Sundance 2023
Last week, I went to Salt Lake City for the Sundance Film Festival.
I’m normally reticent about reviewing movies.
I’m afraid that if I didn’t like a highly-acclaimed movie, it’s just because I didn’t get it.
(Sometimes I also think that about movies I do like.
Like I missed the point but by coincidence also liked it for another reason.)
But these festival movies feel like they exist outside the realm of normal movies.
Hardly anyone has seen them yet and can tell me I’m wrong.
Even if, later on, I turn out to disagree with the consensus, I bet they’ll cut me some slack because I saw it before people had agreed what to think about it.
That said, reviews of any kind are a new format to me, so bear with me.
I probably overrated everything since I was so jazzed to be there.
Spoilers abound.
A Still Small Voice
A Still Small Voice is a documentary about Mati, a hospital chaplain-in-training, and her supervisor, David.
It is centered on her conversations in the patients at Mt. Sinai and the meetings with David and the others in her cohort.
I’ve long been aware of the existence of hospital chaplains, but until watching this, I never realized how much they (at least this brand) are exactly what I thought they were.
Mati, though raised in an orthodox environment and knowledgeable about religion, is nonreligious.
Her job is to comfort the sorrowful using whichever fungible belief system lets her help them assign a higher meaning to it.
For a grieving widow on the phone, that means sharing her personal belief that death is the end.
For a young couple who lost a twin in childbirth, that means grabbing a Christian book of rites and performing an impromptu baptism.
For many patients, it just means listening.
The whole vocation selects for the most empathetic, most sensitive, and most agreeable people.
This comes across as clearly in the meetings among chaplains as with their patients.
The cohort has a regular group therapy meeting facilitated by David where they join each other in anger, helplessness, frustration, etc. even when they appear to be checked out.
Especially in the one-on-one meetings, they were all maddeningly obsequious to each other’s feelings.
(I’m not sure I could be friends with someone who tried so hard not to hurt my feelings).
Also maddening, before every meeting, they took a moment to center themselves.
When they felt present, they’d say, “I’m here” (a familiar clarification for the Zoom meetings).
It came across so automatic and clinical, but I wonder whether there isn’t some value to the ritual as practice because it strongly affected some patients.
Then again Mati and David’s falling out at the end reminded me how unnatural it is to calmly say, “I’m feeling angry”.
All the shots of their fingers fidgeting felt like a prefigurement of that fight.
As a bonus, I think the app I used to work on made a few-frame cameo.
Also, after the Q&A, I learned that almost everyone else in the theater was or had been a chaplain because they all took a group photo.
The Eternal Memory
The Eternal Memory is a documentary about Paulina Urrutia taking care of her husband, Augusto Gongora, a famous Chilean journalist and TV presenter with Alzheimer’s.
When I set up my schedule, it didn’t occur to me that I was watching two medical documentaries back-to-back.
If the theater were closer, I would left to see The Deepest Breath, but I’m glad I stayed.
The Eternal Memory follows the couple’s daily life, taking walks, going to Pauli’s plays and rehearsals, reminding Augusto of his family and where he lives.
It was a palette cleanser after the uncanniness of A Still Small Voice.
Whereas the chaplains’ job is to sort of manufacture personal connection, Pauli and Augusto have a real 23 year history together despite Augusto’s memory.
This is a clear exhibit of Paul Bloom’s empathy / compassion dichotomy.
The chaplains empathize with the patients (maybe necessarily) to understand how to help them.
Pauli cares for, supports, and loves Augusto, but she doesn’t try to feel his pain.
That would be destructive to her and ruinous to their relationship.
Frankly, she has plenty of her own pain from her husband not always recognizing her (pain from which Augusto himself sometimes comforts her!)
I’m sure much of the context was lost on me.
Without knowledge of Chilean history, it felt like spending an hour with very cute grandparents.
They flirt and Pauli reminds Augusto of their first date.
At one point, she reads a note he wrote to her in the front of one of his books about how it is vital for a country to remember its history.
Important, perhaps, but not vital.
Though both Chile and Augusto Gongora have lost their identities whether through corruption and regime change or Alzheimer’s, they are nevertheless able to preserve some of their essence.
