The New York Times-20080125-New American Realism Emerges Amid Grousing and Hummers

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New American Realism Emerges Amid Grousing and Hummers

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Shortly before I said my goodbyes at the Sundance Film Festival, I saw a man sitting in a parked S.U.V. with the vanity plate CARPDM. The window on the driver's side was down -- a cigar idled in his left hand -- and his voice and that of a man on a speakerphone were pouring into the frigid air, words like negotiation and agency mixing in with various numbers. It's the sort of image that encapsulates one Sundance, the festival of flamboyant self-importance, and if the films had not been as good this year, it might have become a defining moment rather than a comic memento of an unexpectedly rewarding week.

There was the usual grousing, of course, about the films and the inhospitable location, a resort town ringed by dazzling mountains and clogged with Hummers that has become unpleasantly ill-suited to a festival this size (more than 50,000 attendees, fewer than 8,000 residents). This is the Sundance of single-digit temperatures, ice-slicked sidewalks, traffic jams, party logjams and insistently glowing Blackberrys that early in the festival flashed distress signals through an industry anxious to find the little indie that could cast some sun on a business facing increasingly strike-emptied release schedules. But this year the noise dropped to a tolerable drone, partly because the bigger deals were so late in coming that they couldn't dominate the conversation and partly because this felt like a year of discovery.

There were also the usual disappointments and heat-seeking selections aglitter with Hollywood types, notably Barry Levinson's What Just Happened?, a self-flattering peek at the business based on the producer Art Linson's book and starring an appealing Robert De Niro. There was enough dysfunction to stock a self-help bookstore, some of it relatively funny (the loony-tune mother and son in Choke, adapted from the Chuck Palahniuk novel), some of it misguided (Tourette's syndrome plus Elle Fanning equals Phoebe in Wonderland). There was even an ingratiatingly twee comedy, Sunshine Cleaning, which seemed specifically engineered -- Alan Arkin, cute grandchild, alienation, resolution -- for a deal with Fox Searchlight, the studio division that picked up Little Miss Sunshine at the 2006 festival.

There was no Little Miss Sunshine this year, although, to judge from some of the pricier deals a few companies are banking on, at least a few breakouts. I wish them luck, not only because independent film has infused energy and talent into the mainstream, as evidenced by the current Academy Award nominees, but also because hits like Little Miss Sunshine turn movie people into truffle pigs. That isn't to say that gems like Sugar,'Ballast and Momma's Man are studio bound, only that they will be seen here and discussed and will seep into the culture. They will probably be bought by a micro-distributor that will release them with a lot of love and not enough money, but they will be part of the discussion.

One theme of that discussion will be the emergence of a new American realism. Although my favorite fiction films at Sundance were different in theme and tone, they were united by stylistic commonalities, a feel for the still moment -- and, importantly, for beauty -- a grounded sense of place and some obvious influences, including the Belgian filmmakers Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne. What was missing from even the most intimate of these works was the solipsism that characterizes one Sundance mainstay, the kind with anguished young men who yearn to break free of their families and towns so they can run away to film school (or a Sundance Institute lab) and turn their suffering into entertainment.

There's a young man at the center of Sugar, but neither he nor it hew to type or expectation. The much-anticipated, greatly satisfying second feature from Ryan Fleck and Anna Boden, who hit Sundance hard and big in 2006 with Half Nelson, this new film pivots on a 19-year-old baseball pitcher nicknamed Sugar (the newcomer Algenis Perez Soto, a true heartbreak kid), who's trying to break into the major leagues. The story lifts off when Sugar is summoned from the Dominican Republic, where he's playing in a major-league academy, and transferred to the minor leagues in Iowa. There, surrounded by cornfields and white faces, he enters a machine that grinds up young men in its merciless search for the next Sammy Sosa.

As they did in Half Nelson, which starred Ryan Gosling, Mr. Fleck and Ms. Boden prove themselves to be especially sensitive when it comes to their actors. This is particularly the case with their lead, Mr. Soto, a nonprofessional whom they discovered playing baseball in the Dominican Republic and who delivers a subtly understated performance. It's one thing to get a great performance out of Mr. Gosling; it's something else entirely to guide an unknown like Mr. Soto to find the emotional truth of his character, tears and a persuasive knuckleball included. It's a lovely turn that rides out a tricky drama all the way to a muted, wonderful finish that resists the usual sports-movie cliches.

Much like Sugar (in the dramatic competition), both Ballast (also in competition) and Momma's Man (playing in a section called Spectrum) make artful use of the real world. A startlingly assured, pitch-perfect first feature from the writer and director Lance Hammer, Ballast stars several nonprofessional actors. The magnificently solemn newcomer Michael J. Smith Sr., and an equally excellent theater actress, Tarra Riggs, play warring family members who find themselves circling each other warily in the wake of a devastating suicide. Expressively shot in the Mississippi Delta by Lol Crawley, who splashes shocks of color on the wintry blue landscape, the film owes an obvious debt to the Dardennes (Rosetta) in its sense of urgency, intimacy and carefully articulated feel for place without in any way being a slavish imitation.

Azazel Jacobs's conceptually bold, emotionally naked Momma's Man has a similarly deep-rooted sense of place, in this case downtown Manhattan. A portrait of a young man at very loose ends -- Matt Boren as Mikey -- the film is at once a valentine to the bohemia of a lost New York and to Mr. Jacobs's parents, the avant-garde filmmaker Ken Jacobs and his wife, Flo, who play Mikey's tenderly loving mother and father. Shot mostly inside Mr. and Mrs. Jacobs's actual downtown loft, a wonderland of clutter chockablock with books and all manner of cinematic ephemera, the film beautifully combines the idioms of independent fiction narrative with the personal expressiveness of the avant-garde for a work of surprising emotional and structural complexity. This is independent cinema defined.

There was the usual complement of fine documentaries this year too, including the celebrity-stuffed Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired (about that filmmaker's 1970s rape trial) and the more downtown Patti Smith: Dream of Life. The documentary that left the strongest impression is The Order of Myths, Margaret Brown's examination of the history and present-day reality of the segregated worlds of Mardi Gras in Mobile, Ala. Handsomely shot and intelligently edited, with none of the maddening sloppiness that distorts too many nonfiction projects, the film explores the secret societies, the fancy-dress balls and the celebratory parades for a story that is at once very site-specific and seemingly simple and as big and richly complex as the United States itself.

[Illustration]PHOTOS: THE ORDER OF MYTHS: Preparing for Mardi Gras in Alabama. SUGAR: Algenis Perez Soto plays a would-be big-leaguer. (PHOTOGRAPH BY FERNANDO CALZADA/HBO); MOMMA'S MAN: From left, Matt Boren, Flo Jacobs and Ken Jacobs in Azazel Jacobs's valentine to lost bohemian New York. (PHOTOGRAPH BY ARTISTS PUBLIC DOMAIN); BALLAST: set in the Mississippi Delta, stars Michael J. Smith Sr. (PHOTOGRAPH BY ALLUVIAL FILM COMPANY)