For their part, some of the Sundance filmmakers already seem to be turning out Hollywood movies. A stylish and intricate thriller such as “The Usual Suspects” – directed by Bryan Singer and stocked with such powerhouse performers as Gabriel Byrne, Kevin Spacey and Chazz Palminteri – is a genre movie any studio would be proud to produce. (Singer’s first film, “Public Access,” shared the Grand Jury Prize two years ago.) “The Incredibly True Adventure of Two Gifts in Love,” a first film by writer/director Maria Maggenti, was shot for a mere $35,000, but it made the big Christmas romantic comedies look artificial and old hat. The storytelling is conventional but the high-spirited story isn’t: a white teenage tomboy (Laurel Hollomon) and a rich, beautiful African-American high-school princess (Nicole Parker) fall in love with each other. First love, straight or gay, has rarely been so expertly enacted.
The excitement this year was not about the competition films. Only two movies in the dramatic competition generated buzz. Edward Burns’s no-budget “The Brothers McMullen,” which won the Grand Jury Prize, is a modest, extremely likable comedy about three Irish Catholic brothers from suburban Long Island and their tortured romantic entanglements. The winner of the screenwriting award, Tom DiCillo’s clever comedy of exasperation “Living in Oblivion,” had a special resonance for the Sundance audience: it’s a behind-the-scenes depiction of the night mare s of making independent movies. By closing night, both movies had been picked up for distribution.
These comedies were easy to embrace. Far more challenging was Todd Haynes’s “Safe,” the love-it-or-hate-it art movie of the festival. This cool, ambiguous and disturbing tale stars Julianne Moore as a pampered California housewife who seems to be allergic to the 20th century. On the surface it’s a movie about environmental illness, but the therapeutic cure she undergoes turns out to be more spiritually toxic than the disease. Haynes’s heady movie forces the audience to work, refusing easy emotional manipulation. It was a reminder that real independence isn’t just a matter of low budgets, but of radical visions.
A more familiar style of subversion was supplied by guerrilla filmmaker Gregg (“The Living End”) Araki. “The Doom Generation” is his first 35-mm effort and it’s dazzling. This punk-spirited, heterosexual and homoerotic road movie is filled with gross-out underground delights. It’s marred only by a bombastic, bloody ending – a familiar failing at Sundance, where too many young filmmakers wrap things up in a burst of fatal melodrama.
Quite possibly the best movie at the festival was Terry Zwigoff’s “Crumb,” the well-deserved Grand Jury prize winner of the documentary competition. First shown at the New York Film Festival, this is a creepy, provocative and astonishingly intimate portrait of the comix artist R. Crumb and his incomparably dysfunctional family. The Filmmakers Trophy was posthumously awarded to Marion Riggs for “Black Is . . . Black Ain’t,” a complex and personal exploration of the multiplicity of black identity. Riggs himself vibrantly addresses the camera from his hospital bed as he is dying of AIDS.
Everyone who saw “Unzipped,” Douglas Keeve’s affectionate chronicle of the fashion designer Isaac Mizrahi as he prepares his fall show, made the inevitable comparison: this was the movie “Ready to Wear” should have been. “Unzipped” is a valentine passing itself off as verite, but its glimpse of the high-fashion world is irresistible. Another treat was musician turned filmmaker Don Was’s tribute to the musical genius of Brian Wilson, “I Just Wasn’t Made for These Times.” Like Crumb and Mizrahi, the reclusive Beach Boy is a one-of-a-kind screen subject. Wilson also supplied the festival its most magical noncelluloid moment when, at a party at the Riverhorse Cafe, he sang four Beach Boys songs to a packed, delighted crowd. For a few blissful minutes, nobody talked about movies. We just swayed to the music, and felt like we were in one.
