Movie Enthusiast Issue 46: Sundance 2018 in Review
Another year, another Sundance! The annual festival of independent narrative and documentary films took place this year from January 18 to January 28, as it always does, in Park City, Utah. For those who are just joining us or may need some refreshing, Sundance programs films in a dozen or so different categories, the distinctions between which don't entirely make sense from the outside. (In other words, don’t ask me to explain how a movie qualifies for the U.S. Dramatic Competition category over the Premieres category.)
Because of this choose-your-own-adventure format, no two people who go to Sundance (or any mid- to large-size film festival) experience the same festival. That said, the general feeling emanating from this year’s Sundance was…“meh.”
This year I kept up with the festival mostly from Nicolas Rapold and Eric Hynes’ daily coverage for the Film Comment podcast. Both are regulars to the festival who have been to this rodeo enough times in the past to be able to put a finger on trends as they come and go. This year they agreed that what we come to think of as a “Sundance movie” can be summed up as a lab-tested, well-executed screenplay. Lab-tested is the key part here: despite seeing a lot of movies with solid scripts, neither of them was especially bowled over by anything they had seen. (Amy Taubin, who joined them for the podcast on day 7, snipped with a bit more exasperation: “It's almost like they invented first-time filmmakers here.”)
All that said, there were a few films worth highlighting. You’ve probably already heard about Hereditary, a horror film which already has a trailer and will be released by A24 this June. I’ve avoided plot details (I mean, it’s a horror film, why would you ruin it for yourself?) but my understanding of this movie is that it delivers much more than what the tired “Hereditary is the best horror film in ages” headlines that graced the front pages of every film-news website after its premiere have promised. You may not hear as much about the post-apocalyptic I Think We’re Alone Now, starring Peter Dinklage and Elle Fanning and directed by Reed Morano, whose previous credits are primarily as a cinematographer (notably for The Skeleton Twins, Kill Your Darlings, and parts of Lemonade). If you like movies that are some grim they're practically begging you not to like them, that’s the one for you!
The winner of this year’s Grand Jury Prize (which in recent years has gone to the likes of Whiplash, Fruitvale Station, and the immediately-forgotten I Don’t Feel at Home in This World Anymore and Me and Earl and the Dying Girl) was Desiree Akhavan’s sophomore feature, The Miseducation of Cameron Post. The film stars Chloë Grace Moretz as a girl from an Evangelical family who is sent to gay-conversion therapy. Intriguingly, this is one of two movies coming out this year (pun not intended, who do you take me for) based on memoirs of ex-Evangelicals who endured gay conversion therapy, the other being the forthcoming Boy Erased. I don’t know about you but I’m getting hives just thinking about all the thinkpieces that are going to pile up about these movies by the end of the year. (Although I might even write one myself, so who am I to talk.)
Whether Cameron Post is any good or not is up for debate, but there’s a bit more consensus that no movie at Sundance this year was better than Madeline’s Madeline, a film which, Proustian connotations aside, explores mental illness in what I’ve heard are some astonishingly inventive ways. Again, I am a spoilerphobe who reads almost nothing into the actual details of these things, but if you’re even vaguely interested in the topic (I know it also involves a lot of theater), pencil this one in onto your watchlist. Fans of Laura Dern should also make note of The Tale, about a journalist who confronts a lifetime of false memories she had created as a defense mechanism against abuse she endured in her childhood.
On the documentary side of things, RBG was the kind of crowd-pleaser you would expect a movie about blue America’s favorite Supreme Court Justice to be. The Grand Jury Prize winner for documentaries went to Kailash, which I had heard nothing about during the actual festival, but which sounds like a pretty harrowing tear-jerker of doc (it’s about a Nobel Prize winner who carries out rescue missions to free children from slave labor in India). There was also a doc about M.I.A. (yes, the Paper Planes gal)—Matangi/Maya/M.I.A.—comprised of home-video footage the singer and her friends have taken in the past two decades. The most important thing to know about this movie is that, at the Q&A after its premiere, M.I.A. started voicing a ton of complaints to the director (who’s a friend!) about all the things she wish he had done differently. It’s a free country, I guess, but I wouldn’t highly recommend chewing a friend out like that in public, uh, five minutes after the world premiere of his film. And on what feels like the same wavelength as Cameron Post, Believer chronicles a year in the life of a gay man in the Mormon church.
If there were any other truly noteworthy movies from this year’s Sundance, we’ll probably only learn about them in 5–8 months’ time, after they’ve found their audiences at various smaller festivals and on demand. For my part, I’m intrigued by Lizzie, a 19th-century Massachusetts period piece with Chloë Sevigny and Kristen Stewart, Beirut, a CIA thriller with Jon Hamm and Rosamund Pike from Michael Clayton screenwriter Tony Gilroy, Leave No Trace, the first narrative film from Debra Granik since her Oscar-nominated Winter’s Bone, Tully, the first reteaming of Jason Reitman, Diablo Cody, and Charlize Theron since 2011’s Young Adult, Colette, wherein Keira Knightley plays the French author of La Vagabonde, and Ophelia, in which Rey from Star Wars plays Hamlet’s main squeeze and fakes her death to outlive the rest of her maligned Danish countrymen. That last one might actually be terrible for all I know, but we’re all entitled to a little bit of dread curiosity now and then, right?