Doing the 'dance

Finding the best of both Sundances.

by Sam Adams

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Published: Jan 31, 2007

ONCE AND AGAIN: John Curran's quasi-musical was Sundance's biggest grass-roots hit, but left without a distributor. (CLICK IMAGE FOR LARGER VERSION)

"Don't go to Sundance," the voices said. "It's too commercial. It's not about the films. It's a miserable tar pit of industry glad-handers and heat-seeking starfuckers, crammed together in an overpriced ski resort in the middle of nowhere." Perhaps I embellish a tad; even when running down the Sundance Film Festival, it's hard to steer clear of exaggeration. But it's true that when I began to ask friends and colleagues if it might be worth making the trip some year, the response was always discouraging: too crowded, too Hollywood, too middlebrow, and above all, too overhyped. It took a while to dawn on me that these same people kept going every year, which either meant they were masochists (one veteran told me he goes "for my sins") or I wasn't getting the whole story.

As I found out soon after driving in from Salt Lake, there are at least two Sundances, one powered by carefully managed pre-festival "buzz" and the other by filmgoers flying by their own lights. (There are also, or so I hear, people who "attend" the festival and do nothing but hit parties and take late, bleary-eyed lunches, but let's please leave them out of it. Sorry, Diddy.) The trick, or at least so reasoned this fumbling Sundance virgin, would be to sample a little of both, taking in the hype and the hypeless, star-fuelled fizzles and utter unknowns. What would a film festival be without the thrill of discovery, or the schadenfreude of watching some self-important star's pet project go down in flames?

As train wrecks go, nothing hit the wall harder than Hounddog. Starring Dakota Fanning as an Elvis-obsessed tween in the rural South, Deborah Kampmeier's overheated Gothic was the movie everyone had to see, like it or (decidedly) not. Already made infamous by news of a scene in which 12-year-old Fanning is raped by an older boy, the movie graduated to genuine scandal when it was condemned sight unseen by the Catholic League, with charges that the filming might have violated child pornography statutes aired (and roundly debunked) in the New York and Los Angeles Times. Not the best introduction, but all press is good press, right?

Not so at Sundance, where even good movies wither in the spotlight. And Hounddog is not even close to a good movie. The rape scene, composed of a few disconnected, discreetly lit shots, is hardly the problem, at least not when stacked up against the movie's cornpone dialogue, off-kilter performances, clumsy symbolism and borderline racism. Pity David Morse, reduced to playing a gibbering manchild with a pageboy haircut, and Piper Laurie, whose overripe dialogue would give drag queens pause ("This ain't no time for your hidin' games — your daddy's been struck by lightnin'!"). But mostly pity Afemo Omilami, saddled with the jaw-droppingly offensive role of a Negro field hand whose main function is to babble incomprehensible folk wisdom for Fanning's edification — at least, when he's not hosting impromptu jam sessions in his hay loft featuring Big Mama Thornton (a briefly enthralling Jill Scott) or telling Fanning, post-rape, that she's now "a nigger" like him. Amazingly, Fanning emerges from the movie unscathed, proving that she can invest even risible material with the ring of truth; how often do 12-year-olds rise above their material? But the combination of jeers and bad press proved toxic to the movie's hopes for a distribution deal, which still has yet to materialize.

In the kind of meaningless coincidence that engages your mind when the movie in front of you isn't doing the job, a 12-year-old girl is also the saving grace of the similarly contrived Grace Is Gone. As an Army spouse struggling to break the news of his wife's death in Iraq to their two young daughters, John Cusack slaps on oversize glasses and a shoulders-first gait, rendering his grief-stricken ex-serviceman as a lumpy, schlubby caricature (not surprising, since Cusack has shown before he's incapable of empathizing with characters who don't share his political beliefs). First-timer James C. Strouse's direction is as awkward as his script, full of unsightly wide-angle shots and pointless high- and low-angle shots, at least when it's not just nondescript. If Grace moves anyone at all (and it must have, since it won the festival's audience award), it's surely due to Shélan O'Keefe, who plays Cusack's elder daughter as a young woman coming to terms with her mother's absence and her father's inadequacies. More than Cusack's nudging and fumbling, her quiet remove embodies the nation's ever-multiplying grief, silently expressed and hidden from view. As with Hounddog, she lends the movie a credibility it doesn't deserve.

