By Kathleen Murphy
Special to MSN Movies

As I lounged, bleary-eyed and movied-out, in a fast-food joint at the Toronto airport, a tall fellow all in black caught my eye. Over my years in the biz, I've observed that screen stars somehow always look as if they're on camera even when they're not — or maybe it's just that we ordinary folk can't help but frame them that way. So even though this long drink of water lacked entourage and looked a bit worse for wear — too much festival partying the night before? — I knew he was Jeff Goldblum.

Just a few days before, this wonderfully quirky actor had shown up on the "Today" show for a reunion of the cast of "The Big Chill." Subsequently, he'd been at the Toronto International Film Festival to promote "Adam Resurrected," Paul Schrader's oddball holocaust tragicomedy.

Complimenting him on his performance as a Jewish comic who survives the camps at great cost, I savored Goldblum's grizzled physog, always the antithesis of movie-star handsomeness. Even before age gaunted and lined this 6-footer-and-then-some's face, his overgenerous mouth and startlingly intelligent eyes suggested a kind of slightly mad bird, part raptor, part dodo. (Remember his superb performance in "The Fly"?)

Why am I going on about this eccentric actor's face? Because, strangely enough, that's one of the great pleasures of any film festival worth its salt: the opportunity to enjoy the amazing diversity of human appearance.

Like it or not, the majority of American movies feature stars whose flesh is buffed, Botoxed, cosmeticized, perfected to a fare-thee-well. And a steady diet of such unreality can't help but get boring, no matter how hooked you are on faces that look like they've never been lived in. Worse yet, most of the stories these mythical creatures inhabit are just as unreal.

Fantasy's fine, but sometimes you really want to sink your teeth (and eyes) into faces and places weathered by experience and maybe even wisdom.

Compare Keira Knightley's perfect features in "The Duchess," utterly unmarked by rape, childbearing, and other assorted ordeals, to those of the aging men and women in Zhang Ke Jia's "24 City," a brilliant pseudo-documentary out of China. The camera holds on each face as these children of Mao share their stories of working in a monolithic factory system that totally defined their lives. Even more than their words, their homely, ordinary, idiosyncratic and, yes, beautiful faces pull you in. The authenticity of their looks and gestures is like a ticket to ride in a time-travel machine, to sight-see foreign climes.

And then there's the diminutive Kazakh witch (Neisipkul Omarbekova) in Gulshat Omarova's "Native Dancer," played by the real deal: Decked out in turban and coat of many colors, she dances on the earth that gives her power to spy out stolen cattle, disease, a kidnapped child. This endearing old woman's face is ageless, a landscape weathered by mysterious knowledge and a sly amusement at humankind's foibles. That this exotic creature from another time should go up against modern-day gangsters and win is icing on the cake.

The genius of Jerzy Skolimowski's "Four Nights With Anna" lies in the way we slowly "read" the lead character, Leon (Artur Steranko), a dark, intense bloke who might be a serial killer or a tender lover yearning for a zaftig Rapunzel.

Leon's unhandsome face rarely changes expression, whether he's throwing an amputated human hand into a furnace or crawling through a window to stare at the woman of his dreams while she sleeps. It's a creepy, underground world our "hero" inhabits, full of ugliness and cruelty, but over the course of four nights and days we learn what lies beneath the mask he wears — and it's heartbreaking, and miraculous, like a candle guttering in the dark.

The first movie I saw at TIFF '08, Lisandro Alonso's "Liverpool," gifted me with a host of unforgettable mugs. That kind of sheer richness and variety of expression and appearance can't help but generate joy in our uniqueness.

And my final film at Toronto, Lance Daly's "Kisses," provided comparable pleasure, with less art. Two Irish teens, serving time in abusive homes and soul-killing suburban environs, take off for the city. As they flee their respective hells, color slowly leaks into what's been a black-and-white film.

The low-budget "Kisses" tells its story in close-ups, long takes of Kylie (Kelly O'Neill) and Dylan (Shane Curry) as they enjoy the magic of unfettered freedom and play, then confront the darker aspects of being on the street. Even when their faces light up with sweet, youthful delight, the old pain and knowledge in their eyes never quite disappears. As a saving bond grows between the two, their exchanged looks are like anchors, keeping them alive even in hell.

Though "Waltz With Bashir" (following on the popularity of "Persepolis") is expressed through painterly animation, its painful plunge into memories of massacres in Palestinian refugee camps finds its power in the "graphic novel" visages of the Israelis who were once soldiers in the 1980s Lebanese war: The blasted countenance of a man who killed watchdogs whose barking would have warned targeted villages, now haunted by nightmares of slavering, murderous dogs of war. The "I was just following orders" shiftiness of one veteran's expression. The sensitive face of the amnesiac filmmaker questing for the truth of his own experience, as well as that of his comrades.

It's truly remarkable how writer-director Ari Folman manages to mine so much humanity from black-and-white drawings. But "Waltz" is about the ways in which we distance ourselves from bloody, guilty reality — and, at the moment the film shock-cuts into actuality, we see that even the potent cartooning of "Waltz" has kept a step removed from horror.

Such international travel, from memorable mug to memorable mug, cleanses the palate, after too bland a diet of Aniston-Knightley-Hathaway, et al. But I found faces I won't soon forget in a couple of American flicks as well: Steven Soderbergh's "Che" and Kathryn Bigelow's "The Hurt Locker."

