Park City Dispatch. 2.

I've been thinking about the opening night film, Friends with Money. You have a lot of time to think when your shuttle bus is in limo-lock behind a Hummer-load of tech execs of the year or studio bureaucrats.

The ensemble cast of Friends with Money, malcontents in over-comforted Los Angeles - with Jennifer Aniston as the odd friend out, who quit a teaching job and now lives hand-to-mouth as a maid - made me think of another film set in LA thirty years ago. This film was Welcome to LA, by Alan Rudolph, and the characters were loners whose paths crossed either in business or by chance. By chance once again, Rudolph, who started out as an assistant to Robert Altman, is on the Sundance jury this year. Back in 1976, Rudolph's story of isolated characters driving to and from empty encounters in sun-baked LA showed disconnected people connecting through sex. Sissy Spacek plays a maid who, innocent enough, also gets her share. Rudolph's characters are charged particles, or as charged as particles can be when you factor in pot, Quaaludes, alcohol and Los Angeles itself. It was aimlessness in a town of intense but hollow ambition.

If you watch Welcome to LA, I'd bet that it would seem nostalgic now. This was an era before AIDS, the earthquake, the riots. It was when Schwarzenegger was a muscleman who did occasional nude shots. It was an era when you worried about what you didn't get from casual sex, not what you did get.

The setting of Friends with Money is that LA world of charity events, private schools with lots of kids named Max, farmers markets, Spanish-speaking domestic help, house renovations and hybrid cars. Unlike the characters in Welcome to LA, these characters are nothing if not connected - dependent might be a better word, co-dependent might be even better. They're comfortable, in the economic sense, not the psychological sense, and they're intensely competitive as they watch each other age more slowly or have more sex with a spouse more often.

The settings are houses, cars and restaurants - what could be more LA?

It's truly a Cinderella story, although I'm much more interested in the cinders than in the salvation of Jennifer Aniston that does indeed make Friends with Money a fairy tale. Frances McDormand's character sets the grim tone; she's a clothing designer who can't make herself look good, and she shares her anger with anyone around. It's too late for her to buy beauty or happiness with money, but there's nothing else there to buy it with.

The ensemble is the sit-com staple. We're talking about a film whose star made her reputation on the idiotic TV show, Friends. Yet Aniston's character here is complex, proud but self-mocking, lonely to the point of dragging around three-timing personal trainer Scott Caan (we used to call these guys "heels") and acceding to his demand for his "take" of the pittance that she's paid after he wipes off a shelf or two. She even wears the skimpy French maid's costume that the generous guy buys as a Christmas present for her. She has the you-take-what-you-can-get attitude of someone who knows better.

(There's second ensemble here, too, the Spanish-speaking gardeners, housekeepers, nannies and construction workers who watch this emotional pageant like a mute Greek chorus on minimum wage, incredulous as Mr and Mrs suffer through the day.)

Eventually, Aniston's character is redeemed after she's forced to follow her heart and go for simple things, like a nice guy. If this isn't romance, I don't know what is. But for me, the life that romance lifts her from tells us much more about the real Los Angeles than love does.

Not to put too much of a meta-narrative spin on this, Friends with Money can also be a metaphor for what the independent film scene has become. (House-cleaning could just as easily be another.) At Sundance, you might say, there's plenty of money, but the friends are harder to find. Has the infusion of money made independent films better films? The jury's still out as to whether the infusion of money into Sundance has made this a better experience for those of us who don't have it. Money certainly doesn't make you any more free if you're one of Nicole Holofcener's characters, although the dilemma of how to be happy if you have money is a luxury that most of the world would love to try. We comfort slaves are lucky to have such "problems."

But where there's money, there's usually art, and there was art at the Library Center in Park City Friday night, January 21. In Destricted, there was sex, too, in the art. (It's funny to think of this, because Utah is a place where authorities are vigilant about the kinds of books that they allow into their libraries, and sometimes fierce about throwing "offensive" books out. Anything that could penetrate the human body was in action on the screen this time.)

With roots protruding from his body, an unidentified man gets intimate with machines - a truck, to be exact - in Hoist, Matthew Barney's contribution to Destricted, a group of short films by six directors doing independent pornography. Each film in Destricted, by such contributors as Sam Taylor-Wood, Richard Prince, Larry Clark, Marina Abramovic and Gaspar Noé, was offered as "cerebral" work that reinvigorates erotic cinema.

