Black and gold and movies all over

By Barbara Vancheri / Sept. 6, 2008

TORONTO -- Steeler Nation is alive and well in Toronto, not that anyone might have doubted that. Stepping onto the elevator at my hotel last night I spotted a Steeler T-shirt - the scores on the back looked to be from the five Super Bowls - and was so busy double-checking that I nearly missed the Penguins jersey on the other passenger. A young couple from Pittsburgh is here for a big musical festival in town and they were flying the hometown colors.

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It seems like just yesterday that Debra Winger (below right) was scooped up in Richard Gere's arms in "An Officer and a Gentleman" but I guess it's been a quarter-century or so, which explains how she's old enough to play the mother of Anne Hathaway and Rosemarie DeWitt in "Rachel Getting Married."

DeWitt, who looks like she could be Winger's daughter, is Rachel, a bride who's worried about more than just rain on her wedding day. She is still chafing at the way her drug-addicted sister, played by Hathaway, sucked the air out of the room and the attention out of the family for years. Now, Hathaway's Kym is clean and out of rehab for the wedding and using the rehearsal dinner to try to make amends, per the 12-step program.

Hathaway, with choppy, chin-length hair and an omnipresent cigarette, gets to really act here, tucking that "Princess Diaries" smile away. We learn, about midway through the movie, what Kym did that rent the family in a way that could never be mended.

There is a confrontation scene between parent and child that makes "Margot at the Wedding" from last year's fest almost look like a fairy tale. There is also a music-infused celebration and enough shaky handheld camera movements to send a few people near the screen fleeing for seats farther back, not easy since almost every chair in the theater was occupied.

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If Viggo Mortensen hadn't agreed to co-star in "Appaloosa," director Ed Harris isn't sure he would have made the movie.

"I don't know, I just had to pick somebody," Harris said jokingly, when asked why Mortensen was his man. Mortensen chimed in:  "Everybody else turned him down."

Then Harris elaborated at a press conference on Friday, "We worked together on ‘The History of Violence,' you know, and I really enjoyed working with him. Viggo, I not only have great respect for him as an actor but as a human being. He's a really decent guy, he's great on the set, he treats everybody really respectfully. I just thought he'd be perfect.

"These were two guys who had to communicate a lot about being who they were and the knowledge of each other without really talking," about their inner feelings in depth. "I wanted a guy who I could ride next to on a horse for 10 hours and never say a word and feel totally comfortable and I figured he'd be the guy. He's the only man I wanted to play the role."

Mortensen, dressed in a T-shirt and jeans, had proved what Harris said.  When reporters' tape recorders - including mine - clicked off on the table in front of him, he checked, flipped the tape over and restarted it. When someone snapped a digital photo of him, he obligingly looked at the back of the camera and smiled and when questioned about "The Road," he could be overheard singing the praises of his young co-star, Kodi Smit-McPhee, just as he had done in Pittsburgh. 

Yes, a class act and classy actor.