Sundance searches for its roots
PARK CITY, UTAH -- Ahhh, the Sundance Film Festival, where the movie executives shop for bananas and garbage bags alongside the snow bums and ski bunnies at the local supermarket, where even the taxi drivers keep a list of movies they have to see, and where average people are desperate to get wind of what the first big business deal will be. As of this morning, the big news was that there wasn't much. Which is not bad news at all.
There have been no obscenely expensive acquisitions, like the recent ones that brought America "Hustle & Flow" and "Little Miss Sunshine." And the most buzzed-about movies -- Deborah Kampmeier's "Hounddog," with Dakota Fanning as an Elvis Presley-loving farm girl with an abusive father, and Craig Brewer's "Hustle & Flow" follow-up, "Black Snake Moan," with Christina Ricci as a nymphomaniac and Samuel L. Jackson as the bluesman-farmer who aims to cure her -- haven't even premiered yet. But their reputations precede them.
The movie a lot of people are bullish about is "Grace Is Gone," an effective weepie eagerly being called "The John Cusack Oscar Movie." He does break new emotional ground, playing a father of two whose wife dies while serving in Iraq, but given his schlubbiness here and that pair of big plastic glasses, he's straining to be taken seriously by being humorless. Still, this year is light on celebrity spotting -- at least until the arrival of Justin Timberlake, who has a part in "Black Snake Moan." And even then, compared to recent years, things seem old-school, if not downright quaint.
Robert Redford, who started this festival in 1981 as an alternative to soulless Hollywood commercialism, has stood by as his event has mutated into a lucrative bazaar upon which the studios descend looking for the next big thing. And for a number of years, it seemed the festival and its filmmakers were sometimes all too eager to grab the attention of hungry executives and their staffs.
With its American films, the event eased into a disturbing sort of self-parody, even as it expanded its scope to become a more credible international festival. Inevitably, the Sundance Labs, while honing artistic vision, also cultivate a Sundance brand. Every year the programmers include some strong American fiction and documentary features. But more and more, breakthrough filmmaking and new, original talent become increasingly scarce.
On the eve of the festival, I had dinner with a studio publicist, a festival programmer, and three other film critics. The sentiment among us all was skeptical: Why still come? What will we discover? Indeed, we knew of three major critics who decided to skip this year. And as far as the absentees were concerned, Sundance had jumped the shark.
Presumably having heard all this before, Redford issued a correction in his opening remarks for Sundance 2007. It's a festival, he insisted, not a marketplace. He seemed to suggest that his event was getting back to basics, returning to its grass roots: Out with the synthetic and over-processed, in with the organic and farm-raised.
This year, Sundance has done a noble job of getting out of its own way. The pretentious and offensive trailers that played before the films have been replaced with quick, abstract clips. This egoless introduction to the movies allows the main attractions to speak for themselves. After three days, while my world hasn't been rocked, I have seen movies I'm enthusiastic about.
One of them is John Carney's "Once" about a Dublin busker and a young Czech immigrant who fall for each while making music together. Part of the movie's charm is its unpolished look and how Glen Hansard and Markéta Irglová, its unheralded leads, do a lot with lonely, longing looks. The movie doesn't reach the stratospheric emotional highs that it wants to with its exultant last shot, but it seemed like I was the only person in the deafeningly elated theater who felt that way. In any case, this is the kind of discovery -- inexpensive, unknown, affecting -- for which we brave the freezing temperatures and trampling paparazzi.
Jeffrey Blitz's "Rocket Science" is another kind of movie people seem to dig: the quirky suburban kid movie. Blitz's 2003 spelling-bee documentary, "Spellbound," was a nail-biter about competitive smart kids. This new film, a fiction comedy, is set in the world of high school debate, and it's a disarmingly funny concoction that has one major ingredient missing from "Spellbound": hormones. Mix the narration of "Little Children," the spunk of "Rushmore," the divorce angst of "The Squid and the Whale," and the random eccentricity of "Napoleon Dynamite," and you have a point-blank hit.
Gregg Araki's stoner comedy, "Smiley Face," deserves an audience, too. He made this little movie, about one day in the life of an incurable pothead, as both a valentine to its lunatic star, Anna Faris, and as an antidote to the dark traumas of his previous picture, the masterpiece "Mysterious Skin." This isn't nearly as good as "Mysterious Skin," but that's the point. All Araki wants you to know is that Faris is one of the most naturally funny women in the movies and that drugs are bad, even if they're really, really funny.
The biggest dud thus far is "An American Crime," Tommy O'Haver's overblown, undercooked piece of drive-in movie madness, with a coolly psychotic Catherine Keener as a real-life Indiana mother who tortures her daughter's teen friend (Ellen Page) to death. There are a dozen ways to tell this story, and, regrettably, O'Haver tries all 12. That case might have made a gripping documentary. Lately, nonfiction has been Sundance's stronger, more fearless wing. This year's crop showcases American nonfiction filmmakers traveling the planet for stories -- or, in the case of Daniel B. Gold and Judith Helfand's "Everything's Cool," reminding us that we might not have a planet on which to travel.
This movie takes the baton from last year's Sundance hit "An Inconvenient Truth," improving slightly on that film's makeshift artistry but lacking the movie's seriousness -- it's too glib. Yet it's worth mentioning because it does manage to expose a few names on both sides of the global-warming debate as self-serving egotists.
Jason Kohn's "Manda Bala (Send a Bullet)" looks at the socioeconomic ladder of corruption in Brazil, from the slums to the Senate. The movie is disturbing, but mercifully it's alive with some very intelligent filmmaking and point of view that sometimes are absent from the American documentaries at this festival.
The feature films here seem to have a harder time shedding believable light on American experiences that aren't white or middle class. They don't seem to know the world is bigger than their characters' concerns -- or they don't seem to care.
Tamara Jenkins's shrewd and sensitive comedy "The Savages" is about that very disconnection. Starring Laura Linney and Philip Seymour Hoffman, her movie is ostensibly about a somewhat estranged sister and brother trying to care for their ailing father (Philip Bosco). The well-educated grownup kids are named Wendy and John, and life serially crashes their Neverland. Jenkins makes them selfish but humanly self-conscious about class, race, and personal failure. At least twice, Wendy wonders aloud whether the play she's written about her life is too, you know, white and middle class.
It's a concern a lot of movies at this festival are too near-sighted to ponder. The answer for Wendy is "probably," but thank you so much for asking.
Wesley Morris can be reached at wmorris@globe.com. To read more about movies visit boston.com/ae/movies/blog. 
