SUNDANCE FILM FESTIVAL to February 1. sundance.org.
PARK CITY, Utah – It’s midway through Sundance and the exodus of the out-of-towners has begun. Most press and industry usually exit immediately after the first weekend, but this year seems a bit different as no single movie has been crowned an obvious victor, and people are already getting on planes.
This lack of consensus is causing mild panic for some. Conversations during the long waits in line help characterize the festival every year, critics, programmers and buyers trying to tease out what everyone should be focusing on. Last year Boyhood and Whiplash were the focus of discussion right from first few days. In 2015, things aren’t so easy to nail down.
At the moment, my fave is Craig Zobel’s Z For Zachariah (rating: NNNN). It’s about a woman (Margot Robbie) fending for herself after an apocalyptic event. She’s joined by a research scientist (Chiwetel Ejiofor), which complicates her situation, only to have things turned upside down again when a third (Chris Pine) crashes the party.
I get excited about stories like this that have an elegantly simple premise and manage to avoid screwing it up with a lousy finish. Sundance often hosts films with great first acts that fizzle quickly, so it’s something to celebrate when a film doesn’t lose its way. Much as I admired 2012’s Compliance, Zobel’s last big festival hit, Zachariah tops it.
I also enjoyed James Ponsoldt’s The End Of The Tour (rating: NNNN), which details James Lipsky’s (Jesse Eisenberg) Rolling Stone interview with David Foster Wallace (Jason Segel) during the latter’s promotional tour for his novel Infinite Jest. It’s a talky road-trip film, yet the performances, particularly Segel’s, are so engaging that I was complete drawn in.
Then there’s Robert Eggers’s The Witch (rating: NNNN), a creepy shot-in-Canada film that’s part Kubrick, part Ben Wheatley and part Guillermo del Toro. I’m no fan of schlocky horror, nor do I have the patience for tedious art films that go nowhere, but this movie is neither of those things. Eggers pays attention to detail in this beautiful period piece, right down to the lyrical dialogue drawn from contemporary accounts of 17th century New England. Plus, it totally freaked out the public audience I saw it with.
At any festival, cramming dozens of movies into a short period means there’s a tendency for decent but not earth-shatteringly good films to be under-appreciated. These are the films that I’d welcome during blockbuster season, even if they suffer by comparison to the best works. Take Rodrigo García’s Last Days In The Desert (rating: NNN), for example. It’s a father-son film with Jesus as the protagonist, it’s visually stunning (with photography by Emmanuel Lubezki) and has a pair of fine performances, both by Ewan McGregor. If it weren’t for a heavy-handed final few minutes, it’d be rated much higher.
Ten Thousand Saints (rating: NNN), with Ethan Hawke in another memorable dad role, is exactly the kind of Sundance-style drama/comedy mix I’ve come to expect. Sleeping With Other People (rating: NNN), a Jason Sudeikis/Alison Brie comedy about promiscuity that director Leslye Headland described to me as “When Harry Met Sally but with assholes,” is an amusing SNL alumni flick similar to last year’s Obvious Child or The Skeleton Twins. Seeing these movies outside the cauldron of a festival will do them wonders.
Besides its slate of features, Sundance may play an even bigger role in setting the year’s agenda for non-fiction film.
There have been a couple of standouts already, starting with Brett Morgen’s Kurt Cobain: Montage Of Heck (rating: NNNN). I’m no fan of Nirvana, yet I adored this doc – surely a testament to its quality. Morgen and his team use motion graphics and character animation as well as piles of archival material and contemporary interviews to paint a rich, complex portrait of Cobain. Music docs rarely have this much ambition, and the crowd responded enthusiastically. I asked Nirvana bassist Krist Novacelic, a participant in the film, what he thought and his pithy one-word review was apt: “Intense.”
At the film’s after-party, I saw Jack Black (here for a pair of films) work his way through the crowd to crash a Meat Puppets gig. This is a huge benefit of this small town fest, where filmmakers of all stripes mingle in a camp-like setting, a far more relaxed environment than the Croisette in Cannes or even King Street during TIFF.
Robert Gordon and Morgan Neville’s Best Of Enemies (rating: NNNN) is another documentary I’m gushing about days later. Neville took home the Oscar in 2013 for Sundance fave Twenty Feet From Stardom, and he and his partner are here with another terrific film, this one looking at the televised debates between William F. Buckley and Gore Vidal in 1968. It’s structured like a prize fight, and this unsentimental look at two iconic public intellectuals and their effect on today’s media and political landscape is thrilling.
I am not a big fan of Crystal Moselle’s The Wolfpack (rating: NN), but this tale of home-schooled, movie-obsessed kids may well take home the audience doc award. I prefer Being Evel (rating: NNN), about mad stuntman Evel Knievel Listen To Me Marlon (rating: NNN), a surreal look at Brando that uses laser scans of his face and hypnosis tapes that the actor made of himself talking to himself and The Visit (rating: NNN), a dry but philosophically interesting look at the ramifications of alien invasion on the politicians and military personnel tasked with initiating First Contact.
I’ve yet to see some buzzed-about films, including Rick Famuyiwa’s Dope and the cancer drama Me & Earl & The Dying Girl, by Alfonso Gomez-Rejon, which sold this week for seven figures. Thanks to most of those pass-holders clearing out after the first weekend and this festival’s excellent track record for adding screenings throughout the week, I should have a chance to see these and many others in the days to come.
