At Sundance, films led by outsiders
THE world has finally gotten with the Sundance Film Festival. For years, thousands have flocked here sometimes for the love of movies, though at other times just because it seemed like a cool place to spend time and money. Each January, they would be met by high-minded reminders that the festival also nurtured talent, believed in story (a Sundance mantra) and embraced diversity. Those paying attention would notice that it generally made good on its principles with a slate that – good, dutiful or mediocre – was striking for its plurality of voices.
And so this year, women were hot (not in a sexist, demeaning way, of course!) along with black filmmakers (again). Except that the festival and its parent organisation, the Sundance Institute, have been pushing and advocating for filmmakers who are not white men for much of their history. In 1979, the year Robert Redford floated his plans for the institute, he spoke about diversity; he did so again this year. For the most part, the festival has been more invested in diversifying its filmmaker population than the kinds of movies it programs. Sundance invariably includes work that’s somewhat off-centre, like Hale County This Morning, This Evening, a drifty, beguilingly elliptical documentary from RaMell Ross about everyday life in Alabama’s Black Belt.
Yet for the most part, Sundance remains committed to character-driven tales about lost, besieged, oppressed, searching and triumphant outsiders of one type or another. All these were in evidence again at this year’s festival, where some of the strongest, most memorable titles included Leave No Trace, a deeply affecting story from Debra Granik ( Winter’s Bone) about a former veteran and his teenage daughter – movingly played by Ben Foster and Thomasin Harcourt McKenzie – living precariously off the grid in the Pacific Northwest. A different outsider emerges in The Kindergarten Teacher, a remake of an Israeli film about a woman who comes to believe that one of her students is a prodigy. Directed by Sara Colangelo, this version doesn’t have the merciless political bite of the original, but it does star an excellent Maggie Gyllenhaal.
Lizzie, a 19th-century period drama directed by Craig William Macneill, turns on Lizzie Borden, an abiding mystery and ambiguous feminist touchstone. Her notoriety is summed up by a macabre ditty, the one in which she gives her mother 40 whacks with an axe and then gives her father 41 more. A controlled Chloë Sevigny, who helped produce the movie, plays the title character with rage that eventually seeps through her prison of a home like a poisonous gas. Sevigny comfortably shares the screen with Kristen Stewart, who, in the role of a sympathetic maid, continues to solidify her standing as one of the great screen performers of her generation.
Given that the ghost of Harvey Weinstein’s career hovered over this year’s event, this fe- male rage seemed apt. So too did the presence of RBG, an entertaining, predictably stirring documentary from Betsy West and Julie Cohen that traces the personal and professional battles fought by Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Weinstein has, of course, been in the news following allegations that he sexually harassed and abused women for decades. He hasn’t been a real factor at Sundance for years and has often loomed largest and most persistently in the imagination of journalists looking for a juicy quote or just a way to shape the festival into an easy-to-parse narrative.
One of the things Sundance has long made clear is that there is no single, easily definable festival. There are tendencies, trends, schools and occasionally – as with the sui generis freakout Sorry to Bother You – a jolt from the blue. Directed by the musician Boots Riley, making his exuberant feature debut, this freewheeling social satire tracks the increasingly surreal adventures of a telemarketer (Lakeith Stanfield), whose life takes an outlandish, dangerous turn when he chooses success over solidarity, a development with stinging political resonance. Often guffaw-out-loud Lizzie funny, the movie pretty much slips into something of a mess but remains a must-see.
In Monsters and Men, Reinaldo Marcus Green follows three Brooklyn men – a young father, a cop and a college-bound athlete – whose lives are upended when a local is shot to death by the police. With a strong cast that includes a very good John David Washington (a son of Denzel Washington), Green movingly affirms the radical humanity of these very dissimilar characters, who remain sensitively, insistently individualised. The only character who enjoys the same in Sebastián Silva’s uneasy drama Tyrel is the title protagonist (the excellent Jason Mitchell), whose weekend with friends takes on anxious, not especially persuasive racial overtones.
The tumult of both #MeToo and Black Lives Matter reverberated throughout the festival much as it has throughout the industry, which remains ridden by multiple crises: the sustained absence of racial and ethnic diversity in the mainstream studios; the future of the theatrical experience; and the worrisome state of foreignlanguage distribution. It’s difficult to know how all this affected this year’s Sundance and whether screenings were genuinely less crowded than last year or only felt like it. Certainly after a week, plenty of movies had been picked up for distribution.
Sundance is where I saw my first film by Lynne Ramsay, one of many female directors who have shown work here, including Nancy Savoca, Alison Maclean, Catherine Hardwicke, Leslie Harris, Kayo Hatta, Dee Rees, Jill Soloway and Ava DuVernay, who became the first black woman to win the director’s award for drama here in 2012 for Middle of Nowhere. DuVernay’s next movie is A Wrinkle in Time, a big-budget Disney movie that will always retain a connection to Sundance, which has consistently made room for women in an industry that has consistently refused to do the same. The barriers still remain in place, but as one after another woman expressed here in noisy and modest ways, change is here.