Mr. Chick Goes to Sundance 2005
TomChick - Features - Comments - 02/05/05
The Great
Brick
You wouldn't think film noir set in a high school would work. Because, after all, "set in a high school" means the stakes are low, the tone is comedic, and the approach is cute, light-hearted, whimsical. High school movies and film noir are almost diametrically opposed. But Brick, a film noir set in a high school, is something different; it’s even darker than Heathers. It is deadly earnest, living as it does in a slightly alternate reality that seems to have been dreamed up by someone in high school, where the adults are inept, where your social standing is determined by who you eat lunch with, and where everything has an inflated sense of life and death. Brick is a densely-packed slick story with thrilling tommygun patter, effective plot twists, and vivid characters. The lead is played by the terrific Joseph Gordon-Levitt, who delivered a formidable one-two punch at this year’s Sundance with this movie and Mysterious Skin.
Brick includes all the trapping of great film noir: an awesome chase scene, a tough likeable hero who gets beat up nine ways to Sunday, a femme fatale who you may or may not be able to trust, a twisted mysteryt that goes on for about twenty minutes and two plot-twists too many, and a slow inevitable journey from the social upper crust down past the ineffectual police (represented here by Richard Roundtree as the vice principal) and finally into a dark world better off unvisited. If Brick weren't so adeptly done, it would have been downright formulaic. Instead, it’s a refreshing homage to the kinds of movies they don’t make any more. Millers Crossing and Chinatown excepted, of course.
Brothers
Ulrich Thomsen, from The Celebration, and Connie Nielsen are a married couple with children and a comfortable upper-middle class life. But he’s leaving in the morning for a rotation with the UN in Afghanistan. Brothers, a Danish movie, opens with a family dinner to say good-bye before he leaves for a few months. What follows is a story about trust, betrayal, desperation, and redemption within a family.
Okay, it sounds like something starring Valerie Bertinelli that you’d see on Lifetime. But director Susanne Bier adroitly navigates the pitfalls of melodrama to present a richly detailed and powerfully honest movie. It would be hard to talk too much about the movie without giving away important plot points, so suffice to say that part of what’s great about Brothers is the way it shifts from one kind of movie into a couple of other kinds of movies. It’s a great story in which the characters evolve and reveal themselves to each other and the audience. The final line is a fantastic example of how to tell and resolve story.
Grizzly Man
I remembered reading about Timothy Treadwell. He would hire a plane drop him off in remote areas of Alaska in the spring. Then he’d spend months hanging out with grizzly bears, camping near them, walking up to them, talking to them, and eventually videotaping them. Then, when the bears were getting ready to hibernate, the plane would come back to pick him up. A year ago last October, when the plane landed, the pilot found a huge grizzly eating something in Treadwell's abandoned camp. There was no sign of Treadwell or his female companion. When the pilot returned with help, it was discovered that the bear had eaten them.
Werner Herzog pieces together the details of what happened to Treadwell, talking to people who knew him and sifting through the hours and hours of videotape. Herzog even uses his own experience to comment on Treadwell, much like writer Jon Krakauer tries to interpret what happened to ill-fated traveler Chris McCandless in the book, Into the Wild. It makes for a rich and fascinating interpretation of someone who you might otherwise dismiss as an idiot who got himself into trouble.
Because Treadwell certainly was an idiot, although you can't help but sympathize with after the movie is over. In one illuminating close up of a bear's face, filmed by Treadwell who obviously saw some expression in the animal's brown eyes, Herzog comments that he only sees "the overwhelming indifference of nature" (Grizzly Man would be a perfect companion movie to Open Water). Later in the movie, after hearing from a coroner who details how Treadwell was injured by the bear before being eaten, Herzog cuts to Treadwell's footage of two bear's fighting; the clear implication is that you're looking at the feral power that was ultimately Treadwell's last encounter with the animals he loved not wisely, but too well.
Hustle & Flow
This is what Sundance is all about: getting up at seven in the morning to make an 8am screening, trudging through the cold to get a seat in the auditorium with no idea what you're in for, and being jolted awake by something positively electric. This was an unexpected delight every bit as thrilling as stumbling into Memento, Hedwig and the Angry Inch, and The Station Agent. If I may gloat for a moment, as soon as it was over, I predicted it would get the Audience Award, which it did. In addition, it was bought as part of a $16 million deal with Paramount and MTV, which ensures that you guys will be hearing plenty about it before it opens.
Although it'll probably be promoted heavily to young urban audiences, it's far more universal than that. It's reminiscent of 8-Mile in that it’s about someone discovering rap as a form of expression, but it's not a rap movie. First-time director Craig Brewer captures rich organic performances from a talented cast, using a sort of free-form storytelling that reminded me of a Cassavetes movie. The lead actor, Terrence Howard, who looks like a black Benecio del Toro, carries the movie with the intensity and conviction of a young Robert De Niro. He plays a pimp in Memphis, but this isn’t a glamorized or gritty presentation of prostitution. Neither is it a movie about being black. It's more about the malaise of a dead end life. But it's not a bleak movie. In fact, my one criticism is how it conveniently takes an easy way out to close a little too neatly. But on the whole, this is the sort of raw vital filmmaking that Sundance is all about.
The Squid and the Whale
The best movie of its kind since Shoot the Moon. Noah Baumbach's movie is much lighter, and ultimately more insidious than Alan Parker's grim chronicle of a family undone. This story of an erudite New York family with its imperious father and icy mother plays almost like a prequel to The Royal Tenenbaums, but without that movie's adult affection for the absurdity of it all. The Squid and the Whale is told from the point of view of the children, which lends it both innocence and therefore more tragedy. Like Ang Lee's Ice Storm, this is ultimately a movie about the inadvertent brutality of well-intentioned but oblivious parents.
A friend of mine recently reminded me of Jeff Daniels in Gettysburg, where he gave a performance that stood head-and-shoulders above a dull workmanlike movie. But in The Squid and The Whale, Jeff Daniels gives the performance of his career, because it elevates the entire movie and drives all the characters in it. Unlike Gene Hackman's larger-than-life Royal Tenenbaum, Jeff Daniels' Bernard Berkman is all too life-sized to bear up under his own flaws. Also great is Jesse Eisenberg, who I really liked in Roger Dodger and here reaffirms that he's someone to watch.
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