It's a real cutthroat atmosphere this year," joked an aspiring young director in line at the 2001 Sundance Film Festival. "People are buying tickets just to burn them."
With an actors' strike looming and most of the Sundance features still looking for distribution deals, the general consensus was that "product"-starved studio reps would arrive in Park City, Utah, with checkbooks open, bidding for anything that successfully rendered the illusion of movement at 24 frames per second. But save for a handful of lucky exceptions—all picked up for modest sums compared to The Spitfire Grills of years past—the Gold Rush turned out to be about as authentic as the faux-Western gift shops and restaurants lining Main Street. That was bad news for the filmmakers and financiers hoping for a healthy return on their investments, but it was a good omen for the movies themselves, which made up in artistic integrity what they appeared to lack in marketability.
The trend toward more challenging and idiosyncratic work, particularly in the Dramatic and Documentary Competition sections, comes at a time when Sundance is not only failing to support independent film, but actively harming it. With each passing year, the festival looks more like a dreary mating ritual, as major-studio boutiques (Miramax, Fox Searchlight) ogle the cheap tramps that shamelessly court their attention. For a lot of big-name stars, independent film has become just another form of charity, a well-publicized visit to the terminally infirm. Even Sundance's locale—a small, pricey resort town at the peak of ski season—discourages the moviegoing public from taking part, unless they have bottomless reserves of cash and patience, two conditions that rarely coincide in one individual. Last year's slate showed signs of improvement, premiering such accomplished fare as You Can Count On Me, Hamlet, American Psycho, The Filth And The Fury, Dark Days, and Two Family House. But who could spot so much as the veneer of artistry in The Tao Of Steve, Love & Sex, Saving Grace, Smiling Fish And Goat On Fire, or The Eyes Of Tammy Faye?
Granted, this year's festival didn't entirely purge itself of questionable buzz magnets—beware Jump Tomorrow and Haiku Tunnel, quirky nothings that were snapped up as quickly as they'll be forgotten—but the chaff was largely relegated to the wilds of the American Spectrum and Premiere sections. Which isn't to say the competition entries were uniformly successful, but most of the failures at least had the courtesy to buckle under the weight of their own ambition. In 2001, the contradictions and compromise that have come to define Sundance were channeled back into the films themselves, lending dramatic tension to a widely varied and provocative range of subjects.
No Sundance film displayed these forces more prominently than writer-director Henry Bean's The Believer, the surprise winner of this year's Grand Jury Prize. A seasoned Hollywood screenwriter whose credits include Internal Affairs and Deep Cover, Bean specializes in characters undone by bold and hugely ironic contradictions. In Deep Cover, for example, an undercover cop finds himself selling drugs in order to infiltrate the higher ranks of a drug organization. Similarly, The Believer goes to the furthest imaginable extreme in telling the story of an Orthodox Jew, brilliantly played by newcomer Ryan Gosling, who repudiates his teachings to such an extent that he becomes a neo-Nazi fascist. His hatred of what he perceives as the weakness and passivity of his people is countered by an unyielding respect for Jewish traditions and artifacts, leading to funny scenes like one in which he scolds his skinhead cronies for going too far in trashing a synagogue. As good as his writing instincts are, however, Bean's direction is marred by awkward staging, an intrusive score (lots of soprano-choir wailing), and an overall lack of visual dynamism. The five-member jury, perhaps sensing that the film would have trouble finding a distributor, appears to have rewarded it more for its audacity than its achievement. Nevertheless, The Believer remains a vital, polarizing bombshell, the thinking person's American History X.
The clear choice for the top prize was another debut, Todd Field's masterful In The Bedroom, which did walk away with a special citation for Tom Wilkinson and Sissy Spacek's heartbreaking performances as an upper-middle-class couple whose marriage is frayed by tragedy. Field, best known for his self-effacing turns as minor characters in Victor Nunez's Ruby In Paradise and Stanley Kubrick's Eyes Wide Shut, had directed a few well-regarded shorts, but his transition into features is astonishingly assured. In The Bedroom is based on a 10-page short story by the late Andre Dubus, but the plot of that story only comprises the last third of the film. The rest has been precisely imagined by Field and co-writer Robert Festinger, who shade a delicate portrait of married life under extreme duress and show how a sudden twist of fate can allow unspoken resentment to bubble to the surface. At a carefully paced 134 minutes, In The Bedroom was by far the longest entry in competition, causing some grim speculation that Miramax's scissor-happy Harvey Weinstein would cut it into an 80-minute montage sequence. If he touches a frame, may a fresh pile of coals be added to his memorial wing in Movie Hell.
The dramatic competition offered other small treasures that were lighter but no less audacious, including a pair of musical comedies that dared to announce themselves as instant cult classics and actually came close to living up to that title. Riding a wave of goodwill from its smash success as an off-Broadway show, writer-director-star John Cameron Mitchell's glam-rock musical Hedwig And The Angry Inch won the Audience Award from ardent fans, who cheered wildly after every number. Thumbing its nose at the cheesy excess of Broadway musicals like Rent, Hedwig fails to rival the complexity of Todd Haynes' Velvet Goldmine, but the decadent dreams of its androgynous hero are easier to access. Unfairly overshadowed by Mitchell's popular success was Cory McAbee's similar hat trick The American Astronaut, a messy collision of cheapo science-fiction effects (à la John Carpenter's Dark Star), Southern-fried punk songs, and gleeful absurdity. A rickety contraption, to be sure, but you have to admire off-the-wall concepts like the planet of filthy miners whose sole pleasure is hearing a boy regale them with the story of how he once saw a woman's breast. ("It was round and soft. Now get back to work!")
