Bill Gates’ Public Partying And Other Oddities: Sundance Recap Part I

I could fill up a column simply detailing random encounters (and that would probably be a very entertaining column) but to do justice to the Sundance film festival, it’s best to start and end any discussion with the films that premiered there. The 2010 festival included a concerted effort by the festival’s programmers to get back to its roots, showcasing the best of up and coming independent cinema. In a somewhat ironic twist, one category of films labeled “NEXT” was created to showcase low to no-budget films at this year’s festival. The fact that they had to create a special category to highlight these films this year was a reaction to the feeling by many that in recent years Sundance had started to showcase too much typical Hollywood star-driven product and had diverged from its founder, Robert Redford’s, original mission statement to serve independent cinema.

That said, it was a star-driven product, albeit a low budget one, that was my favorite film at the festival – Get Low, directed by Aaron Schneider, and starring Robert Duvall, Bill Murray and Sissy Spacek. Keep in mind I only had the opportunity to see 8 out of the over 100 films that premiered at the festival, though I tried to see films that had a lot of buzz going in. Get Low is inspired by the real-life story of a 1930’s Tennessee hermit who decided to throw his own funeral party while he was still alive. In the film, Duvall plays an outsider harboring a dark secret and is reviled by all the locals in his town. Duvall enlists Bill Murray, portraying the owner of the local funeral parlor, to help him plan his funeral party, with the hope that he may get to tell his story to all of the townspeople and ultimately rest in peace. The premise is simple, and while there are quite a few laughs along the way because of the ingenious comic-timing of Murray, this film is a complete showcase for Robert Duvall. The film packs an amazing emotional wallop that truly sneaks up on the viewer. Yes, we are talking tissue time, but more than that we are talking about one of Duvall’s best roles ever, and given his career, that is saying something. If this film is released and marketed properly (Sony Classics will be releasing it, but no release date has been announced as of yet), I believe Duvall is a shoe-in for an Academy Award nomination next year. His character could even be a distant relative to the one Jeff Bridges plays in Crazy Heart, and at this point it seems like Bridges will be walking off with Oscar gold come March 5. After the film, as the cast walked out on stage for a post-film Q&A, each actor got a heavy applause upon introduction, and then when Duvall took the stage, the audience slowly rose in unison into a rousing standing ovation – the only one I witnessed at the festival, and most definitely well-deserved.

From Get Low, a film that ultimately is life-affirming, and moving to perhaps its polar opposite – The Killer Inside Me, based on a novel of the same name, directed by Michael Winterbottom and starring Casey Affleck, Jessica Alba, and Kate Hudson. Killer is a film that fascinates, confounds and ultimately disturbs as it is unapologetic in depicting brutal violence upon its lead female characters. It’s one thing seeing Jessica Alba’s character take a punch to the face, but Winterbottom piles it on to the point of making a viewer sick, especially in showing the close up horrifying effects of the violence being depicted. I lost count in exactly how many times Alba’s character was punched in the face, but let’s just say there were way way too many. Throw in another way. Some would argue the ultra-violence is integral to the portrayal of the psychotic sexually-charged killer at the center of the film (I’m going to avoid spoilers here, but the identity of the killer is revealed near the beginning of the movie, and so the central question of the movie is not who is the killer, but is why does he/she do it and what on earth is wrong with said person?), but for me, the violence took me out of the movie every time. And that’s a shame because violence aside, the film is beautiful to look at, and the performances are mostly magnetic. In one of the last acquisitions of the festival, IFC picked up the rights to distribute Killer. It will be interesting to see if the theatrical release is edited at all to tone down the violence.

Stay tuned to this space for Part II of my Sundance recap including my thoughts on Cyrus, Sympathy for Delicious, The Romantics, The Violent Kind, and Meet the Rileys, as well as the best of the gifting lounges and parties at this year’s festival.

Jonathan Fuhrman can be reached via email at smarthollywood@gmail.com or on Twitter @smarthollywood.

This is an opinion piece. The views expressed in this article are those of just the author.