Park City, Utah – The sidewalks were slushy, the clean light was fading against the Wasatch Mountains and Sundance Film Festival ’06 was marching through its first full day. And already a dilemma.
Set to screen up the road at the Holiday Village theaters was Kelly Reichardt’s “Old Joy.”
Down the way at Eccles – the largest venue attached to the Park City High School – was the premiere of “Little Miss Sunshine.” Which to see?
In the scheme of world events, this was a decidedly minor either/ or. Nevertheless, it is, in miniature, a snapshot of the good, the sad and the ungainly about Sundance, an extravaganza of independent film now in its 22nd year that opened Thursday night and runs through Sunday.
This year’s fest has 120 features, 84 world premieres and 48 films by first-time directors.
“Old Joy” features no one you’ve heard of, directed by someone a few indie aficionados might have. Reichardt’s “Rivers of Grass,” which premiered at Sundance, made it into art houses and onto some top 10 lists in 1995.
“Little Miss Sunshine,” on the other hand, stars, well – stars. No, not necessarily superstars, but people with wattage and name recognition. The ensemble comedy about a family that takes their youngster to a beauty pageant has the sort of cast that gets folk driving from Salt Lake City to Park City to eye a celeb or two. There is Steve Carell, for example, who won a Golden Globe for the Britcom redux “The Office” and starred in the very successful “The 40-Year-Old Virgin.” Greg Kinnear, Toni Collette and Alan Arkin also star.
When people go on about “Sundance buzz,” the noise around “Little Miss Sunshine” is what they mean. It premiered Friday evening, and a bidding scrimmage ensued. The next day, the debut feature of co-directors Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris sold to Fox Searchlight for a reported $10 million.
If and when Reichardt’s quiet beauty about male friendship finds a distributor, you still may not see it for another year.
The Sundance Institute is using the festival to launch its 25th anniversary celebration. At the opening- day press conference, Robert Redford – founder of the institute and one of the festival’s founders – told the packed Kimball Art Center the festival was conceived as a place to show films that had few opportunities for exhibition.
Along with Redford, festival director Geoffrey Gilmore and openingnight film writer-director Nicole Holofcener set the tone for a festival that is wrestling with its angels, to borrow the title of Frieda Lee Mock’s fine documentary about playwright Tony Kushner.
“The heart of Sundance is in development,” Redford said. “We program not for commerciality. We program for diversity.”
It was the media and film buyers, he pointed out, who have made Sundance into a market.
“It became a market when things started to get bought,” Redford said, pointing to Steven Soderbergh’s “sex, lies and videotape” as the tipping point. But the institute and the festival’s internal mission have never changed.
More recently, it’s been celebs like Paris Hilton (who threw a party here Saturday night on Main Street) and the mushrooming of elite celebrity spas and lounges that have made Sundance more bizarre than bazaar.
As Redford promised, there’s plenty of diversity here. But there’s also a fog setting in among critics and industry folk that much of what’s on view so far has been seen before.
Weeks before Sundance, senior programmer Shari Frilot said performances were one of the keys to this year’s festivals. Maggie Gyllenhaal’s turn as an ex-con, recovering addict in writer-director Laurie Collyer’s well-done “Sherrybaby” proves Frilot’s point.
Gyllenhaal continues to impress. She makes her character’s struggle to remain clean, to become a real mother to her daughter, at once sympathetic and frustrating.
In Holofcener’s “Friends With Money,” Jennifer Aniston does it again. After the dud studio pic “Rumor Has It,” she shows that with the right material, she is capable of hitting authentic notes that feel generationally spot on, even quintessentially American.
Aniston plays a former private-
school teacher who cleans houses in L.A. It’s her friends that have the money. Some of them have enough to make a $2 million donation to a charity. Other aren’t in that league but own their own businesses. Catherine Keener plays a screenwriter married to another screenwriter. They have enough capital to pop the roof off their home and put on an addition – one that blocks their neighbor’s view to the ocean.
“Friends With Money” is amusing, though not as revelatory as Holofcener’s “Walking and Talking” and “Lovely and Amazing.” Frances McDormand is outright funny as an increasingly cranky clothing designer married to a man her friends believe is gay. But Holofcener doesn’t force any story arcs here. “Friends With Money” lands so gently, you’re not sure it ever took off.
Film critic Lisa Kennedy can be reached at 303-820-1567 or lkennedy@denverpost.com.
