DOCUMENT THIS: Truth trumped fiction at Park City this year
by Amy Taubin
The best movie I saw during the Sundance Film Festival was at Slamdance, which set up shop 15 years ago in a ramshackle hotel on Park City’s Main Street, right across from Sundance’s prime showcase at the time, the Egyptian Theater. Slamdance began as a kind of salon des refusés, and it still is. Its ambience—communal and grungy—hasn’t changed a jot, and as far as I could see, despite the addition of digital projectors, its screening facilities are as low-tech as ever (not that Sundance’s are anything to brag about). Nevertheless, for those who come to Park City to hunt “product,” Slamdance can’t be ignored. Last year, it gave future box-office bonanza Paranormal Activity its first public screening. This year, the hottest ticket in Park City was for its single screening of Steven Soderbergh’s And Everything Is Going Fine, a portrait of the late writer/performer Spalding Gray who is presumed to have committed suicide in 2004. Since Slamdance’s main theater seats only 140, most people didn’t even try to get in. Why Soderbergh preferred to “sneak” this fragile, exquisitely fabricated movie at Slamdance rather than subjecting it to Sundance’s tweeting hordes should be obvious but was still the subject of much blogosphere speculation in the early days of the festival (before attention turned to Paris Hilton sightings and the surprising number of heavyweight independent distributors on what, in comparison to last year, seemed like a buying spree).
And Everything Is Going Fine is a tribute to Gray in the form of a final autobiographical monologue, mediated by the camera and constructed by a filmmaker attuned, as Gray was, to the presence of death in life, or as T.S. Eliot wrote in the opening of Four Quartets: “Time present and time past / Are both perhaps present in time future, / And time future contained in time past.” Soderbergh collages excerpts from videotapes of Gray’s performances, TV interview clips, and bits of home movies, allowing Gray to tell his own story just as he did on stage for 25 years, his brilliantly timed gallows humor matched by equally brilliant editing. Gray’s is virtually the only voice in the movie; there is neither commentary nor title cards. Cinema is a ghostly art, and here it is as if Gray has come back from the grave to confirm that, as he feared and prophesized, the end of his life was written in its beginning.
Similarly pared down to a single powerful moviemaking strategy, Sebastian Junger and Tim Hetherington’s Restrepo is the documentary correlative to The Hurt Locker. Veteran war correspondents, the moviemakers embedded themselves with a small platoon of the U.S. Army’s 173rd Airborne Brigade during its 15-month stint in the Korengal Valley, one of the most dangerous postings in the Afghanistan War. Repeatedly attacked by Taliban forces who move freely in the surrounding mountains, the men nevertheless build Outpost Restrepo (named for the platoon’s medic, who was killed in action). The outpost was intended to provide security for a road that eventually, in some lunatic scheme of things, would be built across the valley. Restrepo is a bit like a theater-of-the-absurd chamber play except that real bullets fly and men are wounded and die. The politics of the movie are entirely contained within the soldiers’ actions, freely expressed emotions, and conversations among themselves and with the filmmakers. There is no outside commentary, only brief title cards at the opening telling us the who, where, and when of the story, and a single sentence at the end stating that in late 2009, the military withdrew from the Korengal Valley. One can only weep and rage that fighting men were sent there at all.
In light of Restrepo, it was surreal—no, let me say this bluntly—it was disgusting to hear Ariel Schulman remark before a screening of Catfish, which he co-directed with Henry Joost, that his brother (Yaniv “Nev” Schulman, the movie’s protagonist) was the most courageous person he’d ever known. The most buzzed-about movie at Sundance, Catfish was suffused with a misplaced sense of entitlement that might have been hilarious if the movie were not also profoundly misogynistic and disingenuous. The premise of this reeking fillet, freshened up with a spritz of online social-networking anxiety, is that Joost and the brothers Schulman, successful New York commercial media-makers, document their daily lives with small video cameras for memory’s sake and also in the hopes that some incident or encounter might turn into a story that “goes somewhere.” One day Nev receives a painting in the mail, a rendering of one of his photos purportedly made by an 8-year-old girl named Abby. More paintings follow and also voluminous Facebook exchanges with Abby, her mom Angela, and Abby’s older sister, Megan, with whom Nev conducts an increasingly hot online and telephone relationship, until a small detail arouses suspicion, and the filmmakers, realizing they’ve been hoaxed, pay a surprise visit to “Abby” and her family, armed with cameras.
