The best (we saw) at Sundance film festival

Lee Chandler (Casey Affleck) becomes legal guardian of his 16-year-old nephew after his brother’s sudden death in Kenneth Lonergan’s Manchester by the Sea, one of the hottest fi ms to come out of this year’s Sundance Film Festival.
Lee Chandler (Casey Affleck) becomes legal guardian of his 16-year-old nephew after his brother’s sudden death in Kenneth Lonergan’s Manchester by the Sea, one of the hottest fi ms to come out of this year’s Sundance Film Festival.

Late at night sometime on the last Tuesday of this year's Sundance Film Festival, during the critics' party, a group of film critics, punchy from lack of sleep and most likely boozy, hatched a hilarious scheme: They would all go to their Twitter feeds and start proclaiming the screening of a fictitious Kristen Wiig film named Abracadeborah as the unquestioned triumph of the festival. Each critic in on the joke contributed another telling detail: It was Wiig's best performance; the character was a magician's assistant; she was blind; someone objected to her use of blackface. Others complained anxiously about the inevitable huge lines at the next morning's 8:30 Press & Industry screening.

The gag totally worked. Critics, some of whom had been left out of the screening of real-life Sundance smash, The Birth of a Nation, (ahem!) were beside themselves trying to figure out why this amazing film wasn't listed on any press schedules. The press office got besieged by phone calls from panicked critics and industry people trying to find out when the next screening was going to be. By midmorning on Wednesday, word began slowly leaking out that the whole thing had been a joke. Many of us exhaled, assured that we weren't missing out on any sort of Next Big Thing and could just return to the business at hand, grinding away on the films that really did exist in Park City.

The lark did actually speak to one of the peculiar and vexing problems at a festival like Sundance, where so little is known about the films beforehand. It was actually possible to miss a single screening and feel as if you'd been left outside, peering in the window like Charlie Chaplin in Modern Times. Films that might have garnered some positive reviews outside of the festival confines were getting raves. Early Oscar buzz (yes, for next year's Academy Awards) started getting trotted out, and films were being sold for record prices, largely due to the sudden interest by streaming companies such as Netflix and Amazon, who swooped in and scooped up several big-ticket films right from under the nose of surprised studios (by midfestival, however, the studios began to regain their touch: The aforementioned Birth sold to Fox Searchlight for a Sundance record of $17.5 million). Sundance is a very closed little community, and within its tight, mountain-lined borders, it was routine for these kinds of frenzied flashes.

Still, there were some 120 films exhibited, and while we did our best, watching movies pretty much from early morning to late night, we only took in about a fifth of the possibilities. With that in mind, here's our annual snapshot of the festival highs, lows, and other peculiarities.

Best Cinematography for Worst Movie: Easily one of the more early divisive films of the festival was Nicolas Pesce's black and white, eerily disturbing The Eyes of My Mother, a title, it turns out, you can take quite literally. The story involves a lonely young woman (Kika Magalhaes) living by herself on a farm and the manic joy with which she dispenses home surgery to unsuspecting victims. It might sound like some sort of Rob Zombie horror film (and in fact, Mr. Zombie was at the fest with his new film, 31), but this would-be art house freaky fantasia was very much intended for critics and cinephiles. Because the film was so beautiful, with exquisite cinematography by Zach Kuperstein, many critics in attendance swooned dutifully, taken in by its physical charms and offbeat sensibility; others found it excruciatingly punishing and purposeless. Put me in the latter category.

Most Unexpected Film Based on Its Title: With a name like Tickled, you might imagine a documentary that concerned itself with the nature of giggling. Instead, it's an investigative piece from New Zealand TV journalist David Farrier, who discovered a website trumpeting something called "Competitive Endurance Tickling," and found it amusing. Tracking down the organization's public relations head, he received a shocking and rude rebuke. Undaunted, he dug further in, despite the company threatening him with numerous lawsuits, ultimately traveling to the United States to find out just what was going on. What he eventually found is anything but funny: a perturbing expose of a very rich and damaged individual who proves what can happen when desperate fetish meets with unfettered wealth.

Best Adapted Jane Austen Character: Whit Stillman's Love & Friendship is adapted from an early Austen novella called Lady Susan, which she never tried to publish, and which confusingly takes its title from a separate early Austen work. While Stillman keeps much of the great author's signature language, he took certain liberties with some of the characters and never more so than with Sir James Martin, played by a hilariously befuddled Tom Bennett. Sir Martin is positively goofy, and so completely unversed he's convinced that there were somehow 12 Commandments and that Moses was told he could pick and choose which ones to keep. Every scene with him is a treat, and he helps keep afloat what is otherwise a fairly minor Austen adaptation.

