Beyond the Multiplex

Other success stories of '04, including "The Motorcycle Diaries," "Garden State," "Open Water" and "Maria Full of Grace," arrived at Sundance pretty much prepackaged. Yes, they all found eager buyers and enthusiastic audiences at the festival (and I thought approximately 1.75 of those movies were excellent). But they all also represent completely conventional modes of filmmaking, and all of them would have easily found distributors at other festivals or through the ordinary deal-making process.

For extra credit, can anyone tell me what film won the dramatic grand prize at Sundance '04? Tick, tick, tick -- no? OK, me neither, I had to look it up. It was a sci-fi thriller called "Primer" whose existence I can only barely remember. I never saw it, and odds are you didn't either. Maybe it's a great movie, but that isn't my point. All sorts of interesting little indie dramas that got written about in tones of awe and veneration by my erudite colleagues at that festival would vanish thereafter with scarcely a trace: "November," "The Woodsman," "The Machinist," "I'll Sleep When I'm Dead," "The Dreamers," "The Return."

Yeah, I know some of those got released, and if you live in a big city and were really quick on the draw, maybe you saw one or two of them. But for a whole complex of reasons I'm not smart enough to untangle, those kinds of movies don't have the same kind of cultural power that, say, Quentin Tarantino's "Reservoir Dogs" or Kevin Smith's "Chasing Amy" or David O. Russell's "Spanking the Monkey" (to cite three seminal Sundance hits of the past) possessed in the '90s.

This is clearly about much larger factors than programming a film festival in Utah -- let's just say that the 2000 election, the events of 9/11 and the Iraq war have played a role -- but the dramatic feature has faded into the shadows in recent years while the documentary has loomed ever larger. Sundance didn't create this situation, but it also hasn't done much to resist it, with the result that other festivals, especially Berlin, Toronto and even Cannes, the aging diva of the Riviera, have become more reliable venues for ambitious dramatic films in the last few years.

Last January at Sundance, the trend was even more pronounced. Consider the two grand-prize winners in 2005: Eugene Jarecki's "Why We Fight" (documentary) and Ira Sachs' "Forty Shades of Blue" (drama). In my not-so-humble opinion, they're both exciting films, but their fates are strikingly different. Jarecki's achingly earnest hymn against militarism was snapped up by Sony Classics and released in major markets a week ago, with a massive publicity push and plans for a national rollout. Sachs' wrenching, Altman-esque drama set in the Memphis music scene was purchased at minimal cost by First Look, a small specialty distributor. After a test run for two weeks at New York's Film Forum, the company decided not to risk a wider release, and the movie is now awaiting release.

By far the bulk of the buzz-generating films at Sundance last year were documentaries: "The Aristocrats," "Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room," "Murderball," "Grizzly Man," "Inside Deep Throat," "Ballets Russes," "The Protocols of Zion," "Rock School." While "Murderball" was an overhyped box-office dud, and "Protocols of Zion" has yet to be released, most of the rest rank among the past year's most successful small-scale releases.

Yet again, the dramatic films that people like me drooled over mostly failed to interest the world. "Thumbsucker" was possibly the most praised festival film of the year, but attracted little audience despite a massive marketing campaign and a cast full of recognizable stars. "The Ballad of Jack and Rose," "Dear Wendy," "Nine Lives," "9 Songs" and "Oldboy" all came and went, without leaving much of a cultural ripple.

The hits, if you really want to call them that, were modest in scale, in ambition and (if you ask me) in level of accomplishment: "Hustle & Flow," "Junebug," "Me and You and Everyone We Know" and "Mysterious Skin" all more or less emerged at Sundance. On the other hand, such future hits as "Kung Fu Hustle," "The Matador" and "The Squid and the Whale" all played there, but those are classic examples of the mini-mainstream fare that has now become Sundance's stock in trade. There was never any question that those movies wouldn't be purchased by major studios and reach big audiences; the only question was how much juice the cumulative buildup of hype, from Park City to Berlin and Cannes and Toronto and wherever else, could generate.

Since I'm not at Sundance right now, I can't tell you whether "Little Miss Sunshine," the little-film-that-could purchased the other day by Fox Searchlight for more than $10 million, is an irresistible seriocomic gem or the hardened nugget of schmaltz mixed with didacticism it sounds like. Nor can I predict whether "American Hardcore," "Crossing Arizona" or "Iraq in Fragments" will be the year's breakout documentary. I'm already sorry to be missing some of the highly praised films on the artier edge, all destined to become unimpressive small to mid-level releases, from Gondry's "The Science of Sleep" to Carlos Reygadas' "Battle in Heaven," Fabian Bielinsky's "El Aura" and Max Makowski's "One Last Dance."

But I don't feel confident that any of those movies will be the ones we're still talking about a year from now. Last year's Sundance roster, for instance, did not include "Brokeback Mountain." Or "A History of Violence," or "Caché," or "Breakfast on Pluto," or the new films then in the pipeline from von Trier, Martin Scorsese, Terry Gilliam, Alexander Sokurov, Hou Hsiao-hsien, Roman Polanski, John Turturro, Tsui Hark and Larry Clark. (Most of those premiered at Cannes or Toronto instead.) Quirks of the calendar and the production process? Sure, in some cases. Not quite right for Sundance in some indefinable way? Perhaps. Index of a film world that has grown ever more difficult to understand? Definitely.

Next page: Lars von Trier moves on from "Dogville"