Still, there were some real reasons to cheer at Sundance 2000. For one, the general level of competence was higher than it has been in years, though there was no breakout sensation like “Reservoir Dogs.” For another, the invading armies of Hollywood agents, hustlers and wanna-be filmmakers are no longer wearing their baseball caps backward.
The shared Grand Jury Prize for best feature film actually went to the two best films in competition. Karyn Kusama’s delightfully unladylike “Girlfight” is a potent mixture of Old Hollywood boy-meets-girl formula and indie grit. It introduced the strikingly sultry Michelle Rodriguez as the macho heroine Diana Guzman, a pugnacious Brooklyn high-school student who takes up boxing to channel her rage, and ends up duking it out in the ring with the handsome boxer she’s fallen in love with. Somewhat more subtle was the quirkily charming “You Can Count on Me” from writer-director Kenneth Lonergan. Laura Linney and Mark Ruffalo play a brother and sister who lost both their parents at an early age. She’s stayed in the family home, a single mother raising a son. He’s a wandering loser who comes back to the small town where she lives. Funny and unpredictable, this sharply written comedy about loving but incompatible siblings features characters who surprise and delight us at every turn.
But the true gems this year were the documentaries. Perhaps the most remarkable was the triple-prize-winning “Dark Days.” Made by Marc Singer, a young Brit who didn’t even know how to load a camera when he started filming, it’s a portrait of the homeless men and women who lived in the train tunnels under New York City. Singer spent two years down there with them, using his subjects as his film crew. This 84-minute black-and-white film is harrowing and at times weirdly funny–a portrait of the down and out that is strikingly honest, uncondescending and unsentimental. Astonishingly, it has a genuinely happy ending. Also not to be missed is the devastating “Paragraph 175,” an elegant and powerful examination of the Nazi’s persecution of homosexuals. On the lighter side was the RuPaul-narrated “The Eyes of Tammy Faye.” Audiences expecting a hatchet job on the heavily mascara’d evangelical diva Tammy Faye Bakker came away seduced by her garish gallantry. It may be more a PR job than a rigorous investigation, but it sure is fun. The villain of the piece is Jerry Falwell, portrayed as an unctuous, scheming hypocrite. How can fiction compete with a figure like that?
