Sundance: Made for America

PARK CITY, UTAH — No breakout film emerged from Sundance this January, although the phenomenon had come to seem like an annual tradition. Unlike past years, the reporters covering the festival failed to confer their critical laurels on a consensus favorite. In fact, it was hard to discern from the coverage of the festival any consensus on anything except the chilly weather and chillier market for filmmakers hoping to sell the distribution rights to their films. As Manohla Dargis notes in her New York Times summary of the festival, some films, like Sunshine Cleaning — which features Amy Adams, Emily Blunt and Alan Alda — seemed "engineered" to land a deal with distributors with a fond memory of Little Miss Sunshine, the darling of the 2006 festival, which trod very similar ground. Another entry from this year, Adventures of Power — about odd characters pursuing the unlikely goal of an air-drumming championship — closely resembles Napoleon Dynamite, which attracted critics' praise and distributors' cash at the 2004 festival. Last year's favorite, the unconventional musical Once, yielded no clear progeny at this year's festival, though Amy Redford's Guitar and U2's reportedly spectacular 3D concert film (tickets for which scalpers were selling for over a thousand dollars each) might fill that role.

The story of these films attests to the sleight of hand always operative at Sundance — an illusion manufactured not so much to hide the truth as distract attention from the cynical reality of the festival. Sundance, especially in recent years, rarely heralds any real artistic triumphs or truly innovative cinematic talent. At best, it engenders filmmakers talented in the art of imitation. Like punk, "independent" is a term that has outlived its original meaning; instead of referring to the methods of creation, it has become shorthand for a particular, limiting style. Sundance's insistent use of the term in its promotional literature echoes the strained and defeated tone of punk's last gasp, "Punk's not dead" — which, as Dave Berman observes in Silver Jews' song "Tennessee," marks the precise moment when it died. The movies submitted to Sundance do not aspire to the status of art or the ideal of independence. They are products, cynically produced, bought and consumed. (The irony of independent films desperately attempting to attract studio backing seems to be lost on everyone involved.)

Park City's Main Street, the festival's epicenter, does not lie far from the Sundance Ski Resort, Robert Redford's first exercise in self-mythologizing. The festival's, and ski resort's, name comes from the character Robert Redford played in the 1969 film Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. Both that movie and The Sting paired Redford and Paul Newman with director George Roy Hill, and these collaborations feature a strangely ahistoric — almost antihistoric — reification of a distinctly American nostalgia that at times seems more informed by Norman Rockwell's covers for the Saturday Evening Post and the stories inside those covers than any actual events or people. The movies are steeped in a dream of American history that's filled with bloodless gentility and extraordinarily close — but never sexual — male bonding, the kind of myths dispelled by contemporary movies such as The Graduate and Easy Rider. In Butch Cassidy especially, the threesome formed near the end of the film follows the model of erotic homosocial triangles, and the dilemmas the men face recall old Western movie and radio serials more than the implicitly radical and politically engaged content of its peers.

You can imagine why Redford might want his filmmaking institute and festival to recall these movies — they're enjoyable to watch and capture a certain vital joy in living — but two other Redford films better frame Sundance's potential and reality. Park City, an old mining town nestled in the mountains of Utah, readily brings to mind Jeremiah Johnson, a notably less successful Redford film that celebrates independence of the kind that the hopeful associate with the festival. But it's Ordinary People, the Oscar-winning Best Picture directed by Redford, that more accurately stands as a model for the kind of films the festival tends to generate: weighty and self-serious explorations of well-sketched American families and the small but lasting sacrifices a relatively stable middle-class existence requires. "Quirky" is the word most often associated with Sundance fare, and it's hardly inaccurate. Yet blanketing these films with this epithet doesn't do either the critic or the film — however dreadful it might actually be — any real justice. If done well, Ordinary People's formula can work; any family, when viewed from within, seems quirky when compared to others. But in recent years this formula has devolved into opportunism. Consciously or not, filmmakers skew their films to hit certain beats, to grant characters certain idiosyncrasies that will endear them, flaws and all, to the viewer — and, more importantly, the distributors whose predatory search for quick and easy financial success mirrors that of the miners who first settled the seemingly desolate area, looking for flashes of buried ore to extract, polish and sell to a hungry marketplace.