The issue of “what did they know and when did they know it,” which has tripped up many a politician, is examined far too little in what passes for documentary truth, particularly in films in which the protagonist, who is often also the filmmaker, is on a personal quest. In the interest of a well-shaped narrative, more than a few documentarians have been fabricating third-act “surprises” by refusing to take the obvious path to knowledge. Had the Catfish filmmakers done a Google search when Nev received that first painting—and I find it inconceivable that as linked-in media types they didn’t—they wouldn’t have been fooled, but they wouldn’t have had a film either. (Or they would have had a different, less sympathetic film about how they spent a year hoaxing the hoaxer.) At Sundance, opinion varied as to how much of Catfish was a fake. I’m less exercised about what is possibly a deceptive timeline than I am about how power is deployed by the filmmakers. In the post-screening Q&A, I asked them why the moment when the hoaxer agrees to cooperate with the filmmakers is omitted. Their answer was essentially that when you make a narrative, you have to make choices, and for them that moment was unnecessary. Which is to say that they could not see beyond “courageous” Nev to allow the woman who set the plot in motion (if indeed she did) a single moment of agency.
Catfish was not the only movie to feature an obsessive videographer or to make identity an issue. Exit Through the Gift Shop bills itself as “a Banksy film” and “the world’s first street art disaster movie.” If it is indeed directed by the artist who goes by the name of Banksy, it is one of the most inspired, adroit, hilarious debut features ever (please quote this on the poster), but one should expect no less from the mystery man who printed Lady Diana £10 notes, painted nine graffiti images on the Israeli West Bank barrier wall, and placed an inflatable effigy of a Guantánamo prisoner in Disneyland. These and many other profoundly political works, executed with great panache, are glimpsed in the movie, which also includes many freshly minted Banksy aphorisms, seemingly uttered by a darkly clad figure whose face is digitally concealed and whom I believe to be the reincarnation of Oscar Wilde. Some Sundancers speculated that Exit Through the Gift Shop was helmed by Spike Jonze, and for a minute I suspected, based on the Rhys Ifans voiceover narration that recalls Velvet Goldmine, that Todd Haynes had a hand in it. However it came into the world, it is a joyous addition to the potential catalogue raisonné of the artist who turned Warhol inside out by proving that anonymity is cooler and more difficult to sustain than fame.
A more conventional art documentary, Tamra Davis’s Jean-Michel Basquiat: The Radiant Child spins out from an extended interview Davis videotaped in 1986, two years before Basquiat’s death. Like Banksy, Basquiat’s roots were in graffiti, but during his tragically short career, he became a prodigious and prolific painter—indeed the most brilliant painter of the last quarter of the 20th century. Davis, who was a close friend, has collected fascinating footage of the artist at work, and this, together with the interview material and a fragmented commentary by critics and curators, makes for a documentary that is both moving and illuminating.
As always, there were more rewarding documentaries than could be packed into five days and still leave any time for fiction. For the first time in many years I felt as if I should have stayed for the entire festival. Not to be missed when it plays on HBO this summer is Secrets of the Tribe by the Brazilian filmmaker José Padilha (Bus 174, Garapa). Two feuding anthropologists, who’ve made their academic careers doing field work among the Yanomami Indians of the Amazon rain forest, are revealed to have violated their subjects in various ways, all of them shocking and indefensible. Alex Gibney’s jam-packed Casino Jack and the United States of Money, a portrait of the rise and fall of über-lobbyist and convicted felon Jack Abramoff, could be the movie of the moment—if Gibney re-edits it to include the recent Supreme Court decision that effectively exonerates Abramoff and is another turn of the screw in the corporate takeover of America.
