BENTONVILLE--When I was a kid, I once walked into a quiet establishment near the front gate of Barksdale Air Force Base that I thought was a doughnut shop. I thought this because of the neon sign out front that said "Doughnuts."
When I asked for a couple of glazed, the undershirted man behind the counter looked at me over the top of his newspaper and said, "I can't do nothing for you, son."
I stood there for an unpardonably long minute before turning around and walking out, being sure to double-check the sign. It said "doughnuts." I almost went back in, but something about the cool finality of the counterman stopped me. I wandered off befuddled.
I wasn't mad at the doughnut shop; it seemed clear that I was the one who didn't grasp the situation. I felt like one of those dumbstruck victims of the Twilight Zone. For whatever reason, I just didn't get it.
That is precisely the way the Bentonville Film Festival seemed to me.
I should add that just because the Bentonville Film Festival completely confounded my expectations does not mean it wasn't successful. I guess a lot of people attended it, though the screenings I sat through weren't half full. Lots of people--too many people--turned out to see the "celebrities." So many that a lot of them who'd ponied up for passes didn't get in, even though they stood in line for a couple of hours. I can't imagine they were happy about that, but that's the way it goes sometimes; lots of people don't get into popular nightclubs and restaurants either. Some have to be excluded so the included can feel special.
I think Geena Davis, who's listed as an organizer of BFF, is onto something. Her Institute on Gender in Media is drawing attention to the under-representation of women, both behind and in front of the camera, in movies and television shows. Some of the panels presented in (and around) Bentonville during the festival addressed important issues. It is curious that Davis declined to talk to our newspaper about the issue--we chased that interview for more than a month and were told in no uncertain terms by the public relations firm handling BFF that she hadn't time to speak to us.
I also think that a family-oriented film festival could work quite well in Bentonville. Despite the town's lack of an actual cinema, there are plenty of potential venues including Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art and various others. I'm not sure, however, that a festival allegedly about celebrating diversity and highlighting the work of artists generally underrepresented in Hollywood is well served by a rule against any material that might receive an R rating. Perhaps it's because the inaugural festival was arranged very quickly, but the presented slate of films--especially the narrative features--was sub-par.
There were exceptions--such as the documentary Code: Debugging the Gender Gap--that were both worthy and on point with the festival's stated mission, but too many were programmatic faith-based movies of direct-to-video quality. In a way, it made sense given that one of the festival's chief corporate sponsors is Wal-Mart, which has bet substantially on exclusive DVD distribution and its on-line Vudu channel; a lot of these films seemed perfectly appropriate for that kind of venue. Yet given the participation of Davis' institute, the lack of adventurous cutting-edge movies seemed strange.
And if the point of the programming is to avoid offending anyone, it wasn't entirely successful. A film critic friend of mine of Pennslyvania Dutch ancestry made a point of telling me he was personally offended by Love Finds You In Charm, a movie adaptation of a novel that's part of a series of Amish "bonnet book" romances by Annalisa Daughety that played at the festival.
"I feel no desire to read, watch or promote stories that insult my heritage by portraying it as quaint or idealized," he says. "While Peter Weir's Witness is short on authenticity (some of the beards are more lifelike than others), he had the decency not to use the Amish as an excuse for a vapid horse-drawn soap opera or as an allegory that would likely offend the people who really wear the beards or the bonnets."
Even more distressing to a film critic was the festival's de-emphasis of its movies. During BFF I heard lots of chatter about lots of things, but virtually no talk about the films themselves. The highlight--for most Bentonvillians, at least--was probably the Sponsors Village set up on the edge of downtown where one could (for free) get Oscar Mayer hot dogs, cups of Kraft mac 'n' cheese, several varieties of Perrier sparkling water, Mars candy products, cans of Coca-Cola personalized with one's name, and lots of other goodies. In conservationist Neil Compton's house on the edge of Compton Gardens, other sponsors such as Dove and Colgate offered free hairstyling, manicures, makeovers and a photo booth to document the results.
It was great fun and a tremendous engine of corporate goodwill, but several of the people wandering through the village seemed unaware of its connection to the film festival.
In general, the inaugural Bentonville Film Festival felt more like a corporate branding event than a celebration of the potential of film to affect hearts and minds. While I don't know if there's anything wrong with that, the general lack of engagement with Arkansas made the BFF feel, in the words of another attendee, "like a traveling circus" that might pick up and move anywhere.
Several prominent members of the Arkansas film community told me they were disappointed in the festival's disinclination to involve locals in planning and prosecuting the festival. While Joey Lauren Adams operated a lively "local lounge" in the Table Mesa restaurant off the Bentonville Square with live music every evening and Arkansas-related panels, there was little to no integration of Arkansas talent into the larger festival beyond the volunteers who tirelessly worked the venues. Several of them told me the attitude of the festival organizers toward Arkansans was generally condescending and dismissive.
"It was clear there were important people and not-so-important people," one of them said. Sources told me that volunteers working VIP facilities were specifically told not to try to engage celebrities and others they were serving. They were not to talk to them. They were not to make eye contact.
I can't help wondering what Sam Walton would make of that.
Still, I read that the Bentonville Film Festival is getting good reviews.
I hear differently, but I don't know that the organizers didn't do exactly what they wanted to do. All I know is that the whole thing felt odd, and I'm at a loss to understand exactly what was going on. It wasn't like any film festival I've ever attended. (Though one of the publicists at the festival saw fit to lecture me on "how film festivals are" when I told her we were consistently given conflicting information about what we'd need to do to make sure we could cover an event.)
That doughnut shop turned out not to be a doughnut shop at all. It was a bookie joint. I still don't know what the Bentonville Film Festival was.
pmartin@arkansasonline.com
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Editorial on 05/17/2015