Park City this year is snowier than I've ever seen, making the UK's recent blanket seem very minor indeed. Thankfully, the locals know how to deal with it here, and though the footpaths are pretty treacherous, the roads are clear and the festival got off to a clean start on Thursday night with screenings of Howl, Restrepo and a programme of shorts. Howl I'm seeing later today (Saturday), and Restrepo, a documentary made by a film team embedded in Afghanistan, has had very strong word of mouth for its relatively even-handed portrayal of the US war effort there. Instead, my first day started with a film I can't tell you about, which is a shame as it was the best of the four. Without giving too much away, you'll know about it by Monday, which is when you'll be hearing all about [blank]'s first onscreen [blank] [blank] – unless the Banksy documentary, Exit Through The Gift Shop, really does reveal the anonymous graffiti artist's true identity. Which I doubt, don't you? The first film I saw was the weakest of the three, although, like the others, it did have its moments. Called Happythankyoumoreplease (a title that is only part explained), it was written and directed by, and co-starring, Josh Radnor of How I Met You Mother Fame. I've never seen that show, so I've no idea how it compares, but I can see that some of his US TV experience has rubbed off on Radnor, and there are some outstandingly witty moments in this otherwise rather formulaic and sentimental story of six New York couples trying to sort out their love lives. Best of the three strands is the central one, in which Radnor plays a novelist who falls in love with a barmaid and whose life is complicated when he finds a lost child on the subway. The kid is running away from a bad foster parent, and so Sam takes pity on him and puts him up in his bachelor flat for a night that turns into a week. Meanwhile, his best friend, who suffers from alopecia, is being courted by a workmate she finds boring, and another of his friends is battling with her lover, who wants to move to LA.
Surprisingly, it got a standing ovation, so maybe it's a cultural thing; it reminded me of several past Sundance films that never made it to the UK, with titles like Flannel Pyjamas, Puccini For Beginners and The Book Of Love, and I suspect this won't tantalise many UK buyers either. I wanted to like it, but I just couldn't invest in the characters, who were so carefully written and performed they seemed more like juicy stage roles than real people. Thankfully, Radnor didn't pepper his film with star performances, cameo or otherwise, a trend that recurs every year (think of The Good Girl, in which Jennfer Aniston played a supermarket worker, or Smart People, in which Sarah Jessica Parker plays a nurse).
The second film I saw rather fell into that trap, further unbalancing what was already a pretty unbalanced story at the best of times. First the good points: Spencer Susser's Hesher stars Joseph Gordon-Levitt, which can only ever be a good thing. He plays the title character, a crude, rude heavy metal-loving drifter whose body is covered in nihilistic, crappy tattoos – a stickman shooting itself in the head on his chest, an index finger (ie, THE finger) on his back. But Hesher isn't about Hesher: it's actually about a little boy, TJ (Devin Brochu), a kid who recently lost his mother and who lives with his grieving, depressant-addled dad (Rainn Wilson) and loving but slightly mad grandma (Piper Laurie). TJ meets Hesher while playing in a building site and loses the vagrant Hesher his temporary pad. For reasons never quite explained, Hesher decides to move in with TJ, which his father rather unbelievably allows.
For a while, it's never quite clear whether Hesher is real or just TJ's angry imagination, and this guessing game rather bounced me out of the film. Further distancing is the introduction of Natalie Portman as Nicole, a local checkout girl who takes pity on TJ, sparking a rather cute crush. But more damaging for me was Rainn Wilson's barely-there performance as TJ's dad, a turn that was so much in the shadow of Steve Carell's work in Little Miss Sunshine, it actually seemed to be following the same blueprint: 1) grow beard, 2) mope around, and 3) that's all.
For all its flaws, Hesher is OK for what it is. But what exactly is it? Again, I was reminded of previous neither-fish-nor-fowl Sundance films such as Thumbsucker, although, like Happymorepleasethankyou, maybe my cultural tuning is out on this one: it definitely played better with the Americans in the audience. However, I must say that Devin Brochu was an absolute diamond, making TJ a very real and stroppy little monster at times before revealing the shy, lost boy inside (he would have made a great Max in Where The Wild Things Are). But if Hesher was peppered with star names, the next film, The Company Men, was absolutely studded, once again having household names pop up in bit parts playing characters with jobs you can never imagine them doing in real life (want to see Kevin Costner playing a brickie? Here you go!). Directed by John Wells, a writer on ER and The West Wing, The Company Men was the jewel in Friday night's screening schedule, bringing stars Ben Affleck, Chris Cooper and Tommy Lee Jones to the stage.
The Company Men is a sage and grown-up film about downsizing and its effects on the upper echelons of the men who run a shipping business in Boston. For those reasons, it is both timely and more than a bit boring, since the business jargon is very tough on the ears in the opening scenes, with talks of mergers and aggressive bids, growth and equity. It is also pretty hard to care about white-collar workers who've had it pretty good for between 12 to 40 years and are only now starting to question such material necessities as their golf club memberships, X-boxes and Porsches.
Yes, that's right, I said golf club memberships, X-boxes and Porsches. If there was some irony here, I might have bought into this film, but the material is so dolefully handled that I couldn't: we really were expected to shed a tear for a middle-aged, middle-class sales guy who has to sell his lovely $650,000 family house and move his flock in with his parents (is there really nowhere cheaper in Boston?). For me, the whole film just lacked spark – which was amazing, given the cast.
The real draw is Ben Affleck, yet again showing how good he can be as the former high flier Bobby Walker, who hits the ground hard after his severance package runs out rather absurdly quickly (he gets paid off from his $120,000 a year job after over a decade's service) and practically ends up on food stamps in three months. Affleck gets some of the best scenes, especially one in which he faces off against a bored human resources officer who keeps him waiting and offers him a job that's way below his capabilities. And, surprisingly, he more than holds his own against Cooper and Jones: Jones is the long-suffering company guy who accepts his fate but goes out fighting, while Cooper plays the guy who can't tell his wife and kids he's been fired, pretending that nothing is happening while his money is running out. Clearly, this being an American movie, there has to be a moral to all this, which is why we get Kevin Costner as Bobby's brother-in-law, the man who sneers at Bobby's former yuppie lifestyle but proves to be an unlikely saviour in his time of need.
This film will undoubtedly bring Affleck a bit of attention since the role is so clearly semi-autobiographical, in that he's playing a guy who has fallen from grace and has to reconnect with life's simpler pleasures. But, in the short term, I don't think the film will have much longevity either here in the States, and as a capper to the opening day it was a damp squib.
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