Indecent exposures - Festivals: Sundance - 2002 Sundance Film Festival - Brief Article

Film Comment, March-April, 2002 by Gavin Smith

It's no revelation that the rhetoric surrounding indie film has become virtually meaningless in the last ten years or so. All the same, the seemingly infinite permutations in the co-opting of the word "independent" can still occasionally produce a frisson---or an incredulous giggle fit. The ne plus ultra of this Orwellian twisting of language came at the end of the 2002 Sundance Film Festival, which climaxed in the 1,270-seat Eccles Theater with an adoring audience's standing ovation for Robert Evans, the producer of Chinatown and head of Paramount from 1967 to 1974. The occasion was the world premiere of The Kid Stays in the Picture, a mildly diverting vanity film executive-produced by Vanity Fair editor Graydon Carter. But, with all due respect to Evans, whose tenure at Paramount was glorious indeed, is it just me, or is there something surreal--no, grotesque, no, make that indecent--about Sundance celebrating this quintessential Seventies Hollywood operator as the apotheosis of the independent spirit? (Particularly when you remember the filmmakers' onstage admission that they more or less surrendered creative control to their subject.) As songwriter Tom Lehrer said when Kissinger received the Nobel Peace Prize: after this, who needs satire?

And yet, to state the obvious: there's no inherent virtue in independence. Authentically independent films--some good, the majority bad or indifferent--continue to be made in droves. All three varieties were to be found in this year's festival, which offered the weakest lineup in all the years I've been attending, incidentally. From the dramatic competition, the only real find was the largely overlooked Paradox Lake (see p. 24). A genuine original, it explores the interaction of an autistic girl and an adult counselor at an upstate New York summer camp. Within a loose narrative framework, director Przemyslaw Shemie Reut creates an impressionistic hybrid in which fiction and actuality overlap, while experimental form and montage heighten the film's beguiling sense of mysterious interiority. And just as he refrains from idealizing autism, Reut and screenwriter Wieslaw Saniewski take care to foreground the motivations of the camp's counselors--their shortcomings and the tensions between them--ensuring that their film achieves a complexity beyond its ostensible "issue."

The Grand Jury Prize went to Rebecca Miller's Personal Velocity, a triptych of "portraits," each focusing on pivotal experiences in the lives of three women--a working-class mother with resentment to spare (played not-quite-convincingly by Kyra Sedgwick) who abandons her abusive husband and begins a new life, an insecure New York book editor (Parker Posey) who has second thoughts about marriage after her career takes off, and a confused young woman (Fairuza Balk) taking a time out from her life who picks up a troubled hitchhiker. Miller's first film, Angela, demonstrated a strong visual sense and feel for mood (albeit influenced by the work of photographer Sally Mann), but this belated follow-up is incoherently shot and uses a dreadful, folkish score that tramples on the film's occasional subtleties. Derived from Miller's recently published short story collection, each segment is a self-conscious exercise in baggage, backstory, and unfinished emotional business between daughters and parents. The film experiments to no particular effect with freeze-frames to heighten key moments and attempts to unify the material with a temporal structuring device (a recurring radio news report that surfaces in each narrative), but its reliance on a third-person voiceover for its most acute insights ("She felt the ambition drain out of her like pus from a lanced boil") lends things a vaguely illustrative air that is reinforced by its diffuse digital video look. Still, there's real bite in the middle story, which is set in a world Miller seems to know well, and Parker Posey's graceful, vivid performance carries the day.

And what of Tadpole, this year's crowd-pleasing festival success story? Writer-director Gary Winick (one of the prime movers behind InDigEnt, the Independent Film Channel's low-budget digital feature venture) makes superior use of the DV format and the film is winning, but it's modest, inconsequential stuff. And with its Upper West Side Manhattan milieu, this well-observed comedy of manners about a precocious private school student's amorous designs on his research scientist stepmother is several shades of Wes Anderson. Winick's handling of his cast is smooth: as the film's embodiment of earnest, passionate youth, newcomer Aaron Stanford makes a strong impression, and, as his object of desire, Sigourney Weaver delicately sketches the middle-aged regret tucked away inside her character's poised self-possession. All the same, the movie is stolen by Bebe Neuwirth in a delicious turn as Weaver's insouciant, cradle-snatching best friend.

Two more ambitious, though much more uneven, takes on desire and its defiantly improbable pathways were served up in Secretary and Pumpkin. The former, a psychosexual comedy adapted from a Mary Gaitskill short story by Erin Cressida Wilson and directed by Steven Shainberg, explores the escalation of a sado-masochistic relationship between a timid, compulsive self-mutilator (Maggie Gyllenhaal) and her employer, a buttoned-down control-freak lawyer (James Spader). The film's overly expressionistic art direction, subtly stylized performances, and final act gearshift involving a fairy-tale test of commitment, are less suggestive of a satire about workplace exploitation than a not-entirely-successful allegory of sexual politics and male-female relationships. Restrained, agreeably monotonous, but at times forced, the film nevertheless sets up an irresistible pas de deux between Gyllenhaal's awkward, out-of-it introvert and Spader's in-a-trance, ultra-intense neurotic. For some time Spader has been quietly cultivating one of the most fascinating deadpan affects in American movies--and in Shainberg's film he seems poised to overtake even Christopher Walken in the understated outlandishness department. Pumpkin, a post-Farrelly Brothers satire of prejudice set in a caricatured world of smug privilege, is also a gansgressive love story: college sorority girl Carolyn (Christina Ricci) becomes a mentor to Pumpkin (Hank Harris), a mildly retarded boy training for the "Challenged Games" competition. Gradually recognizing his "beautiful soul," she falls for him, breaks with her perfect tennis-star boyfriend, and gradually becomes a social outcast. Writer Adam Larson Broder and co-director Tony R. Abrams contrive a world in which the couple are the only authentic people--everybody else is either a hypocrite, in denial, or a substance abuser. Although the film's multi-genre pastiche becomes increasingly labored, it develops a curiously melodramatic, almost Sirkian, edge and an improbable emotional potency--a la All That Heaven Allows, everyone conspires to keep the young lovers apart, with near-tragic results. But the film's genre-surfing mode is grating, and the constant shifting between parody and earnestness is ultimately wearing.