So, Sundance 2018 has come and gone, much like the flu that I caught while I was in Park City, and the whole damn industry is left to pick up the leftover tea leaves and try to read them. You never know what will become a big ol' hit and shock the world (what's good, Call Me By Your Name) and what might turn out to be some hot garbage that clutters up multiplex screens come August (we see you Patti Cake$). But that never stops people from trying.
There are a number of films that I’m personally bummed that I missed while I was down there. That’s normally true with any given festival, but especially so this time, given that my illness caused me to leave before I could see stuff like Sorry to Bother You or Tyrel or Hereditary or Eighth Grade (let it be known that I would have stayed longer if I could have walked across a parking lot without feeling like I was going to faint). Thankfully, all of those will be seeing some sort of major release at some point later on this year, and who knows? They might even make an appearance at this year’s IFFBoston if we’re lucky enough.
That said, I’m extraordinarily pleased with what I did manage to see at the festival this year, and I have a weird feeling that at least one of the films featured -- Lynne Ramsay’s astonishing You Were Never Really Here -- will endure its way to my top ten list at the end of the year, give or take some sort of Cannes insanity.
But there are still some small reviews to get out of the way, for some damn solid films and a few mediocre ones, from the ones with the biggest buzz to the small ones that surprised everybody with their quiet power. So that's a wrap on Sundance 2k18, but we'll be feeling the effects of this one for a while.
Don’t Worry, He Won’t Get Far on Foot
This biopic of the Portland-based cartoonist John Callahan was heavily buzzed about up until its first public screening, which pretty much took the wind out of its sails and drowned a bunch of midshipmen in the process. The pieces for a good film are all there — an excellent cast (including the GOAT Joaquin Phoenix, Rooney Mara, Udo Kier, Carrie Brownstein, Jack Black, Kim Gordon, and Jonah Hill), a great subject matter, and a director who, once upon a time, was the champion in his weight class — but late-period Gus Van Sant strikes again and underwhelms once again. There’s a decently smart structure to the whole thing: Aside from a few shots telling us early on that Callahan (Phoenix) seemingly makes it on alright, the film follows him from his days as a committed alcoholic party animal, to the car accident that caused him to lose the function of most of his limbs, and to his recovery and time in AA in the years after the crash.
It’s set up so that we follow the Twelve Steps along with Callahan — even if we don’t realize it — and we find him in conflict and conversation with a number of the people of his life, from his sponsor (Hill) to his Swedish girlfriend (Mara) to the welfare office (Brownstein). In Van Sant’s hands, all of this becomes an overlong and tiring bore, nearly free of the humor and pathos that so defined Callahan’s life.
It really feels like Don’t Worry is caught between dueling versions of its directors: On the one hand, you have a younger Van Sant, encouraged by, of all people, Robin Williams, to make this film and there are sequences in this that you can see coming from that movie — his reunion with the man (Black) who put him behind the wheel of a car the night of the accident being one, along with a certain set of hijinks involving a train — which land. The other is the elder Van Sant, seeing opportunities for pathos and his structure in the setting of the AA meeting, which is a bit of a dramatic dead end at a certain point, especially when we start hearing the same stories over and over again and the forced revelations that follow. He doesn’t know when to let his actors just let loose and run rampant over the whole damn film, nor does he have the faith in the script to let Callahan’s stories tell themselves in actual scenes rather than flashbacks.
It’s a film that feels like a tremendous missed opportunity, one that acutely realizes that this is not the ideal method for you to be seeing this story, but just sort of shrugs its shoulders and says that they’re going to do it anyways. Perhaps Van Sant is doing a tremendous disservice to his own film by reminding us what Robin Williams could have brought with him to this role, perhaps we all need to be a little more cynical about how Williams’ would have been in the film: regardless, Don’t Worry has enough trouble existing already that you don’t need to complicate it with thoughts of what could have been.