Sundance is full of surprise endings

PARK CITY, UTAH -- More than ever, the Sundance Film Festival is a Rubik's Cube of hype, talent, and market value. Rarely have the three wrestled more noisily than at the 11:30 Saturday night screening of "Napoleon Dynamite." It was only the second day of the festival and already the buzz for Jared Hess's directorial debut was running up and down Main Street. For good reason: The film, a straight-outta-Idaho surprise, is a surreally funny teen-nerd comedy poised somewhere between Todd Solondz's "Welcome to the Dollhouse" and a really good "Saturday Night Live" sketch.

The audience ate it up and roared for more, but in the corner of the theater sat a disgruntled group of buyers for the art-house arm of a major studio. It wasn't that they didn't like the film -- a few did, others thought it was all style and no content -- but the audience response meant that they would be forced to negotiate for a movie that, as ingenious as "Napoleon Dynamite" is, will probably make about 35 cents when it is released to theaters.

This is the Sundance Effect, in which high altitudes and the inclusive festival vibe often result in film companies' snapping up the rights for fine little movies that don't play so well in the real world. "Happy, Texas" (1999) is the dictionary definition: Bought for $10 million by Miramax at Sundance, it grossed $2 million in theaters. The trend continued with 2002's "Tadpole" and last year's "Pieces of April."

This year the buyers' checkbooks were out by the third day. "Napoleon" was quickly bought by Fox Searchlight for $3 million, which is several geometrical progressions beyond its production cost. In a highly unusual deal, Miramax and Fox Searchlight paid $5 million for joint worldwide rights to "Garden State," a charming, funny, ultimately much too chatty coming-of-age comedy written and directed by its leading man, Zach Braff, star of TV's "Scrubs." Focus Features spent $4 million for Walter Salles's intimate epic "The Motorcycle Diaries," about the young Che Guevara (Gael Garcia Bernal of "Y Tu Mama Tambien"), with plans for a late 2004 release and a run at the foreign film Oscar.

More startling was the announcement that Lions Gate had paid $2.5 million for distribution rights for "Open Water," a thriller about two scuba divers stranded at sea. With no stars and filmed with what seems like your uncle's camcorder, "Water" is as cheap as they come -- but it does the job, especially if you've got a shark phobia. Lions Gate will probably take the "Blair Witch" marketing route, selling it as a you-are-there version of "Jaws," and who knows? It might even work.

Sundance is full of sharks and guppies, but telling one from the other can be difficult. In its 19th year, the festival is more Hollywood than ever -- cellphones are at every ear, and the producers' credits always get more applause than those for the directors or actors. Yet excitement can build around the least expected movies. The big-studio Ashton Kutcher time-travel thriller "The Butterfly Effect" was hooted off the screen, while "Primer," a film by Texan Shane Carruth that cost $7,000 to make, had festivalgoers marveling and scratching their heads at an intricately written metaphysical drama about time machines and personal ethics.

"The Best Thief in the World," a film by Jacob Kornbluth that was nurtured in the Sundance screenwriting labs and follows an angry Manhattan kid (Michael Silverman) coming to grips with his family's collapse, was touted as a must-see but turned out to be dreadfully written, with stars like Mary-Louise Parker defeated by ham-handed dialogue. By contrast, a Korean film with a mouthful of a title -- Kim Ki-duk's "Spring, Summer, Autumn, Winter and . . . Spring" -- has rapidly become a topic of must-see discussion on festival shuttle buses and in hotel lobbies. It's an elegantly simple, profound Buddhist fable, a film with no pizazz whatsoever and all the stronger for it.

In other ways, Sundance 2004 is far more muted than earlier incarnations. The shadow of Peter Biskind's tell-all "Down and Dirty Pictures: Miramax, Sundance, and the Rise of Independent Film" hangs over the proceedings. In his remarks before the opening night screening of the surf documentary "Riding Giants," Robert Redford (whom Biskind portrays as a passive-aggressive control freak) wanly joked that he was off to a book signing with Miramax's Harvey Weinstein. Weinstein himself hadn't even showed up by the festival's midpoint.

The celebrity quotient is low so far -- there have been sightings of Paris Hilton and a Baldwin brother or two, whereas last year Britney Spears and Jennifer Lopez created traffic jams. The action is in the screening rooms, and even there the fictional films are inspiring little more than shrugs. Many are cut from the same Sundance-movie cloth: pensively poky movies, exquisitely acted by stars taking pay deferments, and so stark as to border on pretentiousness. "The Clearing" and "We Don't Live Here Anymore" both play as the children of "In the Bedroom," with incandescent performances (Helen Mirren and Redford himself in the muted kidnap thriller "Clearing"; Mark Ruffalo, Naomi Watts, and an astonishing Laura Dern in the adultery drama "Anymore") slowly boxed in by solemnity. The rare film to stay on an even keel throughout is "The Woodsman," but since this quiet little stunner stars Kevin Bacon, in a career-best performance, as a pedophile out on parole, it's not exactly a megaplex hit in the making.

Instead, the documentaries are shining more than ever. The box office success in 2003 of such Sundance discoveries as "Capturing the Friedmans" has primed buyers and audiences for more nonfiction, and this year's offerings are living up to expectations. "Super Size Me" is a funny and profane piece of Michael Moore lite in which Morgan Spurlock films the results of his 30-day McDonald's binge ("I'm never eating there again!" is the much-overheard response coming out of screenings), and Robert Stone's "Neverland: the Rise and Fall of the Symbionese Liberation Army" is this year's "The Weather Underground," a dive into an almost-forgotten, now unbelievable slice of '60s history.

The "Neverland" screening was even more remarkable for the appearance at the post-film Q&A session of Patricia Hearst, who wasn't interviewed for the movie. The former kidnap victim, bank robber, and John Waters star touched upon the central nerve of Sundance 2004 when she said in response to an audience question that "if this film had been some kind of dramatic production, I wouldn't have watched it. I would have told my lawyer to watch it." With reality this compellingly bizarre, fiction doesn't stand a chance.

The same goes for "DIG!," the best film I saw during the first half of Sundance. Initially Ondi Timoner's documentary feels like "Behind the Music" times two as it follows a pair of West Coast rock bands over the course of seven years. But as the fortunes of the Dandy Warhols take flight while the Brian Jonestown Massacre is consistently dragged down by the personal demons of leader Anton Newcombe, "DIG!" becomes a viciously sharp essay on art, commerce, friendship, and madness.

The film's director was at Sundance, blinking in the strong light of acclaim and new motherhood. Timoner, 30, held interviews while nursing her 11-week-old son, laughing as she related how both child and film emerged from their respective wombs at the same time. After many lonely months bringing "DIG!" into shape in the editing room, Timoner debuted her cinematic progeny with no idea of what audiences would make of it. "I walked to the press table with some publicity postcards," she says in disbelief, "and they went, `That's the movie everybody's talking about!' " Blissful contact between an unknown filmmaker and an unsuspecting audience: At Sundance, despite the traffic, the dream still works.

Ty Burr can be reached at tburr@globe.com.