Pittsburgh Dispatch.

Pittsburgh is in the midst of an identity crisis. Since Steel left town, taking with it half of the city's population, this former capital of industry still known as the Steel City has struggled to reinvent itself as a regional center for commerce and the arts. Playing a significant role in this effort is the country's oldest media arts center, Pittsburgh Filmmakers, which kicked off the 25th edition of their Three Rivers Film Festival this weekend.

As usual, the slate of 40 films is as exciting and diverse a line-up of movies as you could hope to find. But the festival organizers deserve extra congratulations this year for selecting films that directly engage with this search for identity. It's practically a theme of the opening weekend, which featured a number of movies with local ties that brought back to the city an eclectic mix of actors and filmmakers from the Pittsburgh arts diaspora.

The fest kicked off on Thursday with an opening night presentation of Chris Bradley and Kyle LaBrache's mock-documentary Pittsburgh, which follows Pittsburgh-native Jeff Goldblum as he returns to his hometown with his then-fiancée Catherine Wreford to appear with her in a regional theater production of The Music Man. Though based on actual events (Goldblum really did appear in a 2004 Pittsburgh production of The Music Man), the film cleverly blends fact and fiction. Goldblum, for instance, plays a stylized version of himself based on his jittery, fast-talking screen persona.

As the title suggests, the city functions more as a character than as a mere setting. Unfortunately, this is one of the areas where the film falls short. Goldblum, who hadn't appeared in a musical in more than 20 years, is set up as something of a con man like his character, Harold Hill, who's using the gullible citizens of a small town with big city ambitions for his own ends (by agreeing to appear in the production himself he guarantees that Wredford, a Canadian actress who needs a work visa to remain in the country, will also be cast).

The dramatic tension should derive from the questions as to whether he can pull off the con and what lessons he will learn from and teach the small town. But aside from shooting a lot of footage on bridges, the filmmakers do a poor job of fleshing out the parallel between Pittsburgh and River City. Exteriors shot here and in New York are virtually indistinguishable from each other and the city's character is never firmly established. Meanwhile, like Goldbum with his twitchy mannerisms, the film never stops moving, never slows down long enough for any one scene or theme to resonate as particularly important.

Pittsburgh is just an acting exercise for Jeff Goldbum, a fact that was reflected in the Q&A session that followed the film. Despite the presence of numerous cast and crew (including Goldblum's parents), the questions focused almost exclusively on what it was like to work with a movie star. Mr Goldblum is a particularly magnetic screen presence and Pittsburgh is a pleasant enough film, but it is a shallow and forgettable light entertainment.

The same can't be said for another opening weekend film starring a hometown hero, Kelly Reichardt's Old Joy. If film festivals are a feast for movie lovers, then Old Joy is the ultimate palate cleanser - fresh, rejuvenating, and a perfect companion to almost any other film. Where Pittsburgh is so busy that no scene registers as poignant, Old Joy lingers restfully on life's in-between moments and elevates the everyday to the level of art. I saw it next to another very good film, Nuri Bilge Ceylan's Climates, and I was delighted with the contrast between the two: Climates is saturated with symbolism and it constantly challenges the viewer to make sense of the film based on its framing and mise en scène, while Old Joy allows the audience the room to simply drift.

Lead actor and Pittsburgh native Daniel London introduced the film and was on hand for a Q&A afterwards. He talked at length about the collaborative nature of the project, about how it was shot in just two weeks with a crew of only six people. It was a welcome reminder to a city too obsessed with projecting a cosmopolitan image that our region's greatest strength is its talent and its strong sense of community. Old Joy is an example of the kind of small, idiosyncratic productions that I'd like to see more of.

Films like Todd Rohal's The Guatemalan Handshake, which like Old Joy also features indie film star Will Oldham. The Guatemalan Handshake, a meandering, Lynchian (Twin Peaks is directly cited in one lovely close-up of a traffic light) tone poem about forgotten people, was the opening weekend's most direct treatment of that theme of identity. Beautifully shot in nearby Harrisburg, Pennsylvania by former Pittsburgh Filmmakers teacher Richie Sherman, The Guatemalan Handshake is set in a rural world characterized by junk food, TV dinners, broken technology (it culminates in a demolition derby) and broken lives.

It looks at America like an archeologist from the future or a visitor from another planet might, taking the objects that we produce and consume and constructing a world from it. The Q&A session that followed the film was the most fun I've had at the fest so far, with a mob of cast and crew fielding a volley of disparate questions from an enthusiastic audience. As they laughed and joked with the crowd about the different ways to interpret their quirky film, blurring the lines between those who make movies and those watch them, I realized that an identity is what you make of what you've got. It's precisely in contradiction and contrast that character is born, and this is why I look forward to the Three Rivers Film Festival every year: for these two weeks all of the faces of Pittsburgh are on display.

Posted by dwhudson at November 6, 2006 7:09 AM