Beyond the Multiplex

Parsing the movies that took the prizes. Plus: Ten festival premieres that ought to make some noise!

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: Scenes from "Padre Nuestro," "Manda Bala," "Enemies of Happiness" and "Sweet Mud."

Jan. 29, 2007 | Sundance always seems to come to a halt with a weird thud, handing out awards that muddy the issue of what this festival is actually about and make nobody happy. This year is no exception. By my count, 29 prizes were spread around among filmmakers, producers, writers and cinematographers at the ceremony in Park City, Utah, on Saturday night. This is still big news, dutifully reported in every newspaper in the country. Beyond the slack-jawed, autonomic response of the entire entertainment media to the festival's name -- which may indeed be the point -- I'm not completely sure why.

Sundance has meant a lot of different things to a lot of different people in its 23 years of existence, but if its awards were ever important, they aren't now. This festival still matters because it hosts glitzy premieres, in a picturesque setting, of noteworthy films that are slightly outside the Hollywood mainstream, and because it represents an oleaginous coming together of movie-biz life forms from both coasts. Deals are made, and maybe 10 percent of them will work out. (Which, believe me, is a good number.) Careers are launched, and sometimes ended. Pitches are rehearsed, delivered, rejected and embraced. French wine and name-brand liquor are drunk in impressive quantities. (At Park City's altitude, sometimes sticking with Utah's infamous 3.2 percent beer is wise.)

All that has almost nothing to do with the juried competitions, which have become a sort of sidebar to the main event, and an increasingly confusing one at that. This year, four sets of 16 films competed for four different grand-jury prizes and four different audience awards. Most of the name films you've already read about at Sundance screen out of competition. Films in competition are a miscellaneous assortment, but they tend to be earnest of intention and modest in scale. There are always a couple that break out -- last year's competition brought us "Half Nelson," while 2005 produced a bumper crop, including "Brick," "Hustle & Flow," "Junebug" and "The Squid and the Whale." (Before you say the words "Little Miss Sunshine," that was not a competition film.)

But most Sundance competition films never find a significant audience or a niche in the culture, and several narrative features of the past two years -- "In Between Days," "Loggerheads," "Police Beat," "Right at Your Door," "Who Killed Cock Robin?" "Somebodies," "Steel City" -- either weren't released at all or whizzed through a few theaters for a few days on their way to disc. (The list of unreleased documentaries would be significantly longer.) Sundance competitions remain a crucial opportunity for little-known films and directors to get exposure, but the sheer quantity is overwhelming and the quality is pretty ragged. Adding a random assortment of 40 to 50 foreign films to a festival almost exclusively known for showcasing American films has only further clouded the waters.

Who won this year, you say? Well, who won what? Any festival that gives out four different awards called the "Grand Jury Prize" is losing its focus and spreading its brand as thin as Country Crock, if you ask me. (They give out a pile of prizes at Cannes, too. But only one is called the Palme d'Or.) If you mean the Grand Jury Prize for an American-made dramatic film, that went to Christopher Zalla's "Padre Nuestro," a thriller about an illegal immigrant whose identity is stolen en route from Mexico to New York, where he hopes to find his father. (I haven't seen it, but reviews and word of mouth have been extremely positive.)

With his trophy clutched in his paws, Zalla can -- well, he can stick it up over his mantelpiece, take a long, cold shower and hope for the best, that's what. He can get a ride on the New York subway -- if he's also got two bucks. You get my drift. I hear "Padre Nuestro" is an excellent film, but here's what's going to happen with it: Some small distributor will take a flier on it, pile up the good reviews from folks like me and pray that the curse of the Grand Jury Prize can be undone.

OK, "curse" is a little much. But Sundance prizewinners, with rare exceptions, don't become impact films. They generally do poorly at the box office, and not all that amazingly among critics and film buffs either. They don't make money and they don't make a splash. Only two Grand Jury Prize films of the past decade could remotely be called hits ("American Splendor" in 2003 and "You Can Count on Me" in 2000), and neither of those grossed $10 million. To find a culture-shifting breakout moment, you have to go back to "Welcome to the Dollhouse" in 1996 (a cult hit that made almost no money).

Next page: This year's biggest Park City discoveries