Sundance: Finally!

[Film Fest] Just when it looked as though Sundance 2008 would provide the most uninspired crop of American Dramatic Competition Films in my memory … well, that's pretty much still true. But at least I can walk away from it all having seen one great piece of filmmaking.

The film is Sugar, the second feature from the Half Nelson team of Ryan Fleck and Anna Boden, and they continue to combine a powerful naturalism with a refusal to allow that “naturalism” to become “tedium.”

The story follows Miguel “Sugar” Santos (Algenis Pérez Soto), a 19-year-old professional pitching prospect, from a training academy in his native Dominican Republic through spring training and his first minor-league assignment in a small Iowa town. The expected culture shock ensues—only knowing enough English to order one breakfast from the diner menu; enjoying hotel-room porn; eating meat loaf with the nice farm family he stays with—but Sugar is more than a fish-out-of-water tale. In the course of exploring a very specific milieu, Fleck and Boden capture something universal about the appeal of America as a land of dreams, and the collision of those dreams with harder realities. Low-key yet engrossing performances from the entire cast contribute to a tremendous piece of human drama. Turns out my sports draft analogy from yesterday was more appropriate than I knew; there’s an obvious #1 pick after all. (Scott Renshaw)

Sundance: Draft Odor

[Film Fest] Day 6. I have at this point seen 9 and 1/8 of the American Dramatic Competition films, with scheduled times to see four of the remaining six. I’ve used the analogy before that Sundance is very much like the draft for a pro sports league, with that excitement for the Next Big Thing, but realizing one of these movies has to win a Grand Prize calls to mind a sadder part of that analogy: There are the drafts where #1 gets LeBron James, and there are drafts where #1 gets Michael Olawokandi.

There are some that are at least deserving of some praise. There’s Phoebe in Wonderland, writer/director Daniel Barnz’s story of the titular 9-year-old girl (Elle Fanning, the also-preternaturally-talented sister of Dakota) and her struggles with undefined emotional and/or neurological issues. Bits and pieces of the film are positively terrific: the relationship between Phoebe and a flamboyantly theater-loving male classmate; Felicity Huffman’s agonized monologue about her parental fears; and the raw despair of a kid who doesn’t know what’s happening to her. But the fanciful stuff occasionally gets too fanciful, as it does when Patricia Clarkson – as Phoebe’s odd duck of a drama teacher – turns into a sort of Mary Poppins figure. It’s solid “B” work, and yet I find myself clinging to its flawed appeal.

Deeper flaws damage both the crowd favorite Sunshine Cleaning and the edgier The Mysteries of Pittsburgh. The former casts Amy Adams (Enchanted) and Emily Blunt (The Devil Wears Prada) as sisters who launch a crime-scene cleanup company, and in the process have to come to terms with their own family baggage. The two lead actresses are typically terrific, particularly Adams as an ex-high school queen-bee struggling to come to terms with her life as an under-employed single mom. But the writing and directing both prove uneven, and I think I’ve officially lost patience with films where I wait for the inevitable revelation of the Past Tragedy That Has Changed Our Protagonist(s) Forever.

Even The Mysteries of Pittsburgh falls into that trap, though it’s problematic for other reasons, too. Rawson Marshall Thurber’s adaptation of the Michael Chabon novel casts Jon Foster as the son of a Pennsylvania mobster whose post-college graduation summer involves hanging out with a gorgeous violinist (Sienna Miller) and her charismatic but bad-news boyfriend (Peter Sarsgaard). The performances are solid all around, but when it comes right down to it, this is yet another one of those stories where someone either literally or figuratively winds up by saying, “My life was never the same after that summer.” This guy, changed a little bit more than most, but still … (Scott Renshaw)

Sundance: So Much Drama

[Film Fest] In a number of ways, the American Dramatic Competition is the centerpiece of the Sundance Film Festival. It is here that we find the new filmmaking discoveries. It is at these screenings where we see anxious agents, buyers and studio executives hoping to be the first ones to say to Filmmaker X, “We want to be in the [Filmmaker X] business.” This is something people in the movie industry actually have said, apparently. I don’t know how anybody does anything in Hollywood with a straight face.

Many of these Dramatic Competition films are “small” and “intimate,” by which we actually mean “artistically interesting but you can bet nobody will make a dime off of them.” Ballast, from writer-director Lance Hammer, comes from that school of minimalist Americana that prominently features non-professional actors, rural locations and semi-improvised dialogue. The connection between the main characters – Lawrence (Michael J. Smith, Sr.), a 35-year-old man traumatized by the suicide of his twin brother; and Marlee (Tarra Riggs), the working single mother of 12-year-old James – is only gradually revealed, and watching their mutual dependence develop is always at least somewhat engaging. It simply never makes the leap to fully engrossing, a problem that might have been more easily overcome if the muttered dialogue weren’t borderline inaudible half the time. Note to directors: If you’re cutting costs by hiring amateur actors, splurge on a boom mic or two.

Like Ballast, Neil Abramson’s American Son deals with African-American main characters, and the limited opportunities available in a bleak town. In this case, however, the bleak town took on a particular resonance, because it happened to be the bleak town in which I grew up: Bakersfield, California. The main character, Mike (Nick Cannon), has just completed Marines boot camp, and is on Thanksgiving weekend leave in “Bako” before a deployment to Iraq – a fact he has chosen to keep hidden from his family and friends. Abramson and screenwriter Eric Schmid hit a little close to home in their portrayal of Central Valley tedium, which captivated me more than stuff like the tense relationship between Mike and his white best friend. I just know that American Son understands what it’s like to be in a place where it feels like driving around and getting high are the only recreational opportunities. Come to think of it, I guess co-star Tom Sizemore – who was arrested while shooting the movie there – understands that pretty well, too.

The Last Word is at least nominally more of a comedy than a drama, though how funny you find it may depend a lot on how much less contrived the whole thing seems to you than it did to me. Evan Merck (Wes Bentley) is a struggling writer who (get this!) makes a living writing profound suicide notes for other people. Then while attending the funeral of one of his clients, he meets the guy’s sister Charlotte (Winona Ryder), who immediately (get this!) decides she’s crazy about this anonymous stranger who claims to have been a college friend of her dead, long-estranged brother. Ray Romano provides a surprisingly effective supporting performance as a depressive composer who befriends Evan, and there are some individually spot-on moments (like the puzzled look on loner Evan’s face when he actually hears his phone ring). But so much of the plotting subsequently starts to hinge on ridiculous coincidences, and the performances are too mannered to allow the subject matter’s real sadness to come through. “It’s execution-driven,” Evan improvises when Charlotte discovers a note-in-progress than he claims to be a screenplay with a lame undercover-cop plot. When you’re trying to make a feel-good suicide comedy, that’s true in spades. (Scott Renshaw)