Make pornography, the filmmakers were told, "do anything you want, as long as you do it in less than 20 minutes," said Larry Clark, who pairs a novice would-be porn stallion with a forty-ish veteran in Impaled.

Clark's cast for his odd short was assembled from casting calls for male and female porn performers. The males, all first-timers, most of them younger than twenty, were experienced porn watchers (everyman a porn star?) and the women were all in the business, but also very young. Most of the young men not only watched porn, they got it from their parents. Clark, as we know, has a way of getting youth to be candid and compliant. Is it exploitation? You decide. It works once again as his interviewees talk about sex for money on the screen - the men talking about their particular sex preferences and ego needs, and the women talking more about the job as a job. The second half of Impaled is the coupling of Clark's Odd Couple, a pale skinny sullen kid of twenty and a giggling nympho twice his age. Not knowing whether the performers were in on the joke or not makes the joke even better.

The project renews Sundance's mission to push the boundaries of sex and gender in a pro-Bush state where some locals still practice polygamy and Brokeback Mountain was banned in a town nearby.

Sam Taylor-Wood chipped with Onan: Death Valley, failed self-stimulation in a majestic landscape. Destricted elicits the question, "Is pornography better if it's made, not by porn pros, but by artists, especially hot cross-over personalities like Barney and Sam Taylor-Wood?" Another inevitable question follows: "Is cinema better when those artists make it?"

Did the mostly young crowd screaming for more porn know that Harry Reems, hero of Deep Throat, the classic of porn's golden era, is living and selling real estate in Park City? That fact never came up at the screening that I attended.

Sharing the art bill at Sundance are a documentary about Sally Mann and a wry adaptation of Dan Clowes's graphic novel, Art School Confidential, by Terry Zwigoff (Crumb, Bad Santa). More about those and other films on art in a later installment.

At the other end of the fashion spectrum from the art stars and the fans who sustain them is Alan Berliner, a filmmaker who's been at Sundance several times with films like Intimate Stranger and The Family Album. I've always liked his work, which has had at its core the rapid-fire succession of still images to make movies that sometimes looked like old-fashioned flip books, sometimes like the torrent of images from within the brain that race ahead of what we would call consciousness. (One of the few inspiring moments of the Destricted porn-athon was Sync, Marco Brambilla's breakneck compilation of porn scenes, a cinematic salute to the idea of the "quickie." Was he trying to out-Berliner Berliner? If so, it was a very nice try.)

Wide Awake tells you what Berliner's film is about. He can't sleep, and this ailment touches everyone he's close to - his mother, his sister, his wife, even his newborn child. Berliner tries everything for his insomnia. We learn that he's been taking sleeping pills in quantities that are far more than what his doctor prescribed. We also learn that physicians who are sleep specialists know far less about sleep than we might think, which doesn't keep them from treating hard cases like Berliner's.

Ultimately our hero decides that he has to be positive, and he accepts that his insomnia gives him more time in which to be productive. Getting to that conclusion takes us through Berliner's creative process of fatigue and energy, and through his family - it's nothing if not a personal film.

But it's more than that. Insomnia isn't AIDS or cancer, so journeying through it with a man who can even have a sense of humor about his affliction doesn't tear us inside out as so many of the disease-of-the-week movies do. As a malady, insomnia is disease-lite. One out of three Americans suffers from it, and Berliner explains that we make all sorts of allowances for an affliction that we're forced to live with. There's a great line that he uses to illustrate this accommodation: "If you boil a frog slowly, the frog never knows there's anything wrong." Remember that. It helps us understand a lot.

There's even more. If this is a film about a Jewish family, and it is, among many other things, since so much of the discussion of insomnia takes place at a table with Berliner and his mother and sister, it's also a story that's a twist on the formula of helping a schlemiel fall in love. In this case, family members are stumbling over each other (or just yelling), trying to help a schlemiel fall asleep, which we learn is harder than love. It's like life, or like the family. Berliner can't slay the dragon. He has to manage the dragon.

As you might have guessed, for a prodigious cinema collagist like Berliner, archival textures are woven, sequenced, overlaid and just piled on. His own filming gives the film a special glow because so much of it happens with night vision, the same kind of technique used to hunt insurgents in Iraq or to observe nocturnal species in their active hours. Berliner himself is an odd twist on the nocturnal species, seen by himself, watching his family watch him. As sick as he is, if insomnia is indeed a sickness, first-person filmmaking is alive and well.

Posted by dwhudson at January 21, 2006 1:58 PM