For the first five minutes, I thought that Derek Cianfrance’s Blue Valentine would be amazing. The opening image—a little girl dressed in red standing alone on an unkempt expanse of lawn as the sound of someone (perhaps the girl herself) calling a dog echoes around her—was at once vivid and ephemeral. The cinematography remains exquisite throughout, and the sense of life hanging by a thread is captured in Ryan Gosling’s nerve-wracked performance—but nothing else quite jells. The Weinstein Company bought the movie not, I suspect, for its artistic qualities but because the extended sex scene between Gosling and Michelle Williams has a raw desperation that isn’t really like Last Tango in Paris but could be sold that way. Similarly, IFC saw on-demand gold in the welt marks on Jessica Alba’s ass in Michael Winterbottom’s miscalculated and soporific adaptation of Jim Thompson’s The Killer Inside Me, in which Alba and Kate Hudson are victims of Casey Affleck’s psychotic cop.
On a lighter note, Nicole Holofcener’s wry and generous Please Give is a thoroughly satisfying portrait of middle-class Manhattanites, mostly women, struggling with love, money, and liberal guilt. Holofcener has a gift for reconciling even the most horrid of her characters to one another and her audience to everyone on the screen. I wish I had similarly positive feelings about a festival favorite, Lisa Cholodenko’s The Kids Are All Right, which I’m sure will be more successful than all the lesbian love stories ever made put together and then some. (Focus Features bought it for a reported $5 million.) The movie is basically a sitcom about a family with two mommies and two teenage offspring. It has wonderful comic performances by Julianne Moore, Annette Bening, and Mark Ruffalo, and an admirable political agenda: that the family values of lesbian couples are every bit as strong as those of hetero couples, so for God’s sake let them have a license. The problem for me is that I don’t think this relationship is all that good, although certainly it is no worse than a lot of heterosexual marriages. But rather than exploring the couple’s problems beyond a few jokes about sleepy libidos, Cholodenko tries to bully the audience, just as Nic (Bening) bullies Jules (Moore), into accepting that family trumps everything else in life. How can I ignore, however, that when Jules has a fling with Paul (Ruffalo) she’s so liberated she literally jumps for joy, not because she’s with a guy, but because he doesn’t squelch her every impulse the way Nic does. By the end I really hated the movie for telling her—and us—what she should feel and do.
Despite the Sundance slogans encouraging us to “rebel” and “grow up from underground,” festival audiences and most of the critical cohort prefer tidy narratives like The Kids Are All Right and Debra Granik’s Grand Jury Prize winner, Winter’s Bone, about a teenage girl fighting off Ozark Mountain meth dealers to keep her family homestead. Some of the best fictions at Sundance, however, were too ambitious and risky not to be messy around the edges, among them Eric Mendelsohn’s elliptical Long Island tone poem, 3 Backyards, which won the directing award; Mark Ruffalo’s auspicious Cassavetes-like directorial debut Sympathy for Delicious, in which a skid-row paraplegic and former DJ discovers a talent for faith healing (it won the Special Jury Prize); Miguel Coyula’s picaresque Memories of Overdevelopment, a bleakly comic sequel to the 1968 Cuban masterwork, Tomás Gutiérrez Alea’s Memories of Underdevelopment; and Tanya Hamilton’s Night Catches Us, an impressively nuanced, complex, and intimate portrait of an African-American community in the mid-Seventies coping with the aftermath of the decimation of the Black Panther Party. I’m not sure what an audience unfamiliar with the history will make of it, but for me, this strikingly unromanticized depiction of the contradictions of Black Power was one of the high points of a festival that this year seemed a bit more interested in honoring specialized movies than glomming onto the break-out successes.
