Yesterday, for the first time in my six years at Sundance, I finally saw festival founder Robert Redford. Sure, it was through a window from the street, as he was conducting an interview and/or Q&A, but that still counts. Cross that off the list, and call my mother.
Slightly more of a downer, my last film on Monday, Martha Marcy May Marlene, stars the Olsen twins’ younger sister Elizabeth (who looks like a non-alien, healthy version of Mary-Kate and Ashley) as a young woman who has just escaped from an abusive cult in the Catskills, taking shelter at her older sister’s summer home in Connecticut. Olsen gives a strong performance, fully embodying the fear and isolation of a damaged, brainwashed woman, and along with her other Sundance film (Silent House), she’s quickly emerging as an indie It Girl.
Photo: Drew Innis
The cult leader is played by John Hawkes, who is in basically every movie at the festival and just got his first Oscar nom for last year’s Sundance winner Winter’s Bone. Martha Marcy May Marlene could be tightened up just a little bit (see the title), but besides that, writer-director Sean Durkin has crafted an affecting thriller and a much more effective portrait of paranoia and anxiety than Black Swan.
Photo: Steve Arnold
This morning started with a brief snowstorm and Australian drama Mad Bastards, in which a rough-and-tumble dad tries to reconnect with his estranged thirteen-year-old son, in the hopes of keeping him on the straight and narrow. More than just one family’s story, it’s also a look at the troubles (drinking, violence, etc.) within Aboriginal communities in the country’s northern Kimberly region. The film features lots of locals as actors and (best of all) the music of the Pigram Brothers. I caught most of their set at ASCAP’s music cafe on Monday, and the band’s folk-blues-rock was more than enough to get me interested in the movie. Suffice it to say to live performances are well-incorporated into Brendan Fletcher’s quietly powerful film.
And then there was Like Crazy, which aims to be this year’s 500 Days of Summer, in that it covers a youthful love story that only exists in fits and starts. Jacob (Anton Yelchin) meets Anna (Felicity Jones), a Brit, while they’re both in college in LA, and they have an immediate, powerful romance…until they graduate, Anna’s visa expires, and the couple has to figure out how things are going to work going forward. Unlike 500 Days of Summer, Like Crazy is told linearly, but it stretches over the course of years, as they’re together and apart. The film smacks of the bittersweet truths of young love, both the good and bad, the tender moments and the stupid, ugly fights. It’s not always comfortable, but it’s a charmer.