I watched all four hours-plus of "Che," interrupted by only a 15-minute intermission, and I can honestly say I was pretty much riveted throughout this ambitious portrait of a revolutionary. Part 1 could be seen as Che's sunshine chapter, full of camaraderie, idealism, and the heady success of the Cuban revolution, while Part 2 offers the shadow side, the doomed, seemingly endless Bolivian insurrection that ended in Che's death.

Soderbergh painstakingly details the process of revolution, mostly avoiding dramatic peaks in favor of the painful, mundane business of guerrilla warfare waged in mountainous terrain. Che's breathing wheezes and whistles horribly — he suffers from severe asthma — as he treks uphill and marshals his men to action. Here's a general who also doctors the wounded and insists on teaching his soldiers to read and write.

Forget star turn and dramatic close-ups: Benicio Del Toro simply and wholly immerses himself in Che and the communities this legendary Marxist assembles. No exhibitionist Lawrence of Arabia, Che's character is expressed in dogged adherence to principle, rather than in intimate moments of emotion or public heroism, the stuff of Hollywood biopics.

Delicious irony: While Che constantly preaches the primacy of the collective, the power of the group, he never seems to notice that he is the lodestone of his cadres of incredibly loyal fighters, who totally rely on his sense of purpose and planning.

"The Hurt Locker" takes place in Iraq, but it could be any battleground. This is a war movie in the style of Sam Fuller ("The Steel Helmet," "The Big Red One") and Howard Hawks ("The Dawn Patrol").

Neither politics nor even place is paramount here; it's warrior mentality and the kind of nonstop tension and danger that shapes the world of war that director Bigelow ("Blue Steel," "Strange Days") aims to spotlight.

From the start, the action of "Locker" takes your breath away, stretching out suspense until your nerves thrum as a trio of American soldiers work to disarm an IED hidden in a pile of garbage bags. This is a film about addiction to the tickle of death's feather on the nerves, the way nothing (neither peace nor love nor survival) matches that turn-on.

Big names like Guy Pearce, Ralph Fiennes and David Morse turn up in "Locker," their faces and voices making them instant standouts. But Bigelow deliberately violates the star principle, to underscore that random bullets and bombs don't give a hoot for fame or beauty.

The camera gets up close and personal with the not-so-famous faces of Jeremy Renner ("Dahmer"), Anthony Mackie ("Miracle at St. Anna") and Brian Geraghty, the principal cast members. We sweat it out with them as the trio labors over IEDs ever more cunningly triggered, and as Renner and Mackie turn stone-cold killers, two men working as one, calling and firing shots at distant snipers.

Futility rules. There are always more bombs and bad guys. A dead Iraqi kid who touched one soldier's heart can't be avenged, a suicide bomber who wants to live can't be saved — and the dead all look alike in the end.

Ranked by critics as one of TIFF's best, "Locker" is a superlative action flick, with smarts to spare about men at war. Hemingway would have approved.

I watched a deeply disturbing French-Canadian movie called "Martyrs," the closest I came to following my long tradition of seeing at least one (guilty pleasure) horror movie at the festival. Lots of blood and gore at the start during a horrific home invasion, then a long, awful sequence of a young woman's systematic physical degradation.

Those scenes of torture in a small cell reminded me of the prolonged death by starvation of Bobby Sands, IRA protester, in Steve McQueen's "Hunger." In both films, you're forced to witness, in stomach-turning detail, the terrible decay and violation of the human body. In the one case, the aim is to see the face of eternity; in the other, to obtain political status for IRA prisoners.

Can God or country be worth such suffering, you wonder — and what purpose is there in our witnessing it?

In "Adam Resurrected," Goldblum plays an actor who literally becomes a dog to save his family from being gassed by the Nazis. In a postwar psychiatric center for concentration camp survivors, he's a charismatic star, albeit prone to all manner of nearly fatal ailments, signs of his survival guilt. His salvation, such as it is, comes from a child who is a dog.

Unfortunately, "Adam Resurrected" is muddled and simplistic, lacking in emotional punch, but Goldblum's long, animated face, full of hound-dog melancholy, manic grief and self-lacerating intelligence, hits home.

In recent years, Toronto has blown me away with the likes of "No Country for Old Men," "Atonement," "Brokeback Mountain," and "Pan's Labyrinth," all of which went on to become major Oscar contenders. TIFF '08's slate hasn't generated much Oscar buzz (maybe "The Wrestler," and, unbelievably, the execrable "Lovely, Still"), and a good many movies, Oscar-bait or not, that you'd expect to have showed up, didn't, including "W" (Oct. 17), "The Road" (opening wide Nov. 21), "Australia" (Nov. 26), "Milk" (opening wide Dec. 12), "Revolutionary Road" (Dec. 26). (The New York Film Festival had dibs on Clint Eastwood's "Changeling.")

So this was, for me, a year not of blockbusters, but small masterpieces and unconventional not-really-masterpieces, films that celebrated life on the human scale, in the context of war, family, journeys and memory.

And what's not to love about TIFF '08's cinematic gallery of beautiful, lived-in, beaten-up, old, despairing, luminous, young, ugly faces, each of which transported me to parts unknown and brought me home again?

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Kathleen Murphy currently reviews films for Seattle's Queen Anne News and writes essays on film for Steadycam magazine. A frequent speaker on film, Murphy has contributed numerous essays to magazines (Film Comment, the Village Voice, Film West, Newsweek-Japan), books ("Best American Movie Writing of 1998," "Women and Cinema," "The Myth of the West") and Web sites (Amazon.com, Cinemania.com, Reel.com). Once upon a time, in another life, she wrote speeches for Bill Clinton, Jack Lemmon, Harrison Ford, Joe Pesci, Robert De Niro, Art Garfunkel and Diana Ross.