In a Sense, It’s Like the Strip

To understand the Sundance Film Festival, to get a sense of why audiences and the film community insist on returning year after year, comparisons with Las Vegas are a good place to start.

On the simplest level, Park City, like the Nevada metropolis, is great street theater, the modern equivalent of visiting a town the day the circus arrives. Turn around and you might see a man waving an impressive wad of cash and loudly offering to buy tickets to a sold-out show; an earnest young activist handing out flyers for “Making a Killing,” described as “the film Philip Morris has feared for years”; or a group of nearly nude protesters from People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, trying to live up to a news release that promised “Activists Bare All for Bovines at Sundance: Animal Rights Group in a Lather Over Leather.”

“My first reaction was, ‘Oh, my God,’ ” says “Jack the Dog” director Bobby Roth, back at Sundance for the first time since being a judge 15 years ago. “The scale, the number of people, the sheer volume, I couldn’t believe it. Even at this advanced age of mine, it feels a little bit overwhelming.”

Adding to the festive nature of things are the giveaways and gimmicks, the party favors, if you will, dreamed up to help spread the word about films, everything from a coloring book (for “Waking Life”) to a condom (for “Jack the Dog,” following the lead of last year’s Woodstock documentary). Food was also a popular accessory, with “Roof to Roof,” an Armenian-language film shot on location in Glendale, handing out Armenian cookies called nazooks, and dominion3, a publicity firm, distributing chocolate cell phones. If you ate all that, you might be grateful for what “Some Body” was giving away: a “quick and easy-to-use” tongue cleaner.

Speaking of cell phones, they are one of the numerous flash points in Park City’s genial ambivalence toward this huge festival, which so takes over the town that one of its favorite Chinese restaurants has completely disappeared for the duration, handing over its location to an aggressive dot-com that was hungrier for space than General Tso’s Chicken.

On one hand, the town appreciates the business, the publicity and the chance to rehearse for next year’s Winter Olympics. But there is the matter of crowding--13,000 parking tickets were handed out last year in what visitors have come to call “Can’t Park City”--and so many mobile communicators that a local alternative paper called Wild Utah has as its motto “We don’t need no stinking cell phones.”

Dreams of Hitting the Big Score

Aside from all this atmosphere, where Sundance most resembles Las Vegas is that, encouraged by stories of jackpots past, everyone comes to town hoping to get lucky. Filmmakers arrive with dreams of extravagant distribution deals, and audiences are eager to be the first to see films, like last year’s “You Can Count on Me,” that will go on to celebrity. This year, two of the most involving competition films both revolve around powerful performances by actresses playing fierce, protective mothers.

“In the Bedroom,” co-written (with Rob Festinger) and directed by actor Todd Field, has a literary feel to it and is in fact based on a short story by Andre Dubus. Measured and reserved, it tells the wrenching story of how a long-married couple cope with an unimaginable tragedy.

As a first-time director, Field works especially well with actors. Both British actor Tom Wilkinson (“The Patriot,” “Shakespeare in Love”) and Marisa Tomei do excellent work, but it’s Sissy Spacek as the fiercest of wives and mothers, who makes the biggest impression, giving a pitch-perfect, emotionally devastating performance that is one of this exceptional actresses’ best in at least a decade.

Equally strong is Tilda Swinton’s performance in Scott McGehee and David Siegel’s mesmerizing “The Deep End,” an elegantly shot (by Giles Nuttgens) and exquisitely made modernization of traditional genre material, in this case the 1940s Elizabeth Sanxay Holdingnovel that was the basis of Max Ophuls’ wonderful 1949 Joan Bennett-James Mason film “The Reckless Moment.”

Swinton, acting both fragile and determined, is a conventional Lake Tahoe housewife and mother who has to deal on her own with dead bodies and threats of blackmail. “The idea of an old-fashioned Hollywood picture, of a woman thinking through a problem for 90 minutes, appealed to her,” says Siegel of the actress best known for her starring role and collaboration with Derek Jarman in “Orlando.”

Co-writers, directors and producers whose last film was “Suture,” McGehee and Siegel are deeply concerned with the look of this precise, beautifully controlled film (McGehee’s sister, Kelly, is their longtime production designer, and, says Siegel, “we tend to start designing at the script stage”). Though admittedly intimidated by following in Ophuls’ footsteps, they are in general intrigued by the notion of re-envisioning the kind of melodramatic material they discovered in old Hollywood films.

“We watched every melodrama we could find,” says McGehee. “It was like the doors of some vast kingdom had been opened to us.”

On the documentary side, almost every one of a very diverse group of competition films has turned out to be a lucky number. One of the most interesting, Kirby Dick’s “Chain Camera,” takes an unusual, intriguing look at an often-visited subject, the teenage sensibility.

Setting up shop at Los Angeles’ John Marshall High School and collaborating with the school’s Media Center, Dick gave 10 students at a time Hi-8 video cameras and asked them to record their lives for a week. After a year, he had more than 700 hours of footage, which was shrewdly edited down to a 90-minute film devoted to 16 of the kids. Posturing and goofing around, searching for romance and worried about being alone, the students display an irresistible combination of candor, humor, vulnerability and attitude. No matter how adult they may feel, it’s their quintessential teenage-ness that makes the most lasting impression.

Documentaries Offer Fresh Perspectives

Many of the best documentaries this year were less than an hour long. The haunting “An Unfinished Symphony” had the brilliant idea of heightening the emotion of archival footage shot during a 1971 antiwar protest march by newly returned Vietnam veterans by cutting it to the transcendent sounds of Henryk Gorecki’s Symphony No. 3.

And, for something completely different, there was “The Natural History of the Chicken.” Directed by Mark Lewis, fondly remembered for his film on cane toads, “Chickens” is a sly, playful yet serious film that intercuts startling images of how the poultry industry functions with interviews with people flat-out in love with their chickens. There’s a woman who brought her chicken back from the grave by giving it CPR, a woman who keeps an underwear-wearing chicken as a house pet, and the tale of a headless chicken so celebrated it toured England.

“I like to have fun on my films” Lewis says, and that’s a feeling he knows how to share.