Late Show

The real gems at this year's Sundance came when no one expected them.

by Sam Adams

[ sundance film festival ]

Conventional wisdom is that the Sundance Film Festival is over by the end of the first weekend. Sure, the festival runs for 10 days, with more than a week to go at that aforementioned point, but the festival's programmers deliberately front-load the opening weekend for maximum coverage, which means that come Monday, the only way to get a fancy new coat or a bag full of pricey skin cleanser is to (gasp!) buy one.

This year, things were just warming up. While some of the higher-profile titles, like The Runaways, starring Kristen Stewart and Dakota Fanning, and Michael Winterbottom's adaptation of Jim Thompson's blood-soaked noir The Killer Inside Me, met with cool if not hostile reactions (we'll come back to that), a handful of unknowns emerged from the pack and climbed to the top of the heap.

The closest thing to a bona fide overnight success was the breakout documentary Catfish, which went from a question mark to one of Sundance's most-talked-about titles. Much of that talking was done in hushed tones, or after a careful check with surrounding parties, since the film's unpredictable surprises are a large part of its engrossing story, but it's safe to relate that Henry Joost and Ariel Schulman's film follows the evolving online relationship between Schulman's younger brother, Yaniv, and a woman in rural Michigan. What emerges isn't as surprising as the mixture of doggedness and compassion with which the filmmakers pursue their subjects.

Equally surprising, if less nonfictional, is Vincenzo Natali's Splice, a genetic-engineering thriller in which hotshot scientists Sarah Polley and Adrien Brody crossbreed themselves a mutant child. Although it draws on a history of cautionary Frankenstein tales (not for nothing is Polley's character named Elsa), the film never goes quite where you think — and, even better, does so without resorting to the arbitrary twists that too frequently substitute for genuine imagination. Natali hasn't made much of a splash since the follow-up to his much-buzzed debut, Cube, fell victim to the caprices of the Weinstein brothers, but Splice balances the mundane and the mythic with as much grace as Steven Spielberg in his prime.

Thanks to its modish nested chronologies, you know where locally shot Blue Valentine is headed, but that doesn't make the trip there less harrowing. Michelle Williams and Ryan Gosling play two halves of a failing couple — she a middle-class wannabe nurse, he a mover and house-painter whose greatest aspiration is to care for his wife and daughter. Writer-director Derek Cianfrance doesn't spare either character from the camera's penetrating gaze, and steers clear of easy — and arguably any — explanation for their marriage's disintegration. The movie's observational approach flirts with superficiality, but Williams and Gosling bring every emotion close to the skin.

Winterbottom's Killer certainly managed to get a rise out of the audience; immediately after the screening, an older woman berated him for making the film and the festival for programming it. Thompson's black, brutally funny portrait of a pathological small-town sheriff (Casey Affleck) is meant to provoke, but the movie never manages to put you in his shoes. The graphic onscreen beatings are suitably appalling, but in the book, you're watching them from the inside.

Sundance's greatest provocation was Four Lions, co-written and directed by British comedian Chris Morris, who comes from the same satirical background as Steve Coogan and In the Loop's Armando Iannucci. Morris' TV work, like his brilliant Brass Eye, cuts close to the bone, hoaxing politicians and celebrities into endorsing phony causes, like a crusade against the deadly drug "Cake." Famously, he satirized anti-pedophilia hysteria by getting Phil Collins and others to sign on to a fictitious charity called "Nonce Sense," prompting a lawsuit and a record number of complaints to the BBC. Four Lions, the story of a group of British jihadis, isn't as incessantly caustic as some of Morris' most incendiary satires, but its complexity of tone is stunning, ranging from outright slapstick to tragic farce. Morris manages to encompass the absurdity and the profound toxicity of religious extremism, overlaying them on top of each other until you don't know which end is up. Distributors have been chary about picking up the film, but the lucky company will be rewarded — in the next life, if not this one.

(s_adams@citypaper.net)