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FOREIGN SEAT: Sundance at a glance
When the tumult died and the gold dust settled, in continuance of a trend that feels at once deeply American and deeply un-American, loners, outsiders, misfits, deviants and freaks ruled the day at the 2003 Sundance film festival. Hollywood attitude and schmooze might well be the engine that drives this 11-day orgy of movies, parties and buzz. But when the jurors emerged from their deliberations, they underscored the festival’s traditional endorsement of small, independently conceived and financed films that nobody in Hollywood would fund on a dare.
This year’s winners, with their themes of perversion, fractured or makeshift families, death, murder and substance abuse exemplify the knotty, skewed fare that has come to be a recognized Sundance staple. American splendor, winner of the grand jury prize, is a fetching combination of biopic, documentary and animation that tells how Harvey Pekar, a Cleveland file clerk and inveterate curmudgeon, came to choose comic books as a medium with which to relate his mundane life. As conceived by co-directors Robert Pulcini and Shari Springer Berman and embodied by actor Paul Giamatti, Pekar is the ultimate grumpy old man, and his charmingly shaggy story feels like a cross between the comic-come-to-life Ghost world and the almost-too-true documentary Crumb.
The winner of the documentary competition, Capturing the Friedmans, also recalls Crumb in its unblinking portrait of a deeply screwed-up American family. During the paedophilia witch hunts that swept the country in the late 1980s, a suburban New York family, the Friedmans, found itself split by the accusation that dad and the youngest of his three sons had committed hundreds of acts of molestation against neighbourhood children who attended computer classes in the family’s basement. Director Andrew Jarecki reveals the shocking course of these charges and the legal entanglements that they entailed, employing contemporary interviews and home videos.
Surprisingly, despite the flashy premieres, the marketing blitzes for ‘small’ films that cost millions and the distracting presence of stars, Sundance still draws hopefuls — both in the audience and among the film-makers
Festival buzz blessed other films that drew bleak visions of something like the contemporary American family including: The station agent, the screenwriting prize-winner, which dealt with a taciturn dwarf who inherits a disused railroad depot and reluctantly forms a bond with a loquacious hot-dog vendor and a divorced artist grieving for her dead child; Pieces of April, a funny, poignant story about a dying woman reluctantly travelling to her estranged daughter’s bohemian apartment for Thanksgiving dinner; and Thirteen, a Larry Clark-ish portrait of teen rebellion and recklessness in contemporary suburbia.
By comparison, the prize-winning documentaries — Terminal bar, about loners at a skid-row tavern, and A certain kind of death, about the method by which Los Angeles county disposes of the physical and financial remains of people who die without next of kin — seem virtually carefree. At least the subjects are spared the human entanglements that make life hell for the Friedmans, Pekars and trainspotting dwarves of the world.
Oddly, the most engagingly visceral portrait of contemporary malaise at this year’s Sundance was an import: 28 days later, Danny Boyle’s British zombie movie which had its North American premiere at the festival and buoyed at least some in the audience with the thought that cultures elsewhere in the world might be as dysfunctional as our own. Boyle’s film might seem an anomaly at an event that seems tailor-made to celebrate American newcomers. But Sundance has increasingly come to be less about discovering the unknown than about being formally introduced to the next carefully marketed thing.
Against the backdrop of such corporate-driven fare, what chance is there now for the stereotypical unknown film-maker with a cast and crew of friends and neighbours and a promotion budget entirely exhausted by the rental of a fuzzy bunny costume for distributing hand-printed leaflets on the street? Surprisingly, despite the flashy premieres, the marketing blitzes for “small” films that cost millions and the distracting presence of Dustin Hoffman, Bob Dylan, Kevin Spacey, Holly Hunter, Jessica Lange, Al Pacino and Andy Garcia, Sundance still draws hopefuls — both in the audience and among the film-makers. It has to do with two histories — that of the festival and of the town that hosts it.
You don’t get to Park City by accident. Perched in a valley 2,000 metres above the eastern Utah desert in the imposing Wasatch mountains, this town of 7,000 full-time residents is an out-of-the-way spot in an out-of-the-way state. But it has resources: silver and lead lodes were discovered on the site in the 1870s and made fortunes that established some of the more prominent Mormon families in the valley below. The mining, predictably, ate itself to death: Park City was listed as a ghost town in 1951. But barely a decade later, winter recreation occasioned a civic renaissance, and more than a dozen chair lifts would be built beside Park City’s peaks during the next decades. Then in 1981, Robert Redford, who resides on a ranch in the next valley to the east, assumed control of a moribund Salt Lake City film festival, renamed it (like his nearby resort and film-making institute) after his Butch Cassidy persona, and moved it up the mountain. Hence the hordes who now make an annual routine of descending on the little town in late January to take in the scores of films, connive their way into the glitzy parties, ogle celebrities — is that really Britney Spears in that stretch SUV? — and kick off the movie year with a heated round of deal making, pitching, dishing and scheming.
Over the years, Sundance has evolved from Redford’s fantasy of impassioned apres-ski movie chat to a crucial moment in Hollywood’s film calendar — the only time of year when something might happen that nobody planned. In the festival’s first decade, Steven Soderbergh, Quentin Tarantino, Richard Linklater, Robert Rodriguez and the Coen brothers made splashes with their debuts and went on to change American cinema for the better. But as they did so, they changed Sundance as well. After Sex, lies and videotape was discovered here and went on to glory at Cannes and the Oscars and $25 million, the festival became, in many minds, a kind of lottery. Movies with no relation to any concept of independent cinema — pictures such as Four weddings and Reality bites — debuted at Sundance to leech some street cred and gain a little heat. In the succeeding years, lunatic bidding wars were fought for little films graced with festival buzz, and while some made huge financial splashes (most famously The Blair witch project), many more — including Girlfight, Tadpole, Clockwatchers and Happy, Texas — sold for as much as $10m and recouped mere percentages, leaving distributors to blame the thin mountain air for catching them up in costly bidding wars. Back in the 1980s, some of the films that won renown at Sundance would have been lucky to play to 20,000 people in the entire course of their theatrical lives. Nowadays, that’s the number of warm bodies that pour into Park City each year for the event, not to mention such bastard spin-offs as Slamdance, Nodance, Schmoozedance and Xdance. A lot of these people have nothing to do with the movies at all; they are snowboarders and other holiday-makers who come to Park City to hit the slopes and spend nights begging their way into parties.
This non-filmic boom was encouraged, in part, by a late-1990s influx of dotcom money into the festival. Companies that are no longer in business spent millions on parties and promotions still spoken of in tones of disbelief and nostalgia. That energy has dissipated in the past few years, what with September 11, a new Bush recession and a new Bush war. But Main Street was nevertheless choked to the point of motionlessness at weekends during this year’s festival, and Redford and his staff publicly bemoaned the size and unruliness of the monster that they had inadvertently sired.
There will doubtless be further changes — even severe ones — in the running of the event. On at least one occasion in its relatively brief history, Sundance has been forced to contract itself in order to better focus on its roots. But the movies, year in, year out, are anyone’s bet. More than any other festival, Sundance feels like a mirror of the culture that birthed it, and as surely as that culture will mutate yet again, the festival will morph too, inevitably, unpredictably; perhaps gracefully, perhaps vexingly; but it is certain to be fascinating. — Dawn/The Guardian News Service
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