Common Theme: Children suffering at the hands of their parents and one another. There were a great many kids in various degrees of peril at Sundance this year, from the utterly harrowing (but sadly necessary), Newtown, which follows the aftermath of the Sandy Hook school shootings from the perspective of the survivors, to the warm, sweet-hearted narrative Morris From America, about a young, black hip-hop loving kid (Markees Christmas) whose loving dad (Craig Robinson) moves them to Germany for his job. Additionally, you had the brood of wilderness-raised kids in Captain Fantastic, a trio of high-schoolers combating their own sexual identities in the grunge-era As You Are, the two young boys brought to odds by their quarrelling parents in Ira Sach's Little Men, and the brave and strong victims of predatory sexual attacks -- and the subsequent social media fallout -- in the Bonni Cohen and Jon Shenk produced documentary, Audrie & Daisy; and so forth. As parents, we all know kids bring drama; at Sundance, they are the drama.

Most Welcome Surprise: This wasn't a total shock, because the film had already played to strong notice at Venice, Italy, in September, but Anna Rose Holmer's debut, The Fits, still blew the critical doors off. It stars Royalty Hightower as a young tomboy, used to training at her brother's boxing gym, who becomes interested in joining the school dance team, just before the other members become plagued with sudden, seizure-like fugues. You can take the film as a kind of dreamy metaphor of adolescence, a la Picnic at Hanging Rock, or you can try to take it more literally, but either way, the sharp performances, gorgeous cinematography (from Paul Yee), and striking ambiguity left most critics utterly enraptured.

Best Use of Kristen Stewart: As one critic put it, to paraphrase: It's been a while since we associated her name with films that weren't terribly good. She still maintains her legion of rabid fans (one critic I know refuses to use her name in tweets so as to avoid the endless likes and retweets the mere mention of her generates), but her output in recent years (including Clouds of Sils Maria, and Still Alice) has reflected an older and more risk-taking sort of actress than her Twilight years might have suggested. Her role in Kelly Reichardt's excellent Certain Women, a triptych of connected-but-separate stories set in Montana, is a perfect use of both her bewitching beauty and her engaging insouciance. She plays a young lawyer, forced to teach an adult education class hours away from where she lives, who strikes up a friendship with lonely young stablewoman (Lily Gladstone), who clearly wants something more.

Best Horror Film: Sundance has a reputation for putting more out-there films under their "Midnight" umbrella, but in recent years, it has also been a showcase for psychologically dense horror films -- we had The Babadook in 2014 and The Witch last year -- so I'm happy to report the trend has continued with Babak Anvari's Iranian horror film Under the Shadow. Set during the tail-end of the Iran/Iraq war, the film, in which a woman and her young daughter are terrorized by evil spirits in their nearly deserted apartment building when her doctor husband is sent to the front lines of the war, is atmospherically spooky, and also filled with plenty of jump-scares (one, in particular, which involves a toaster, is devilishly effective). As with many of the best horror films, it can be viewed as a far-ranging metaphor, either for a repressed country still in the throes of the grinding military conflict and the ultra-conservative cultural revolution, or for the proto-feminist anger of a woman unable to continue her medical studies under the harsh new regime.

Best Performance (Male): This could easily go to Casey Affleck for his superb work in Manchester by the Sea (see below) or Viggo Mortensen in the aforementioned Captain Fantastic, but we'll go with Craig Robinson's portrayal of a lonely father trying to keep his son afloat even as the grief he still feels for his dead wife threatens to engulf him in Morris From America. The film culminates in a masterful monologue with his son that is sweet, funny, tender and saucy.

Best Performance (Female): Again, there are many worthy contenders (Michelle Williams in Manchester by the Sea, Kate Lyn Sheil in Robert Greene's curious half-documentary/half-drama Kate Plays Christine, Rachel Weisz in the otherwise underwhelming Complete Unknown), but the single most moving performance was Lily Gladstone in Certain Women. Her character's loneliness isn't played with the slightest edge of histrionics, instead, she sagely goes the other direction, burying it so deeply behind a largely flat affect that any flicker of emotion, such as comes near the end of the film, when she begins the long ride home after being thoroughly rejected, carries the weight of a pint of tears.

Best Film: Kenneth Lonergan has earned a reputation among many critics as a kind of genius ("We don't deserve him," one besmitten such critic gushed after the film's premiere) after his last film; the legally entangled Margaret was finally released in 2011, and was hailed as a film-of-the-decade nominee. His new film, Manchester by the Sea, which stars Affleck as a deeply repressed man trying to ward off a tragic past but is forced to return to his hometown after the death of his brother (Kyle Chandler) to take care of his 16-year-old nephew (Lucas Hedges), is absolutely stunning. Lonergan, a gifted playwright before adding film to his repertoire, has a way of layering in so much depth to his characters that their moments of self-conviction carry enormous power. The film will likely be held until the end of the year to make a prestigious awards push, but keep it in mind until then.

MovieStyle on 02/05/2016

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