There and back again... indie darling Catherine Keener (right) returns to Sundance with An American Crime.
Ominous news. Three blisters have appeared on my left foot. This wouldn't ordinarily be an issue, accustomed as I am to observing an inviolable regime of car, desk and sofa that keeps physical exertion to a minimum.
However today it is an issue because I'm about to head off to my third Sundance film festival, where for the next eight days I will shuffle through snowdrifts and slushy roads en route to screenings, parties and the hotel room. That's a lot of walking, but I'll gladly chafe the skin off my soles because Sundance delivers an annual influx of wildly exciting talent and ideas that makes it the greatest film festival experience I know.
It doesn't stand on ceremony (you know who you are, Cannes and Venice), it doesn't overwhelm with the sheer number of films (Toronto), and it doesn't smack of uber-smug efficiency (Berlin). At a time when some of the bigger festivals have become little more than bloated media opportunities, Sundance retains a focus on what the event is about: film-making. There's a passion that hovers over the jam-packed screenings and parties in Park City, and because so much is new and unknown, there's a real sense as the lights go down that you could be about to see something special. Sex, Lies and Videotape, Reservoir Dogs, The Blair Witch Project, Memento and Napoleon Dynamite all came out of Sundance - who knows what will emerge this year.
The festival opens with Chicago 10, Brett 'The Kid Stays in the Picture' Morgen's documentary about the 1968 anti-Vietnam war protests in the US. Let's be honest, it sounds a bit worthy (ie dull), so I'll give this one a miss. Far more appetising are titles featuring some of the better actors working today. Three performances are already being singled out as possible Oscar contenders for 2008: Catherine Keener as the murderous Indiana single mother Gertrude Baniszewski in the true-life drama An American Crime; John Cusack as a father of two whose wife has just been killed in the Iraq in Grace Is Gone; and our very own Jim Broadbent as the eponymous Lord Longford, the former cabinet minister and campaigner who formed a controversial bond with Moors murderer Myra Hindley.
Indie darlings Philip Seymour Hoffman and Laura Linney are expected to serve up a delicious treat as squabbling adult siblings in The Savages, while Dakota Fanning promises to dispel her Disneyfied persona by playing a rape victim in Hounddog. What else? Teeth chows down on the vagina dentata myth, Meryl Streep plays a university patron who helps a brilliant Chinese student in Dark Matter, Kevin Kline reinvents himself as a Texan cop on the trail of human traffickers in Trade, and Jared Leto gains 50lbs to play John Lennon's killer Mark David Chapman in Chapter 27.
There are plenty more, and once the festival gets underway new must-sees will emerge. Definitely worth a few blisters.
