluate things after the festival ends.

Hotties Missed

Jim Sheridan’s IN AMERICA (which I hope to see later today, or perhaps tomorrow – a colleague who saw it yesterday morning told me it's "the one"); Peter Mullan’s THE MAGDELENE SISTERS (which the head of a top indie distributor said was "one of the two best films I've seen at the festival thus far….it makes you want to commit suicide, but it's very well done"); Steve James' STEVIE, a documentary about a guy named Stevie Fielding who grew up dysfunctionally and whose life, as observed by James' camera, is taking a turn for the worst; and Niki Caro's THE WHALE RIDER, which won the festival's People's Choice award Sunday. A journalist friend took me aside last week and swore it was the best thing he'd seen thus far.

Proof Positive

"The comparisons between ANTWONE FISHER and ORDINARY PEOPLE are not only very clear on the screen but also very deliberate on Denzel's part. In the Oct. 26, 2001 edition of the NEW YORK TIMES, Rick Lyman (or somebody) did a "Watching Movies With Denzel Washington" piece. The film Denzel chose to screen was ORDINARY PEOPLE He discussed Robert Redford's directing as an inspiration as he was then beginning work on ANTWONE FISHER." -- Wayne von Aken.