Park city limits
The cultivated eccentricity of the Sundance film.
‘It ’s very Sundance.” That’s been the refrain clinging to Me and Earl and the Dying Girl since its premiere this January at, yes, the Sundance Film Festival — where, the toast of Park City, it received the Grand Jury Prize, the Audience Award and a standing ovation.
But simply premiering at the Sundance Film Festival does not a “Sundance movie” make. You probably have a good idea already of what the appellation means: think irreverent banter and piped-in ukulele, primary-coloured title cards and songs by Sufjan Stevens. Think breezy entitlement, wry posturing and white middle-class twentysomethings with first-world problems. Think people of colour relegated to comic relief.
You know by now what to expect of a Sundance movie. We all do. A type has hardly been so readily copied, or so easily parodied, since the western or the film noir.
Me and Earl and the Dying Girl advertises its fanciful Sundancery from the very perch of its high concept. A trendy teenaged milquetoast (Thomas Mann), alongside best friend Earl (Ronald Cyler II), whips up hand-crafted video riffs on The 400 Blows and A Clockwork Orange, and soon marshals his gifts to devise a parting gift for the terminally ill schoolmate (Olivia Cooke) his mother demands he console. Twee exploits naturally abound. And the effect is completely familiar. “Its values,” writes Ignatiy Vishnevetsky in the AV Club, “are pure film school,” as formal idiosyncrasies of the sub-Wes Anderson variety are shoehorned in wherever they’ll fit; its sensibility, meanwhile, is conspicuously (and emptily) “movie-hip.” Matt Prigge, in a scathing review for Metro, charges the film with “hipster racism.” The Dissolve’s Scott Tobias dismisses it as “cutesy and slight.” And then there’s Lou Lumenick in the New York Post: “it does read like a prototypical, quirk-filled Sundance Film Festival Award winner, complete with an African-American teenager whose primary function appears to be to help his white buddy.”
It isn’t hard to understand what Lumenick means when he calls Me and Earl and the Dying Girl a “prototypical” Sundance movie. He’s shunting it, as a lot of critics have, into a very particular tradition. Its kinship is with Garden State, Little Miss Sunshine, Away We Go, (500) Days of Summer — movies that share, among other distinctive features, a world debut among the mountains of Park City.
What’s odd is the synecdochal maneuvering required to get us here. Garden State, to take the most widely loathed example, did indeed enjoy its world premiere at the Sun- dance Film Festival, where it was received warmly and almost instantly snapped up by Fox Searchlight and Miramax for $5 million. But Garden State isn’t really representative of the Sundance programming. It isn’t even representative of that year’s slate: Open Water, Super Size Me and Primer all premiered alongside Garden State, but nobody thinks of them as “Sundance” movies in quite the same way. The honour has been reserved for Zach Braff ’s strained hip whimsy alone.
Nor was 2004 an aberrant year. Here’s a brief testament to the festival’s usual diversity: Super Troopers, American Psycho, The Blair Witch Project, Saw, Fear of a Black Hat, Reservoir Dogs, Blood Simple — all screened at Sundance, and many rather notably. In its early days, you may recall, Sundance was in fact best known as a hotbed for independent American films of the Reservoir Dogs and Blood Simple variety. Success stories of that kind were what the festival became famous for doing well: smart, savvy pictures made without studio financing were routinely whisked from success in Utah to surprise triumph in the mainstream, and any number of Hollywood fortunes were built from Sundance cache.
It was in the early 2000s, more than a decade after the festival launched Steven Soderbergh and Quentin Tarantino into the stratosphere, that the kind of Sundance movie we know today shimmered into view. The independent cinema revolution had come and gone, and in its place stood a new kind of indie — the Garden States and Little Miss Sunshines to which Earl seems so obviously indebted. Juno, too, was another major one, though, interestingly enough, Juno never played Sundance: it premiered at Telluride before moving onto TIFF. That’s how far the Sundance idea extends — it even covers movies with no connection to the festival.
Juno and Garden State, like Earl, are “indie” films in the same way that, say, the Arcade Fire is “indie rock”: the term tells you something more specific than the widely applicable and not very instructive fact of something’s independence. (Plenty of independent rock musicians sound nothing like indie rock, and plenty of indie rock bands are not independent. Same goes for indie films and Sundance movies.) I think that what we’re talking about here are certain overlapping characteristics — the ukulele, the primarycoloured title cards — and, more than anything else, a presiding sensibility. Like pornography, you know a Sundance movie when you see it. The overweening preciousness, the highly cultivated eccentricity: it’s the spirit of the picture that makes it so recognizable.