Snow Business

LISA SCHWARZBAUM'S SUNDANCE HIGHS AND LOWS

This was the year Sundance elders marketed a mantra — FOCUS ON FILM — in an effort to clear a festivalgoer's mind of the distractions of celebrity sightings and rampant swagnation. And the mantra became a freebie button — which is a form of swag, no? Still, I took the message to heart: My Sundance would be about the films — more precisely about the filmmaking — and not the distribution deals or the stuff.

Which is why I was so impressed and excited by Starting Out in the Evening, Andrew Wagner's mature, compassionate, elegantly made drama about a courtly old New York novelist (Frank Langella), his unhappy adult daughter (Lili Taylor), and a bold graduate student (Six Feet Under's superb Lauren Ambrose) who insinuates herself into their Upper West Side lives. Based on the novel by Brian Morton, the movie is shaped, shaded, and polished like fine literature — in well-chosen words, in meaningful silences, and in the intimate visual texture produced by the medium of the HD cam. In Wagner's bright, ballsy previous film, The Talent Given Us, he brought the best out of his own nonactor parents as stars. Here, the filmmaker's confidence and good taste elicit towering work from Langella — a lifetime beaut of a performance bound for awards — and inspires the rest of his fine cast to shine, too.

I felt I was in similarly strong hands with Tamara Jenkins, who made the striking 1998 Slums of Beverly Hills. Her humane, grown-up drama The Savages is undeniably downbeat — Laura Linney and Philip Seymour Hoffman play sister and brother, prickly, wounded adults themselves, who must organize elder care for a difficult father (Philip Bosco), now retreating into dementia. But Jenkins, blessed with the class-act, A-team duo of Linney and Hoffman, has a gift for aerating real pain with real humor.

I keep returning to my interest in the quality of the filmmaking — how a piece is constructed, how one shot connects to the next, how story, script, lighting, editing, pacing, and performance cohere — because so many of the movies that make waves at Sundance don't. Cohere, that is. For every singular work like The Pool — an immaculately observed drama about two poor boys in Goa, India, from documentarian Chris Smith, who made the 1999 indie hit American Movie — there's a derivatively winsome Rushmore-meets-Garden State comedy about teenage oddballs, like Rocket Science. I was intrigued by Jessica Yu's offbeat, scrapbook-like documentary Protagonist, in which four men narrate their own life stories and, in so doing, exemplify elements of classical Greek tragedy. But I was itchily unconvinced by the damp, palliative ''prestige issue'' drama Grace Is Gone, about a patriotic American dad (John Cusack, embracing bad hair, bad eyeglasses, and belly bloat for his art) who can't bring himself to tell his two young daughters that their soldier mother died in Iraq. So he takes them on a long car trip. (Never once does he make them buckle their seat belts — a nagging distraction.)

I enjoyed watching Parker Posey be Parker Posey in Broken English — effervescent, sexy, in want of a cute man but endearingly terrible at letting love in, even in dreamy Before Sunset-scented Paris — but I wish the teeny espresso thimble of a first feature film by Zoe Cassavetes looked less slapdash and whatever-y. I appreciated the ambition of Chicago 10, Brett Morgen's snazzed-up attempt to draw parallels between the political ire of Yippies in 1968 and YouTubers in 2007 — but I was frustrated by the facile stylization of the animated sequences, with groovy stars (Nick Nolte, Hank Azaria) voicing real words from the trial of the Chicago Seven. As for Teeth, well, the premise of a high school virgin with a body so keenly adapted to the demands of Christian purity that her vagina comes equipped with teeth is so witty and cheeky a cautionary tale/horror pic/empowerment comedy that I can't bring myself to nitpick. Besides, newcomer Jess Weixler, as the damsel with a vagina dentata, is a radiantly funny, blossoming star with a big future ahead.

If the Sundance gods really wanted us to focus exclusively on film, they shouldn't have left treacherous mounds of rubbish lying around. Weapons, a foul exercise in suburban teen male swagger, exults in flaunting poorly composed scenes of guys vomiting, urinating on other guys, and shooting them, too, for reasons wise ticket holders didn't stick around to discover. And how's a Zen-minded cineast supposed to concentrate when ambushed by buzz-sniffing TV camera crews trolling for post-screening reactions to Hounddog? Here's the thing: The movie is a dumb howler of a Southern gothic about child abuse and the healing powers of a magical black man. It's as risible a tale as ever snookered a handful of good actors (including David Morse, Robin Wright Penn, and the unsinkable Little Miss Dakota Fanning) into saying, ''Well, heck, count me in, it sounds like art.'' Come to think of it, Hounddog is one of those instances where the programmers themselves forgot to focus on film. Then again, at a festival this distracting, it's bound to happen.

For more of Lisa Schwarzbaum's Sundance impressions, see her video report here.