Sundance. Momma's Man.

"Momma's Man pierced me to my core," writes Michael Tully. "It is, without question, the most beautiful expression of a child's love for his parents that I have ever seen, heard, or read."

"A portrait of a young man at very loose ends - Matt Boren as Mikey - the film is at once a valentine to the bohemia of a lost New York and to [director Azazel] Jacobs's parents, the avant-garde filmmaker Ken Jacobs and his wife, Flo, who play Mikey's tenderly loving mother and father," writes Manohla Dargis in the New York Times. "Shot mostly inside Mr and Mrs Jacobs's actual downtown loft, a wonderland of clutter chockablock with books and all manner of cinematic ephemera, the film beautifully combines the idioms of independent fiction narrative with the personal expressiveness of the avant-garde for a work of surprising emotional and structural complexity. This is independent cinema defined."

Updated through 1/26.

Salon's Andrew O'Hehir awards his own Narrative Grand Prize: "For a film about a man who is arguably sliding into paralyzing depression, Momma's Man is a work of haunting loveliness and Proustian delicacy, shot through with unexpected humor. Jacobs's previous film, The GoodTimes Kid, was an appealing zero-budget indie in a Jim Jarmusch vein, but Momma's Man is a vast leap forward. It's a film of acute perceptions, great sadness and wordless, ecstatic joy, and the one unforgettable narrative film I saw at this year's festival."

"There's a lot of comedy in Momma's Man - Ken Jacobs, so deadpan he's almost sinister, is particularly fun to watch - but as it slinks towards a sweet/sad climax between mother and son, it's devastatingly melancholy," writes Karina Longworth at the SpoutBlog. "Momma's Man is, essentially, a chick flick for cool, bridging-30 boys."

"The strength of this film lies largely in Boren's capturing of Mikey's sense of confusion and helplessness," writes Kim Voynar at Cinematical. "As Mikey's parents, Flo Jacobs and Ken Jacobs hit all the right notes of a mixed concern for their son's well-being and a desire to help him figure out what's going on."

Sara Cardace talks with Jacobs for New York's Vulture.

The Reeler talks with Jacobs, too.

Update: Online listening tip. Kevin Buist talks with Jacobs for the SpoutBlog.

Updates, 1/26: Michael Tully has more to say at Hammer to Nail: "Almost everyone I know who saw Momma's Man considers it to be by far the best film they saw at the festival, but it's interesting to discover that the only other people I know who shed tears over it were males.... I'm such a fan of the charismatic Jacobs that I was disappointed to realize he wasn't acting in the film alongside his parents. But it didn't take me long to understand that he couldn't have played the lead role. That would have been the worst decision of all (something a lesser artist would not have been able to understand). There had to be a level of remove.... To Jacobs, Momma's Man is a home movie he can watch when his parents, and the loft, are gone. To me, it might very well be the finest American independent film of the decade."

At indieWIRE, James Israel quotes Boren: "When we finished shooting the film I would stay up late dreaming about this incredible loft. It was like I always visualized Aza's Dad like a Willy Wonka and I thought if he pulled a book out that the walls were gonna change and I'd fall into something."

"Like Sugar and Ballast, the festival's other great narrative films, Jacobs's low-fi third feature forges unique stylistic territory for the American independent film while specifically recalling such disparate classics as Alexander Sokurov's Mother and Son and Albert Brooks's woefully underrated Mother," writes Rob Nelson at indieWIRE. "Jacobs's work is a rare cinematic expression of heartfelt matriphilia; someone in the industry with love to spare needs to pick up this gifted orphan right away."

Posted by dwhudson at January 25, 2008 6:07 AM