Festival’s best confront U.S. hypocrisy
From Satan to segregation, festival's best offerings battle hypocrisy
PARK CITY, UTAH Few mainstream institutions challenge the American identity with the head-on boldness and verve of Robert Redford’s Sundance Film Festival — it’s beyond inspiring.
This year’s motto in bold caps is “risk independence,” the latter word well-chosen and fairly loaded, given its use in the other name for the American Revolutionary War.
Yet that independent spirit of “find the silent places and talk” confrontation has been absolutely coursing through the festival’s dozens of feature films since it opened last Thursday. Being here with a third short film — Trevor Anderson’s Docking — never has felt like such a privilege.
Because man, is the vibe down here one desperate for change in a country that is simply not doing its best for much of anyone below the millionaire level, especially near the concrete where most of us scrimp and scurry.
Running into Democracy Now’s Amy Goodman at Sundance HQ, I noted that while things just maybe seem more hopeful lately, she simply said, “There’s a lot of work to be done.”
My initial aim here was simply to give you a movie-review head’s-up about the finest cinema we saw, moving through the festival-as-airport simulator of long lineups and disturbingly necessary jacket and bag searches for weapons at the gates before each movie.
And I can indeed tell you Brittany Runs a Marathon is a gut-busting comedy that also happens to discuss, nakedly, how we feel about our imperfect bodies.
Yet looking back, it was striking how the truly great films we saw took on American hypocrisy within institutions that should be the most protective instead of destructive.
Particularly strong was firsttime director Scott Z. Burns’ The Report, in which Adam Driver plays real-life Senate staffer Daniel Jones, leading an investigation into the CIA’s Detention and Interrogation Program, a very expensive, U.S. government-sanctioned torture machine of Middle Eastern prisoners from the latter Gulf War, infamously including waterboarding and straight-up murder — with the bonus of being an unfortunately effective terrorist-recruitment lure from the Bush years on. The closer Jones gets to the truth, the more the same government he’s working for actually tries to block and even destroy him.
It was gratifying how many questions the audience asked Jones afterward instead of the actors, a sure sign of political engagement. As someone writing weekly political columns through the “shock and awe” Bush years, it’s extremely satisfying to see this story — which does not hold back criticizing President Obama — be so well-packed into one solid snowball. It’s this generation’s All the President’s Men, without question.
My favourite film, though, was Penny Lane’s funny and surprising Hail Satan?, which on the surface looks like a whimsical flyover of The Satanic Temple, yet as it moves along is such an alluring portrait of the actual, non-child-sacrificing political-protest organization you might actually want to join up.
The film’s central figure is Lucien Greaves, the Temple’s spokesman and co-founder, a smart-spoken and risk-taking hypocrisy fighter who, with humour and wit, unravels the myth that America is supposed to be a Christian nation … something its own Constitution expressly forbids.
One of the film’s many standout sections finds TST taking on Ten Commandments monuments at state capitols, many of which, astonishingly, were donated by Cecil B. deMille around the time his big-budget film of the same name came out — so nakedly a Hollywood promotional device that Charlton Heston appeared at ribbon-cutting ceremonies.
The Temple argues in court: if this Christian monument can live so close to public, governmental institutions, it’s only fair we drop off our Satanic statue of horned Baphomet flanked by children.
And boy, do the frantic crowds come out, yelling through megaphones against that idea, some of them calling for violence on camera.
Yet as Greaves explained after the premiere, arguing for the religious pluralism found in the nation’s founding documents, “We want the Satanic monument only on grounds where Ten Commandments monuments already are present. The notion being, it’s a reconciliation of opposite — it doesn’t have to be a war.”
He added, “I think a lot of other religious organizations are going to have to start recognizing they have non-theists in the fold, people who still identify culturally, still believe in its ethics, still have this attachment to this lineage — but they no longer believe in, or feel they need to claim they believe in, things that are just intellectually insulting.”
“I was not expecting to be as thoroughly inspired,” director Lane noted, “and to think about who my people are who I can gather with and make change.
“Because you don’t need money or connections — you can just be really f---ing smart, and get your five best friends.”
Meanwhile, over in Sundance’s New Frontier virtual reality section, less politically-charged demonstrations included Runnin’, an immersive disco dance floor scored by Reggie Watts — and I’m happy to report I tried yoga for the first time inside Embody, floating via binocular headset in front of a skyscraper-sized, human shaped mountain, bending and stretching. If this trippy new animated reality is yoga, I’m here to Namaste.
But perhaps the most moving and brilliant thing at the festival, period, was Roger Ross Williams’ Traveling While Black. It’s the result of 360-degree footage filmed inside Ben’s Chili Bowl, a Washington, D.C., diner found in The Green Book survival guide, first published in 1936 to help travelling African-Americans find sanctuaries away from often violent racism.
Under the stereoscopic headset and microphones, you’re right there in the booth beside the film’s subjects and can look in any direction during historical re-enactments and modern interviews, including with Samaria Rice, the mother of Tamir Rice, the teenager shot by Cleveland police in 2014, talking about the American nightmare as a row of supporters watches from the counter, shaking their heads and crying.
The scenes shift from a theatre, the back of a public bus and a train car — where you turn and see the reflection of a young African-American where yours would be.
Watching this, I again understood how VR can go places no ordinary cinematic documentary can, giving viewers near-physical access to a seat in which they’d never, ever otherwise be sitting … and yet empathize down to the marrow.
And if that feeling is not the most noble point of all of these cameras and microphones and subjects hurry-up-and-waiting, I don’t know what is.