Sundance aglow with stars, 'Sunshine'
PARK CITY, Utah -- At Sundance, even the shuttle bus drivers are stars. Last Friday evening, one driver leapt from his seat during a particularly sluggish traffic jam and informed his passengers that he had once been a stunt double in ''Ferris Bueller's Day Off." The riders accepted the news with weary smiles, for what value does celebrity have when everyone is one?
The 2006 edition of the Sundance Film Festival is wrestling as every edition does with notions of bigness and smallness, of Hollywood celebrity and do-it-yourself independence. It was possible to go from seeing a little film (by studio standards) like ''Friends With Money," in which Jennifer Aniston plays a pot-smoking loser housemaid, to watching the paparazzi sprint up Park City's Main Street after Aniston's limo while crowds gawked for a look. And it was possible to witness a filmmaker like first-timer Dito Montiel become inarticulate with happiness at the sight of audiences applauding his rough-hewn coming-of-age-in-Queens movie ''A Guide to Recognizing Your Saints."
There are 120 feature films in this year's Sundance -- chosen from 3,148 submissions -- and they span all levels of ambition and impact. ''Friends With Money" is the new film from the gifted indie writer-director Nicole Holofcener (''Walking and Talking") and the closest thing to a Hollywood movie she has made yet. Set in Los Angeles, it centers on a group of mostly married yuppies: mismatched screenwriters Catherine Keener and Jason Isaacs, rich and complacent Joan Cusack and Greg Germann, and mad-at-the-world Frances McDormand and her husband (played by actor-playwright Simon McBurney) who everyone thinks is gay. Aniston's character is their odd-woman-out pal, and if it sounds like a 40-something version of her old TV series, you're not half wrong. (''Friends With No Budget" might be a better title.)
Holofcener has an an ear for the way people really talk, though, and ''Friends" is at its best extremely funny and painfully acute about middle-age growing pains among the comfortable classes. Besides, few other filmmakers would give its leading actresses such three-dimensional roles.
There were more Hollywood stars at play in the buzz hit of the festival's first week, ''Little Miss Sunshine," a comedy that had audiences standing and cheering and distribution executives burning up their cellphone minutes. Some Sundance movies have ''crowd-pleaser" written all over them, and this is one: Directed by Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris from a script by Michael Arndt, ''Sunshine" is the latest in that worn indie genre, the dysfunctional family road-trip movie. Dad Greg Kinnear wants to be a motivational speaker, mom Toni Colette is a suburban breadwinner hanging on by her nail-tips, brother Steve Carell is the No. 1 Proust scholar in America and a suicidal basket case, grandpa Alan Arkin snorts heroin, and disaffected teen son Paul Dano has stopped speaking. They're all driving from Albuquerque to California in a VW minibus to enroll 7-year-old Olivia (newcomer Abigail Breslin) in the Little Miss Sunshine beauty pageant.
If it sounds too, too wacky to work, the movie's great fun nevertheless; you end up rooting for the characters even on the few occasions when the directors go for the easy laugh. Underneath the comedy is a poignant look at the all-American obsession with winning -- the need to be number one if you want to be anybody at all.
The obsession in Park City, of course, was who would buy ''Little Miss Sunshine" and for how much. By Saturday the news was out: Fox Searchlight had paid a reported $10.5 million for the rights to distribute the film. Immediate second-guessing from the industry hordes raised the specter of ''Happy Texas" and other favorites of years past that were bought for big amounts and went on to box-office failure. Will the Sundance high-altitude fever once again translate to a collective shrug from real-world moviegoers? Hard to say. Marketed correctly, ''Little Miss Sunshine" could be a genuine word-of-mouth indie hit like ''Garden State." Mismanaged, it'll be just another festival success that died on the vine. Look for a probable release this summer.
Other films catching the wind of good buzz in the first week include two music documentaries, ''Awesome! I [expletive] Shot That!" and ''American Hardcore." The first is the Beastie Boys concert film where the group gave video cameras to 50 audience members and asked them to record the show and themselves; the results have festival-goers who've seen it happily reeling from sensory overkill. ''American Hardcore," by contrast, is a punkology document about the thrash bands that arose in the Reagan Era, from Black Flag and Minor Threat to Boston's own Gang Green, SS Decontrol, and Jerry's Kids. If those names mean anything to you, you'll love the film; if they don't, it'll all look like one blurry '80s-video mosh pit.
