Beyond the Multiplex

A terrifying, sexy thriller from an Oscar winner. Plus: Sarah Polley directs -- and Anna Faris delivers one of the greatest stoner monologues of all time.

By Andrew O'Hehir

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

 

Clockwise from top left: "Red Road," "Away From Her," "The Great World of Sound" "Year of the Dog" and "Smiley Face."

Jan. 23, 2007 | PARK CITY, Utah -- Sundance is where you might run into Bono and Steve Buscemi one minute, and then get stuck in line at the supermarket behind a woman in high-heeled designer snow boots buying a single can of Red Bull and, in front of her, a Mexican couple laboriously paying for infant formula with WIC vouchers. OK, I'm exaggerating for effect. I didn't run into Bono at all. I only talked to people who did. And Bono and Buscemi were not together. (The latter was buying some coffee at the only decent place in town that isn't Starbucks.) If I could somehow have brought Bono, Steve, the sexy Red Bull lady and the young Latino couple together -- well, that sounds like an independent film to me.

But would it be a narrative feature or a documentary? It's the question of the hour up here. At roughly the halfway point of Sundance 2007, with only a few major premieres still ahead of us, conventional wisdom seems to be clustering around the idea that it's a great year for risky and ambitious documentaries -- I've already covered "Chicago 10," "Zoo," "The Future Is Unwritten" and "For the Bible Tells Me So," and there are more to come -- while the fiction films look tidy, safe and a bit lackluster.

Even the narrative features so far anointed as hits at Robert Redford's suburb-in-the-sky are more like variations on time-honored indie themes than grand statements or aesthetic breakthroughs. No one will say a bad word about "The Savages," Tamara Jenkins' long-awaited follow-up to "The Slums of Beverly Hills." I haven't seen it yet, but the recipe sounds familiar: Take two high-integrity actors (Laura Linney and Philip Seymour Hoffman), thrust them into a high-anxiety family situation (parental illness) and let the tears and laughs fall as they may.

In the biggest acquisition of this year's festival so far, the Weinstein Co. just paid $4 million for the rights to James C. Strouse's "Grace Is Gone," in which John Cusack plays a patriotic dad who spends the whole day with his daughters at an amusement park, trying to summon the courage to tell them their mother has been killed in Iraq. Harvey Weinstein has apparently been telling anyone who will listen that he smells a 2007 Oscar for Cusack in this role, but does anyone in the country want to see a movie that's about Iraq, even peripherally? Don't we go to movies to stop thinking about stuff like that?

I have yet to catch Zoe Cassavetes' romantic comedy "Broken English" (with Parker Posey and French heartthrob Melvil Poupaud), and eagerly anticipated American features such as Craig Brewer's "Black Snake Moan," Deborah Kempmeier's "Hounddog" and Nelson George's "Life Support" still lie ahead of us. Here are five noteworthy narrative features that premiered in the past few days and really stuck with me. There's not much connective tissue -- they range from Scotland to rural Ontario to Charlotte, N.C., and Burbank, Calif. -- but there are some coincidences. Four of the five directors are first-time filmmakers, and four of the five films feature commanding actresses in memorable leading roles. I might also observe that my favorite narrative film and favorite documentary so far are both British, in a festival predominantly focused on American film. But let's open that can of worms some other time.

It's almost cheating to start with "Red Road," the debut feature from English director Andrea Arnold (who has actually won an Oscar, for her 2003 short film "Wasp"). This neo-noir thriller has been bouncing around the filmfest world since premiering last May at Cannes, and should finally reach U.S. theaters this spring. But it's still dynamite, the kind of sexy, paranoid, creepily atmospheric picture that invades all your senses at once.

Set in and around an especially dire Glasgow public-housing tower, from which the film gets its title, "Red Road" focuses on Jackie (impressively played by Kate Dickie), who works in a security center manning the closed-circuit cameras situated throughout the central city. She spots a guy she knows, a ginger-haired roustabout named Clyde, while monitoring the Red Road tower -- and she's not happy to see him.

To give away more than that would be unfair, but this is the first thriller I've ever seen with a female protagonist in the prototypical noir hero role of pursuer and sexual aggressor. Like the heroes of countless tough-guy films, Jackie is a wounded loner with a secret, who sleeps with somebody she shouldn't and must face the consequences. "Red Road" is economically crafted and full of startling moments. Arnold's evocation of the ruined, post-"1984" surveillance culture of inner-city Britain is nothing short of terrifying.

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