No Boundaries

thesixtyone

All good things must come to an end, such is the case with this year’s Sundance Film Festival. I need to get back to doing other things. So it is with only a little further ado that I say goodbye to this year’s fest.

I had wanted to spend some time on: The Company Men, Wasteland and Freedom Riders (all good), and 3 Backyards (incomprehensible). Hopefully, I’ll get to them later in the year. On a kind note, my personal experience this time around was just absolutely fantastic. They have a new festival director and this may have been the cause, or it might have been a change in the general tone of film, or maybe I’m just getting better at the flick-picking. Almost all of the films I saw this year, documentary and dramatic, were hopeful and forward-looking, rather than the now slightly out-of-vogue 60-minutes style of nasty finger pointing. My wise mother has told me that America was that way (people looking for a cure rather than a cause) during the depression as well.

It began with an unfortunate mix of the first festival weekend (this is always a little crazy), a national snowboarding championship event, and a succession of the first real blizzards of the season. Things got funky.  Then everything opened up.  I’m enjoying Sundance much more now that the economy has slid and the hype (foregoing word should be capitalized, placed in a 30-point font and colored fluorescent pink) has died way-way down. All but one of the films I saw was either entirely sold out or close to it.

I started off with the tweet-seminar which was of greater value than I first gave it credit for, having allowed the concepts to sink in.  I also attended a “3D in film” workshop, which was excellent. It was kind of funny to watch many of the extraordinarily-attractive streaming out of the room when the filmmakers on the dais began discussing physics at length. We are entering an era where funny glasses will be necessary at almost every movie. That isn’t good. Avatar has established a direction, and everyone is going to be following it for a while. Avatar is only a meager beginning to something better and rather awesome when you think about it.

This is the first go-round where I can say that I didn’t see a bad film. A couple of the highlights included: being introduced to the audience (in the re-screening of the classic film Metropolitan) as the person who was sitting in the seat of Roger Ebert when the film was first screened in the early 90′s. Beforehand the director asked me to stand on cue. Everyone turned around, smiling, and then looked confused, thinking: “that isn’t Roger Ebert”.

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Well, what a week or so it has been. Sundance is officially over, but it isn’t over for me. I still have two more movies to see this evening and a few more posts to write. Writing so much about movies is fun, but it gets a bit difficult to fit into the spare moments of every day. That is, if you try to do it well. It is good to get it all out of one’s system while it’s fresh.

In the middle of my Sundance forays a couple of things, worthy of thought, came up and took me off track for a while. I’ll just touch on one of them now.

While doing my teeny chore of web-based research on the film Freedom Riders (an excellent documentary about groups of white and black students, primarily, who rode buses into the deep south in 1961 as a way of forcing desegregation of interstate commerce), I found myself sidetracked, at considerable length. The film got me thinking, for the first time, about how pro-integration whites were treated in the South. This has some import for me because I was, for my first six years which were spent in Arkansas, a pro-integration white boy in the South or, at least, the swaddled bundle that my pro-integration parents lugged around.

My father was a reporter for the anti-segregation Arkansas Gazette, then an editorial writer with the, also anti-segregation, Pine Bluff Commercial, then a Nieman fellow at Harvard for a year, then an editorial writer at the Arkansas Gazette. My mother was a part-time writer for smaller, largely union-owned, papers. She had the master’s in journalism from Columbia. He was, more or less, the Brad Pitt character in A River Runs Through It (without the Brad Pitt looks). It was the late fifties and early sixties and we all know about how that was for professional women in the “masculine” careers because we’ve seen the Madmen.

He was born on a proverbial dirt-scrabble farm in the proverbial tar-paper shack in northwestern Montana (between Kallispell and Libby) and ended up in journalism by ways and means that I’ve never understood. My parents met in Washington state where they were both reporters. He realized that the South was going to be the place to be for journalists of that era and sent clippings to the notorious Harry Ashmore.

I know a bit more about their (our) time in Arkansas than I did a few days ago because I found the University of Arkansas, Arkansas Gazette Project. Done for historical purposes, while most of the journalists of the civil-rights era were still alive, this is a collection of oral histories. There are around 130 interviews of most everyone who worked with my father at the Gazette, including a 78 page interview of him, done in 2001, a year before he died, which I didn’t know existed. Guess what I did all weekend.

