On the opening night of Sundance, festival director John Cooper reminded crowds that this was the place where "Beast of the Southern Wild" was born, suggesting that if we only looked hard enough, we might find such a treasure again this year. But breakouts like "Beasts" are few and far between, and none of the 16 films in dramatic competition -- half of which were directed by women and all of which I saw -- embodied that sort of rousing new vision.
Instead, the lineup included an overall high quality of work shaped more to the proven commercial and artistic standards of the indie film scene. For example, unvarnished coming-of-ager "The Spectacular Now" and highly varnished chick-lit comedy "Austenland" could pass as studio pics, while Lake Bell's "In a World ..." (set in the world of Hollywood voice coaching) and Cherien Dabis' "May in the Summer" are limited only by the hyper-specific contexts in which they are set. If it were only funnier, "May" could have become a breakout "My Tall, Skinny Jordanian Wedding."
I'd say the quality of the dramatic lineup announced itself most impressively in the level of formal sophistication displayed by certain filmmakers. Coming-of-age stories and navel-gazing sex comedies are par for the course at Sundance; what you don't always get is a movie as ravishing as Andrew Dosunmu's "Mother of George," which heightens classic meller material to a point of stunning visual abstraction -- the latest testament to the genius of d.p. Bradford Young. Or perhaps that would be the other Young-lensed film in competition, "Ain't Them Bodies Saints" (the dramatic jury saw fit to award the films a shared cinematography prize).
But I don't mean to knock the more conventionally shot films you cited: "In a World ... " and "Austenland" afforded many welcome laughs. As for "The Spectacular Now," it's simply the freshest, most touching high-school movie I've seen in years, and the latest proof that director James Ponsoldt excels at breathing new life into exhausted genres.
"The Spectacular Now" owes much of its appeal to its outstanding central couple, Miles Teller and Shailene Woodley, who seem refreshingly real compared with the countless teen lovers we've seen at Sundance. I love how personal so many of these stories are, though the majority seem to reveal the limits of the filmmakers' life experience. I'm surprised "The Way, Way Back" directors Nat Faxon and Jim Rash are still dwelling on their teen years, for example, and found Jordan Vogt-Roberts' "Toy's House" to be the funnier teen summer tale.
But the material gets more interesting as the storytellers (or their subjects, at least) get older. I'm thinking specifically of Stacie Passon's complex look at modern commitment, "Concussion," in which a lesbian housewife faces her mid-life crisis by what she euphemistically calls "breathing" (renting herself out as a female prostitute), and Drake Doremus' admirably grown-up "Breathe In," which stars Guy Pearce as a failed rock musician who falls for the foreign-exchange student he's hosting. And, of course, 18 years after "Before Sunrise" played Sundance, Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy re-examine their love story from a more mature place in "Before Midnight," though that one disappointingly skims more than plumbs where the pair's minds are now.
We'll have to agree to disagree on "Before Midnight" -- if Hawke, Delpy and Richard Linklater had plunged any deeper into those characters' psyches, we might have had a slasher movie on our hands. I typically come to Park City expecting discoveries, not masterpieces, and so it was a shock of the happiest kind to encounter a truly world-class piece of filmmaking, Cannes competition-caliber stuff, from a director who seems to have absorbed the various influences of Rossellini, Rohmer, Bergman and even Kiarostami into his very being.
Will the filmmakers from this year's promising pack have aged so well 20 years hence? When Linklater first showed up at Sundance with "Slacker" and "Before Sunrise" in the early '90s, he was helping to pioneer a filmmaking movement that clearly informs the mumblecore movies and low-budget two-handers that make up part of today's American indie landscape. Yet the way Linklater's work has deepened -- gaining in craft and assurance without sacrificing that searching, spontaneous quality -- strikes me as both remarkable and rare.
One talent who gives me hope: Andrew Bujalski, whose hilarious black-and-white oddity "Computer Chess" was the deserving winner of this year's Alfred P. Sloan prize. Here's hoping Bujalski puts that $20,000 to good use. Among its many virtues, this uncategorizable whatsit offers a considerably more interesting look back at the days of old-school computer technology than this year's slick closing-night entry, "Jobs."
Festivals indeed have a way of putting different films in intimate dialogue with one another. Which brings us to this year's big jury/audience winner, Ryan Coogler's "Fruitvale," about the victim of a tragic 2009 police shooting, and Alexandre Moors' much less heralded Next entry "Blue Caprice," which unfolds from the perspective of the infamous Beltway snipers. Both of these debut features tell tense, ripped-from-the-headlines stories that try to make sense of senseless acts of brutality. And both play in subtle, provocative ways with our perceptions of their black male protagonists and their possibly violent inclinations.
So why did one ring so true, while the other felt somewhat forced by comparison? Perhaps because "Fruitvale," though it boasts stellar performances and builds to a climax of undeniable emotional force, spends an hour rigging a series of implausibly neat contrivances intended to maximize the poignancy of what's to come. "Blue Caprice," by contrast, is a serious, psychologically grounded attempt to contend with the nature of human evil, and it begs our understanding rather than our sympathy. "Fruitvale" insists on its protagonist's humanity, but it's "Blue Caprice" that leaves you pondering what it means to be human.
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