TORONTO— Martin Sheen wasn’t happy. Quite visibly. The look on his face as he charged off the upper-floor elevator of the Royal York Hotel was one of stony, resolute fury.

I was a dedicated weekly watcher of “The West Wing,” and nothing fictional that I ever saw on the face of President Josiah Bartlet on “The West Wing” ever matched the look on the face of the real Martin Sheen as he charged off that elevator toward the din outside.

I didn’t blame him. He was caught, as was every other guest at Toronto’s Royal York Hotel on the festival’s opening weekend. How, after all, were we to know in advance that the union representing the hotel’s service workers— chambermaids, laundry workers, room service waiters, etc.—had called for the Royal York to be hit by one of its one-day “Rolling Strikes” to make jolly well sure that every festival guest got a strong whiff of real labor reality as the biggest and greatest film festival on this continent got under way.

So there was an unholy racket outside. There was a picket line full of employees shouting, singing, carrying signs and banging sonorously on empty plastic food tubs turned upside down. And Sheen clearly wasn’t happy about it.

Sheen is a lifelong activist of the left — the kind who, in his past, has thought nothing of being arrested over 70 times at nonviolent protests. And he, like all of us at the hotel, had been caught unaware and, in effect, had crossed a union picket line.

So what did he do in his furious discomfort? He went outside to the picketers, got their cheers, grabbed a placard and marched with them.

I, personally, was thrilled, which is more than I can say I felt about any movies I watched at the festival (though everything I saw was good, including one special one, of which more later).

No matter what one’s politics or feelings about labor issues, here, at the very least, was one Hollywood celebrity who was 100 percent true to his professed beliefs, even though he was in Toronto in the first place to promote his son Emilio Estevez’s film “The Way,” in which he stars as a father who has a religious experience retrieving the body of his son after he dies in an accident in France.

Sheen told representatives of the Unite Here Local 75 that he and his family would check out of the Royal York if asked. (They weren’t asked.)

You wouldn’t think a film festival would be a place for knotty issues of labor etiquette — especially those, like Sheen’s, involving the beliefs of a lifetime. He handled his with consummate grace.

I’m not so sure I handled mine as gracefully. I’ve written for decades how much I’ve disliked “Siskel and Ebert,” the TV show, and the public expectations its popularity forced on movie critics in America. I was still moved, though, by Ebert’s on-air plight as he dealt with a partner — Gene Siskel — who was clearly failing because of the brain cancer that eventually killed him. And I’m more than moved now by the terrible plight of Ebert himself, whose battle with thyroid cancer has resulted in so much surgery that he can neither speak nor eat, but is nevertheless doing some of the best and noblest work of his life as a writer of blogs and film criticism.

So here was my etiquette problem: I’d gotten to the press and industry screening of Darren Aronofsky’s hugely praised “Black Swan” an hour early to make sure I had an aisle seat. Ebert, as is usually the case, arrived just 15 minutes before start time.

As he walked up one of the aisles of the Scotiabank Theater that continually tripped up people young and old, frail and hearty all through the time I was there (they’re tough to negotiate even when the theater lights are on), he tripped up slightly. His wife, Chaz, grabbed his left arm. He instinctively held his frail right hand out to whoever might catch it on an aisle seat.

That was me. I helped him into the seat next to mine, which is where he watched the film, at the behest of the fellow on the other side, who was saving the seat but whose expected friend didn’t show up. My etiquette problem? Do I get up and give the wife of the ailing but tenacious and now noble critic my seat even though I was there an hour early to get the seat I wanted?

Well, I didn’t. She — as she did the night before at the screening of Ben Affleck’s “The Town” — got a nearby seat a couple rows back. During the film though, as Ebert’s breathing seemed a bit distressed, I was tempted to find her and change seats so that she could sit next to him. Thankfully, it proved unnecessary.

Obviously, much larger things are at stake at film festivals than idiosyncratic etiquette problems—none more human, though.

In my four days there, I saw nothing bad, and one film that I found utterly extraordinary — even though I fear for its commercial life and strongly doubt its presence during award season: Rodrigo Cortes’ “Buried,” the newest entry in what has now become Claustrophobia: The Film Genre, wherein one man — or one small group of men — in the tightest of spaces deals with the threat of death.

The claustrophobic “Lebanon,” which takes place inside an Israeli tank, opens in Buffalo this weekend.

Also at the Toronto Festival was “127 Hours,” a powerful claustrophobic film directed by the virtuoso Danny Boyle, whose “Slumdog Millionaire” captured the world after its festival launches, and starring James Franco as Aron Ralston, the mountain climber and adventurer who was forced to cut off his own arm when he was alone and pinned by a rock.

“Buried,” starring Ryan Reynolds, is an utterly amazing film about a truck driver buried alive in a coffin in Iraq and held for $5 million ransom after a bloody road incident. It’s a stunt in every second of the film that takes place entirely within that coffin (lit by a lighter, a cell phone and some glow sticks). But it’s a magnificent stunt and a brilliant, harrowing, film.

Also surprisingly impressive to me, in an entirely different way, was “Everything Must Go,” a film I dreaded as I did few others at the festival but forced myself to see out of curiosity to find out what would happen on-screen to a short story by one of the most admired American writers of our time. The short story is “Why Don’t You Dance?” by Raymond Carver.

And the film “Everything Must Go” stars, yes, Will Ferrell in his second serious film role after “Stranger Than Fiction.” Predictably, it has already received an uncomprehending and unappreciative review in a movie trade which, clearly, wouldn’t have known a Carver story from a dog-food label.

There’s no question that writer/director Dan Rush added some sweetener and cereal to flesh the story out and make more of a popular movie out of a work that was written in entirely drier literary conditions.

But there’s no question in my mind that Ferrell is surprisingly — almost startlingly — right as the alcoholic in Carver’s story. He plays a man who comes home after losing his corporate job to discover that his wife changed the locks on the house and left all his belongings on the front lawn. As with so many of Carver’s stories, there was obvious autobiography to it—his struggles with alcoholism, at the very least.

Raymond Carver, who died of lung cancer in 1988, taught for a while at Syracuse University and once came Buffalo to read from his work at the Hallwalls Gallery. R. D. Pohl introduced me to Carver after the reading, and we talked a little.

The fact is that Ferrell is quite good physical casting in any Carver story of any autobiography whatsoever. He is tall, like Carver, and his face, though longer, is similar in type. So, too, is his voice. Ferrell’s performance is restrained and quite deft at capturing the imploding, beer-dampered fury of a man who is caught in a world of absurdity and betrayal (his own self-betrayal, worst of all.)

A simple matter of film festival etiquette, then: If you’re a critic and you see an actor do something bracingly good against formidable odds and know that he is likely to be misunderstood if not dismissed, shouldn’t you say so?

Well, I just did.

jsimon@buffnews.comnull