I’m sitting here in the indieWIRE condo for what is thankfully my last night in Park City (not that I didn’t have fun, I’m just horribly exhausted and craving normalcy). I’m spending it jamming sweaters into an overstuffed suitcase, catching up on e-mails, and watching a post-SAG awards TBS airing of Dumb and Dumber, which I haven’t seen in years but am realizing quickly I can also recite word for word (over the winter of ‘95 I probably saw it five times at the movie theatre). Oddly enough, it stars Jim Carrey and Jeff Daniels, who also headlined my two least favourite Sundance ‘09 films: I Love You Phillip Morris and Arlen Faber.
Cinematic complaints aside (and there really weren’t too many beyond those two), my second Sundance offered a really lovely mix of original and satisfying filmmaking, most notably Lee Daniels’ Push: Based on a novel by Sapphire, which ended up winning both the grand jury prize and audience award for U.S. narrative. Here’s both of Daniels’ speeches from last night’s ceremony:
Push tells the story of Precious Jones (Gabourney Sidibe), an obese, illiterate Harlem teenager pregnant with her father’s child and living with her psychotic mother (played by Mo’Nique in a brilliant, fucking terrifying performance). This one-sentence summary doesn’t exactly make “Push” sound like a fun time at the movies, and often its not: It depicts some pretty intense physical, emotional and sexual abuse. But it’s also remarkably funny at times, and takes some stylistic chances (most notably fantasy sequences) that bring some needed moments of lightness to the film despite usually being my greatest cinematic pet peeve.
Most importantly though, “Push” accessibly represents a whole slew of themes and characters rarely (if ever) depicted on screen with this kind of poignance of authenticity: African-American female youth, poverty, AIDS, African-American homosexuality, the late 1980s, illiteracy, sexual abuse… You’d think that mixing this many issues together might create some serious potential for overwrought or overly sentimental results, but “Push” is just too creative and too raw to ever feel bogged down. Its final act left me emotionally wounded in a way that’s totally indebted to an obvious passion and connection Daniels’ had with the material and the totally ballsy and uncompromising way he went about executing it.
I also give the film some serious credit for managing to utilize the as-yet-undiscovered acting talents Mariah Carey, Lenny Kravitz and Sherri Shepard, each giving fantastic, nearly unrecognizable performances as Precious’ social worker, nurse and school secretary, respectively.
Other Sundance ‘09 standouts, for me, included Lynn Shelton‘s Humpday, which involves two straight male friends attempting to have sex on video for “art’s sake.” I was really skeptical going in. But its indie sensibility and pitch-perfect performances allowed it to push way past what some Hollywood film (cough, I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry) might have done with the topic. Totally improvised, the film was was not only hysterically funny (in a way that was never once offensive to homosexuality), but also managed a really perceptive character study of two heterosexual males struggling with their open-mindedness. Its a film that is going to make a lot of heterosexual men really uncomfortable, but in the best possible way: I’d hope at least, that it might make them consider their relationships to each other, to homophobia - which can at times be a inherited force in a lot of people that’s beyond their control, to each other, and to their egos.
I could go on about a few other films (Lone Scherfig‘s Oscar bound An Education and Sophie Barthes‘s Cold Souls in particular), but I need to get back to stuffing that suitcase and prepping for a day of airport and plane related hell. Until 2010, Sundance…
Though the last batch of blog posts re: Oscar wouldn’t suggest it, I’m still very much in Park City. Which means I’ve now spent ten days not sleeping much, eating shit (Burger King has been almost a daily fixture), watching movies, and trying real hard to keep up.
The weekend will be more lax and I’ll do some more substantial blogging, but in the meantime, here’s an audio clip from an interview I did two days ago with “Motherhood” director Katherine Dieckmann and star Uma Thurman:
Meeting Uma was a pretty bizarre occasion. I’m a big fan, so it brought on a lot of anxiety initially. For a while I just sat awkwardly awaiting the interview on a couch beside Anthony Edwards’ daughter (Edwards and Minnie Driver, both in “Motherhood,” were also doing interviews in the room). Little Miss Edwards showed me how her HD Flip Camera was nicer than my year old non-HD Flip Camera.
Then just before the interview began, Kevin Spacey walked by, to which Thurman stood up and hugged him, greeting him with an enthusiastic “Spaceman!” I watched from my seat below as they stood 2 feet in front of me and invited one another to each other’s parties that night.
