With deals done, focus returns to the films
PARK CITY, Utah -- The back half of a film festival can be a lovely thing. The deals have been done -- at Sundance 2007, they have been many, big, and probably foolhardy -- and most of the A-list celebrities have gone home, toting their gift bags behind them. There's really not much to do now except see movies. Has Robert Redford's Little Festival That Could (and Did) jumped the shark, as some people are complaining? Maybe. And maybe it's the better for it.
The most high-profile films -- those would be the Southern Gothics "Hounddog" and "Black Snake Moan" -- have aroused outcries and heated defenses from a mediasphere that had yet to see either film. Both have disappointed festivalgoers, though, and "Hounddog" in particular has become the object of gleeful derision for its perceived cliches, with a review in the online magazine indieWIRE calling the film "the 'Showgirls' of Sundance." Bad-movie buzz can do more damage in Park City than any conservative baying over Dakota Fanning's rape scene.
In the festival's second week, the dust has settled from the flurry of acquisitions. Emboldened by the commercial breakthroughs of last year's Sundance pick-ups -- Oscar nominees such as "Little Miss Sunshine," "An Inconvenient Truth," and "The Illusionist" -- distributors have been willing to fight hard and expensively to get the films they want. The big story has been "Son of Rambow," a tiny tale of a young boy torn between the Bible and Sylvester Stallone in 1980s England. Paramount Vantage paid $7 million for rights to the film, which has delighted and touched audiences, but the company faces a tough sell trying to break this whimsical no-star drama out of the specialty market.
Fox Searchlight has also gone on a bender, buying the Mexican drama "La Misma Luna" for $5 million, the quirky comedy "Waitress" for $4 million, and the upscale suspense thriller "Joshua" for $3.5 million. The tragic backstory behind "Waitress" -- it was directed by actress Adrienne Shelly , who was murdered late last year -- has drawn curious audiences and, although no one would admit it, presumably affected the bidding. The movie itself is a studied but enduringly sweet farce about a small time diner waitress (Keri Russell ) who gets pregnant by her loutish husband (Jeremy Sisto ) only to fall in love with her new OB-GYN (Nathan Fillion ). With support from a cast that includes Cheryl Hines , a very funny Andy Griffith , and Shelly herself, "Waitress" has given festivalgoers the chance to say goodbye to a winsome and much-loved talent.
The Weinsteins have returned to the game with the ferocity of old -- rumors had Harvey Weinstein pounding the hotel room door of the producers of "Grace Is Gone" at 1 in the morning, eager to close a sale. The Weinstein Co. got that film for $4 million, a sensible price given its audience-friendly nature and the presence of co producer John Cusack in the lead. The likely break-out star when this Iraq home - front tear-jerker is released, though, is Shelan O'Keefe as Cusack's watchful, prematurely grown-up adolescent daughter.
Magnolia bought rights to "Crazy Love," the latest documentary from publicist-turned-filmmaker Dan Klores and a fine example of this year's strong non fiction slate. Steeped in the eccentricity of Klores's beloved New York City, "Love" painstakingly (occasionally too painstakingly) tells of onetime tabloid staples Burt Pugach and Linda Riss . He was married when he met her in 1957 but fell for her anyway, only to hire thugs to blind her with lye after she broke up with him. When he got out of jail, she married him, and, as the gravel-voice Riss notes, that may have been the proper punishment. The movie says sadly funny things about pathology and desire, and about how we all may create our own great loves and enemies.
Politics have been in the air and in many of the films, but more obliquely than some were expecting. Charles Ferguson's "No End in Sight" breathes fire with its lucid, unblinking condemnation of the current administration's foreign policy failures, but no one at Sundance really needs convincing; as acclaimed as the film has been, its real work will be done in the outside world. Similarly, a scheduled march against the Iraq War one morning drew more media to Main Street than protesters.
The documentaries that have drawn the most buzz, instead, have peered into unexpected corners of the world and brought back bizarre and engaging human stories. "The Monastery: Mr. Vig and the Nun," for instance, focuses on an elderly Dane hoping to deed his down-at-the-heels castle to the Russian Orthodox church and the sister from Moscow who locks horns with him. Directed by Pernilla Rose Gronkjaer , it's a surprisingly comic portrait of two ornery but idealistic misfits coming to terms, and it captivated festivalgoers lucky enough to see it.
Slamdance , the increasingly prominent Sundance alternative unspooling at the top of Main Street, has also had its share of winners, including the documentary "Row Hard No Excuses," directed by the Boston-born filmmaker Luke Wolbach and produced by his Essex-based dad, Bill Wolbach . A gritty look at a 3,000 - mile, trans-Atlantic rowing race, "Row Hard" focuses on two New Englanders who take 58 days to make the crossing in a wooden boat, destroying their hands and nearly their spirits. Like all good sports docs, the film goes from micro to macro on a dime, ultimately achieving an exhausted beauty.
Disappointment is a common emotion at Sundance, and it flowed out of screenings as varied as "Joshua" (homicidal 9-year-old boy with annoyingly dumb yuppie parents played by Sam Rockwell and Vera Farmiga ), "Broken English" (a Holly-go-very-lightly chick flick with an adorable Parker Posey and no spine), and the documentary "Girl 27" (an unsinkable story about a 1937 rape at MGM almost sunk by the self-aggrandizements of its director, David Stenn ). "Dark Matter," a very confused story of a Chinese graduate student lost in America (Liu Ye ), manages to waste Meryl Streep in an inconsequential supporting role -- no small feat, that.
"Chapter 27," by contrast, wastes the talents of Jared Leto on a story that simply didn't need telling : the murder of John Lennon as told from the point of view of killer Mark David Chapman. The actor gained more than 65 pounds for the role and convincingly transforms himself into a bloated, pale sociopath whose obsessions include "The Catcher in the Rye" and the Bible in addition to the ex-Beatle. Lindsay Lohan is good as a fellow Beatlemaniac, too, but writer-director Jarrett Schaefer never convincingly explains the demons that drove Chapman. The result is an unpleasant act of cinematic rubbernecking that celebrates a deserved nonentity.
The festival prizes won't be handed out until tonight, but by Thursday evening, as "Chapter 27" was having its premier e screening in the Eccles Theatre, there was already a sense that this year's Sundance was over. At a quiet dinner in the mountains that night, held by a prominent buyer and attended by various members of the press and entertainment community, the talk wasn't of films just seen.
The director of "Grace Is Gone," James C. Strouse , relaxed with his pregnant co producer wife and expounded on why the classic 1972 Elaine May comedy "The Heartbreak Kid" was no longer on DVD. Filmmaker Darren Aronofsky , here as a juror for the Alfred P. Sloan Prize for best film treating scientific or technological themes (the "Primer" award, basically), brooded gracefully about his film "The Fountain" getting "skunked" by "The Illusionist" in the recent Oscar nominations for best cinematography. No one had the heart to kick "Hounddog" around any more.
The moment had passed, until next January.
Ty Burr can be reached at tburr@globe.com. 
