Sundance 2006 - final report

Dave Calhoun sees his last few films of the festival and looks back on the good and bad from the last week.

Jan 27 2006

As sure as snow falls on the mountain-tops of Utah, each year the organisers of the ever expanding Sundance Film Festival must contend with accusations that they have abandoned the event's indie roots. The charge is largely unfair, and this year festival founder Robert Redford and director Geoff Gilmore tackled it head-on, stressing in various speeches and interviews that Sundance is as committed as ever to screening diverse work from young, low-budget first or second-time directors. The programme speaks for itself. Central to the festival are the dramatic and documentary competition sections which screen work from emerging American filmmakers, and this year the quality of films in those strands was unusually high. The festival's real problem is one of image. As Sundance grows, so too do the rubber-necking crowds and the ubiquity of the commercial interests that pitch up in town looking to snaffle some indie credibility for themselves. Park City's Main Street is lined with the temporary HQs of companies – Volkswagen, Intel, Motorola – that host press interviews and parties and hand out free gifts to visiting 'celebrities', many of whom have nothing whatsoever to do with independent film or even cinema. In turn the media obliges by covering this dubious philanthropy. It's hardly surprising that films by anonymous young filmmakers are lost in the fog when the big story of the day is Paris Hilton being given a free mobile phone.

Still the festival's most-anticipated movies are those in the 17-film-strong Premieres section, and this year the most promising draws in that corner of the event were 'The Science of Sleep', the third feature from French director Michel Gondry, and 'Art School Confidential', which reunites director Terry Zwigoff and screen and comic-book writer Daniel Clowes, who worked together on 'Ghost World'.

'The Science of Sleep' turned out to be the most excting film in a quite lacklustre Premieres section. Gondry wrote the script himself, leaving behind Oscar-winning screenwriter Charlie Kaufman with whom he collaborated on both 'Human Nature' and 'Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind'. The film has all the visual and romantic charm of Gondry's music videos, mixing frenetic, smart ensemble drama with moments of arts-and-crafts effects; think of cellophane as a substitute for running tap-water and knitted horses galloping across cartoon fields. The film is a story of confused love in which Gael Garcia Bernal plays Stephane, a half-Mexican Parisian who moves into his mother's empty flat shortly after the death of his father and finds that his dreams and waking-life are beginning to blur into one. Next door lives Stephanie (Charlotte Gainsbourg), with whom Stephane clumsily falls in love. Gondry examines our dream-worlds with wit and wonder, and Bernal gives a wonderfully comic performance. It's a film defined by imagination and romance.

Zwigoff's 'Art School Confidential' was a disappointment. It starts well as Zwigoff introduces the various stereotypes that new student Jerome (Max Minghella) comes across at a crumbling art college in Brooklyn. His two roommates are variously a camp, in-the-closet fashion student and an obsessive wannabe filmmaker. Caricatures are well-drawn, and Zwigoff and Clowes show the same wry interest in the lives of the arty and unwashed that will be familiar to fans of 'Ghost World'. But 'Art School Confidential' soon falls victim to a muddled plot that moves between Jerome's search for both love and an artistic voice and the presence in the neighbourhood of a serial killer. These three strands collide clumsily, and the film lacks the misanthropic edge of both 'Ghost World' and 'Bad Santa'. It's Zwigoff's most mainstream and worst film yet.

Elsewhere in the Premieres section, there lingered a depressing string of mid-budget misfires and mediocre diversions. 'The Darwin Awards' is a cynical, broad exercise in shoehorning a film into an attractive option-deal in which Joseph Fiennes and Winona Ryder play insurance investigators who travel from one case of fatal stupidity to another, mirroring the anecdotal spirit of the popular website of the same name. 'The Night Listener' (an adaptation of an Armistead Maupin novel) allows Robin Williams to deliver a rare restrained performance as an ageing gay writer and radio presenter who is drawn into close contact with one of his fans, but the film is nothing more than a quite unexceptional thriller that lacks ambiguity and daring. And Neil Burger's 'The Illusionist' features Ed Norton as a popular magician in 1900 Vienna who falls foul of the local royal family; the film is a solid if unmemorable piece of atmospheric whimsy that wanders uninspiringly into shot-through-a-teabag historical territory.

Thankfully, there was plenty of diversity and much original talent on display in dramatic competition – a programme of 16 smaller feature films made largely by unknowns. Leading the pack was 'Half-Nelson', a feature developed from an earlier short film, 'Gowanus, Brooklyn' by director Ryan Fleck and writer Anna Boden. Ryan Gosling gives a great performance as Dan, a laidback history teacher in Queens, New York who struggles with both an unfocused desire to change the world and a habit for drugs and alcohol. He strikes up an unlikely and intriguing friendship with one of his pupils, a young Afrian-American girl called Drey (a terrific Shareeka Epps); it's a relationship that offers a nuanced and insightful comment on continuing cultural and racial divisions in modern America.

Another great acheivement is Chris Gorak's writing and directing debut, 'Right At Your Door', which imagines a multiple dirty bomb attack on Los Angeles from the point-of-view of one young couple, Brad (Rory Cochrane) and Lexi (Mary McCormack) who live only a few miles from an explosion in the Downtown area of the city. It's a claustrophobic, restrained affair that elicits fear and discomfort with great economy. The horror is largely imagined, rendered only by smoke on the horizon, panicked radio reports and the odd horrible sign, such as dead birds falling out of the sky. Gorak has done wonders with a small budget and tapped brilliantly - but not cynically - into current fears.

Other impressive new dramas were Laurie Collyer's 'Sherrybaby', a sobering piece of realism in which Maggie Gyllenhaal plays a single-mother and recovering junkie on parole; 'Stay', a sharply written comedy that riffs on one young woman's guilty secret that she gave a dog a blow-job in her youth; and Goran Dukic's black comedy 'Wristcutters: A Love Story', in which Patrick Fugit kills himself and enters an even more miserable world, a familiar-looking purgatory for all those who have 'offed' themselves.

Art and life collided oddly on my final night at the festival when it emerged that actor Chris Penn - brother of Sean - had been found dead in his Los Angeles home. Penn was due at Sundance the next day to support the premiere of his latest film, 'The Darwin Awards', a macabre comedy about death in which he has a brief role. The screening went ahead as planned, attended by Penn's co-stars Winona Ryder and Joseph Fiennes. As I said above, it's a poor film, and unwittingly a sober reminder to us all that our next move may be our last. Choose carefully, I say.

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