Another documentary that many are finding impossible to shake off is ''A Lion in the House," a 3 1/2-hour epic about five families coping with the ordeal of a child with cancer. Similarly, Boston-based filmmakers Steven Ascher and Jeanne Jordan's ''So Much So Fast" is about a Newton family's response to the news their grown son has Lou Gehrig's disease. Shorter than ''Lion," it's still an emotional killer and a triumphant Sundance return for the directors of the 1996 Grand Jury Prize winner ''Troublesome Creek." As usual, nonfiction Sundance entries tend to be less compromised than their fictional brethren, and documentaries like ''Thin" (about anorexia), ''Crossing Arizona" (about illegal immigrants), and ''small town gay bar" (what the title says) presented an unvarnished look at their respective subjects.
The fictional films made their respective peace with varnish, by contrast. ''Lucky Number Slevin" was all gloss: an overly clever crime caper with weak twist, a strong cast -- Josh Hartnett, Lucy Liu, Ben Kingsley, Bruce Willis, and Morgan Freeman for starters -- and a screenplay by Jason Smilovic that's too glib by half. Director Paul McGuigan (''Gangster No. 1") makes the nastiness go down prettily enough, and it's hard to resist Kingsley as a gangster rabbi, but maybe it's time for Sundance to give up on the Tarantino imitations already.
John Hillcoat's Outback period western ''The Proposition" pulls its influences from Sergio Leone and Sam Peckinpah, with a dollop of punkish extremity thrown in for good measure -- the script was written by Australian cult-rocker Nick Cave, who also does the score. Starring Guy Pearce, Emily Watson, and a depraved Danny Huston, the film is ultra-violent and poetically tender.
''The Night Listener" could use a little violence. An adaptation of the novel by Armistead Maupin (''Tales of the City"), it stars Robin Williams as a gay radio celebrity and Toni Collette as the guardian of an ailing young fan, and it plays nearly like a version of ''Misery" that doesn't want to stoop to being a horror film. Like Williams's ''One Hour Photo," ''Night Listener" doesn't trust its own genre.
For true signs of uncompromised indie-film rawness, a festival-goer has to hit Slamdance, the parasite festival that plays its own lineup of features and shorts while attached to the belly of the host object, or find a screening of ''Destricted," the one film at Sundance that dares to offend.
Willfully transgressive, the omnibus film lets seven directors rip on the theme of pornography and art. As explicit as any hardcore film but with many more pretensions and a welcome amount of wit, ''Destricted" aims to get audiences hot and bothered, and while the worst vignettes are merely boring, the best are very good indeed. The highlight is Larry Clark's unexpectedly sweet ''Impaled," a sort of an oddball reality short in which the bad-boy director of ''Kids" fixes up an average-joe young guy with a porn actress. It sounds seamy but ends up offering genuine insights into how young men approach sex in a world where pornography sets expectations of what's ''normal," and how certain women approach a business they enjoy as a business. (In other words, the interviews are better than the sex.)
''Destricted" ends not with a bang but a whimper: an intensely anti-erotic short by France's Gaspar Noé (''Irreversible") whose title can't be mentioned here, much less its contents. This one caused the audience to bail out in sizable numbers, but those who toughed it out were rewarded with a provocatively unpleasant essay on desire and loneliness.
There's enough slickness and stars elsewhere for Sundance to risk a shock or two. Celebrities are plentiful -- Aniston, Keener, Liu, Pearce, Sally Field (Sally Field? Turns out she's on the Sundance board of directors; who knew?) -- and the parties overflow with the young, the hip, and the desperate for their films to be seen. The best story making the rounds: The New York-based filmmakers of a short called ''Robin's Big Date" arrived in Park City having booked and prepaid their lodging through a seller on craigslist.com, only to arrive at the address to find there was no house there. The seller's name? ''Alex Baldwin."
At Sundance, even the scam artists are stars.
Ty Burr can be reached at tburr@globe.com. 
