Nicole Armour on the Dramatic Competition and beyond - some of the films, and questionable awards, at the 2001 Sundance Film Festival

Film Comment, March, 2001 by Nicole Armour

When John Cameron Mitchell's Hedwig and the Angry Inch won the Sundance 2001 directing prize, it capped a series of surprises spread throughout the ten-day festival. Several of the best films in competition were overlooked by the jury, whereas Hedwig, buoyed as it is by Mitchell's undeniable charm (and the unbridled enthusiasm of its audiences), is less a film than a happening, a paean to Seventies rawk. As is the case with most festivals, awards don't mean a thing at Sundance.

Based on the popular off-Broadway musical, Hedwig tells the story of a German-born transsexual whose band performs in shrimp-cocktail restaurants across America, shadowing the stadium tour of Hedwig's former protege, depressed rock superstar Tommy Gnosis. Stephen Trask's songs are the best thing in the film, and Mitchell delivers them with relish, but in the absence of narrative development they seem disconnected from the action. Hedwig's act references the most sexually charged of the Seventies glam rockers -- in one instance, she fellates her bandmate's guitar as Bowie once did. But whereas Bowie's act was exciting and outrageous, Mitchell's homage is finally lackluster, neither provocative nor erotic. Hedwig contains many of the fashionable ingredients found in several other festival offerings -- fluid sexuality, a youthful fetishization of Seventies Americana -- but lacks what it needs most: raging sexual energy and a strong emotional hook.

Further proof of the irrelevance of awards: the Dramatic Jury passed over DeMane Davis and Khari Streeter's operatic and original second feature Lift. (Their first, Black and White and Red All Over, co-directed with Harry McCoy, screened at Sundance in 1997.) Davis and Streeter met while working at a Boston advertising agency and became interested in advertising's capacity to define new needs for young blacks. Taking this as its point of departure, Lift tells the story of professional "booster" Niecy (strikingly played by Kerry Washington), a window display designer at an upscale department store who makes her living buying designer clothes with stolen credit cards and reselling them to a roster of clients. And she's good at what she does, lifting clothes, shoes, jewelry, or whatever she can fit into a Donna Karan coat pocket or a Coach tote bag. In several dazzling scenes, Niecy, radiating confidence, moves purposefully through clothing stores, reveling in her ability to fool their obsequious sales clerks. Preferring to operate alone, she rebuffs an offer from the leader of a crew of thieves to put her skills to use, but when her emotionally detached mother -- and most demanding customer -- requests an expensive necklace, Niecy finds it's easier to raise the stakes than to say no.

Besides the fact that it offers a window onto a way of life never before seen in film, Lift is remarkable for the way it insists on a direct connection between its protagonist's criminal life and her inability to please her mother. Mother and daughter both mask the ugly, thwarted aspects of their lives with polished exteriors, and their materialism isn't merely identified but positioned at the core of the film's drama. Lift's smooth visual style, strong performances, and fascinating subject more than make up for its slightly pat ending.

Several other Dramatic Competition highlights were centered around mother-child relationships and avoided flashy camerawork and sensationalism. In the Bedroom and The Sleepy Time Gal are both controlled, deliberately paced domestic dramas with close, loving families at their center.

The first third of actor Todd Field's In the Bedroom has an unhurried, intimate feel as it establishes the dynamic between a bright, college-bound only child (a warm, open Nick Stahl) and his parents (Tom Wilkinson and Sissy Spacek) and the mother's disapproval of the son's relationship with an older single mother (Marisa Tomei). Thirty minutes in, the film takes an abrupt turn when the son is murdered by his lover's unstable ex-husband. The next hour of In the Bedroom dwells on the parents' grieving and outrage and then in the third and final act the story turns again in the direction of a tense, methodical thriller. Field orchestrates these changes in action and mood with tremendous dexterity and attention to nuance, and from the exquisite opening images of Stahl and Tomei lying together in the grass, he demonstrates a keen understanding of the link between character and place. Though In the Bedroom received a Special Jury Prize for Wilkinson's and Spacek's performances, by all rights the best directing prize should have Field's name on it.

Scott McGehee and David Siegel's belated follow-up to their 1993 Sundance hit Suture bears some striking similarities to Field's film, but where In the Bedroom is genuinely moving, The Deep End is decidedly stiff. Directly inspired by Max Ophuls' 1949 film The Reckless Moment, McGehee and Siegel puzzlingly set out to update the postwar American melodrama. Both films are based on a 1947 Ladies Home Journal serial by Elizabeth Sanxay Holding, but McGehee and Siegel's version makes several critical changes to reapproach the material from a contemporary angle. In the original, a woman's teenage daughter becomes involved with a shady older man who later dies in an accident after a struggle in the family boathouse. With her husband absent, the mother disposes of the body and covers up her daughter's involvement; events are then complicated by the appearance of a blackmailer. Casting Tilda Swinton in the role originally played by Joan Bennett, MeGehee and Siegel relocate the story from an upscale L.A. beach community to the pristine shores of Lake Tahoe, a modification that benefits the film primarily on a visual level. The lake becomes the dominant visual metaphor for the mother's emotional world, her face frequently refracted through the surfaces of windows, pools, and aquariums. (Giles Nuttgens' stunningly crisp photography deservedly won the cinematography prize.)