TIFF 2024: Millers in Marriage, Sketch, The Deb

In my final dispatch from this year’s Toronto International Film Festival, I watched three films about families in crisis. In Edward Burns’s drama “Millers in Marriage,” three fifty-something siblings contend with how relationships morph and change as you age. In Seth Worley’s imaginative film “Sketch,” the shared grief of a father and his children manifests as a child’s monstrous sketches magically brought to life. Lastly, in Rebel Wilson’s musical “The Deb,” two cousins learn to see the value in each other and the power of shared community. 

At one point in “Millers In Marriage,” the 14th film from writer-director-producer-star Edward Burns, fading music journalist Johnny (Benjamin Bratt) recites lyrics from the song “Suite: Judy Blue Eyes,” saying, “Don’t let the past remind us of what we are not now.” He’s sharing a bottle of wine with Eve (Gretchen Mol, in the best performance of her career), a former rock star in the 90s, who gave up showbiz to start a family with her manager, the now alcoholic Scott (Patrick Wilson). Eve is one of the three Millers of the film’s title. She is a woman filled with regrets but has not yet given up on all her dreams.

Told in a cross-cutting, nonlinear fashion that replicates how certain people in our lives can cause us to recall memories out of the void, the film is bookended with Eve’s journey as she assesses the state of her marriage. We also follow her brother Andy (Burns), an artist separated from his domineering wife Tina (Morena Baccarin), and starting a new chapter with a no-nonsense divorcee named Renee (Minnie Driver, the film’s MVP). The third Miller is Maggie (Julianna Margulies), a writer whose novels chronicling Upper East Side champagne problems are wildly successful. Meanwhile, her husband Nick (Campbell Scott, looking almost like a carbon copy of his dad) is a novelist of more “serious” subject matter who is currently suffering from writer’s block. 

Stephen Stills wrote “Suite: Judy Blue Eyes” as his relationship with fellow musician Judy Collins began to dissolve. It examines the effects of aging and growth on people and what happens when dreams change, but love continues to flow everlasting. Burns explores these same themes with his characters, all of whom are moving into a third phase of their lives. They’ve established careers (in Eve’s case, deferred them), had children, and built families. What happens to a family when children leave to start their own? What happens when your career flourishes but your relationship remains stagnant? What if while you’re growing as people, you also grow apart? I must be getting older myself because although I’m a generation younger than the characters in this film, I could relate to many of these questions myself and left the film thinking deeply about my own life.

Writer-director-editor Seth Worley’s “Sketch” is a miracle. It’s the kind of big, warm-hearted family film with just a tinge of fantastical horror that I grew up with in the ’80s and ’90s—think films like “Honey, I Shrunk the Kids” or “Jumanji.” It feels wholly original and just a little bit frightening, the way kids’ drawings and imaginations can be. 

The film centers on the Watt family. Widower Taylor (Tony Hale, never better) is doing his best with his two kids after the death of his wife. However, no one is actually doing okay. Taylor has removed every photo of the dearly departed from their home and even plans to sell the place. Daughter Amber (Bianca Belle) is working through her grief through increasingly violent drawings of monsters with complicated backstories. Son Jack, worried about his little sister, is overcompensating as he tries to fix every little situation. 

When Jack discovers a pond that fixes broken things, he contemplates placing his mother’s ashes in its magical sapphire waters. When Amber intervenes, her notebook falls in instead, bringing all her sketches to life in the most wonderfully horrific ways possible. A giant blue monster with snake legs and Google eyes named Dave attacks their school bus. Hundreds of red “eyeders”—spiders that are just an eye with legs—steal all their things. 

Each creature is more elaborate and specifically weird than the next as Taylor, Amber, Jack, and their school friends try to figure out how to defeat these larger-than-life monsters made of crayon and marker and glitter and glue. Along with its thrilling set pieces and subtle humor, Worley’s sharp script examines all the ways grief can manifest intensely; the dark and the light and the pain and the joy and the anger and sadness and the love. In the end, we are made of all of these conflicting feelings, and what better way to exorcize them than through the transformative magic of art?

I was slightly put off by the description of “The Deb” on TIFF’s website, so my expectations were quite low. (I also generally don’t like musicals.) This is when a film festival can completely surprise you. From the first song, a takedown of rich kid champagne problems entitled “FML,” I was hooked by Rebel Wilson’s plucky, charming directorial debut. The song, which Meg Washington and screenwriter Hannah Reilly wrote, not only sets the tone for the film’s sharp satire, but also shows Wilson’s directorial prowess. The music cleverly interpolates the iconic song “It’s the Hard Knock Life” from “Annie,” with Wilson directing the privileged teen girls sporting stereotypical, private schoolgirl plaid skirts in a way that combines both the choreography from that earlier musical, but also the iconography of millennial favorite Britney Spears.

A quick montage later, the film’s lead, Maeve (Charlotte MacInnes), has been canceled after her stridently woke girl boss feminism goes a bridge too far, ending her reign as her school’s queen bee. Put on a bus by her mother to Dunburn, a small town in the Outback, Maeve is to spend the summer with her lonely cousin Taylah (Natalie Abbott). A typical fish-out-of-water film ensues, in which we see that Taylah’s simple life and dreams are far more complex than Maeve gave them credit for. The whole film serves to dispel myths about rural culture. As someone who grew up in an isolated rural community, I always appreciate it when a film chooses not to punch down but rather to expand what city folk think country life is like.  

Wilson herself stars as the self-described “rural stage mom” of the resident mean girl Annabelle (Stevie Jean), a talented singer with secrets of her own. She’s the kind of woman who, in her words, puts the “cunt in country.” Wilson is credited with additional writing, and it’s not hard to tell where her humor sharpened Reilly’s already buoyant script. Wilson never steals the spotlight from the three teenage leads but bolsters them with her strong supporting performance. Reilly’s script takes playful jabs at every form of cancel culture, performative allyship, and a certain form of modern feminism that often seems more rooted in a need for attention than in doing any tangible good in the world.

In the end, this is a film about finding your own strength, about helping others rather than judging them. It’s a joyful film, but one that’s not afraid to use a bit of colorful language. For me, this was one of the most surprising revelations of the festival and, for once, a worthy, truly crowd-pleasing film on which to end this wonderful festival.