If the 16 dramatic entries were distinguished by their uniform integrity (albeit variable success), their documentary counterparts were set apart by their uniform quality. A virtual embarrassment of riches, the category was remarkably diverse in style and subject matter, ranging from a dizzying pop history of skate-punk revolutionaries (Dogtown And Z-Boys) to an intimate and deeply moving chronicle of transgenders in backwoods Georgia (Southern Comfort). With a couple of notable exceptions, most of the documentaries were shot on digital or high-8mm video, yet for once, the cheaper format opened not only financial doors, but creative ones. With small, flexible cameras in hand and unlimited footage to burn, directors were able to continue and advance the fly-on-the-wall vérité originally championed by D.A. Pennebaker, Frederick Wiseman, and the Maysles Brothers.
Unfettered by the prohibitive costs of film stock, Chris Hegedus and Jehane Noujaim's Startup.com and Kirby Dick's Chain Camera were whittled down from several hundred hours of videotape shot from multiple cameras at once. Pennebaker's wife and co-director of The War Room (a riveting behind-the-scenes account of the '92 Clinton campaign), Hegedus proves again to have the good instincts to pick up on a juicy story from its inception and negotiate unlimited access to the drama as it unfolds. Startup.com follows the high-stakes maneuvering of two young friends and business partners who attempt to launch govWorks.com, a web site designed to connect users with local government, letting them pay parking tickets, renew licenses, or take part in town meetings online. As the venture capital mounts, so does the pressure to succeed, causing enormous conflict between the partners' responsibilities to the business and each other.
Breaking the mold altogether, Kirby Dick—whose disturbing yet oddly touching Sick: The Life & Death Of Bob Flanagan, Supermasochist premiered at Sundance in 1997—handed out palm-sized digital video cameras to high-school students for his innovative Chain Camera. With the willing participation of an ethnically diverse public school near Hollywood, Dick gave cameras to 10 kids at a time so they could record personal diaries. After a week, the cameras were passed to 10 more, and so on, until roughly 200 students had recorded diaries, leaving Dick with about 700 hours of footage. From that, he chose 16 subjects from a wide variety of backgrounds and temperaments. With just a short glimpse into each student's life, Dick captures more intimate, revealing, and uproariously funny moments than a season's worth of Fox's well-meaning (and lamentably canceled) series American High.
Yet despite the proliferation of video projects, there was still room on the documentary slate for the gorgeously contrived artistry of Mark Lewis' The Natural History Of The Chicken. Working in the maverick tradition of Robert Flaherty and especially Errol Morris, Lewis (Cane Toads) doesn't even pretend to conform to traditional standards of documentary truth. Instead, he interviews his subjects extensively, then scripts out highly detailed and stylized reenactments in which they participate as "actors." In the film, Lewis presents an oft-hilarious selection of bizarre chicken stories—a woman who revived a frozen chicken through mouth-to-beak CPR, a man who irritated his rural neighbors by raising 100 roosters for cockfighting, and so forth—that demonstrate society's strange and widely varied relationship to the animal. In many ways, Chris Smith's delightful Home Movie (his follow-up to American Movie) seemed like a companion piece, exploring people's odd connection to their dwellings with the same gentle curiosity and humor.
Unfortunately, the prurient tabloid shocks of a non-competition documentary, Raw Deal: A Question Of Consent, made a cheap grab for the spotlight and cast an ugly pall over the festival. Thanks to Florida's Sunshine Laws, graphic footage of a 27-year-old stripper who may or may not have been raped at a Delta Chi frat party found its way into the hands of an opportunistic student filmmaker hungry for exploitation. What might have been a serious look at the disturbing ambiguities of a rape charge is instead handled with all the sensitivity and class of an Inside Edition segment. The stir over Raw Deal made the front page of the New York Post and led to a highly publicized distribution deal with Artisan, but to actually watch a woman struggling to wrest herself from a much larger man is to be unsettled by a queasy mix of sadness and resentment.
But once the dust settles and the manufactured controversy becomes yesterday's news, the soul of the 2001 Sundance Film Festival will be won by Richard Linklater's Waking Life, a groundbreaking, one-of-a-kind journey into a hypnotic dreamscape. Advancing old-fashioned rotoscoping techniques, Linklater and animation director Bob Sabiston turned digital-video footage of real-life actors and settings into painted characters and backdrops that shimmer with dazzling color. Delving into a young man's subconscious as he drifts in and out of sleep, Linklater uses the eye-popping visuals to draw viewers into loosely connected philosophical monologues. The strangely narcotic effect works like a contact high, as if Linklater has somehow discovered the secret to communicating ideas through osmosis. By peering through a unique prism, Waking Life opens up new ways of seeing the world and, in doing so, almost single-handedly directs a beleaguered festival toward the future.