Thursday, 25 January 2001

SUNDANCE: DAY SEVEN

It was another interesting day on the mountain as I caught two films that were very well received by the audiences with whom I watched them. In one case, they were absolutely right. And in the other, they were sucked in by an ending that was 80 percent better than anything else in the movie… and even then, was not really all that good.

The movie that was exceptional is The Deep End. It's the kind of film with a curve ball around every corner, so writing about it in any depth is problematic. The movie starts with the matriarch (played by the ever exceptional Tilda Swinton) arriving at a night club to talk to the bad man that her 17-year-old son has fallen in with. The sequence, which leaves Swinton's character vulnerable but resilient, keys the whole film. The character is alone with her son, her younger daughter and her aging father-in-law, with the father/husband away on a ship. This is not a broken family, but the mother is really left to her own devices. Things quickly get complicated and choices have to be made. And every choice has a consequence. And every consequence gets darker and more complex. .

Besides the strong performances by Swinton and Jonathan Tucker, who plays her son, there is a movie career building performance by Goran Visnjic, who leaves ER behind and makes his case as much more than a pretty face. He actually has the widest character arc in the film and carries it off without any show of effort.

The guys who made The Deep End, Scott McGehee and David Siegel, who share a writer/director/producer credit, were previously known for Suture, a Sundance hit that I have always considered over-rated. This film is far more conventional, though still clearly in the arthouse realm. This would be a perfect Sony Classics or Paramount classic release.

The disappointment film of the day was Madison, which will likely become a high-profile seller with decent commercial potential. So why am I grumbling? Well, the film's director, William Bindley, is not very good yet. The cinematographer is not listed in the Sundance program or the film's press kit, yet he deserves major kudos for any success this film achieves, because it looks like a real movie, despite Bindley's consistent failures of coverage, matching and creation of space. It is one of the major first-time-director symptoms to make a movie that has too many close-ups. Madison suffers that malady.

The most bothersome part of the picture for me was the musical score (the writer of which also goes unnamed), which is about the most overt case of theft I have ever heard in a film. At my most generous moments, I decided that we were listening to a temp track because anyone with a soundtrack to The Cider House Rules, American Beauty and some adventure movie… I think it's The Right Stuff... could reproduce almost the entire soundtrack. The reason I am sure it isn't a temp track is that each theft trails off at the end with a little change of pace. If you were here, I could hum it to you and explain more clearly, but these were not subtle lifts. If you saw the TV ads for Cider House and American Beauty, you will recognize the music.

So, why did the audience go for it? Well, Jim Caviezel is a great, overwhelmingly likeable actor. Bruce Dern turns in a performance that makes one wonder why he works so little. Brent Briscoe provides solid back-up, as ever. And while they have somewhat thankless roles, due to a screenplay that is riddled with bunt singles that the actors have to run out, Mary McCormack and The Phantom Menace's Jake Lloyd get the job done. Some of the nicest moments are little improv beats by McCormack and Caviezel (who play husband and wife) that Bindley barely manages to get on camera.

The one home run in the movie is the closing race… which is pretty much the exact race you know is coming from the first frames of the movie. Bindley throws up more flags than the United Nations. And the bad guys, kids and adults alike, are further over the top than RuPaul at a nunnery. But audiences are forgiving and whoever buys this film for $10 - $12 million will make good money on cable and in the video market with a family film that may even do $12 - $18 million at the domestic box office. But all that said, Bindley has a long, long way to go as a director. He's not pretentious, but he isn't really strong enough to shoot episodic television, much less the bigger feature that this film will land him.

Until tomorrow ...