CRITIC'S DIARY: Sundance Docs "Doll," "Daniel Johnston,” and "Grizzly" Celebrate Independent Vision
By Stephen Garrett
Annually at Sundance screenings, audiences watch a quick festival trailer that celebrates, in its own quirky way, the pursuit of independent filmmaking. But this year’s trio of shorts, produced by celebrated online filmmaking studio JibJab, have been unusually inappropriate—pushing edgy sarcasm to the point of outright mockery. It starts with the letters in the word “Independent” dissolving away into “Inept,” then ridicules personal vision as being a destructive and borderline homicidal impulse, and finally ends with a song about how indie types refuse to work for “the Man” while scores of the festival’s corporate sponsors flash on the screen. It’s disheartening to see Sundance get so jaded about itself, when the bulk of the movies on display are such uniquely independent celebrations of eccentric minds, alternative visions and what it means to be human.
[From Eugene Jarecki's “Why We Fight.” Photo Courtesy of the 2005 Sundance Film Festival.]
A few films in this year’s overall lineup actually stooped to the trailers’ level of contempt. Worst among them is “Hard Candy,” David Slade’s vulgar excuse for a pedophilia message movie that preposterously turns a 14-year-old girl (Ellen Page) into a steely kidnapper who ties up a suspected child molester and decides to perform castration surgery on him. Hyperarticulate, rarely flustered and a strategic mastermind, the teenager is given no convincingly personal motivation for her relentless, razor-sharp rage (let alone her psychotic grace under pressure), and the whole movie comes off as a sadistic exercise in shock-value nihilism.
Less aggressively exploitative is Greg Mclean’s “Wolf Creek,” a wonderfully atmospheric but seriously flawed Australian thriller about a trio of campers who come across a serial killer in the Outback. With an almost endless set-up that keeps away the chills until much later in the film, very little character development among the principals and no understanding of the killer’s reasons for his actions, this potentially arresting slasher flick simply becomes a boring slaughterhouse.
What’s disheartening about both these films is that they try to provoke without any real sense of thought or meaning behind the plot points and overall themes—unlike the most accomplished provocation of the festival, Thomas Vinterberg’s “Dear Wendy.” Working from a script by Lars Von Trier, Vinterberg weaves a rich, darkly disturbing and wickedly smart story about a group of social misfits who become gun-wielding pacifists and gain confidence and self-respect through their love affair with firearms. Despite an unfortunate third act that blows away all the fragile conceits and extensions of disbelief upon which the film is based, “Dear Wendy” still has a haunting power that makes the movie’s ideas resonate long after.
Pushing the limits of taboos need not be a simple exercise in button-pushing. Just look at nonfiction entry “The Aristocrats,” Paul Provenza and Penn Jillette’s gut-busting take on the creative process. Featuring more than 100 of today’s top comic minds telling shockingly vulgar variations of the same joke, “The Aristocrats” is probably the most offensive talking-head movie ever made as well as a hilarious reminder of these artist’s ability to put their signature on a blank canvas. The strangely endearing film revels in the power of the imagination not only to appall but also to inspire.
Taking an unblinking approach to tough subject matter also extends to two arresting documentaries that in lesser hands might have come off as ham-fisted or merely opportunistic. Kirby Dick’s Oscar-nominated “Twist of Fate” examines child molestation in the Catholic church with a raw candor and bold honesty rarely seen in similar, and far lesser, news reports on the same subject. And “Murderball,” from Henry-Alex Rubin and Dana Adam Shapiro, turns its cameras on the world of quadriplegic rugby in a manner that shys away from cheap sentiment or condescending uplift, trading in sainthood for a warts-and-all look at the personalities that drive the sport.
And a trio of biopic docs show the madness behind truly original independent visions. Greg Whiteley’s “New York Doll” is an affectionate, if slight, portrait of former New York Dolls bassist Arthur “Killer” Kane, who traded in the drug-soaked downward spiral of post-fame rock n’ roll for a place in the Mormon church. The struggle with mental illness and its relationship to creative genius fuels Jeff Feuerzeig’s “The Devil and Daniel Johnston,” a mind-blowing journey through the life of the sweet-voiced singer-songwriter, which has so many serendipitous triumphs and tragedies (both professional and personal) that the truth plays like psychedelic folklore. And Werner Herzog, no stranger to the subject of near-lunatic personal obsessions, delivers “Grizzly Man,” a fascinating chronicle of misfit conservationist Timothy Treadwell, whose solitary exploits among the wild grizzly bears of Alaska—and fanatical resentment towards civilization—make for a mind-bending philosophical discussion of nature’s power for harmony and chaos.
Among the most shocking films in the festival, though, are two matter-of-fact studies of capitalism gone awry. Alex Gibney’s “Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room” takes the viewer step-by-step through the events in that multi-billion-dollar company’s twenty-year history which led to one of the country’s most devastating bankruptcies—a debacle with reverberations that included opening the door for Arnold Schwarzenegger’s political career. And Eugene Jarecki follows up his absorbing documentary on Henry Kissinger with “Why We Fight,” a sobering, cool-headed and meticulous cinematic essay on the effects of the military-industrial complex against which Eisenhower warned so sternly about upon leaving office. His thesis—that the seeds of perpetual war were planted more than fifty years ago and have spawned a monster that must be fed constantly with overseas interventions—makes both political parties culpable and is a clarion call for democratic change against the big businesses that have come to dominate national politics. Let Sundance mock itself silly with trailers that send up those who resist the overpowering strength of corporate domination—as long as the festival continues to deliver the kind of thought-provoking material that keeps those independent voices alive.
