Sundance 2009: The Truth Was Out There

Everyone at the Sundance Film Festival is looking for something. Filmmakers are looking for distributors....

“World’s Greatest Dad” asks a similar question: is it better to act like a good person or to act improperly in order to be thought of by others as good person? The man pondering that dilemma is Lance Clayton (Robin Williams); he spends his days as a high school English teacher and frustrated writer. When his utter douchebag of a son, Kyle (played by Daryl Sabara, a long way from his days as an angelic, chubby crime fighter in the “Spy Kids” series), dies of an overindulgence of autoerotic asphyxiation, Lance makes his death look like a suicide, and writes a heartfelt note to complete the illusion. But when the note leaks to the high school newspaper, Kyle the outcast becomes Kyle the folk hero, and Lance, writing as Kyle, suddenly finds a path to becoming the literary giant he’s always dreamed of becoming. This sordid affair was written and directed by Bobcat Goldthwait, who previously assaulted the sensibilities of Sundance audiences with the bestiality comedy (or a beastialedy?) “Stay,” later renamed “Sleeping Dogs Lie” post-Sundance. His premise is flat-out brilliant, but the execution needs work; the subject matter may be taboo, but Goldthwait’s directing remains shockingly pedestrian and, at times, weirdly literal — for instance, when the high school collectively discovers Kyle’s note, a montage of students and faculty reading it while the teen’s ghost hovers nearby is scored to a song that declares “I hope I become a ghost.” The film works best as a showcase for Williams, working (thankfully) in a lower key than his default comic mode, as a man so unsure of himself he can’t even hold a slice of pizza properly. Like Stew in “Passing Strange,” Lance tries to write his way out of a pedestrian life; like Stew, he comes to regret his reinvention.

Lance comes to decide that “the worst thing in life is ending up with people who make you feel all alone,” an attitude that would surely be shared by Sam Bell, the character played by Sam Rockwell in the clever science-fiction picture “Moon.” Bell is the sole human inhabitant of a moon base dedicated to harvesting lunar rocks to supply clean-burning fuel in the near future. Closing in on the end of a three-year contract of mind-bending solitude, Bell begins to hallucinate; after an accident in a rover, he awakens to discover that he is no longer alone on the base. Discussing how “Moon” relates to the rest of these films is difficult without spoiling the film’s twists, but Bell, too, is faced with a dilemma that forces him to confront the truth about himself and his time in space, and forces the audience to decide again whether “the real” can come in a source entirely artificial. And like “World’s Greatest Dad,” “Moon” is most effective as a forum for a lead performance, in this case, for the remarkable Rockwell, who spends the entire movie reacting to robots, videos, and figments of his imagination that were only given life in post-production. All of these high-tech shenanigans were brought to convincing life by director Duncan Jones (son of “Space Oddity” David Bowie), but the movie could have looked half as good and still worked thanks to Rockwell’s nuanced performance. His talents are the movie’s greatest special effect.

The effects in the documentary-romantic comedy hybrid “Paper Heart” are of a much lower quality, quite purposefully, but the line between actuality and artificiality is just as blurry. Comedienne Charlyne Yi stars as Charlyne Yi; her real-life boyfriend Michael Cera plays Michael Cera. Their relationship is presented as if captured by a documentary crew following Yi on her quest to discover the nature of love, after years of refusing to believe in the concept. Yi and Cera’s interactions are entirely scripted (or as scripted as improvised comedy gets), but scenes with Yi engaging ordinary folks and discussing their love lives (with handmade, lo-fi paper doll reenactments of their most important stories) are not. Director Nicholas Jasenovec keeps upsetting the film’s apple cart of verisimilitude — a date between Yi and Cera seemingly occurring without the presence of the documentarians ends with Cera turning to an off-camera source and asking if they want his microphone back. As Cera and Yi’s relationship deepens, their relationship to the film crew and the onscreen Nick Jasenovec (played nicely by Jake Johnson) breaks down in ways that feel like a critique of reality television techniques: the characters don’t go to Paris, they’re sent to Paris by the production because it will add some nice romantic flavor to the documentary’s finale. Many critics I respect felt “Paper Heart” terminally twee and Yi’s onscreen naïveté grating. I found something affecting in Yi’s presence and her dates with Cera (who’s in typically low-key, charming form) genuinely romantic, even if the events themselves were complete fabrications, as if, as Stew is told in “Passing Strange”‘s section set in Germany, “only love is real.”

Whether or not this theme is relevant to the outside world, whether or not these films will resonate with wider audiences (and I suspect some will more than others), whether they connect to the mood of Obama America, they felt incredibly relevant at Sundance. Everyone there is wondering about “the real.” Was that movie really good? What did you think? Are people really going to buy that? Did I really just see Patton Oswalt inside the Main Street Pizza & Noodle? By the man’s own admission, yes.

[Additional photos: "In the Loop," IFC Films, 2009; "Paper Heart," Paper Heart Productions, 2009]

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