Slow 'Dance

Less hype, more quiet pleasures at this year's Sundance.

by Sam Adams

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Published: Jan 30, 2008

LUCKY BAKE: Julianne Moore shines as a small-time actress who marries into a fortune in Savage Grace. (CLICK IMAGE FOR LARGER VERSION)

With no prom queen to crown, no consensus hit surging above the tide of unknowns, the Sundance Film Festival was a study in tempered expectations. Industry observers declared this year's lineup, with its massive number of first-time directors, as a feeding frenzy, with some 100 films on the block — a prediction that, when buyers burned by some of last year's pricier acquisitions kept their hands in their pockets, turned to accusations that this year's fest was a bust.

With blogs and BlackBerrys turning the buzz-hunt into a spectator sport, expectations were raised and dashed within hours. Would Sunshine Cleaning, with Amy Adams and Emily Blunt as sisters who go into the crime-scene cleanup business, make a clean sweep of it? Not quite. What about What Just Happened?, based on producer Art Linson's thinly veiled account of shooting David Mamet's The Edge in the Alaskan wilderness? Not so much.  

Free-floating particles of hype wafted down Main Street like airborne snowflakes, attaching themselves to anything that looked vaguely like a celebrity — hey, was that 50 Cent? But a few miles away, where actual screenings took place, movies that lacked the requisite sizzle were quietly cleaning up.

Even if it hadn't come into the festival with distribution already attached, it's doubtful Tom Kalin's Savage Grace would have occasioned much fanfare. The 14-year gap after Kalin's first feature, Swoon, has all but erased his name from an entire generation of filmgoers, and the movie's story — based, like Swoon's, on real events — is as seedy as it is obscure. But Savage Grace is a quiet stunner, a reserved but engrossing psychodrama whose cumulative impact is devastating. Summing up a career's worth of silently suffering women of privilege, Julianne Moore plays Barbara Baekeland, a small-time actress who marries into the Bakelite fortune. Her husband (Stephen Dillane) is a second-generation wastrel who props up his flagging manhood with verbal abuse, their son (Eddie Remayne) a pale, practically translucent dandy whose relationship with his mother grows closer and more pathological as her marriage fractures.

Savage Grace builds to a series of incidents that would seem outrageous in another context. But without relying on reductive foreshadowing or pat psychobabble, Kalin and screenwriter Howard Rodman earn the movie's final scenes, when what has seemed like a poisoned take on Edith Wharton suddenly becomes something out of Edgar Allan Poe.

Making its Stateside debut, Michael Haneke's Funny Games visits equal horrors on a bourgeois family, in the form of two white-clad psychopaths (Michael Pitt and Brady Corbet) who terrorize them in their country home. Remaking, or rather re-creating, his 1997 Austrian feature (which, even in German, bears the same title), Haneke duplicates the original practically shot for shot, as if it were an opera with changing casts rotating through a standing set.

Haneke's exercise might seem even more fruitless (and more bananas) than Gus Van Sant's Psycho, but for those who've seen the original, the remake — known for convenience's sake as Funny Games U.S. — is a fascinating endeavor. Within the otherwise identical frames, the differences pop out like the variables in a scientific experiment.

The film's viewers, meanwhile, function as Haneke's lab rats, subject to a series of deliberate and increasingly direct confrontations. It's an entirely different movie when seen with an unsuspecting crowd than it is at home alone; you can hear Haneke's manipulations taking hold all around you, and at the same time fool yourself into thinking you're different from the rest.

Sundance vets Ryan Fleck and Anna Boden returned with Sugar , a straightforward but entirely satisfying account of a Dominican baseball pitcher (Algenis Perez Soto) who is ground up and spit out by the minor-league machine. The Half Nelson writer-directors adopt an unassuming naturalist style that might lead some to overlook the movie's virtues, but considering the simplicity of their story, it's surprisingly unpredictable. The plot never falls into pat arcs, and Soto, a nonprofessional actor with a wicked knuckleball, brings a depth of feeling to the hoariest of sports-movie tropes. Following its Spanish-speaking hero through a succession of Midwestern farm-team towns, the movie doubles as a reflection on the loneliness of immigrant life, conveyed by shooting Soto with long lenses so that the people around him are reduced to a blur of life, close at hand but unreachable.