Eileen
I’ve actually decided to try not to spoil Eileen because it’s the best movie here that people might actually watch.
Going in, all that I knew was that it was based on a book with a traditional structure by Otessa Moshfegh.
Eileen is a boring, plain protagonist living with her alcoholic ex-police chief father when she meets Anne Hath–I mean Rebecca, the svelte new Harvard psychoanalyst (quack(?)) at the boys prison where she works.
It’s a typical manic pixie dream girl story that appeals to my sense of humor, superiority complex, and love of routine (and sweets).
(This is what I’m talking about!
I know it’s not about the routine, but I can’t help but admire it.)
Thomasin McKenzie is perfectly cast in the superposition of main character and “person just filling up space”.
Watch Eileen to see the wave function collapse!
Cat Person
David Sims’s Letterboxd review is, “there hasn’t been a third act collapse this bad since Clippers-Rockets 2015”.
I’m not familiar with the game, but I imagine it was middling with a few good moments until the end when all the players and the ref spontaneously caught fire.
Cat Person, based on the 2017 New Yorker story of the same name, is the story of Margot a college sophomore working at a movie theater concession stand, and her brief, tumultuous fling with Robert, a very tall, awkward man who’s a little older than you thought he would be.
The original author, screenwriter, and director gave an introduction before the screening where they talked about how crazy it was that the short story went viral and how many important conversations it started.
You can imagine my surprise when I saw they threw out everything that made the short story relatable or insightful.
It opened with the famous quote, “Men are afraid women will laugh at them. Women are afraid men will kill them.”
I would never argue with Margaret Atwood, but the movie convinced me that the quote isn’t quite the gotcha people think it is.
Using J Evans Pritchard PhD logic, we can measure fears along two dimensions: how bad it would be for the fear to be realized, and how likely it will be.
Neither feels good, but there’s wide agreement that getting killed is worse than getting laughed at.
But according to Cat Person, women will definitely laugh at men (by the theaterfull!), but men (even the creepiest stalkery men) won’t kill a woman (even if she gave him a good reason and made it really easy for him (like, for instance, by macing herself in his garage while trying to put a tracker on his car)).
I’m convinced that the only reason Margot did the tracker thing was because she was looking too unambiguously good, so they needed her to do one awful, out-of-character thing to restore balance (and make it feature length).
I would say the movie is less subtle than the short story, but I think it’s actually a difference in kind rather than degree.
Robert being an actual stalker rather than just a shy, sensitive, stunted man changes the entire meaning.
The only explanation is that the story and movie are products of two distinct cultural moments.
The short story was a product of MeToo.
When everyone was focused on consent, it pointed out how much space there was between consent and enthusiasm and between consensual sex and good sex.
I’m not sure what the movie was saying if anything, it was such a hot mess.
My fundamental complaint with this movie (and I’m sure the reason it got to me so much) is that I subscribe to the putanumonit school of everyone basically wants the same things out of relationships, so we should stop thinking about dating (especially specific dates) as this weird, zero-sum battlefield universe where Cat Person is set.
As it is, I’m sure I’m just asking too much.
As a silly thriller, it was fine.
There were some funny moments, especially Margot’s fantasies.
Didn’t appreciate the larger fraction of the humor mocking musical theater.
A Thousand and One
This was a good movie.
Good enough that I’ve also decided to try not to spoil it so much.
After getting out of Rikers, Inez moves back to Brooklyn and rescues (kidnaps) her son, Terry, from the foster care system.
They run away all the way to Harlem where they get an apartment, reconnect with Inez’s partner, Lucky.
The whole time, I expected something horrible to happen to them, and it just didn’t.
The focus was all on conflict among the three main characters.
Even at the end, when something horrible did happen, the consequences were more interpersonal than material.
Cassandro
Cassandro tracks the rise of Saul Armendariz in Lucha Libre from humble beginnings fighting as El Topo (The Mole) to Cassandro, the first exotico (fighter who performs in drag) to win.
(It is mildly amusing to consider that, before Cassandro, normal Lucha Libre costumes were ok, but drag was a bridge too far).
I assumed that it would fit into the typical sports movie mold, but it didn’t.
Lucha Libre is much more dance than sport.