Two films from the 2008 festival that largely failed to attract attention from either the press or distributors provide examples of the low and high points of Sundance. On the low side, displaying the lazy acceptance of the kind of mediocrity Sundance has come to represent, stands a dull film called The Great Buck Howard. It features John Malkovich as a down-and-out magician who plays to half-full auditoriums in the likes of Bakersfield and Akron. Malkovich commits himself to the role and delivers an incessantly goofy performance — he has an unflattering haircut, wears bad suits and, in a running gag that ages quickly, greets everyone he meets with an overly enthusiastic handshake that strains believability and suggests an indifference to verisimilitude on the part of director Sean McGinly. Malkovich gives a valiant effort, but McGinly's script is painfully reminiscent of some first drafts from undergraduate creative writing classes, failing to demonstrate more than a glancing acquaintance with the often muddled, complex motivations and personal histories that drive real people. While Malkovich's role most nearly approaches this understanding, the mood swings and outbursts still feel arbitrary, invented more to enliven a placid script than to investigate the mysteries of being. Colin Hanks plays the hapless narrator who struggles to find happiness and direction in his life when he quits law school, much to the disappointment of his stern father, played by a stiff Tom Hanks. Neither son nor father resembles an actual person. Hanks fils wears well-pressed suits and hair combed to a fine sheen even while he works for Malkovich's magician on what must be a meager salary. Colin Hanks' character — we are told but never shown — yearns to be a writer. In a scene that passes for revealing in this film, he confides to Emily Blunt's charmless PR agent character that he writes "things that happen to me, things that I wish would happen to me." She replies, "That makes you a writer." This one-to-one simplicity informs the entirety of the film. Nothing is unexpected or unexplained and oddball traits are substituted for fully imagined characters. As of this writing, this film is still seeking distribution; the cynical opportunism was perhaps laid too bare.

Also still seeking distribution is Stacy Peralta's excellent new documentary Made in America (pictured above), one of the films at this year's Sundance that best represents the promise and potential of the festivals's original vision. Made in America documents the history of Watts and south Los Angeles, which is surrounded by wealthier neighborhoods such as Beverly Hills and Orange County. Peralta refuses to accept others' explanations for Watts' decline, instead looking for answers in the neighborhood by conducting fascinating interviews with those responsible for the violence. Though some predictable documentary elements, such as academic talking heads, make appearances throughout the film, it largely avoids clichés and conventions. The manner and speed with which Peralta presents a wealth of information reinvigorates what has lately become something of a tired genre, especially at Sundance. An implicit urgency energizes the film throughout: Still photographs take on three dimensions and the camera moves through this deconstructed representation of reality with a sure purpose without losing the thread of the narrative or disorienting the viewer. When presenting the incident that incited the 1965 Watts riots — a racially profiled traffic stop that escalated out of control — Peralta uses what looks like rotoscoping, changing a photograph to a simply drawn three-dimensional scene. The effect lets the viewer take in the information at an additional remove from reality and judge the facts without prejudicial editorial choices. It also reinforces the commentary offered by Kumasi, a participant of the riots. Kumasi explains that he and the other residents had a feeling of hopelessness engendered by the disinterest of the state, which had left the buildings to crumble around them; throwing bricks at the National Guard was a political statement, an expression — and exorcism — of internalized oppression. Despite some feeble attempts at fixing some of the ills that sparked the riots, the same conditions persisted until 1992, when another botched traffic stop incited another, even more widespread riot. In between these two external outbreaks is when "the mechanics of oppression" — Kumasi's term — turned the internalized violence of Watts residents against each other by creating the Crips and the Bloods, who have played out a bloody territorial struggle over the last three decades. The extent to which this influences the behavior of a number of Watts residents makes itself startlingly clear in an interview near the end of the film. Peralta asks a current gang member (who was previously seen explaining that, in order to kill, he had to assume the mentality of an animal because "that's what we are to them") what he would want if he could have anything in the world. After a long pause the man answers simply, "Freedom."

Peralta's stated goal in making this movie was to humanize figures he feels have too often been reduced to caricatures or, worse, animals. His film is exceptional, and it admirably achieves his goal. But the failure of such an obviously excellent film to get anyone's blood up at Sundance tells you much about what the festival has become. Though Peralta's film will probably eventually receive wide distribution, it was passed over in the initial round of bidding while American Teen, a documentary derivative of Laguna Beach and The Hills, garnered an early and lucrative deal.

Admittedly, complaints about the decline of artistic taste and the grubby financial goals of artists are not new. German philosopher Theodor Adorno, in a 1938 essay bemoaning what he calls the "regression of listening" and the decline of popular taste, suggests that musical criticism originated at "the threshold of historical time," only slightly later than the discovery of music. Exhibitions like Sundance offer a convenient space for the reassessment of these familiar complaints. While media coverage of most other prestigious film festivals focuses on the winner of the grand prize — which at least superficially indicates an interest in artistic merit — the coverage of Sundance largely abandons the pretense of aesthetic appreciation. In art's place, reporters and organizers alike casually let slip the purer, less subjective language of economic concerns. Rarely does even the most astute assessment of Sundance completely escape the pull of the market's interests. The blame, of course, does not totally lie with the reporters. The terminology of the festival created by its organizers often uncomfortably resembles the description of a factory farm; the Sundance Institute website incessantly refers to "emerging filmmakers," as if they are being fattened up for market. At both places, inherently unique products are stripped of individuality and distinction in order to be turned into precisely engineered commodities that resemble nothing so much as each other but nonetheless turn a quick and tidy profit. The festival then becomes, in this analogy, the storefront, where potential buyers get a chance to eye the fully processed product. Together, the organizers of the festival and the reporters who cover it contribute to what Adorno might call a regression of seeing. The American cultural conversation suffers many ailments, and some of the worst of these, stretched and bent by the altitude and cold of Park City, become more pronounced and sharply focused by Sundance, like an arthritic joint foretelling a storm.