They’re Obsessed With Obsession

Like God’s pure snow, which traditionally arrives in this skiing town just in time to delight nature-starved moviegoers, obsessive behavior in general and sexual obsessiveness in particular have blanketed the Sundance Film Festival. And don’t think that hasn’t been noticed.

The first screening of “American Pimp,” the Hughes Brothers’ candid and dispiriting documentary look at what they call “the most mythical figure in black culture,” created a scene of such bedlam that festival-goer/heartthrob Ben Affleck, among others, was nearly trampled in the uncaring crush to get in.

The scene was only marginally calmer at “Sex: The Annabel Chong Story,” an erratic documentary look at the life and career of someone schlockmeister Jerry Springer eagerly introduced to his TV audience by trumpeting, “This woman had sex with 251 men in 10 hours.” Dressed in a severe black tunic and jeans, the self-possessed Chong told the post-screening audience that her career in pornography was partly motivated by a desire to “break down gender stereotypes, stereotypes of the porn chick as a bimbo, a coke-addicted victim.”

Master documentarian Errol Morris (“Fast, Cheap and Out of Control,” “The Thin Blue Line”) is no stranger to obsession, or to Sundance, for that matter, a place he says he prepares for by “spending 72 hours in a meat locker with people I don’t like, and all of them have cell phones.”

Morris was in Park City before Sundance was Sundance, debuting his first feature, the pet cemetery-themed “Gates of Heaven,” at the Egyptian Theater back in 1978.

“There was a snowstorm, I was staying in a Godforsaken condo and I only had a small idea of where it was located,” Morris remembers. “I had to hitchhike back there, and I was picked up by people who’d been in the theater and had hated the movie. They asked me what I thought, and since I had no alternative means of transportation, I said I, too, was extremely disappointed.”

Morris’ new documentary, “Mr. Death: The Rise and Fall of Fred A. Leuchter, Jr.,” underlines that when it comes to depicting obsessive behavior, Morris has no peer. This strange, disturbing but never less than compelling film is sure to be one of the most provocative he has made--and for Morris, that’s saying something.

Leuchter first came to Morris’ attention as a kind of engineering Mr. Fixit for the nation’s means of legal execution, someone who believed in what the director calls “one of my favorite oxymorons, painless execution.”

Once he interviewed him, however, Morris became aware that there were two Fred Leuchters: “Fred the self-styled execution technologist and Fred the Holocaust denier. The combination seemed overwhelming, so much so that though there were many articles written about Fred, nothing combined these two elements. It was if they could not be addressed in one place, a crazy kosher idea of separating milk and meat.”

A self-described “obsessive character in my own right,” Morris was attracted to Leuchter in part, as he’s been to other obsessives, because of “seeing the Everyman in them, which is a very frightening thought.”

Describing how Leuchter came to believe that no one was gassed at Auschwitz also fascinated the director because of his own long-standing desire to make a Holocaust film, to “find a different way into that subject matter. The struggle about whether the Holocaust happened is at its heart about something very deep and disturbing, a struggle over good and evil. It’s struck me many times: If history is up for grabs, what meaning do good and evil have?”

A documentarian who believes “if you let people alone to talk long enough, they will reveal who they really are by how they use language,” Morris says that one of the themes of “Mr. Death” is “how we can convince ourselves of anything. One person I know contrasted this film to ‘Schindler’s List.’ If that film’s thesis is ‘Anyone can be a hero,’ mine has the far more disturbing thesis that ‘Anyone can think they’re a hero.’ ”

By contrast, and even though their subject matter has an undeniable amount of intrinsic interest and at times dazzling talkers as subjects, neither “American Pimp” nor “Sex” can completely overcome the numbing effect of the sleazy and exploitative worlds in which they are set--worlds in which a complete and terrifying contempt for women is the lingua franca.

Interestingly enough, the work of exceptional actresses has been the main pleasure of the festival’s fiction films so far. Tony Award winner Janet McTeer is vibrant and sassy as a free-spirited mom in Gavin O’Connor’s “Tumbleweeds,” and young Canadian actress Sarah Polley, memorable in “The Sweet Hereafter,” reveals herself to be a performer of enormous skill and poise in Audrey Wells’ “Guinevere.” Blessed with an alive, luminous quality and the ability to bring truth to every kind of scene, Polley does wonders with what might in other hands be a standard transition from a socially awkward to a completely self-possessed young woman.

Also, two of the most promising features in Sundance’s dramatic competition deal feelingly with the dilemmas of women. “Judy Berlin,” the first feature from writer-director-editor Eric Mendelsohn, takes place on the title character’s last day in Babylon, Long Island, before leaving for a hoped-for acting career in California.

Shot in elegant black and white, “Judy Berlin” features an ironic sense of humor and a poetic feeling for life’s little moments and small crises. Asked if his film was at all autobiographical, Mendelsohn replied, “Only in the sense there are five or six lawsuits pending from my parents.”

Equally accomplished is writer-director Toni Kalem’s “A Slipping-Down Life,” adapted from the early Anne Tyler novel. A whimsical, reflective romance that deftly captures the off-center ambience of Tyler’s fiction, “Life” focuses on the unlikely relationship between a brooding hunk of a rock singer (perfectly captured by “L.A. Confidential’s” Guy Pearce) and the partially formed woman (Lili Taylor) who becomes (yes) obsessed with him.

The story of how Kalem came to do the movie has an obsessive quality of its own. Herself an actress (she was Gianelli in “Private Benjamin”), Kalem said she’s been interested in turning this book into a film for nearly two decades (“since I pilfered the book from Random House when I worked there as a secretary”) and originally wanted to play the starring role herself.

“Other people buy houses or buy cars, I had a ‘Slipping-Down Life’ habit,” Kalem explained. “I took acting jobs just to pay for the option. I had horrible, horrible moments when I thought someone else would do it; I once took the red-eye to New York to save my option. Everyone said, ‘Toni, you’ve done enough, let it go.’ But I said, ‘If I can’t do it my way, I’ll keep optioning it; I’ll come up here in a walker if I have to.’

“Being here to tell the story is something I never would have dreamed of. And I’m not 100 yet.”

“The struggle about whether the Holocaust happened is at its heart about something very deep and disturbing, a struggle over good and evil. It’s struck me many times: If history is up for grabs, what meaning do good and evil have?”

ERROL MORRIS, about the Holocaust-denying subject of his documentary, “Mr. Death”