Beyond the Multiplex

As Jennifer Aniston and her celebrity friends sweep up the accolades in Park City, one thing is clear: Sundance has lost its cultural mojo.

By Andrew O'Hehir

Read more: Andrew O'Hehir, Movies, Movie Reviews, Bubble, Arts & Entertainment, Reviews, Steven Soderbergh, Sundance Film Festival, Beyond the Multiplex

Jennifer Aniston in Nicole Holofcener's "Friends With Money."

Jan. 26, 2006 | It's one of the busiest weeks of the film year, with a new work of provocation, claustrophobia and all-around leg-pulling from the irrepressible Lars von Trier, along with an experimental micro-indie from Steven Soderbergh that's meant to reshape the Luddite patterns of film distribution. But let's start by talking about a film festival I'm not attending.

On second thought, is there really a major movieland hoedown happening near the Utah ski slopes right now? Oh, I'm sure the next issue of Us Weekly will carry some lovely color photos of Jennifer Aniston, Catherine Keener, Frances McDormand and the rest of the cast of Nicole Holofcener's "Friends With Money" at the opening-night parties. But that's pretty much the Sundance problem in a nutshell.

Beyond the tide of biz-deal news and gossip flowing out of Park City via film-geek blogs and news wires, the mainstream media's response to Sundance 2006 has been pretty tepid so far. The festival that once -- hell, just a few years ago -- seemed to define the cutting edge of American pop culture has become an ambiguous brand name, basically a pretty winter stopover on the ceaseless gravy train of celebrity and publicity. It's Cannes, with earmuffs instead of bikinis, or anyway it's trying to be.

I'm really not bashing Sundance, and part of me wishes I were there right now, sitting around with some other idiots soaking in an après-ski hot tub and discussing Michel Gondry's latest antics or whatever. My own decision not to go this year was as much pragmatic and logistical as anything else. You pick your battles; this year I'm going to check out the South by Southwest festival in Austin, Texas, which has more outsider cred, and I also hope to make Cannes (a much higher glamour factor), Tribeca (a mini-Sundance, right in the indie industry's backyard) and Toronto (far more substantial in film-geek terms).

You can always claim that festival organizers could or should have done things differently, but Robert Redford and his collaborators were always clear about their intention to create a counterestablishment in the film world, different from Hollywood but not exactly opposed to it. To the extent that truly "independent" or "alternative" status is now to be found elsewhere -- and that it's de rigueur to deride Sundance, directly or by implication, in certain cool-kid circles of the movie world -- they have clearly succeeded.

Sundance remains a major marketplace for new films seeking distribution, to be sure, and arguably the most important such marketplace in North America. But for reasons largely outside the festival's control, it just isn't the signifier of hipness it used to be. Among other things, the indie-film market's center of gravity has shifted sharply away from dramatic feature films and toward documentaries (or at least films described as such). Sundance has either followed or led this trend, depending on how you look at it, but either way the festival's one-time mojo as a venue for risk-taking, mind-blowing dramas and comedies has largely dissipated.

Two years ago, Sundance's documentary competition showcased the smash hit "Super Size Me," the devastating future Oscar nominee "Born Into Brothels" and several other noteworthy films, including "The Corporation," "The Hunting of a President," "Los Angeles Plays Itself" and "Metallica: Some Kind of Monster." (Admittedly, the grand jury prize went to the relatively obscure rockumentary "Dig!" but that kind of thing is par for the course.)

There were some important dramatic films that made deals at Sundance in 2004, but perhaps only the soon-to-be cult hit "Napoleon Dynamite" fit the classic Sundance pattern: a strange little movie without much of a punch line that couldn't easily be summarized or sold in advance. Without the buzz of genuine excitement and discovery it provoked in that Absolut-primed Park City audience, it might never have gotten the boost it needed.

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