The Year of Apolitical Cinema?

Have indie films gotten soft? This year's big-buzz titles tend to be the movie equivalent of comfort food.

Indeed, what’s not to like about films that don’t take a stand on the controversies of the day or take the bold leap to challenge the viewer?

You might expect the documentary world, at least, to air our society’s grievances with a sharper and stronger edge. But two of the most widely seen nonfiction films of 2009 address that always-contentious topic: fashion (“The September Issue” and “Valentino: The Last Emperor”).

Even “Food, Inc.,” the year’s second highest-grossing doc, seems like the perfect candidate to energize progressives against corporate evils, but the movie, with its even-keel arguments and ultimately wholesome outlook on what we can all do to eat well if we’re privileged enough to afford to, is largely the cinematic equivalent of “comfort food.” (If you really want Americans to swear off mass-produced food, show them George Franju’s gory 1949 short “Blood of the Beasts.”)

In separate conversations over the last couple weeks, two veteran film executives have used this notion of “comfort food” to describe the type of film that audiences currently want. “In the early days,” one distributor said, “being a controversial film was ‘manna.’ Now, people want to get away from controversy.” The reason, he suggested, may be the fact that Americans — even progressives — are so inundated with politics as a result of the 24-hour news cycle that they’re seeking movies primarily for escape rather than illumination.

This is a familiar argument, and it helps justify the decisions of distributors to support less risky cinema — particularly at a troubling economic moment when few companies are comfortable taking on the unconventional. In so doing, of course, this only sustains the cinematic status quo; like a dog chasing its tail, the film industry doesn’t realize they’re in a rut until they’re too exhausted to change course.

Why a film like Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck’s “Sugar” hasn’t been more embraced this year shows just how deficient we are in embracing the politically or formally daring. “Sugar” doesn’t just explore issues of capitalist exploitation and cultural dislocation in its humanist chronicle of an aspiring Dominican baseball player, but structurally, the movie’s third act pulls a fast one on the viewer that no other film has had the balls to do in a while. “Sugar” has the courage to not give the viewer what they want or expect — a characteristic that so few filmmakers or distributors (and complacent audiences, too) realize is a virtue.

[Additional photos: "The Messenger," Oscilloscope, 2009; Algenis Perez Soto in "Sugar," Sony Pictures Classics, 2009]

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