Film Comment: Unnatural selection

A Sundance 2003 sponsorship promo title card: "Making the Deal." A polar tear drags himself across an ice cap before collapsing--hard to tell if he's totally wounded or just exhausted. Another card: "The Nature of Independent Film." Plucky salmon leap upstream through rapids--cut to one unlucky fish carried off by a hungry bear. A reminder, as if we needed one, that Darwinism is the name of the game in the movie business. Both Festival Director of Programming John Cooper and Robert Redford himself had a hand in the conception of those schadenfreude-embracing promos, which preceded every public screening. What on earth are they trying to say? No more Mr. Nice Guy? So much for the Spirit of Independence and The Encouragement of New Talent.

While it was a strong year for the Dramatic Competition, it had to be the worst yet for the Premieres section--aside, that is, from Alan Rudolph and Craig Lucas's extraordinary The Secret Lives of Dentists, an astute dissection of marital crisis and masculine denial that's by turns emotionally agonizing and improbably antic, and Campbell Scott's Off the Map, a dreamy, unhurried Seventies-set study of nonconformity and its discontents. The section has steadily devolved into a series of gala launching pads for studio product, plus the occasional DOA folly like Thomas Vinterberg's It's All About Love, one of the festival's bigger disasters. A woefully misconceived follow-up to The Celebration, Love features Joaquin Phoenix helping his superstar ice-skater wife Claire Danes to flee from her sinister business managers; meanwhile, a second ice age is bringing about The End of Civilization As We Know It.

Among the other premieres: Neil Labute's latest exercise in schematic misanthropy, The Shape of Things is an In the Company of Men retread with a scenario of internal manipulation predicated on a clueless notion of contemporary art and its excesses. The sharp acting of original Broadway cast-members Paul Rudd, Rachel Weisz, and Gretchen Mol provides some compensation; Owning Mahowny, an engrossing, low-key character study/thriller with Philip Seymour Hoffman as an assistant bank manager who embezzles millions to feed his gambling addiction, is a case of one step forward/two steps back for director Richard Kwietniowski; his visual control has advanced since his 1998 debut Love and Death on Long Island, but this sophomore effort lacks any of the earlier film's thematic resonance; Northfork, the third and (though it's not saying much) best of Michael and Mark Polish's films, is Wild River as re-conceived by Guy Maddin and directed by Joel Coen (ten minutes in, my intuition told me it was a dead cert for Cannes: French cinephiles just can't get enough of that studied mise-en-scene ... and what is it about these brother filmmaking teams?); and Thom Fitzgerald's heartfelt but labored The Event, which uses a clumsy whodunit/Rashomon structure to take us through the assisted suicide of an HIV-positive cellist: underwritten, full of simplistic moral dilemmas, devoid of any dramatic subtext, Fitzgerald's film comes off like daytime TV or a therapeutic How To Cope When the Time Comes instructional video.

Falling well short of Herbert Ross's Pennies from Heaven, Keith Gordon's The Singing Detective is a strained and ultimately incoherent Hollywood transposition of Dennis Potter's now-legendary 1986 TV series, from a screenplay by Potter himself. It's doomed from the get-go by the casting of Robert Downey Jr. Whatever his personal demons, self-pity and/or self-ingratiation are the basis of every performance he's ever given, and to cast him as Potter's self-loathing, misanthropic writer protagonist (originally played by Michael Gambon) is ludicrous. Pared down to two hours, the material has been thoroughly drained of its poisons, in particular its lacerating misogyny. What's more, Potter's portrait of a wounded psyche compulsively reconfiguring primal scene trauma as film noir murder mystery has become unintelligible--assuming the vulgar Freudian equations of the TV version ever made sense to begin with.

Unsatisfying as it was, The Singing Detective naturally took its place alongside Dramatic Competition highlights Camp and American Splendor, and Alex Steyermark's Prey for Rock & Roll, forming a quartet of films that posited creative struggle and self-expression as a psychic necessity, a means of personal salvation in the face of mediocrity. In Steyermark's engaging rock-underdog saga, it's what drives Gina Gershon's pushing-40s small-time rocker and her band (Drea de Matteo as the rich-kid junkie bass player, Lori Petty as the kick-ass guitar hero, and Shelly Cole as the pint-sized, not-yet-jaded drummer). Gershon's got a passable voice, and the band has the requisite look, attitude, and chemistry, plus songs by Steven Trask, the musician behind Hedwig and the Angry Inch. It's a film about empowerment (hence the seemingly distracting abusive boyfriend subplot), but what's impressive is that we're never supposed to think the band is anything more than average--there's no breakthrough finale where the hard work pays off with acclaim and a record deal. The film's bottom-line insistence on integrity and commitment to your art is a message this festival ought to take to heart as it continues to sell itself to the highest bidder.

Gavin Smith is the Editor of FILM COMMENT