Sundance Film Festival 2011: The Devil's Double, Higher Ground, Cedar Rapids and The Details

Lee Tamahori's The Devil's Double (pictured) is a film I knew about, having been on set in Malta last year, and it pretty much matched my expectations. It's a very rough-edged film, which is both a good and a bad thing. In some ways, it reminded me of a straight-to-video Vestron action movie from the 80s, which I imagine Tamahori may take exception to, but I mean that as a positive, since its aim is to entertain in a slightly cruel and unusual way, not to preach about the situation in the Middle East.

Based on a true story, it stars Dominic Cooper as Latif Yahia, an Iraqi soldier who is co-opted as a stand-in for Saddam Hussein's son Uday during the first Gulf War. Latif is a mild-mannered and righteous man, possibly because he's been fictionalised to hell and back, and when Uday (also Dominic Cooper) first proposes the deal, Latif refuses it. Uday is a hard man to say no to, however, and with a death sentence hanging over his family Latif reluctantly accepts – but as Uday gets crazier and crazier, Latif becomes more and more sickened, vowing to leave this madman's grasp. Cooper, so wasted in the horrible Tamara Drewe, really gets a chance to show his chops here, and though his electric performance has split audiences here because of its hysterical, supercharged almost Monty Python-esque tone, he really is a revelation. Ludivine Sagnier as Uday's fickle Lebanese floosie, is less well served by the film's weak script, and though I enjoyed it, I wondered about The Devil's Double's UK prospects, since the drama, humour and violence are all equally hard to stomach.

I saw Vera Farmiga's Higher Ground on the same day as Kevin Smith's Red State, and, weirdly, it's almost the same movie, telling the story of a woman who first resists and then falls into a strict Christian movement (not a cult so much, but just as repressive if not so controlling). I didn't like this at all; much as I love Farmiga as an actress, as a director, she needs to be less afraid of editing and think of narrative as much more of a dramatic drive than a mere gradual unfolding. Higher Ground simply plays out as a series of scenes in the life of a woman who never ever seemed real to me, and by the end of it I felt completely flummoxed as to what it was and who it was for. Part of me applauds it for not plunging into melodrama, but another part of me wishes it had made more of a commitment to whatever it was supposed to be. In the end, I felt I'd seen an inferior version of Adrienne Shelly's Waitress, which I saw here in Sundance and which remains criminally underseen.

As for Cedar Rapids... Ugh. This really was a stunted studio movie, even though it was brought to the festival by Fox Searchlight. If you've ever wondered what a Will Ferrell movie would look like with the charm surgically removed, head to this. Ed Helms, whose appeal completely baffles me, stars as Tim Lippe, a smalltown insurance agent who is sent by his boss to a business conference in the big city. His boss warns him to stay away from the bad crowd (John C Reilly and a surprisingly game Anne Heche), but he gravitates towards them anyway, and alleged hilarity ensues. I thought Miguel Arteta's film was just terrible; when Reilly is reduced to showing his bare arse for laughs, you know the bottom of the comedic barrel is really being scraped.

Comedy is not well starred at this year's Sundance, and though it sort of works, Jacob Aaron Estes' The Details is yet another weird one. Definitely in the one-bad-day subgenre of yuppies-in-peril movies, it stars Tobey Maguire as Jeff, a married and well-to-do gynaecologist whose perfect life starts to unravel after he lays down a new lawn in his garden. Jeff makes plans to illegally extend his house too, which brings him into contact with his crazy neighbour Lila (Laura Linney), and so begins a spiral of infidelity and chaos that threatens to wreck his sanity, marriage and livelihood.

I quite liked this movie for its unusual spin on karmic balance – Jeff is, in some ways, a decent guy whose increasingly good deeds never seem to cash out – and Maguire, whose performance doesn't gel until the end, suggests he does have a career post-Spider-man, even if he still looks too young for these kinds of parts. However, it remains one of those odd-duck Sundance curios, something you might enjoy, stoned or a bit tipsy, if you stumbled on it on TV at midnight but wouldn't thank yourself for rooting out at a cinema more than half an hour's journey away. Which is the average Sundance movie, really.