THE Sundance Film Festival is a celebration of independent film. The claim is driven home with the insistent hammering on a nail already embedded. In screening after screening — each book-ended by a rapturous introduction and a Krakatoa of applause — the objective viewer can’t help feeling that the hammer is damaging the woodwork that is the festival’s credibility. Even hyper-bole has its limits.
Midway through the festival, the 2005 American Dramatic Competition includes so many clunkers that I’m left wondering what purpose the competition serves. It would be folly to guess which film will win — there are some good ones — but it’s simple enough to predict which ones won’t. It needn’t be so: there are more than enough good new American films screening in other parts of the festival that could mop the floor with the competition.
Hard Candy, which was screened in the Park City at Midnight programme, is a sensational debut by an expat Brit, David Slade. A 14-year-old girl is lured to a café by a chatroom-trolling photographer. He invites her back to his pad for some modelling shots. Guess which one gets the date-rape drug. Wrong. As in classic two-handers like Sleuth, your empathy oscillates between the characters. The sensational Ellen Page, a 16-year-old Canadian, would have had a crack at the Best Actress prize had the film been in competition. She’ll have to make do with rave reviews. Same goes for the director.
Slade, who has made a name in rock videos, is definitely a talent to watch. Hard Candy is the perfect film in the technical sense, where the cinematography and the exposition work together. Obvious it may sound but this is what separates the wheat from the chaff, the storytellers from the montagists.
The Matador, a world premiere, features Pierce Brosnan as an anti-Bond, paid rather than licensed to kill. When he meets Greg Kinnear’s travelling salesman in Mexico, he’s beginning to feel the effects of a life taking life, while Kinnear is trying to keep his own life together after the death of his son and a downturn in his business.
Written and directed by Richard Shepard, this unlikely pairing leads down to a blackly comic symbiotic relationship. Hope Davis provides a sparkling third-act injection that carries the film to a satisfying conclusion. Not great but not bad either. Brosnan — trotting about in cowboy boots and Speedo — neatly puts a bullet through his Bond image.
In film-making the musical montage is the last refuge of the scoundrel: a lightly strummed guitar, some ethereal vocals and a bunch of images that does nothing but pump up the running-time. According to an editor in attendance here, the rule of thumb is one montage per movie. Watching Steve Buscemi’s Lonesome Jim, I stopped counting after four. Reflected in a broken window pane, time-lapse clouds scud through the blue prairie sky . . . Why not stop the film and recite a haiku?
The story of a man who thinks he might be a writer but is too depressed to do anything about it, Lonesome Jim is, admittedly, the victim of my expectations, particularly after the promise of Buscemi’s 1995 debut, Trees Lounge. He was introduced at the Sundance screening as “one of the greatest actors of all time”. Buscemi is certainly a fine character actor. His soulful eyes, supple and expressive face and distinctive voice have rounded out a number of films, from Reservoir Dogs and the Coen Brothers’ Fargo to starring roles in Living in Oblivion and In the Soup. But it’s just as well he isn’t in the film.
Instead, Casey Affleck is handed the unpleasant task of playing Jim, a character who grows increasingly inert as the comely Liv Tyler comes on to him and bad things befall his feckless family. At the end, he climbs back on the bus that brought him home and heads off into oblivion. If only it had stopped there the film might have made a point: yes, Jim, you are a loser. Instead, the bus stops and we’re treated to the sight of Affleck running after Tyler’s car, breaking the record for the fastest mile.
Some of the bad films might have made good short films. Scott Coffey’s Ellie Parker features Naomi Watts as a hard-driving but hapless actress on the verge of abandoning the business. It begins with an audition and moves into an extended sequence with her switching wardrobe and make-up as she heads to the next audition, taking calls from agents, friends and boyfriend — all conducted at speed on LA freeways. Mobile sandwiched twixt head and shoulder, Watts pulls it off — squawking, crying, whingeing. Unfortunately, the film continues for another hour without any justification.
Similarly, Thumbsucker. It’s a lovely visual premise: the titular teenage protagonist breaks his addiction to his thumb. Lou Pucci plays the kid, Tilda Swinton plays his mum, Vincent D’Onofrio his dad, Vince Vaughn his debate team teacher. Each is convincing in their respective parts. But it makes no sense to stretch this over 90 minutes — even with the stunt-casting of Keanu Reeves as a Zen orthodontist.
So one falls thankfully into the arms of The Dying Gaul, the debut of the screenwriter Craig Lucas, whose Longtime Companion is considered the seminal gay-themed story. Indeed, it must have been the inspiration for the new film. Peter Sarsgaard plays a down-on-his-luck screenwriter who has written a script based on the death of his lover. Campbell Scott plays the Hollywood executive who offers him $1 million for the script on condition that he change the gender of the lover — “half of America hates gays”, he patiently explains. This pact with the devil is just the start of a slick psychological thriller. Patricia Clarkson, as the exec’s wife, takes a shine to this wounded man and starts to play god, while the exec plays his new lover. An early favourite for the Grand Prize, it is stunning in its shifts of morality.
Noah Baumbach’s The Squid and the Whale takes another route, presenting a family of monsters and daring to redeem at least some of them. Jeff Daniels is an insufferable academic and literary novelist whose best work is behind him and whose female students lie before him. Laura Linney is his wife and she’s sleeping with their sons’ tennis coach. The boys are learning from these selfish role-models. Baumbach, who co-wrote The Life Aquatic with Wes Anderson, has a sly wit but never loses sight of the emotional core of the story. With apologies to Philip Larkin, they f*** you up, your mum and dad, but they can’t be blamed for everything.
As for the new international titles that have screened so far, the stand-out comes from the Danish double-threat of Thomas Vinterberg and Lars von Trier, director and writer respectively. Literally a love letter to a gun, Dear Wendy, screening in the Premieres section, picks up where von Trier’s Dogville left off — a blistering satire of America’s fetishistic relationship with firearms.
Sundance’s saving grace continues to be its documentaries, in competition or otherwise. There’s nothing like reality to put the boot into all the flummery, the moping, the crumby catharsis and ersatz angst. Especially when you’re laughing at 100 comedians telling the same joke. Paul Provenza and Penn Jilette’s The Aristocrats is more than just a documentary; it's the punchline to what professional comedians in the English-speaking world — from Billy Connolly to Robin Williams — consider to be the filthiest joke ever told.
