Sundance Film Festival

Reality sets in, this last day of Sundance, as 50,000 attendees move on to greener pastures and the glistening snow-covered peaks encircling Park City once again seem a part of the natural landscape instead of a fancy festival backdrop. Down below on Main Street, festival dreams and destinies have intersected. All that remains is for this year’s festival to fade to memory.

Riffing off Barry Levinson’s Robert DeNiro-starrer about a harried Hollywood producer which premiered out-of-competition (I quite liked it), The Hollywood Reporter captured the received take on this year’s festival with its headline, “Stunned ‘dance: What Just Happened?”

HR bemoans a scarcity of acquisitions, citing What Just Happened? as an example of how the presence of stars no longer ensures a Sundance film will be picked up. (WJH? also features Bruce Willis, Sean Penn, Catherine Keener, Stanley Tucci, and John Turturro in juicy comedic roles.)

Hopes were stoked, of course, that Sundance films would conveniently fill distribution pipelines emptying because of the writers’ strike.

Hollywood’s hand-wringing misses by a mile, as far as I’m concerned. Independent filmmaking, as putatively embodied by the Sundance Film Festival (which once upon a time routinely protested it wasn’t a film market), doesn’t hold its nose at commercial success—every serious filmmaker deserves to make a good living and enjoy the fruits of his or her talent and achievement. But to measure the success or significance of Sundance or its programming by cash register rings is dismissive of Sundance’s sole raison d’etre, the indie filmmaking ethos.

Can you imagine a headline that read instead, “Stunned ‘dance: Hearts and Minds Moved To Tears”?

Neil Young once famously gave the finger to corporate sponsorship of rock tours and the use of rock stars to sing commercials in his 1988 screed, “This Note’s for You,” in which he sang, ”I don’t sing for nobody, makes me look like a joke.” (It’s a riff on “This Bud’s for You.”) Who could have imagined back then that even Bob Dylan would someday sing on TV commercials?

So a tip of my black beret to Sundance’s programmers: how fitting that the closing night film is Neil Young’s (or Bernard Shakey’s, Young’s directorial alter ego) CSNY Déjà Vue. I saw the film this morning at Sundance’s largest venue, the Eccles. Despite the fact it began at an eye-rubbing 9:15 a.m., the Eccles was full.

I must admit I wasn’t expecting much. After all, CSNY Déjà Vue is built around CSNY’s Freedom of Speech Tour during the run-up to the 2006 Congressional Elections. Could it be much more than four graying 1960’s rockers reminiscing on stage to audiences of aging hippies who’ve traded LSD for Lipitor?

But you know you’re on to something powerful and uncorrupted within the first few minutes. As David Crosby remarks regarding Neil Young’s role in the reunion, CSNY these days is a dictatorship, a benevolent one driven by Young’s passion and fury at the war in Iraq, which produced an anti-war website and album released free on the Internet (the source of his lightning-rod song, “Let’s Impeach the President”). Whether you subscribe to Young’s views or not, he airs all viewpoints in the film. (More than a few concert-goers in Atlanta tell Young what he can do and where he can go, in language not appropriate here.)

As the audience shuffled out of the Eccles, I looked around to see what others were feeling. Most were silent, lost in thought or reverie. CBS News’ Nancy Giles was typically animated, leading an ad hoc discussion among several women in the aisle. (Will she do commentary on the film for the next CBS News Sunday Morning?) There were no faces without moistened or even reddish eyes, including mine. I can’t recall the last time I’ve witnessed such emotional unanimity in an audience.

Surely this is the more meaningful metric by which to assess Sundance, this year or any.

P.S. Who knew Bernard Shakey was such a terrific director?

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