The Park City Effect

Film Comment, March-April, 2004 by Gavin Smith

The Sundance audience comprises an odd mix: jaded press and industry people, twentysomething hipsters, enthusiastic Utah locals, and well-off ski resort visitors. It's a mostly cinephile-free zone--not an entirely bad thing. There's usually a palpable sense of excitement before the weekend and evening screenings at the festival's flagship Eccles Theater. People are so thrilled to be there that they actually applaud the sponsor logos that flash onscreen before the movies begin. Maybe it's the altitude. Every year, by festival midpoint, this hothouse euphoria alights on one or two crowd-pleasing titles. These films gather an unstoppable must-see momentum, perhaps scoop up an audience award, possibly get picked up for inflated sums--and then open to critical indifference and certain box-office oblivion. Remember The Spitfire Grill? The House of Yes? Happy, Texas? Will you remember Pieces of April a year from now?

Zach Braff's Garden State and Jared Hess's Napoleon Dynamite, both slotted in the Dramatic Competition, were this year's beneficiaries of what we might call the Park City Effect, and they handily embody two entrenched indie film tendencies. They're both unheralded directorial debuts, and they're both centered on misfit youths stuck in cultural backwaters--but the similarities end there. Braff, on the strength of a starring role on the TV sitcom Scrubs (and likely with all sorts of help from agents and industry contacts), got his project set up with Jersey films power trio Danny DeVito, Michael Shamberg and Stacy Sher. Thus Garden State is a Hollywood insider indie. In the hallowed triple-threat tradition of Edward Burns, Braff stars in and directs his own screenplay about a depressed, struggling actor who returns to his New Jersey hometown tot his mother's funeral, decides to stop taking his anti-depressants, meets cute with Natalie Portman, and finally comes to terms with Dad, played by Ian Holm at his most annoyingly introverted. As an old high school buddy stuck in a dead-end lifestyle, Peter Sarsgaard steals all his scenes--which isn't saying much given the movie around him. The festival catalogue compares Garden State to The Graduate and Harold and Maude. Whatever. I'll begrudgingly allow that Braff's direction is competent, but, as with its illustrious forebears, it's a mystery to me how the Sundance audience--make that any audience--could be so enamored of a film that settles so quickly into comfortably insipid mediocrity.

Made by a young unknown with no connections, and coming out of nowhere to take audiences by storm, Napoleon Dynamite, by contrast, exemplifies the modest rags-to-riches indie model of popular renown. Set in rural Idaho, this high school comedy details the daily humiliations of a gangling, peevish geek, forever spluttering in barely suppressed rage at the delusional schemes and absurd fixations of his annoying, vaguely autistic-seeming older brother and an arrested-adolescent uncle. More Wes Anderson than Todd Solondz, it attempts to be an affectionate celebration of the underdog while reveling in spastic slapstick and outlandish non sequiturs. It does have its moments and, unlike Garden State, it isn't readily assimilable to stock movie forms. But as funny as it is, Napoleon Dynamite is an insistently grating, ultimately joyless, utterly debilitating experience that never transcends its underlying freak show impulses.

"Do you think this family has been a government experiment?" asks 31-year-old director Jonathan Caouette, toward the end of Tarnation, his emotionally devastating saga of family trauma and convulsive self-discovery. "Yes, it has been," replies Renee, his brain-damaged mother, a former child model and shock therapy casualty. A truly pathetic figure, she's the tragic heart and lost soul of this harrowing journey down memory lane that begins when New Yorker Caouette travels back to his Texas hometown after his mother ODs on lithium.

Navigating between abjection, narcissism, and loathing, Tarnation is an autobiographical anthology in which family snapshots, tape recordings, Super 8 and video home movies, pop songs, found footage, and the teenage Caouette's underground filmmaking are swept up and into a swirling digital vortex to chronicle its maker's passage from childhood turmoil and teenage acting out (and coming out) to eventual psychic survival. Always compelling (although it drifts a little in its latter stages as Caouette reaches safe haven in New York), the video is many things simultaneously--a son's tender tribute to his mother, an exorcism, a musical fantasia, an act of defiant self-assertion, a session in confessional therapy, an exercise in perverse nostalgia, and more.

Although Caouette employs a third-person onscreen text narration that creates a sense of distance, his frenzied montage stays just this side of overwrought. Nonetheless, the video has a directness and a wrenching emotional force that ultimately overwhelmed my minor reservations. Tarnation belongs to what might rightly be considered a fourth generation of Queer Cinema--one that's digested everything from Jack Smith and John Waters to Sadie Benning, Todd Haynes, and Luther Price. (In Caouette's case, there are also possible traces of Canadian videomaker Donigan Cumming's methods.) But there's nothing derivative about this video--you know the filmmaker means every frame and that his very identity is on the line. Still, with the first 20 years of his life out of his system, where will Caouette go from here?