Beyond the Multiplex

Questions from SXSW: Will we be destroyed by an oil crisis or the credit card companies? And why is that cellphone in Parker Posey's panties?

By Andrew O'Hehir

Read more: Andrew O'Hehir, Movies, Movie Reviews, Arts & Entertainment, Reviews, South by Southwest, Beyond the Multiplex

A depleted Azerbaijani oil field in "OilCrash"

March 16, 2006 | AUSTIN, Texas -- It's the end of an exhausting, exciting week of movies in Texas and I feel something like one of those legendary Casanovas, Clark Gable or Warren Beatty or whoever, who spends his declining years brooding over the women he didn't bag. I have watched an awful lot of films in the last few days at the South by Southwest Film Festival, but there are always more, and the ones that haunt me are the ones unseen.

I saw Lindsay Lohan shake her groove thang, as much as she is able, in "A Prairie Home Companion." I sat breathless through the final minutes of the documentary "OilCrash," maybe the ultimate feel-bad apocalyptic film ever made and the one true knockout at SXSW this year. I snorted up coffee at Charles Nelson Reilly's sweet and hilarious impression of Meryl Streep watching the rushes of "Sophie's Choice." (That's in "The Life of Reilly.") I nearly jumped out of my seat when the Pixies finally played "Monkey Gone to Heaven," over the closing credits of "loudQUIETloud." I choked back tears while an Oklahoma woman described the night her college-age daughter hanged herself in her dorm room, overwhelmed by credit-card debt. (That's in the documentary "Maxed Out," another civilization-in-decline opus).

But, Jesus, how could I have missed the documentary about Tommy Chong? Tommy Chong! An icon of our age, and a hero of the anti-Bush resistance besides! On Austin drive-time radio on Tuesday, some DJ was asking him who had smoked more pot in his lifetime, Chong or local hero Willie Nelson. (Tommy graciously replied that he suspected Willie had a big lead on him in that arena.) I also missed the documentaries about full-contact medieval-warfare re-enactors ("Darkon"), about the guy who's trying to revive roller derby using original '70s roller-derby female stars ("Jam"), about the word "fuck" (sorry, that's what it's about and that's what it's called), about the deeply creepy world of underground horror films ("S&Man") and about some guy who works at a local Wendy's who people here think is kind of hilarious and cool ("Junior! The Wendy's Guy").

Notice that I haven't mentioned any narrative feature films yet. I missed some of those too -- I've heard modest buzz here about the New Hampshire-made indie comedy "Live Free or Die" and a British drugs-'n'-violence film called "The Great Ecstasy of Robert Carmichael" -- but the fact is that documentaries are eating the independent-film world, or have eaten it already. This has a lot to do with production costs and a little to do with the zeitgeist, or maybe the other way around. But either way, most of the talked-about movies at SXSW this year were docs, and it's in that genre where this festival's spirit of resistance comes through most clearly.

Sometimes that spirit is entirely personal and sometimes it amounts to nothing more than whimsy (a fine thing on its own terms). SXSW prides itself on opposing whatever the supposed dominant paradigms of the entertainment industry are, and both the music and film festivals have been accused of creating a cultural bubble, only tangentially connected to America. This year, though, you could feel a note ranging from concern to rage in many of the films and conversations here -- a worry and anger also felt in Hollywood, which wound up giving its biggest award to a preachy little movie about race relations.

Maybe this is what it boils down to: We had a week of great weather in one of America's most pleasant cities, along with a film festival that everyone in the business genuinely enjoys attending. We came away wondering what in hell is happening to our country and what in hell the people who make, sell and watch independent film can do about it. (Answer: Develop a new distribution model!) Of course it's an unfair question; art or cultural production or whatever you want to call it doesn't solve political problems. Sometimes it can start conversations, focus attention on neglected issues and so on. But mainly what movies do, if they're any good, is engage your senses, your emotions and your intellect, and blow your mind. From that, other things follow -- more good things than bad, I suspect, but who really knows?

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