There are good movies and bad movies at the
Sundance Film Festival, but neither group tells you anything about the quality of individual entries. You may hear that this year restored faith in the state of independent cinema. Or you may hear that it destroyed hope for its sustainability. Both perceptions are equally valid, because nobody in Park City has seen all of Sundance's 200-odd movies; as a result, the diversity allows for a wide variety of individual viewing experiences. Still, when the media frenzy dies down and life continues, the movies that retain a lasting presence do so on the basis of buzz and little else.
The buzz coming out of Sundance generally falls into one of two categories: Discoveries and breakouts. While these movies come from newbie and experienced veterans alike, they are often collectively placed on a pedestal as the saving grace of independent film. It's a disingenuous proposition, but also unfair to the many movies left out the equation. While I'm glad that Sundance discoveries like
Winter's Bone,
Catfish,
Buried and
Blue Valentine will make it out to the larger public, I worry that the chatter sustaining these movies overwhelms the opportunity for other noteworthy festival entries to gain much attention at all.
Consider the revelatory drama
The Imperialists Are Still Alive! Like a 1990s-era Amerindie upgraded to post-9/11 concerns, this insightful low key account of a young Islamic photographer living in Manhattan addresses global concerns with an engagingly human touch. Directed by
Zeina Durra, whose emphasis on playfully philosophical dialogue recalls
Whit Stillman, the narrative patiently navigates a credible series of conflicts while simultaneously developing an intimate portrait of the characters' lives. Our creative heroine, Asya (
Elodie Bouchez), learns that her good friend has been abducted by the CIA, leading to an increased sense of paranoia. But her fears are allayed by the blossoming of a relationship with her new lover, a gentle Mexican with the wits to deflate her fears. As a result,
Imperialists develops into a plea for cross-cultural lovemaking that evades sentimentalism in favor of something far more compelling: Reality.
Imperialists might play decently enough in New York and L.A. or even better with some sort of grassroots release, but Sundance hardly offered a viable platform for it. The movie's strengths are in its soft-spoken nuances. As a result, there's nothing "crowdpleasing" about it in the conventional sense, which creates an automatic blockade on the road to Sundance buzz. (
Lovers of Hate,
Bryan Poyser's clever man-trapped-in-a-condo feat, faces a similar problem -- but expect this Austin filmmaker to get a second shot at mass exposure when the movie inevitably screens at
South by Southwest in March.)
Even movies with stars, budgets and distribution might miss out on the festival exposure they deserve. I would put
Nicole Holofcener's introspective family dramedy
Please Give into this category. Holofcenter, whose
Friends with Money is often cited as the last fairly decent movie to open the festival, captures neurotic social dynamics as few other contemporary directors can. Her latest feature, an understated New York odyssey that made this city dweller excited to head home, stars
Catherine Keener and
Oliver Platt (in probably his best role) as a benevolent middle-aged couple with plenty of self-doubts beneath the surface of their seemingly uneventful lives.
While they spend their days buying the possessions of the deceased and reselling them at their neighborhood shop, the couple also cope with their whiny teenage daughter (
Sarah Steele) and a crabby old neighbor (
Ann Morgan Guilbert), whose apartment they purchase in the hopes of using it once she died. Rounding out the ensemble narrative, the elderly woman's two adult grandchildren (
Rebecca Hall and
Amanda Peet) show up at the building and become inextricably linked to the other characters' lives. As the story careens forward, nothing out of the ordinary ever truly develops. Instead, Holofcener's plot stays firmly within the realm of authentic behavior and magnifies its presence. Her script amounts to a study of aging and honesty mainly based around Keener's precise expression of a woman in need of doing good deeds: She tries volunteering and charity work before realizing that she can serve her purpose by simply remaining close to the people around her.
However, Holofcenter gets this point across without sacrificing incisive humor for sentimentalism.
Please Give has a certain kind of happy ending, one that avoids promising that everything will turn out alright and instead simply concludes that life just goes on.
Certain to gain notice at the very least for the fine onscreen chemistry shared by Keener and Platt,
Please Give will open through
Sony Pictures Classics on April 23rd. It failed to receive the sort of traction at Sundance that the big buzz movies did, but in a sense it really needs none of that extra attention at this time. However, to reach that verdict and avoid pointing out the merits of
Please Give would miss the point of showcasing it at the festival at all. Because if a good Holofcenter movie winds up as a Sundance afterthought, something is definitely amiss in Park City.
Then again, audiences enjoyed
Please Give and reviews were kind. The buzz, however, took a negative turn with
Joel Schumacher's
Twelve, the festival's closing night selection. As Gawker points out
in this roundup, the 70-year-old (!) director's stylish adaptation of
Nick McDonnell's drug-filled novel about rich New York teens getting high on pricey intoxicants has been almost universally reviled. In my opinion, this mass verdict misses the point. At times theatrical and joyfully raunchy,
Twelve barrels through a plot involving likable drug dealers and empty-headed high school sex kittens before climaxing with a brutal act of violence.
Relying on
Kiefer Sutherland's deadpan voiceover to guide the action, Schumacher views his characters seriously while adding a satiric touch. (And don't tell me that's accidental. The script takes clear-cut jabs at its vapid anti-heroes. "I have a lot of boyfriends," one says. "I mean, I'm not a slut.") For most critics at Sundance,
Twelve comes across as doubly dismissible even to those unfamiliar with its contents, simply because it suffers from the stigma plaguing most closing night movies -- and Schumacher, after all, directed the worst installments of the
Batman franchise, among other genre-based atrocities. But I think this Schumacher accomplishment works just fine as B-movie entertainment with a breezy flow. It's easy to dismiss such an uneven product as simply mediocre, but to me this feels like
Gossip Girl with guns. Maybe that doesn't scream Sundance, but I'll gladly consume an unabashed guilty pleasure with or without the festival's arbitrary assistance.
# posted by Eric Kohn @ 1/30/2010 07:31:00 PM
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