Alex Rivera's Sleep Dealer takes on the border wars more directly. Mixing neorealism and science fiction, Rivera imagines a futuristic Mexico where migrant labor has become virtual. Fitted with nodes that link their central nervous systems to a supercomputer, desperate campesinos plug in and operate equipment on the other side of an airtight border, working in a country they can see but never touch. Rather than dreaming of a better life, young boys bliss out to reality-TV bloodsport, watching American fighter drones mow down suspected "aqua-terrorists" for trying to liberate the flow of privatized water.

Far from the festival's most polished documentary but, by a hair, its most galvanizing, Flow: For the Love of Water reveals Rivera's vision as fact and not fiction. Envisioning a day when water and not oil is the planet's most valuable limited resource, Irena Salina's urgent and unsettling film is an unrestrained attack on corporations like Suez and Vivendi, who have privatized a substantial portion of the third world's water supply at the expense — and rarely to the benefit — of its poorest residents. In a remote South African hamlet, the villagers pay more per gallon than affluent city dwellers; those who cannot afford it drink standing or polluted water, and frequently die of it. Americans, meanwhile, spend some $9 billion annually on bottled water, which often comes straight from the tap — and that's if you're lucky, since bottled water, unlike its municipal counterpart, is effectively unregulated. Given that the U.N. estimates the entire world could drink clean water for a third of what we spend on the bottled stuff, it might be a good time to invest in a Klean Kanteen.

No less mind-boggling is Robb Moss and Peter Galison's Secrecy , which traces the history of government confidentiality from its origins in the 1940s to its epidemic incarnation in the present day. Although it's not exactly nonpartisan, the movie presents compelling, if frequently unnerving, arguments from both sides. Former CIA Jerusalem bureau chief Melissa Boyle Mahle explains, without blinking an eye, that secrecy has the advantage of allowing the government to take actions in private that would seem inconsistent with our ideals if brought to light. Whatever you think of that reasoning, she's hardly the first to think it, just the first to say it without beating around the bush. But while spooks past and present claim they can only function under a cloak of secrecy, one observer points out that the 9/11 attacks might have been prevented had the alphabet agencies not been too paranoid to share information. Appearing at the public screening, Mahle argued that intelligence agencies can only work in secret when the general public trusts them to hide only what needs to be hidden. That trust, she said, has been damaged in the last decade, and is badly in need of repair.

Among documentaries of a more personal stripe, the standout was Isaac Julien's Derek , a loving portrait of the late Derek Jarman, whose polemically queer and intensely personal movies savaged the conformity of Thatcherite Britain. Fittingly, Julien goes against the grain of traditional docu-portraiture. The only voices heard at length are Jarman's own and that of Tilda Swinton, his longtime muse, whose incantatory voiceover accompanies shots of her prowling the streets of London as if looking for his ghost. Steven Sebring's Patti Smith: Dream of Life toys less successfully with formula, jumbling footage gathered over a 10-year shoot into an impressionistic wash.

Veteran cinematographer Ellen Kuras, who drew whoops just for taking the stage, made her directing debut after 20 years of working on Nerakhoon , whose Laotian protagonist is credited as editor and co-director. The titular "betrayal" is personal but also political, encompassing the abandonment of Laotians who aided the U.S. during the Vietnam war, and were subsequently executed or imprisoned. But Americans play the good guys in The Linguists , as two intrepid ethnographers scour the globe saving shreds of dying languages from total extinction. Perhaps their next charity case could be the lingua franca of indie film.

(s_adams@citypaper.net)

 

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