SUNDANCE AT HALFTIME: CRITICAL DISPATCH #2
Although this has been a subdued Sundance to begin with, the festival has hit its halfway mark without the significant midweek lull veterans come to expect. As Mike S. Ryan observed over at Hammer to Nail, the industry presence has been somewhat muted this year, so the crowds are as non-cinephilic as ever. This is not good for the audience reaction to the more challenging films. Yet the energy at the premieres and parties hasn’t much changed since the weekend, in part because it hasn’t been that palpable to begin with. One US dramatic competition world premiere I saw at the Racquet Club this weekend was far from a sellout, even with a prime early evening slot. Still, many of the films continue to impress.
Kevin Asch’s Holy Rollers, and Sultan Sharrief’s Bilial’s Stand have something in common beyond being “inspired by true events”. At first glance, these two movies couldn’t be more different. Holy Rollers is a traditionally financed and produced indie featuring Jesse Eisenberg in a career best performance as a hassidic Jew in Brooklyn considering a rabbinical path and all its trapping before being lured into the international ecstasy trade by his wayward neighbor. Bilial’s Stand, made piecemeal over four years, is a brazenly autobiographical, starless, penny pinching production from Detroit about one black muslim teen’s decision to go to the University of Michigan despite the naysayers in his family and in the diverse, suburban high school he treks out to in order to avoid the substandard education offered in Detroit’s toxic public schools. Both are infectous, high-energy affairs that deal with young men from rarely represented insular communities that have strict guidelines for conduct who try to rise out of their circumstances to pursue their desires, familial responsibility be damned.
Although both films are far from perfect, I was taken with each and in the case of Bilial’s Stand you are graced with a film and filmmaker that are this festival’s unlikeliest success story. Films about working class African-Americans are almost never told with this much freewheeling inventiveness and first person verve. Mixing non-actors playing themselves with trained performers, the film uses a consistent voice over from Julian Gant’s protag with incredibly witty animations over the live action footage to illustrate his singularly perceptive and often highly comic worldview. It’s full of performances that are rough around the edges but as authentic and appealing as any I’ve seen at the festival thus far. For me it has single handedly validated the already much maligned NEXT section, which has otherwise felt like some vain attempt to program SXSW knock offs.
Perhaps the only film at this festival more unlikely is Mads Brugger’s The Red Chapel, a madcap peek inside the repressive walls of North Korea. Three Danes, two of whom are of Korean descent, one of whom is handicapped, travel to North Korea to participate in a “cultural exchange” that will see the two Danish-Korean comedians perform a variety show or sorts for an young audience in Pyongyang. What awaits them however is a front row seat for the silent terror and false public image that most repressive government in the east forces on its citizens. Alternately chilling and hysterical, it’s a grand comic stunt in the tradition of Borat, but its got much more at stake that exposing the latency of American racism or homophobia; we get to see how 23 million people deal with a level of ideological control and suppression of individuality that’s puts George Orwell’s worse nightmares to shame. This is a film that begs to be seen widely.
One can’t say the same Eric Mendelsohn’s US dramatic competition entry 3 Backyards. Featuring a cast of usually stellar performers (Edie Falco, Elias Koteas, Embeth Davidtz), the long in the making follow up to Mendelsohn’s well-regarded indie Judy Berlin is steeped in a mediocre aesthetic and poorly conceived withholding of relevant character information from the very beginning. While admirably trying to escape the contrivances and cliches of the multi-strand, braided narrative that’s become so popular at festivals like Sundance in the past decade, it fails to adequately dramatize, well, anything. Suburban ennui has never been quite this boring, pointless and patently absurd, but at least it has nice lens flares.
I’ve never been much of a fan of the brothers Duplass but their new film Cyrus is a winner on every level. Featuring John C. Reilly as a depressed middle aged man, divorced for seven years from his filmmaker ex-wife (Catherine Keener) who remains his best friend and is about to be remarried, he unwittingly charms a beautiful but mysterious woman (Marisa Tomei) with whom he quickly becomes smitten. However, a wrench is thrown into the mix when he discovers her overweight twenty-one year old son (a terrific Jonah Hill), who lives with and shares an incredibly close bond with her that’s more soul mate than child-parent. They insidiously battle for her affection, leading to touchingly human mishaps and plenty of opportunities to flex the Duplass’ formidable comic muscles. They’ve always been very good writers of funny yet naturalistic dialogue, but Jay and Mark have come a long way as directors since The Puffy Chair and here, with studio subdivision money to boost their production values and star wattage, we get to see them reach full maturity.
Finally, Rachel Grady and Heidi Ewing, who tend to make documentaries about people who couldn’t be more ideologically different then themselves, have once again shed light on a corner of the American culture wars in a way that is perceptive and fair minded. 12th and Delaware chronicles what’s going on at one street corner in Fort Pierce, Florida, a street corner that is like a virtual dividing line between Red and Blue America; on one side of the street sits an Abortion clinic, on the other a Catholic Church sponsored outfit that’s often mistaken for the clinic, except when its workers are out of the street, actively dissuading people from entering the building on the other side of Delaware. We see both sides of the intractable, distinctly American conflict in the pair’s typical verite fashion, from doctors who must be driven to and from the clinic with sheets over their heads to conceal their identities for fear that they may become the next George Tiller as well as the genuine moral outrage of their opponents, who parade around the clinic with pictures of aborted fetuses, march on Washington and provide no shortage of anti-abortion viewpoints to the often conflicted women, young and old, who’s very futures hang in the balance of this unyielding ideological battle. This is an essential film, every bit as strong as their Oscar nominated Jesus Camp.
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