Finding Fun in the Sun(dance)

If you tell someone who lives in Aspen that you spent five days skiing and watching sixteen films, they might suspect that you spent the week on a cocaine binge with the ghost of Hunter S. Thompson. If you tell the same story in Park City, Utah, though, even your cab driver will give you a knowing smile that says, “Your first Sundance Festival, eh?”

After many years of waiting, prowling the “Sundance” section at Blockbuster, and watching channel 117 (Sundance Channel), I finally made the pilgrimage to Robert Redford’s mecca of film and celebrity this January. Despite the all-star journalists at the country’s top newspapers, magazines, and blogs that criticize Sundance’s growing commercial and mainstream vibe, I think I found the true spirit of the festival. It just resided in the least likely places.

The moment I got off the plane in Salt Lake City, I already knew that I was in a strange place. Young men and women were walking around in suits with name tags, heading out to begin their two years of mission work. The driver from Salt Lake to Park City explained the whole story of the Mormons to me—from Joseph Smith to the point in the 1970s when Latter Day Saint clerics announced that miraculously the Mormon church was no longer just for white people. I soon found that the most common defense of character in Utah is, “I’m not Mormon.” The driver was Italian, he said.

Once the car pulled into aesthetically grungy Park City though, the world of “Big Love” polygamy and temperance was quickly replaced with a veritable terrarium of the entertainment industry. Lay people and stargazers alike slipped down icy Main Street looking through windows where cozy, rising and falling stars sipped spiked coffee in corporate sponsored parties and gifting suites.

In its 25th year of existence, the festival itself is still fairly straightforward. A series of theatres spread across the Salt Lake City area­—though primarily in Park City—each show between four and five independent films (features, documentaries, and shorts) each day over a two-week period. I was only there for the second week of the festival and primarily saw feature films from the Premiere, U. S. Dramatic, and World Dramatic categories.

Every kind of film critic was represented: the loves-it-all USA Today type, the can’t-stand-anything-but-artsy New York Times type, the bitter-because-I’d-rather-be-writing-scripts L.A. Times type, and everything in between. Those endowed with press or corporate passes blew by the long lines that grouped outside the theaters, but for once, nobody seemed to mind. Despite the wintry weather, the cinematic discourse continued on between strangers and new acquaintances unabated.

Even with the diversity of the audience, the highlight of the festival is still very much the films (“Not movies!” as someone screamed to a woman on the shuttle one day). The first and probably most poignant one I saw was “Bronson,” which stylistically told the true story of England’s “most violent criminal.” The performance was a tour de force by lead Tom Hardy, and the combination of his intense acting with a loud soundtrack of Wagner and Pet Shop Boys created a “Clockwork Orange”—on a particularly violent day—ambience.

Other notables included John Krasinski’s (“The Office”) adaptation of David Foster Wallace’s “Brief Interviews With Hideous Men,” entitled “Sin Nombre.” Krasinski directed and stars in the film, which follows an ex-gang member as he tries to escape Central America into the U.S. [CORRECTION APPENDED]

“In the Loop” and “I Love You Phillip Morris” were also remarkable in their own right. “In the Loop” is a hysterical British comedy that follows English and American bureaucrats as they stumble clumsily into the Iraq War. Like a wry, comedic version of “The Ugly American,” its side-splitting humor is tinged throughout by the debacle of the current situation in the Middle East.

“I Love You Phillip Morris,” starring Jim Carrey and Ewan McGregor, is a composite of “Catch Me If You Can” and “Brokeback Mountain.” Carrey’s character is imprisoned for white-collar crimes, and there he falls in love with fellow inmate Phillip Morris (McGregor). The film is all at once extremely funny, sad, and beautiful, and if it hasn’t already been bought, then it soon will.

Despite the abundantly obvious corporate presence and mainstream feel, there is still an organic quality to Sundance that makes going to the festival an otherworldly experience. Where else can you sit in a full theatre of enthusiastic moviegoers hanging every moment like it was their last hour with a lover? Where else can you watch actor Lou Pucci in three films in one day and sit next to him in another movie the next?

The diva journalists who complain about and run from the Sundance of today are also the ones that blow past the commoners waiting in line. They get invites to corporate parties and play dress up with celebrities. To them, Sundance is a circus, but to those who can’t afford the circus, it’s a dream come true.

I knew I was at the Sundance of lore when the Filipino man renting my hotel manager’s basement drove me the hour to Sundance Resort one day because no other option was remotely affordable. I knew I was at Sundance when the busboy, who didn’t speak much English asked if I liked “The Informers”—because he did.

After the circus moves on back to L.A. and New York, the locals of Park City, on whose backs the festival rests, come together to watch the “Best of Fest” at several Sundance venues. I was lucky enough to get tickets to the Audience Award Winner for Documentary, “The Cove,” which focused on the annual slaughter of dolphins in Japan. It was one of the most moving films I had ever seen in my life and was so intense it played more like an action movie than a documentary. It was the first and only movie I saw that got a standing ovation at the end—1,200 people, many of them residents, cheering, crying, and appreciating the film in a uniquely touching way.

I looked down the aisle from where I was, and a blind woman was standing, clutching her seeing eye dog’s leash in one hand and letting out a loud whoop. While the entertainment industry and media complained of recession and commercialization, Sundance was still bright and glinting in the eyes of those with an undying love for film.

—Columnist Andrew F. Nunnelly can be reached at nunnelly@fas.harvard.edu.

CORRECTION: The Feb. 6 article "Finding Fun in the Sun(dance)" incorrectly stated that the movies "Brief Interviews With Hideous Men" and "Sin Nombre" were one and the same. In fact, the two are distinct films, both shown at Sundance. The former was by director and screenwriter John Krasinski and the latter by director and screenwriter Cary Joji Fukunaga.