Park City Dispatch. 6.

If you've been paying attention to news of Sundance in the newspapers and the trades, you've probably heard of Little Miss Sunshine, the comedy directed by Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris that's packed in the public. Before it was bought for distribution by Fox Searchlight for more than $10 million, and long before any commercial release, the small film already seemed to be anointed as the breakaway hit, this year's Sideways or this year's Sex, Lies and Videotape - the low-budget product that brings in high-budget profit and launches a thousand imitators.

My reaction is that, if that's the case, it doesn't take much. Little Miss Sunshine has some solid, charming performances, especially from the adorable young Abigail Breslin and Steve Carell, but it's still a cookbook family comedy about overstressed parents, an angry son, a gay uncle recovering from a failed suicide attempt, and a trash-mouthed grandfather, all on a bus to Redondo Beach where homely but sweet Olive, who's seven, will compete against dolled-up peers in a  beauty contest. Nothing wrong with that, but nothing extraordinary either. To quote a line from Terry Zwigoff's Art School Confidential, "that's so September 10th."

This was the hot ticket for Sundance public screenings, but the press was just as eager to see it. Journalists crowded into the press screening at the Yarrow, in a sardine can of a hall. If there was an empty seat, I didn't see it. At other festivals like Berlin or Toronto, this is the kind of crowd that you expect for a major documentary on a serious issue or the premiere of a film by a respected director. Like the public, the press was charmed. Go figure.

Standing outside the Yarrow, I ran into the film editor of a prominent newspaper. In response to my question as to whether he liked the comedy, he said that he didn't, but that didn't matter. His jaw was dropping, having seen just what fluff brings out the crowds these days, crowds in the press that ought to know better.

The Darwin Awards, written and directed by Finn Taylor, was another one. The unverified word before the premiere was that tickets for this farce about stupid people killed in stupid ways were going for $700 on eBay. May be that's true. If so, the buyers are on my Darwin list. Even the aisles were clogged for this one. I guess you could waste your money on something stupider, like a Hummer or just about any restaurant in Park City, but this was still stupid.

For those who aren't au courant, the Darwin Awards are prizes given to people who die in the stupidest ways and are thought to be enriching the gene pool by not passing their genes on. The only reason that the makers of this film aren't in consideration for that same prize is that they're still alive.

Think of Jackass, except here you had a cast with David Arquette, Winona Ryder (who's great) and Joseph Fiennes, who Americanizes his voice into the role of a cocksure private detective who's not nearly as smart as he thinks he is. You've seen all these hare-brained gambits before in cartoons, except the cartoons were a lot funnier. Maybe this says something about casting, whether it's a stupid Hollywood effects-fest or just a stupid "independent" film. If you have the right people who are thought to appeal to the right audience, you can get anything made. There's nothing to be lost by aiming too low. To be fair, the enraptured audience that stuck around for the wisdom of the filmmaker and cast in the Q&A afterwards didn't seem to mind one bit. You can pity our species, because this has "hit" written all over it.

Some films at Sundance still define the un-hyped.

So Much So Fast, by Steven Ascher and Jeanne Jordan, witnesses the five years following the diagnosis that the once-healthy Steven Heywood has ALS, amyotrophic lateral sclerosis or Lou Gehrig's Disease. It's bad enough that the disease seems sure to kill tall handsome Steven in a few years. That's a given, an inevitable outcome since there's no treatment for the degenerative neurological condition. It's even worse that too few people have the disease: research medicine and the pharmaceutical companies (who need big numbers to drive their bottom line) don't mobilize for a treatment, much less a cure.

Heywood's brothers and his family rally, and for a while, we have what looks like a battle being won by willpower, and by an ensemble cast of scientists who are convinced to join the fight by Jamie Heywood, Steven's brother. Jamie takes the lead and forms a foundation to study ALS. At first the money rolls in and supporters join up, taking us back to the idea of "so much so fast," the urgent race to accelerate the slow, deliberate pace of medical research, not just to find a cure, but to save someone whose life is slipping away on camera.

