The Trouble With Sundance

By RICHARD CORLISS

Correction Appended: February 1, 2007

Everybody, I mean everybody who's anybody in movies, or hopes to be, is in Park City, Utah, this week for the 2007 Sundance Film Festival. In this Lourdes of independent movies, hermitty young auteurs will schmooze with Hollywood's BlackBerry set. From the ferment of high art and hype art will emerge new faces, new voices and, I can almost guarantee, at least one film that will figure in next year's Oscar race--just as Little Miss Sunshine, from Sundance '06, is being touted for a Best Picture Academy Award nomination.

The kind of indie film nurtured by Sundance has become the dominant non-Hollywood movie form for smart people. They're the ones who made Little Miss Sunshine a hit, and Ryan Gosling's turn in Half Nelson a must-see. The moguls have taken note too. In terms of product and talent, Sundance has become the crucial farm system for the major studios.

Problem is, indie movies are getting as predictable as Hollywood's. Sundance movies have devolved into a genre. The style is spare and naturalistic. The theme is relationships, beginning in angst and ending in reconciliation. The focus is often on a dysfunctional family (there are no functional ones in indie movies) that strives to reconnect. Within this genre are a few subspecies: the family breakup film (The Squid and the Whale), the finding-your-family-at-school movie (Half Nelson, Brick), the gay drama (Mysterious Skin). Way too frequently, the family goes on a trip. Given the typical Sundance pace, which is leisurely to lethargic, these road movies rarely get in the passing lane.

The predictability of recent Sundance films is a pity, because the fest used to discover original movie minds. The honor roll of those who introduced their early work there includes both the big fish of indie cinema (among them Joel and Ethan Coen, Jim Jarmusch, Kevin Smith and Darren Aronofsky) and some of the mainstream's champion swimmers (including Steven Soderbergh, Quentin Tarantino, Bryan Singer and Christopher Nolan).

What most of these directors share is a gift for bending, sometimes gleefully mutilating, film form: taking old narratives styles like the crime movie or musical or horror film and making them fresh, vital, dangerous. The subjects could be familiar--amnesia in Nolan's Memento, obsession in Aronofsky's Pi--but when the story was told in reverse, or turned into a weird thriller, the narrative ingenuity became bracing and delicious. They were different from Hollywood--and different meant better.

You don't find as much originality in Sundance films these days, and for a simple reason. In the beginning, the festival was a home for the homeless, for a rambunctious outlaw take on filmmaking. There was no need to be cautious, since indie films were rarely hits. But as Sundance became the showcase for a form of movie gaining marketplace pull, young directors naturally made films to fit the new mold. Sundance films weren't quirky; they did quirky. Quirky became another genre.

In fact, truly imaginative movies have always been anomalies at Sundance. The program is heavy with earnest studies of emotional accommodation. This isn't a supple form, and now it's become formula--creaky and calcified through endless repetition.

What's saddest is that the ersatz indie drove out the previously dominant alternative to Hollywood: the foreign film. Fellini and Truffaut are dead, but there are still exciting, challenging movies being made in Europe, Latin America and especially Asia. Some of these films get theatrical release, but to see many top films from Japan, South Korea, China, Thailand and India you need to rent them. A good video store or a specialty DVD catalog is the new art house. Trying to get your intellectual fill with Sundance films is like choosing homemade popcorn over the concession-stand variety: higher quality, little nourishment.

Sure, there are good Sundance movies, with fine actors providing glimpses of behavioral truth. But in general the films are way too cozy. Instead of the high-budget sequels Hollywood deals out, the indie scene offers virtual remakes of earlier, more vibrant films, the rehashing of familiar feelings. Sundance used to be a daring, occasionally dazzling alternative to Hollywood; now, it's just a different sort of same.

The original version of this story mistakenly reported that director Ingmar Bergman is dead. At age 89, Bergman is living in Sweden.