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What constitutes fine art, who’s in charge of the process wherein art is called art, and why do those who make it, so often, get damaged in the process?

In an unusual way, the film Jean-Michel Basquiat: Radiant Child is both conventional documentary and personal narrative.  Without hearing the filmmaker, Tamra Davis, speak before and after the film, one would assume it is entirely the former. Davis, who was a close friend of Basquiat, has structured the film to speak for her, in describing his short life and their shorter relationship, in a way that would be appropriate to both his and his family’s wishes.

Basquiat was a darling of the New York art world in the 1980′s. He became the most publicly recognized of several artists including Keith Haring and Julian Schnabel, and was a close friend and protege of Andy Warhol. A high school dropout, he began as a graffiti artist and entered the cultural elite via the New York club scene and the early icons of the era: Madonna, Blondie, and David Bowie.

His work is primitive in nature and refracts African, Haitian and Hispanic cultural influences. The most significant outgrowth of his work has been in graphic design where colorful, bold and childlike images are juxtaposed with text. This has developed, in part, as a response to the ubiquity of neat and predictable computer graphics. Basquiat died of complications related to heroin usage at age 27.

The film presents Basquiat in an almost identical way as Wikipedia. The major difference is that some of the negative aspects of his life are not present in the film. Throughout, I found myself wondering the extent to which the film, as a celebration of his life, excluded negative details. In the Q&A it became clear that, through control of the display of his work, the Basquiat family also approved and censored the film. Negative aspects of his family life, including his mother’s mental illness, went without exposition in any great detail.

Another thing which could have stood in the way of a complete depiction of the artist is the filmmaker’s involvement in the same community of artists, dealers, curators, and buyers that produced and, perhaps, destroyed the artist. Since reading Tom Wolfe’s (of the Bonfire of the Vanities variety) 1975 The Painted Word, I’ve regarded the art world with healthy skepticism.

In the case of much modern art, a prohibitive factor in the escalation in the value of work is the productivity of the artist. Because a lot of new work can be created very rapidly, it is difficult to value existing work highly. Wolfe argues somewhat convincingly that it is the traders in art who make the market for it by manufacturing demand. In other words, it’s all about the PR. He also infers, less convincingly, that this process is independent of the quality of the art.

At any rate, while watching the various art representatives, dealers and buyers speaking, I wondered about the extent to which they may have financially benefited from the artist’s early death. Basquiat fits an established model of artistic incandescence, associated with notoriety, followed rapidly by decline and demise. I think it is worth wondering why this occurs again and again, and questioning who benefits from it. The absence of these questions was the film’s greatest fault.

The film is well made and worth seeing. I found it much more compelling than the similar drama made about his life. Aspects I enjoyed most were the Filmmaker’s use of music (jazz and Ravel), the abundant use of his art, and the tenderness with which the childlike essence of Basquiat is portrayed. It is unfortunate that the entire story could not have been told.

I wanted badly to love HOWL. I’m a beat-era fanboy and have been for decades. This is derivative of my, more general, love for lyricism in literature and jazz which extends well beyond the beats and is not a celebration of beat lifestyle or philosophy.  Though I do find much of the later compelling.

HOWL is not considered a documentary by its producers or those that make the decisions about what goes in which category at Sundance.  It certainly seemed like one to me.  I found it unusual, but a documentary none the less.

I’m not at all sure why it matters. I think it may be similar to the tendency of authors to cast their work as non-fiction when it isn’t, because the market for fiction is so very very lousy. The market for documentaries is poor relative to their dramatic counterpoints, or so I’ve heard. That the circumstances in film are exactly the opposite of that in publishing is curious indeed.

The HOWL audience could be divided into two parts. The beat fanboys (and fangirls) and those, unknowing at the outset, who watched in wondrous trepidation of all those flying penises. Both groups had reason for some disappointment. It would have been impossible not to disappoint the first group because, as dedicated cultists, we are protective of our favorite facts or persons or theories. We are easily upset by perceived  misrepresentation or omission. We tend to squeal.  I suspect that the film left many of the later group just wondering why.

