Streetwise

At Sundance, a West Philly filmmaker's doc gets a well-deserved nod.

by Sam Adams

[ film ]

Sundance reporting is all about trends: the new indie It Girl; how many movies touch on this or that subject; what sells, for how much and to whom. But one that slipped by unnoticed this year is that directors from Philly have taken home some of the festival’s top honors in two of the last three years. In 2009, it was Lee Daniels with the thrice-crowned Precious, and this year, West Philadelphian Jon Foy was awarded the documentary direction prize for Resurrect Dead: The Mystery of the Toynbee Tiles.

If you’ve lived in the city awhile, you need no introduction to the Toynbee tiles, though it couldn't hurt to jog your memory. Embedded in asphalt all over the city (try 19th and JFK for starters), they have been broadcasting their message for more than two decades: "TOYNBEE IDEA / IN MOVIE 2001 / RESURRECT DEAD / ON PLANET JUPITER." Turns out, similar tiles have been found from Boston to Kansas City, Mo., and as far afield as Buenos Aires. But they're nowhere so numerous as in Philadelphia, which is why Foy, who was raised in Willow Grove, dropped out of film school in Austin and moved back to Philadelphia to hunt for the Toynbee tiler.

For five years, Foy cleaned houses for Homeworks and worked as a human guinea pig for medical studies at Penn and Drexel to finance the film. (As if that weren’t West Philly enough, one of the first things Foy did after he was admitted into Sundance was quit stocking shelves at the Mariposa Co-op.) The protagonist is local artist and musician Justin Duerr (of the band Northern Liberties), who has been hunting for the origin of the tiles since the early 1990s. While Resurrect Dead stops short of a definitive solution to the Toynbee tiles mystery, it constructs a compelling hypothesis that manages to be wholly satisfying while still leaving major questions unanswered.

Also winning a special documentary prize was Leonard Retel Helmrich's Position Among the Stars, the final third of a trilogy about an impoverished Indonesian family. Helmrich’s films are vérité in their noninterventionist approach, but through the use of ingenious camera rigs including makeshift cranes made from bamboo stalks, he garners incredible shots that lend the family's life an epic quality. Over the course of the three films, Helmrich has delved so deeply into their lives that you still feel as if you've left them too soon.

It’s possible I’m not entirely objective about Matthew Bates' documentary Shut Up Little Man!, but I was with it from the opening audio montage — more specifically from the second I heard the voice of the bartender whose apoplectic response to crank phone calls has gone down in tape-trading history. As any aficionado of audio vérité knows, the films title comes from the surreptitiously taped quarrels between dyspeptic roommates Raymond and Peter, whose thunderous arguments were recorded through the paper-thin walls of their San Francisco shitbox.

Speaking of It Girls — where Sundance is concerned, a contractual obligation — this year's most deserving candidate was Elizabeth Olsen, who held down the lead in the single-shot horror Silent House and the post-cult decompression drama Martha Marcy May Marlene. That Olsen is the younger sibling to tween dynasts Mary-Kate and Ashley accounts for the initial interest, but before long people were talking about her supremely self-possessed and layered performances and not her bloodline.

If it's an It Boy you seek, look no further than Joshua Leonard, who played the Jesus freak husband in Vera Farmiga's directorial debut, Higher Ground, as well as directing and starring in the unjustly overlooked The Lie. Working from Carolyn Briggs' memoir This Dark World, Farmiga charts the course of a woman who finds and loses faith amid the hippie-inflected Christianity of the 1970s. Although its narrative could have used more shape, the film is remarkable for its matter-of-fact treatment of religious belief; when Farmiga's character begs the Holy Spirit to make itself known, she sounds as if she's talking to a tardy child. Intriguingly, the film's lack of mysticism led some critics to condemn it for treating the Jesus freak movement like a cult, a wrong-headed but revealing charge that points up just how rare it is to depict religion as an ordinary part of daily life.

From a thumbnail sketch, The Lie might sound insufferably glib: A new father, feeling his countercultural ideals drowning in a sea of middle-class responsibility, is so desperate for a break that he tells his co-workers his baby has died. But from that cringe-worthy premise, taken from a T. Coraghessan Boyle story, Leonard and his cast mine thoughtful insights as well as uncomfortable comedy. With Jess Weixler and Mark Webber, Leonard receives script credit for improvising his character (the screenplay is credited to Devil and Daniel Johnston director Jeff Feuerzig), which no doubt accounts for the film’s richness and lived-in wisdom.

With clockwork regularity, the festival’s hothouse atmosphere turns minor mediocrities into fleeting sensations, a fate that this year befell Drake Doremus' long-distance tearjerker Like Crazy. Starring the ever-colorless Anton Yelchin and a tightly wound Felicity Jones, the movie charts the seesawing progress of a trans-Atlantic romance imperiled by the vagaries of student visas and work permits. Doremus, who previously directed the directionless Douchebag, drew inspiration from his own relationship, which accounts perhaps for the shapeless literal-mindedness with which the film transcribes the pair's back-and-forth pas de deux. But his leads can’t convey the depth of feeling necessary to make the tedious up-down worth staying involved with. Nonetheless, Like Crazy nabbed a $4 million distribution deal and the festival’s Grand Jury Prize, as well as acting honors for Jones. (Considering that Martha Marcy May Marlene was in competition, Olsen wuz robbed.)

Miranda July's days as a Sundance sensation may be behind her, but The Future was a singularly impressive second act. Building on the perilously precious but miraculously inoffensive tone of Me and You and Everyone We Know, July brought adult concerns and a dash of libido to the story of a thirtysomething couple (July and Hamish Linklater) uncomfortably confronting the rest of their lives. You'd be forgiven for pulling the rip cord the second you learn that the film is narrated by a croaky-voiced cat, but after The Future it's clear that July's ingenuousness is polemical and not naïve; she's forcing you to drop your defenses rather than taking refuge in nonexistent innocence. The post-screening discussion was dominated by viewers asking July to clarify this or that point, but she wisely refrained. The questions she doesn’t answer are the ones most worth asking.

(s_adams@citypaper.net)