Park City Rocker

Our intrepid film critic reports on the best of this year's Sundance Film Festival.

by Sam Adams

DEATH WISH: Tom Hardy plays "Britain's most famous prisoner," a ferocious man who lives in a constant state of rage, in Bronson.

Given the shark-tank clusterfuck that Sundance can sometimes seem, it's fitting that the best movie at this year's festival was a scabrous, foul-mouthed satire about midlevel functionaries scrumming for political power. The first feature by British comedy veteran Armando Iannucci, In the Loop is a transatlantic farce about the drunken march to war, a manic tragicomedy whose most outrageous moments are rooted firmly in truth.

Iannucci, who helped create Steve Coogan's unctuous talk-show host Alan Partridge, is a master of the comedy of cringe, and he's never worked closer to the nerve that he does here. In the Loop is an outgrowth of Iannucci's BBC series, The Thick of It, a frenzied, doc-style piss-take on parliamentary politics, but the movie broadens the scope and raises the stakes. The series is premised on the notion that the vast majority of governance is consumed with bureaucratic foofaraw, but the petty squabbles of In the Loop have far-reaching consequences.

In the Loop adds Americans to the dramatis personae: a dovish general (James Gandolfini), a Rumsfeldian State Department honcho (David Rasche, last seen in the similarly bleak Burn After Reading), and a plethora of think-tank-trained true believers whose youth and uncomplicated loyalties have vaulted them past more experienced, less cooperative staffers. As one incredulous Brit remarks, "It's like Bugsy Malone, but with real guns."

Yanks aside, though, the show is unquestionably stolen by Peter Capaldi, reprising his role as The Thick of It's volcanic press czar Malcolm Tucker, whose scorched-earth tirades reduce many a luckless opponent to smoke and ash. The ultimate political gamesman, Malcolm lives for the thrill of combat, most fully engaged when his blood is at a boil. Conscience and even ideology take a back seat to blood sport.

More terrifying, if only by a whisker, is Tom Hardy's turn in Bronson, a violent, operatic character study that is equal parts Derek Jarman and A Clockwork Orange. Nicholas Winding Refn, of Pusher trilogy fame, treats the story of "Britain's most famous prisoner" as an antihero origin myth. The previously unremarked Hardy gives an incandescent performance as Charles Bronson (née Michael Peterson), a feral, uncontainable beast of a man whose ferocity seems boundless. Heedlessly assaulting prison guards with no apparent regard for his own well-being, he lives in a state of constant rage, his energy matched only by that of the film itself. Vicious and purposefully amoral, Bronson is hardly a crowd-pleaser, but there's a fierce and passionate cult audience just waiting to discover it.

JONESIN': Gabourey Sidibe plays a sexually abused teen in Philly native Lee Daniels' award-winning Push.

Stylistic excess and barbed-wire performances enliven Lee Daniels' Push: Based on the Novel by Sapphire, which took the festival's top dramatic and audience awards as well as a special prize for star Mo'Nique. The story of Clarice "Precious" Jones (newcomer Gabourey Sidibe), an obese Harlem teen who is pregnant with the second child conceived by her abusive father, Sapphire's novel is, practically speaking, unfilmable, but Daniels cushions its blows without softening them. Precious' violent and monstrous mother (Mo'Nique) still demands sexual satisfaction from her own daughter, but her desires are fulfilled offscreen.

HALF OFF DEPOT

Why live life at full price?

The West Philly-raised Daniels headed a cast of Sundance locals that included former WYSP DJ Ross Katz, making his directorial debut with the home-front drama Taking Chance (due on HBO Feb. 21) and writer David Brind, whose threefold exploration of teenage sexuality, Dare, was shot mainly on the Main Line.

This year's crop of Sundance entries logged a goodly amount of time on the outer fringes of sexuality. Lynn Shelton's Humpday was the festival's most talked-about title, with the story of two longtime friends (Baghead co-director Mark Duplass and The Blair Witch Project's Joshua Leonard) who decide to make a gay porn film. Exactly why these two straight dudes choose to get it on is a question the movie doesn't, and probably can't, answer, but however cracked its premise, Shelton's film plays out with utter conviction from that point on. The relationship between Duplass' straight arrow and Leonard's bushy-bearded wanderer brought scads of Old Joy comparisons, but Shelton's all-improv method is closer to Mike Leigh, with a less controlling hand on the tiller.

The festival's worst-kept secret was the unannounced sneak preview of Steven Soderbergh's The Girlfriend Experience, which sold out despite the director's coy denials. Starring porn queen Sasha Grey as a business-minded New York escort, the movie crosses the static log shots of Bubble with the scrambled chronology of The Limey in the service of a bleak and alienated portrayal of a society where sex has become synonymous with currency. (The unexplained title refers to prostitutes who offer simulated romance as well as sexual gratification.) Immaculately shot with the same HD Red camera used on Che, Girlfriend is a deliberately chilly affair whose lack of climax can be construed as a conceptual coup. At least at this press-packed screening, the most forceful release came in the form of laughter, when critic Glenn Kenny turned up as a sleazebag blogger who demands a "review copy" of Grey's services in exchange for a positive notice.

Making more intimate use of video, Boy Interrupted and Burma VJ turn their cameras on personal and national tragedy. The latter, directed by Anders stergaard, is comprised mostly of footage shot by the Democratic Voice of Burma that bears witness to the brutal repression of the 2007 protests against the country's military dictatorship. Using a cannily restaged framing sequence to protect his subjects' identities, stergaard creates a testament to the power of technology to combat totalitarianism, and a demarcation of the precise point at which it becomes insufficient.

The existence of Boy Interrupted is as unimaginable as the story it tells. Shot by Dana Heinz Perry and her husband, Hart Perry, the film looks back at the suicide of their 15-year-old son, Evan. The film is a story of triumph as well as tragedy. Evan, whose paternal uncle killed himself at the age of 21, had been obsessed with ending his life since the age of 7. Until the fateful decision to try taking him off his meds, Evan's family had managed to bring their son to a state of relative peace, and his friends pay eloquent tribute to his passion and creativity. The film's Q&A was filled with parents who'd either been through or narrowly escaped similar circumstances, an outpouring that reduced the rest of the room to respectful silence.

(s_adams@citypaper.net)