This is an odd movie.  It is the story of the poem and not the poet. There are three intermingled veins: a James Franco narrative which both presents and explains the poem, lengthy animation sequences which interpret the poem, and a courtroom simulation which portrays the obscenity trial of Lawrence Ferlinghetti, following publication of HOWL, in dramatic form.

I found the Franco narrative limited in that it dealt almost exclusively with the text of the poem. The animation left me thinking that time could have been better spent dealing with more context from the life of Allen Ginsberg and the other beats in a traditional documentary form. It was evident in the Q&A that some are upset with any animated interpretation of the poem. I disagree. Interpretation of literature in film is not exactly new.  It just didn’t fit with anything else. I enjoyed the trial simulation scenes most. David Strathairn and John Hamm are well cast and the dialogue which is taken directly from the trial transcripts is fascinating. If a drama was the goal than this should have been expanded to make up the core of a film along the lines of Good Night and Good Luck.

My personal complaint with most discussion of beat literature is the assumption that the style was born of jazz and  formed completely new in the minds of Kerouac and Ginsberg.  What about Thomas Wolfe? Of the Look Homeward Angel variety. Kerouac describes himself and Wolfe walking past one another on the Brooklyn bridge as a passing-of-the-baton sort of moment. He acknowledges Wolfe’s style as the predecessor to his own. And it so obviously is.

This is the problem with the beat fanboys. Impossible to satisfy.

What constitutes the family ideal in the America of 2010?

It was about who: mother, father, children. Now it’s more about what: love, tolerance, understanding. The what was always part of it, but everything fell into a system of well-defined roles which changed in a well-defined way over time. And there were societal consequences for any who lived outside of those roles.  There were also plenty of conventional families who made do without the what. There still are.

Welcome to the Rileys is a film that defines family in terms of what can work versus what is expected. It begins with three lost souls and ends with something different and better, but not something trite, obvious or well defined.  James Gandolfini and Melissa Leo fill the roles of parents who lived for a daughter who has died. With her death they have largely died as well. Leo more so than Gandolfini who continues to fight to find something approximating life in his world. Kristen Stewart plays an almost-homeless youth lost in the New Orlean’s sex trade. The three interact and something resembling family evolves.

The film is not a simple story of how a complicated man rescues a tough but innocent girl from the evils and perversions of the sex industry. That narrative relies on old-school moral offense to work and has been done several times before.

I found much more in Welcome to the Rileys.  It is a story about the family as an ill-defined relationship for a period of time.  It is the family loosely defined as a tacit agreement to honestly and fairly meet the needs of every member. So it is the opposite of those films which portray the man as the strong though confused rescuer and the girl as an irascible though weak victim.  This new sort of  family lessens the weaknesses and enhances the strengths of all. Participation is passive. Contribution is multi-directional. It has a certain magic.

Gandolfini makes the film, overcoming an unfortunate forced southern accent with his unique mixture of affability and reserve.  As Tony Soprano, his personal amalgam of strength and vulnerability allowed a likable character capable of the horrible. His running away from Soprano may be the source of the ill-chosen dialect.  But the best part, of what made Soprano work well, is present.  In this film he establishes himself as a contemporary John Wayne.  Sensitive in his toughness.  Attractive in his unattractiveness. Bold in his reticence.

Stewart plays the feral daughter of everyman, loosed into the harshness of the world, very well.  She is sensitive, vulnerable, tough, erratic, moody, and honest. There is little sadness in her character which is both good and surprising. Leo is a bit forced in her quiet role as modern housewife medicating life into an enabled form of oblivion.  She does have several humorous revelatory moments as she emerges back into the world. These are some of the best in the film.

The thing I liked best about Welcome to the Rileys is that it points no fingers.  It is a gentle film.  Things just happen. And things must be dealt with.  It is a step in the direction away from outrage (finding and contemplating a source for every woe) and takes the stance that, in just a moment, directions in life can be changed.  That with decisive action, right or wrong but well intentioned, paths can open and solutions can be found.  That ruminating on blame will do more harm than good and is more a way of avoiding action than solving problems.  It is refreshing after so many films that seek an audience by providing a villain that we’ve been trained collectively to hate.