When it finally came time, Uma stopped me before I started: “Wait a minute. Could you show me some ID?” She had a totally serious face and its fucking Uma Thurman so without any thought I actually pulled out my Ontario Driver’s License. “I’m kidding! I’m kidding!” She laughed at me before lowering her voice and saying, “but seriously, how old are you?”
By the end of the interview me & Uma were totally BFFs and I spent the entire night celebrating “Motherhood” at the dinner and party. “Spaceman” never showed, but Jodie Foster did, and Minnie Driver ended up performing in the middle of the living room.
Here’s a clip from the post-premiere Q&A of Glenn Ficarra and John Requa’s “I Love You Phillip Morris,” perhaps the most high-profile film screening at Sundance this year:
I was horribly annoyed the entire time. Almost every question predictably pertained to the gay content in the film. One man shouted out: “What was it like playing a gay man? McGregor answered the question as eloquently as it allowed. “Its the same as playing any other kind of man,” he said. “It was never unpleasant or awkward to kiss or cuddle.” The directors responded by noting that “the whole point when we got into this was just to portray them as two people in love. Gay had nothing to do with it was just incidental.” How many fucking times have we heard these answers? Or questions about the “risk” involved in playing a gay man.
Worse was all the cheering whenever anyone on stage said anything remotely pro-gay. This is 2009. Of course they’re going to say those things. Whether its because they are simply decent human beings or faking it because they are at the world premiere of a gay film they just made, they’re answers couldn’t have been anything else. It’s nothing revolutionary and doesn’t deserve applauding.
You can see the rest in the video, but seriously: Is this going to be the same, repeated bullshit everytime a gay movie gets made in the mainstream? Whether Tom & Antonio, Heath & Jake, Sean & James, Jim & Ewan, what is with this homophobic curiosity as to how challenging it must be for two straight actors to kiss? And this lame sense of liberalism people get from “tolerating” these films? I feel like I’m being repetitive even getting annoyed by it.
A new annoyance altogether though, was the film itself. Based on a true story, “Phillip Morris” follows Steve Russell (Jim Carrey), a con man who meets the love of his life, Phillip Morris (Ewan McGregor) while in prison for insurance fraud. Russell devotes the rest of his life to ensuring that he and Morris will remain together forever, which leads to some pretty extraordinary feats. This includes, most incredibly, faking his own death from AIDS.
I’ll give the movie this: It’s new territory. There is nothing issue-oriented about it, unlike almost any other straight-made gay film ever to find itself in the mainstream. Ficarra and Requa’s approach was, as they said, to treat the film as if it was just about “two people in love.”
The problem is, its not about that. Its about a mentally unstable man whose dishonestly seems directly related to his issues with sexuality. Its about AIDS. Its about the influence of Christianity in closetdom (Russell is a devout Christian married to Leslie Mann for the first 1/2 hour of the film). Its about coming out. Its about two men in love, which socially and politically is not the same as any other combination of genders. Especially when its based on a true story and set across the 1980s and 1990s, vastly complicated climates for gay identity.
Its actually a pretty amazing story with a lot of potential, almost none of which is realized here. I found the film shallow and underdeveloped. While I honestly believe Glenn Ficarra and John Requa had the best intentions, they were clearly not the right people for the job. They bring a bizarrely farcical tone to a subject matter that does not warrant it. Carrey and McGregor’s performances always felt slightly distanced from reality, as did their relationship, and that led me to find it impossible to find any sort of true representation of gay identity on the screen. Instead, I kept thinking: This is what happens when a bunch of well-intentioned straight guys make a gay movie.
I occasionally even found myself rather offended. Which I’d like to think is not an easy task. I’m usually a big fan of PC boundary-pushing comedy, at least when its done right (“Its Always Sunny In Philadelphia” is the random example that popped into my head). But that’s not really what was going on here. First of all, I rarely found it actually funny. And sometimes it felt like it was simply mocking the subject matter, mostly because of how distanced I felt from it. People in the theatre were laughing, I just wasn’t one of them. And I know many a gay that felt the same way.
But a lot of people seemed to like it, so maybe I’ve just all of a sudden become a whiny gay, or the sleep deprivation of Sundance led me into any easily offensive mind state.
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