Wendy, Alex and Stephen Heywood

Why the family agreed to give this kind of access isn't addressed, yet Asher and Jordan are given what seems like total access to Steven Heywood, the near-perfect son in a near-perfect comfortable family outside Boston. Even perfect families have the grimmest of tragedies. Yet the story isn't grim. Besides the access that documentaries need, there's a warmth to their film that makes it more than an eye on a private turmoil, although just being that eye would have been enough. The warmth stays with you here, even when things fall apart. Steven deteriorates, Jamie's once-steadfast wife leaves him, and the foundation sustained by fevered optimism goes broke. Jamie asks the employees to work for minimum wage. In case you haven't guessed, nobody finds a cure.

Somehow optimism survives. Steven wants to live as long as he can (ALS is one of the diseases at the center of the debate over assisted suicide) largely because of his son, and the hope that he and his wife can have another child. Now that's hope. With no treatment available besides intubation and motorized wheelchairs that arrive after months, Steven's son somehow gives his father a life-sustaining energy - it's real, but even that has its limits.

You expect So Much So Fast to be the story of a triumph over adversity, a hymn to the redemptive power of technology and a case study in the courage of a man facing death. It's all of these, but what we want to believe in gets complicated. As Steven's muscles deteriorate, to the point where his lungs might no longer work, a tube goes in to ensure that he can still breathe. He's kept alive, but communication seems to stop. We never see on screen whether Steven is still alive now.

Another look at a life taken away from a young man is The Short Life of José Antonio Gutierrez, a documentary by the Swiss filmmaker Heidi Specogna. José Antonio Gutierrez was a Guatemalan immigrant and a marine who became the first American to die in the war in Iraq in March 2003. When his body came back, the motivational official story came out from the Bush administration that Gutierrez fought adversity to be an American, and that he died giving something to his country.

From this film we get the real story from those who knew Gutierrez. He was a street orphan from Guatemala City, a casualty of an earlier war between Indian rebels in that poor overcrowded country and an army assisted by the US in its campaign to crush them, whether or not civilians died, and hundreds of thousands did. We're taken from the streets of Guatemala City to the path northward to the US border (quite a few films this year have that border as theme and subject), and to Los Angeles, where José is homeless once again as he looks for work and finds shelter with foster families. Part of why he joins the Marines, a big part, is just to get a green card. We learn that thousands of immigrants are doing the same, putting their lives on the line, and sometimes giving their lives, so that they can remain legally in the US. All this is framed in an atmosphere in which illegal immigrants are almost as unpopular as Osama bin Laden.

Several people have told me that they think The Short Life of José Antonio Gutierrez is the best film of the festival. It's surely one of the best. Heidi Specogna has reconstructed an inconspicuous life, the kind of life that used to be called "minor," without a single interview with Gutierrez, few records, and the recollections of those who knew him. Her research found plenty of people in Guatemala who would talk. It's striking how many people remember the boy with no family. The cherubic street kid, small for his age, who could see an immediate opportunity in front of him, was also a cheerful, talented young man who wanted to become an architect some day, once he got the documents and the money he needed to enroll somewhere legally. An acquaintance in Los Angeles remembers that he wanted to give something back to the country that was not yet his. Gutierrez certainly learned how to say the right things. He was good at flattering, too.

This tale of the ultimate immigrant gamble - as if gambling with your life to cross the border wasn't enough - is not so new. In World War I, European immigrants from Italy, Ireland and Eastern Europe were told that if they joined the army, they would become citizens, although the threat of being hunted down and deported those days by the INS or anything like it was negligible. Many joined, and many died.

There is another part of this film that is a glimpse into the sociology of the armed forces, which are often the last chance for those who can't find a job and can't afford an education, and certainly can't get a passport. The military at its lowest level is filled with immigrants, mercenaries fighting America's wars in the hope of becoming American. By the term mercenary, I don't mean ruthless and cold killing for a buck. I'm just suggesting that these cash-poor young men and women are paying a price for citizenship. It can be three years of their lives at war. It can also be their lives.

Posted by dwhudson at January 28, 2006 2:58 AM