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

Film Comment, March-April, 2002 by Gavin Smith

Then there was Miguel Arteta's The Good Girl, from a script by the estimable Mike White: its story of a discontented supermarket cashier (Jennifer Aniston) tom between her slobbish housepainter husband (John C. Reilly) and a passionate but unstable teenage co-worker (Jake Gyllenhaal) gets off to a flying start, in part thanks to sharp supporting performances from Zooey Deschanel and White himself. But what begins as an edgy comedy with authentic insights slowly turns completely routine. Whatever else you could say about Arteta and White's previous collaboration, Chuck & Buck, at least it took real risks.

Most discouraging of all, indie veteran Victor Nunez, whose last two films, Ruby in Paradise and Ulee's Gold, epitomized Sundance at its best, returned with Coastlines, an uneasy, pedestrian attempt to marry a crime story with a relationship drama in his signature unforced, unsentimental manner. The film explores the triangular relationship between a young Florida cop, his wife, and their best friend, just released from prison and reluctantly drawn back into dealings with local gangsters. Nunez is trying to get at feelings of longing, exclusion, and subtle class friction generated by this trio's dynamic, and though things remain grounded in everyday reality, the film never ignites because the director's heart is not in the less-than-compelling crime plot mechanics. In fact, they prevent him from giving his characters the space to develop dimension and complexity. (It doesn't help that Timothy Olyphant is miscast as the ex-con--he's too remote and inexpressive.)

Nunez couldn't be further from everything that a self-regarding, self-pitying Hollywood fat cat like Robert Evans stands for, and he's too gifted an artist and has too much integrity not to survive a minor artistic failure. And though the concept of "independent film" has in many ways become an albatross around the Sundance Film Festival's neck, as long as people like Nunez continue to make films in their own way, successful or unsuccessful, the movie industry, from which the festival can no longer separate itself, can't completely eradicate what it is to be a true independent.

Gavin Smith is the editor of FILM COMMENT.