PARK CITY, Utah - The mood of unsettled gloom that has hovered over this year's Sundance Film Festival finally came into focus Tuesday night, as news that actor Heath Ledger had died in mysterious circumstances in New York City made its way from person to person. One story going around was that Harvey Weinstein's BlackBerry lit up in the middle of a screening the mogul was attending, followed by the BlackBerries of everybody up and down his row - the jungle drums of Sundance. A few hard-hearted festival-goers tried cracking jokes, but they fell on frigid air. The actor was too widely admired; the loss too big to immediately process.
Suddenly there was something tangible to be unhappy about, although a free-floating cynicism had already been hardening into This Year's Attitude. To be impassioned about a movie was to be suspect, at least in the festival's early going.
There have been bright spots, of course. Ryan Fleck and Anna Boden of "Half Nelson" fame returned, bringing the much-admired "Sugar," one of the few films to get applause from the jaded press corps. The film continues the couple's love affair with talented characters out of their element, and the setting - Dominican baseball players trying to make it in America - is novel and compelling. Algenis Perez Soto plays a young pitching sensation drafted into the US farm system and slowly losing his bearings; the film itself is an epic boy's life that says trenchant things about professional sports and their casualties
And then there was "Young@Heart," possibly the most rapturously received documentary here. British filmmaker Stephen Walker traveled to Northampton, Mass., to film the Young@Heart Chorus, a vocal choir whose average age is 80 and whose choice of material includes songs by the Clash, James Brown, Sonic Youth, and a lot of Talking Heads.
Watching two very old-timers give the Godfather of Soul's "I Feel Good" their all is a very special experience indeed, and the movie works like a charm at the cutesy-grandpa level. As "Young@Heart" progresses, though, and some of the choir members fall by the wayside, the real toughness and clarity of the subjects renders the film immensely moving. These geriatrics have no illusions about where they are and where they're going - soon - and their response is to find eerie new meaning in Coldplay's "Fix Me" and to bellow the Clash's "Should I Stay or Should I Go" against the dying of the light. It's a lesson not lost to anyone at Sundance 2008.
But there were few breakout audience favorites a la "Little Miss Sunshine" two years ago or "Once" last year - unless you count a handful of superb documentaries, which everyone knows are death at the box office right now. Consequently, there were no big-money acquisitions by fat-cat distributors in the first five days, and the deals that were done after that had a tentative, wishful-thinking feel. Only Focus Features' $10 million pickup of "Hamlet 2," a comedy about an eccentric high school teacher (Steve Coogan) staging a Shakespeare sequel, had the swagger of yore.
Even that foolproof Sundance genre - the whimsical indie dramedy - seemed to skip a beat. The Internet-infidelity saga "Downloading Nancy," starring Maria Bello and Jason Patric, was greeted with open hostility, one audience member calling it "offensive on a molecular level." "Pretty Bird," the first film written and directed by the young actor Paul Schneider ("Lars and the Real Girl"), certainly looks good on paper, with its hip cast and oddball story line about a deluded entrepreneur (Billy Crudup) and a rage-aholic aerospace engineer (Paul Giamatti) building a rocket belt.
Except that the movie doesn't hit one note that doesn't feel strident or forced. Realizing they've been dealt a set of mannerisms rather than actual characters, the stars mug endlessly and mirthlessly - even a reliable farceur like SNL's Kristen Wiig flails. This is the kind of maximum quirk that Sundance used to take to the bank and that here reaches a thundering dead end. In its own small, overbaked way, "Pretty Bird" feels like the death of indie cinema.
Depressed yet? All right, it wasn't that bad. Clark Gregg's "Choke," based on the Chuck Palahniuk novel, was a more digestible mix of bad behavior and anarchic comedy, about the misadventures of Victor (Sam Rockwell): sex addict, scam artist, colonial re-enactor, and momma's boy. Anjelica Huston plays momma, hospitalized with dementia, and Kelly McDonald plays a doctor with unusual notions of patient care. Everything to do with Victor's job at a historical theme park is hilarious, but the film loses focus and eventually its nerve, although entertainingly. You'll get a chance to decide for yourself: Fox Searchlight acquired the film for $5 million on Tuesday. Another audience-pleaser on a similar subject has been "Momma's Man," the latest from the playful art-house director Azazel Jacobs ("The GoodTimesKid")
By and large, though, the documentaries are capturing the excitement and daringness - the drama - that the fictional features have strained for. "American Teen," for one, has had festival audiences on their feet by the end credits, cheering the four Indiana high school students director Nanette Burstein follows through a single year.
The movie simultaneously upholds and explodes the eternal cliques of high school, showing us a queen bee, a star jock, an artsy girl (Hannah Bailey, a real life Juno refreshingly minus the genius dialogue), and a nonentity who are much more and occasionally less than even they think they are. By Wednesday, the film had been purchased by Paramount Vantage for $1 million - small potatoes by Sundance standards but wholly appropriate by those of lower altitudes.
Other documentaries winning audiences over included: "Anvil!: The Story of Anvil," about an obscure but long-lived Canadian heavy-metal band; "Trouble the Water," a Hurricane Katrina story, featuring astonishing disaster footage shot by one of the film's subjects, Kimberly Rivers (who arrived at the festival pregnant and by Monday had given birth to a son in a Salt Lake City hospital); and Morgan Spurlock's "Where in the World is Osama bin Laden?"
"Where in the World" gives the "Supersize Me" director - a sort of younger, bouncier Michael Moore - a chance to travel to Mideast hot spots ostensibly seeking Osama so he can collect a reward and make the world a better place for his own unborn child. The film's real purpose is to interview average Muslims and show us they're just like us: a majority of non-fanatics who wish the fanatics would stand down and let everyone else live their lives. (Hey, sounds familiar.)
What Spurlock (and Moore) do could be called docu-vaudeville, and "Where in the World is Osama bin Laden?" is very funny in places. It's necessary, too, for putting specific human faces on people we often think of as a mass. The director's pose of just-folks naiveté turns to shtick long before the end credits, though, and you may come out of the film wanting the long cool view of a policy analyst.
Ty Burr can be reached at tburr@globe.com. For more on movies, go to boston.com/ae/movies/blog.