Early on, Saul reveals himself to be extremely charismatic as Cassandro (kudos to Gael Garcia Bernal), much more expressive than the philistine, Gigantico.
He wins over all the crowds.
After that fight and a training montage, Cassandro (with the help of greedy organizers) can’t lose.
Bad things do happen to Cassandro, but, like wrestling moves they appear painful while ultimately glancing off.
Another strange fact is that Lucha Libre seems real in this world.
Organizers can tell fighters who should win, but otherwise the outcomes usually don’t seem pre-arranged, much less the moves.
I can’t tell whether this is a difference between Pro Wrestling and Lucha Libre or if it’s specific to this movie.
Cassandro has a trainer (a fabricated character according to the director), but it’s not clear why.
He already has oodles of stage presence, and she does seem to train him in fighting which implies that (in this universe) the fights are real.
You Hurt My Feelings
I almost didn’t see this because my friends had gone to an earlier screening and hated it, but someone else wanted to go, so I went along with him, and we really liked it.
We had a nice shouting match over dinner about it.
You Hurt My Feelings is about mediocre, middle-aged, upper-middle class, white, New York couples.
(I’m glad I got to see this in a theater with people closer to the target demographic who could remind me who the jokes were written for.)
Beth is struggling to get her second book out.
Her psychiatrist husband, Don, mixes up his patients and offers cliched advice.
Her sister, Sarah, is an interior designer who fails to satisfy her yuppie client (In retrospect, it’s hilarious that my friends hated this).
Her brother-in-law is an actor who gets fired.
Even the security guard in the pot shop where her son works is mediocre.
Beth overhears Don saying that he actually doesn’t like her book, then they have a few Socratic dialogues about whether it’s ok to lie to be encouraging.
It’s about the least subtle thing possible which kind of suits it.
It’s incongruous that it’s a very explicit movie with a very self-deluded cast.
But it does have a happy ending.
In the one year time jump, everyone does seem more competent.
Maybe they’ve all worked through their problems and learned how to communicate.
Also, it made me realize how depressing the trope of couples getting each other anniversary gifts they hate year after year is.
The Accidental Getaway Driver
A misleading title.
Long, an old Vietnamese driver, gets called for a late-night pickup and gets kidnapped by 3 escaped convicts in LA.
So he intentionally albeit unknowingly drove people who already gotaway fartheraway.
That’s not merely a semantic distinction.
It’s not a fast-paced heist movie.
It’s mostly 4 guys talking in motel rooms.
I don’t usually think about cinematography, but this was way more beautiful than you’d expect a movie about 4 guys talking to be.
Almost too beautiful.
I watched this when I was very tired, but others confirmed that it was totally unclear which war Long had fought in and for which side.
I mean, I assume the Vietnam War, but the chronology was confusing.
The best scene was when they were trying to throw sunflower seeds into a cup.
Overall Festival Experience
It didn’t feel like a festival since I was so removed.
I think I would go again next year, stay in Park City, take PTO, go to more screenings, and ski more, but I probably wouldn’t go every year.
Normally, I watch one movie per week, alternating among recentish hits, classic must-sees, and more artsy films.
I could watch 8 movies in 5 days any time I want (and maybe I will now that I’ve thought of it).
Most of the screenings I went to wouldn’t fit into any of these categories, but I was impressed with the quality across the board.
And there were 16 or more films that looked just as good that I didn’t have time to see.
I saw Q&As for about half of the screenings.
It’s mildly interesting to see what the directors are like, but people asked boring or stupid questions across the board.
(One person asked the director of A Still Small Voice whether he knew how things would turn out when he started. He said, “Life unfolds.”)
No judgment.
I don’t know what to ask.
The best question I thought of was to ask the director of You Hurt My Feelings whether she thought it was ok to be mediocre and incompetent, but I thought better of it.
I was got the SLC Pass because it was the only one available when I looked
There was a deal where it was $200 if you’re under 25, and you can see any screening in SLC without getting tickets.
I think it wasn’t sold out because the wording was confusing.
I didn’t take PTO, so I went to 4 screenings on Sunday and about one per night during the week.
I did get an individual ticket to see Cassandro in Park City with friends, so it would have been cheaper to get individual tickets for everything, but it was close enough that the convenience of the SLC pass made up for it in my mind.