Going Pro - Sundance Film Festival

Film Comment, March, 2000 by Gavin Smith

Gavin Smith reports back on this year's Sundance Film Festival

THE ETERNAL MOVIEGOING DIALECTIC between the thrill of discovery and the slump of disappointed expectation becomes supercharged in the acceleration and compression of a film festival, any film festival. At Sundance, as ever, the action oscillates between more or less unheralded Competition contenders during the day and the more anticipated nighttime Premieres with their brand-name directors and casts. But where the world's other major festivals offer the compensations of a seductive, or at least convenient, milieu, Park City in midwinter offers only spartan bootcamp hardship -- it is the one essential festival for the committedly masochistic cineaste. The air is literally thinner up there, and the pickings are slimmer. Someday, the bottom may fall out of the indie market -- and that's when things will get interesting again.

Actually, this was the year the Dramatic Competition Jury (including Kevin Smith, Janet Maslin, and Tarantino producer Lawrence Bender) got it right. Karyn Kusama's Girlfight and Kenneth Lonergan's You Can Count on Me, which shared the Dramatic Grand Jury Prize, were the unmistakable standout films. Though more diverse and ambitious in style and largely less generic in terms of material, few of the Competition films came within hailing distance.

Grounded in a precise, unemphatic naturalism, Girlfight is the story of a strong-willed Hispanic teenage girl from Brooklyn who takes up boxing without her father's knowledge, gradually wins her skeptical trainer's respect, falls for another boxer, and eventually takes her first steps towards going pro. Although this material is familiar enough in outline, and succumbs to some slightly schematic emotional complications, there's much that's impressive: Michelle Rodriguez's fiercely self-possessed, emotionally nuanced lead performance, an unostentatious, completely authoritative sense of the boxing and working-class milieu, excellent cinematography and production design, and fully imagined and well-acted secondary characters, such as Jaime Tirelli's trainer and Santiago Douglas's boyfriend. There's nothing hyped-up or rhetorical in writer-director Kusama's handling of things, and no overt agenda or posturing -- any sense of the protagonist's struggle for self-esteem or to transcend her limited prospects emerges incidentally rather than didactically. Executive-produced by John Sayles, who appears in a cameo, this is the kind of authentic indie miracle that is Sundance's raison d'etre. Kusama, who also deservedly won the best directing prize, is the festival's most exciting find.

Likewise breathing fresh life into familiar material, You Can Count on Me comes on like a feel-good, sentimental, TV-movie tasteful drama about the virtues of smalltown life. Unusually sharp editing is the first hint that in fact it's a superior, acutely observed comedy-drama about family ties and the struggle to find a sense of purpose, even managing to work in some genuinely metaphysical intimations. It's buoyed by four immensely enjoyable performances: Laura Linney as a capable, responsible single mother; Matthew Broderick as her unsympathetic, buttoned-down bank-manager boss; Rory Culkin as her precocious, flat-affected young son; and in particular Mark Ruffalo as her seemingly burned-out drifter brother back for a visit. Predicated on the give-and-take of the siblings' dynamic and the pleasing spectacle of each character performing against expectation, ultimately writer-director Kenneth Lonergan's film is canned -- but it's premium quality canned. With its accomplished, old-fashioned narrative values, richly drawn characters, and incisive, droll dialogue, it justly won the best screenplay award.

Best of the rest in competition? Star Maps director Miguel Arteta and "Freaks and Geeks" and "Dawson's Creek" writer Mike White's Chuck and Buck, a kind of inverted Rain Man most interesting for the regressive, homoerotic overtones that develop in its latter stages. After his mother's death, childlike, emotionally arrested Buck (played by White himself) moves to L.A. to reclaim his long-lost childhood pal Chuck (Chris Weitz), now a yuppie music industry executive. Incapable of moving on with his life, when he's rebuffed, Buck holds Chuck's sympathetic fiancee responsible and writes a play intended to make Chuck realize how he's been manipulated, using his savings to produce it. Arteta and White give all the characters their due, and the performances are decent (mention should be made here of Lupe Ontiveros as the seen-it-all theater manager who takes Buck on and directs his play). But the film is pretty negligible, pointless, almost an exercise. Shot on DY, transferred to film, cost next to nothing, looked like shit: cold, fuzzy, and coarse. If that was the point, I missed it. Even after projection goes digital, video will still mostly look dismal and viewers will mostly dismiss it as badly shot until it matches the resolution, latitude, and contrast of film.