A week into the Sundance Film Festival, the heat-seekers thought they finally had found their you’ll-remember-you-were-there event: a Thursday night screening of a family drama called “The Myth of Fingerprints.”
Other movies in dramatic competition, particularly “Clockwatchers” and “Going All the Way,” were the hype magnets earlier in the festival but, once seen, their respective buzzes dissipated. Now the spotlight was on “The Myth of Fingerprints,” which had gained word-of-mouth support throughout the week.
Co-stars Noah Wyle and Julianne Moore were in the packed library auditorium, as were Hollywood types and filmgoers who had arrived three hours early to get on the waiting list for tickets. The programmer introducing the movie made some comment about how the room was so charged with energy that it was ready to explode.
Then the lights went down, and writer-director Bart Freundlich’s story of disparate family members returning to their New England home for Thanksgiving began.
In the beginning, every minor-key joke received a major chorus of laughter. By the anti-climactic ending, the atmosphere wasn’t quite so charged, as if the audience had come to a collective realization: This was a nicely crafted, nicely acted, small movie–nothing more.
So it went for much of the 1997 version of Sundance. Record numbers of studio honchos, media representatives and film fans overwhelmed this ski resort town looking for this year’s “Shine” or “Reservoir Dogs,” yet the movies stubbornly refused to reward the hype.
And perhaps that’s as it should be. The Sundance festival was designed as a showcase and meeting place for independent filmmakers working outside the studio system. Sundance Institute President Robert Redford said he still considers the festival’s atmosphere to be “communal,” but that quality was hard to find amid the rushing from crowded (often substandard) venue to crowded venue to star-studded party.
The movies themselves served to undercut the notion that Sundance has become simply a Hollywood feeding frenzy, since nothing on screen inspired such high-stakes bidding like last year’s $5 million acquisition price for “Shine” and $10 million for “The Spitfire Grill.” Leading this year’s more modest acquisitions parade was Tom DiCillo’s charming “Box of Moonlight,” picked up by Trimark Pictures for a reported $3 million, and writer-director Mark Waters’ play adaptation and Parker Posey star turn, “The House of Yes,” for which Miramax plunked down a reported $2 million.
But if the films didn’t evoke dollar signs among Hollywood honchos, they also don’t forecast a particularly exciting year in American independent film, as last year’s entries–which also included “Welcome to the Dollhouse,” “Big Night” and “Bound”–did.
This year’s crop, particularly the dramatic competition movies, was mostly an earnest bunch, depicting troubled teens, confused sexuality and families in conflict. Many of these stories were artfully told, but few reflected the thrill of a young artist learning to use a box of magical tools.
Of the 18 dramatic competition entries, Alex and Sylvia Sichel’s sensitively observed “All Over Me” was the superior city-girl-whose-best-girlfriend-is-messed-up film (the vaguer “Arresting Gena” was the other) and experimenting-with-lesbianism film (the more superficial “Slaves to the Underground” was the other).
Writer-director Kevin Smith’s non-competition “Chasing Amy”–a welcome return to the dialogue-driven style of “Clerks”–also explores ambiguous sexuality through the story of a comic-book artist (Ben Affleck) in love with a lesbian (Joey Lauren Adams). Jane C. Wagner and Tina DiFeliciantonio’s “Girls Like Us” won the documentary Grand Jury Prize for following four ethnically diverse South Philadelphia girls through their struggles over the ages 14 to 18.
“There’s a dialogue happening around teenage sexuality, particularly teenage female sexuality,” Wagner said. “It’s very exciting to see it becoming an issue.”
Other patterns emerged as well. Two dramatic competition movies depicted dysfunctional families gathering for Thanksgiving (“The House of Yes,” “The Myth of Fingerprints”), three portrayed young guys sitting around smoking pot (“Black and White and Red All Over,” “Strays,” “Hurricane”), two savaged the corporate workplace (“Clockwatchers,” “In the Company of Men”), two referred to cult murder/suicides (“Santa Fe,” “Colin Fitz”), two featured characters obsessed with presidential assassinations (“The House of Yes,” “Santa Fe”), two explored the bonding between two dissimilar young men (“Going All the Way,” “The Delta”) and two ended with their protagonists fleeing their hometowns by train.
The similarities must have been apparent to the dramatic Grand Jury and the audiences, since both groups went against the grain with their awards picks. Director Jonathan Nossiter’s “Sunday,” the surprise winner of the dramatic Grand Jury Prize and the screenwriting award, was the only competition film about middle-age people. “Sunday,” which arrived at and left Sundance without a distributor, depicts a day in the life of an unemployed man (David Suchet) living in a New York men’s shelter and an out-of-work actress (Lisa Harrow) who mistakes him for a famous film director. Throughout, the movie keeps the characters and viewers guessing about the line between real and make-believe.
By awarding the Filmmakers Trophy to Neil LaBute’s “In the Company of Men,” the jury recognized the one dramatic entry willing to wear its nastiness on its sleeve. The low-budget movie, which shows two businessmen reaping their revenge on womankind by leading on a deaf secretary, probably provoked the most debate.
Audiences split their award between two films that presented familiar stories with style and heart. Morgan J. Freeman’s “Hurricane,” which also won the jury’s directing and cinematography awards, is a New York troubled boys’ tale with actual plot twists and a gritty lead performance by Brandon Sexton III.
And Chicago director Theodore Witcher’s “love jones” places a boy-meets-and-loses-and-perhaps-regains-girl story in the city’s black underground poetry scene. With its literate protagonists (Larenz Tate and Nia Long) and unabashed romanticism, the movie is Witcher’s conscious counterpoint to the street violence often equated with black-oriented independent films.
Although it didn’t win any awards, Tim Blake Nelson’s “Eye of God,” about a small-town woman (Martha Plimpton) who takes in a convict (Kevin Anderson) she met by mail, jumbles its chronology to build to one of the festival’s most stirringly lyrical endings.
“Clockwatchers,” a visually engaging but aggressively dreary look at temp workers, and “Going All the Way,” a stylized ’50s tale of male friendship that bogs down in ’90s-style angst, may be considered the biggest disappointments, but they were set up for a fall. Unlike most of the competition films, they hadn’t been screened for distributors before the festival.
“The expectations are so high that it’s unfair to the producer and director,” said Rena Ronson, executive vice president for the distribution company Lakeshore Entertainment. “Most often these are low-budget films that have had hard times being made, and basically a film has a buzz because it hasn’t been seen.”
Likewise, movies without expectations (or pretensions), particularly those in the non-competitive American Spectrum category, often became crowd-pleasers. Writer-director Julie Davis’ “I Love You . . . Don’t Touch Me,” which the Samuel Goldwyn Co. acquired during the festival, is an appealing comedy about a young Jewish woman looking to lose her heart and virginity. The Broken Lizard Comedy Group’s “Puddle Cruiser” also became a fave by stocking a college campus with likable performers and some big laughs.
As for the premieres not in competition, David Lynch’s new “Lost Highway” delves as deeply into dark dream logic as any of his works since “Eraserhead.” Some of the middle section feels overly familiar for Lynch, but otherwise his all-enveloping sound and vision cohere with a jarring impact and distinctiveness that many of this year’s Sundance filmmakers should hope someday to match.