Although Robert Redford sidetracked his opening-day press conference for a swipe at George W. Bush, the festival's political offerings generally fell wide of the mark. Opening-night showcase Chicago 10 desperately caters to the youth demo with motion-capture animation and a soundtrack featuring Rage Against the Machine and the Beastie Boys, but its attempt to paint Abbie Hoffman, Jerry Rubin, et al, as pioneering shit-stirrers without at least considering the possibility that they helped get Nixon elected is half-baked at best. Charles Ferguson's Iraq war doc No End in Sight and Rory Kennedy's Ghosts of Abu Ghraib are impressive feats of collation, but they're not persuasive enough to sway unconverted audiences, and they don't reveal anything you couldn't learn by catching up on your New Yorkers. Not so Annie Sundberg and Ricki Stern's The Devil Came on Horseback, which finds an emotionally powerful way into a story too many Americans have found easy to ignore: the ongoing genocide in Darfur, Sudan. Approaching their subject with an eye toward greater U.S. involvement, the directors focus on Brian Steidle, a former U.S. Marine who was stirred to activism by the devastation he witnessed firsthand. Steidle's photographs of charred bodies and decimated villages, taken when he was serving as a military observer for the African Union, touched off an outcry when they were published in the New York Times, but that's only half the story. The second half begins when, rather than touching off the rush of aid he expected, Steidle's photographs ignite a semantic debate: Does the systematic murder of black Africans by government-backed militias constitute "genocide," or merely "acts of genocide"? It's hard to fathom the disillusion that Steidle, an ex-soldier from a diehard military family, must feel as his former commander in chief dithers while Darfurians die, to say nothing of the cynicism involved in parsing the nation's way through a loophole in the Geneva Conventions. Steidle hopes that the movie, together with his book of the same name, will help to generate public support for targeted sanctions on the Sudanese government, but the film will have to nail down a distributor first.

In a competition slate stocked with fine but unremarkable romantic comedies (Zoe Cassavetes' Broken English, Justin Theroux's Dedication) in the time-worn Sundance fashion, Adrienne Shelly's Waitress stood out for its sunny good humor and perfectly pitched comic performances. Positing an adulterous romance between Keri Russell's glum pie waitress and Nathan Fillion's tongue-tied obstetrician, the relentlessly winsome feature came with a bitter undercurrent, shadowed as it was by Shelly's tragic murder two months previous. But whatever dark mood might have prevailed before the lights came down, it was instantly washed away, returning only as its final image inadvertently evoked thoughts of the afterlife.

Among the docs, generally considered a stronger batch than this year's fiction films, standouts included Amir Bar-Lev's My Kid Could Paint That, a troubled and provocative take on the story of a 4-year-old art prodigy that may be a tad too self-questioning for its own good, and Dan Klores' Crazy Love, a sympathetic recounting of a passionate affair that turned to madness and back again, leavened with cheerily obsessive pop songs.

For days during the festival, Redford could be seen on the cover of a local newspaper proclaiming that Sundance was "a festival, not a market," a bit of wishful thinking that fell away as the festival's relatively cool opening weekend morphed into a midweek sales event, with prices soaring to $7 million for the British coming-of-age comedy Son of Rambow. But the movie that qualified as the festival's truest grass-roots hit left the festival without a distribution deal. Beginning with a 9 a.m. screening on the festival's first full day, John Carney's quasi-musical Once took on gradual but unmistakable heat as the festival went on, building word of mouth without the help of stars or phalanx of publicists. Starring musicians Glen Hansard and Marketa Irglova, who wrote and play their own songs, the film tells the story of a not-quite-romance between a Dublin busker and a Czech immigrant, using music to fill in the gaps where words won't do. Carney naturalistically positions his songs within the narrative, but the movie ever-so-subtly departs from reality at times, notably in a glorious unbroken shot where Irglova, clad in a tattered bathrobe and fuzzy slippers, walks back to her apartment while listening to one of Hansard's unfinished songs on her CD player. As she begins to sing along, composing words as she goes, his voice magically joins with hers, lifting us away from the city streets even as the camera testifies to their unchanged existence. Buoyed by boisterous Q&As studded with impromptu musical performances (Hansard, though an "unknown" in Sundance terms, has fronted the rousing Irish rock band The Frames for the last 15 years), the film snapped up the audience award in the world cinema category, but by festival's end, a deal, multimillion or otherwise, had yet to be finalized. Without stars or a genre hook, the film must have seemed too great a risk for buyers who wrote seven-figure checks for junk like the apocalyptic mash-up The Signal. A road-tested crowd-pleaser with a killer soundtrack and charismatic leads — who needs it?

(sam@citypaper.net)

 

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