..Gary Dretzka
..Noah Forrest
..Leonard Klady
..R.J. Matson
..David Poland
..Douglas Pratt
..Ray Pride
..Michael Wilmington

'Jackson Hole Film Festival 2007:
New Indie LaunchPad

"Ladies and gentlemen, in a few moments it will be our pleasure to welcome you to Jackson Hole, Wyoming," announced our Delta flight attendant, a continual source of upbeat chat. The lilt in her voice matched the lift of my spirits as we neared the vividly green fields at the feet of the majestic snowcapped Grand Tetons.

The greater valley region is called Jackson Hole, the town itself is Jackson - established 1897, population 8,647, elevation 6,234 feet. It is old enough to have a fascinating history, large enough to draw a wide range of intriguing people (including ex-Angelenos, New Yorkers and Chicagoans), and high enough to generate a clean oxygen-fueled euphoria, without the headaches and shortness of breath that accompany higher altitudes (like the 9,078-foot elevation of Telluride, Colorado, for instance).

I was flying in to cover the Fourth Annual Jackson Hole Film Festival, a smallish festival (over 90 films in 5 days) with a lot of moxie.  Festival entries played in town theatres that were all within easy walking distance from each other, ranging in size from the 125-seat screening room in the historic, Western-themed Wort Hotel, to the 475-seat theatre in the handsome new Center for the Arts.

This year's festival, which kicked off Thursday, June 7, had several juried sections: indies (features, documentaries and shorts), sports action films, student films, global insight, and the world program spotlighting the Far East. (There was also a special screenings section, out of competition, of narrative features that already have distribution.) Winners received Cowboy Award statuettes, handed out Sunday at a laid-back, enjoyable ceremony emceed by affable, witty Mayor Mark Barron. On Monday, the winners enjoyed encore screenings.

The common threads uniting the five very different competing independent features were excellent casts and impressive production values achieved on shoestring budgets. The winner for best indie feature was writer-director Brad Gann's Black Irish, about a dysfunctional Boston Roman Catholic household. Although the film boasts more drama per minute than (thankfully) most families will ever experience, the movie's characters are truthfully rendered. Based in part on real events in the life of actor Finn Curtin, the director's long-time friend who appears in a supporting role, the movie centers on the youngest son in a family of five.

At first glance, altar boy, star prep school student and baseball fan Cole McKay (Michael Angarano) would seem the classic enabler, mediating the conflicts between his unemployed alcoholic father (Brendan Gleeson), his social worker mother (Melissa Leo), who insists unmarried daughter (Emily Van Camp) carries her pregnancy to term, and his junkie brother (Tom Guiry), a dim brute barely one step ahead of the law. As a plot description, this may not sound groundbreaking, but the storytelling is confident; the dialogue, life-like; the performances, natural; and the cinematography by Michael Fimognari fits the rhythms of the movie--energetic in action sequences, restrained in quiet emotional scenes. There's a restaurant stickup that's a tad awkward, and the final rapprochement sequence verges perilously close to sudsy, but to his credit, Gann reins both in, leading to a conclusion that, if not exactly upbeat, is decidedly hopeful.

The satirical drama He Was a Quiet Man won writer-director Frank Cappello the Cowboy for best director.  (It's certainly an improvement over his screenplay for Constantine.) If Jackson Hole had awarded an acting prize, it might well have gone to Christian Slater, who delivers a solid performance as Bob Maconel, an immensely lonely, frustrated and meek low-level corporate factotum who fantasizes about killing co-workers. One day at the office while he is contemplating murder, Bob drops the bullet he was loading into his handgun. As he hits the carpet looking for it, all hell breaks loose in an adjacent cubicle: another colleague has beaten him to the punch, picking off employees one by one. In the right place at the right time to become a hero, Bob is transformed from loser to leader in a heartbeat.

Through body language - slumped shoulders, averted eyes, simulated myopia - and cosmetic touches such as a thinning hairline and a mottled complexion, Slater's aspect is leagues away from the brash young Turks he played in movies like True Romance. He doesn't appear to be acting in the big, showy way that Michael Douglas did in his similar role in Falling Down. Bob talks to his pet fish, and the fish talks back (one of the film's modest but effective CGI flourishes); Bob enters into an unlikely affair with an office hottie (Elisha Cuthbert) and yet it makes a kind of fevered, loopy sense, because Slater is so good at luring us into Bob's version of reality. The film's ending has stimulated discussions about what really happens, but clues are there all along, if you just follow Slater's lead.

Another entry about a quiet protagonist with a seriously overactive imagination is the German-language drama The Boy Without Qualities, written and directed by Thomas Stiller. More dour than Cappello's film, Stiller's doesn't take off until roughly midway. Marek Harloff stars as Tim, a twenty-something orphan living in Hamburg with his aunt and her loutish boyfriend, who resents him. For solace, Tim turns to the ghost of his father, whom he remembers as a debonair sea captain (by way of Gene Kelly). The movie eventually unravels the mystery behind the introvert's delusions, but far more interesting are the female characters. As the aunt, Dagmar Manzel projects the toughness of a working-class survivor of Hamburg's rougher precincts, while maintaining the vulnerability of a middle-aged woman in love with a cad. As Tim's new artist friend, Lisa Martinek enlivens the drab surroundings, ushering in light enough to reach even the dark corners of the traumatized young man's mind.

Of the five competing indie features, my personal favorite was The Elephant King, a film whose catalog description was tantalizingly brief. Writer-director Seth Grossman sets two American brothers loose in Thailand. The younger, Oliver (Tate Ellington), an emotionally fragile, aspiring writer, has been entrusted by their mother (Ellen Burstyn) to bring home his older sibling Jake (Jonno Roberts), an erstwhile anthropologist who has squandered his grant money on booze, drugs and hookers. Jake decides Oliver needs to lighten up, so he pushes him toward the alluring Lek (Florence Faivre), a Eurasian bartender with very flexible ideas about love and fidelity. But things don't go exactly as Jake planned; no matter how much he has gone native, he is still a stranger in a strange land, and as he sinks deeper into substance abuse, and Oliver becomes more enthralled by Lek and her exotic, permissive culture, their lives fragment in an eerily beautiful but nightmarish collision. To say much more would risk spoilers, but imagine Requiem for a Dream crossed with 'The Beach, and you'll have a glimmer of the pleasures awaiting viewers of The Elephant King. In addition to the uniformly fine performances from the cast, credit cinematographer Diego Quemada-Diez, production designer Lee Yaniv and art director Tommaso Ortino for the movie's luscious, ethereal look.

Least of the narrative indie features - and the most derivative - was the British entry January 2nd, which director Matt Winn, who co-wrote the screenplay Ellis Freeman, Robert Murphy and Tony Strong, says was heavily influenced by The Big Chill. Eight adults, whose friendships and other cross-pollinations go back a couple of decades, reunite for a New Year's bash at the country home of the only couple among them in a stable relationship. Of course, that turns out to be anything but. Perhaps as a result of all the screenwriters, the story is painfully over-written; the best moments come when the talented cast members (who largely come from television) get a respite from their arch, brittle lines, and are able to evoke everything going on inside their characters' heads merely through the power of their expressive faces. Technically, one can't fault the movie (although Winn apologized that the print being screened was a little dark); for having been made for a song, it's quite professional. Still, the adult characters are all either odious or weaklings, and the little girl caught between her parents' sniping is just another precocious movie kid. It's not fun, and you don't come away with any new insights into the human heart.

But, hey - four out of five is a pretty good percentage. Coverage of the ambitious slate of Jackson Hole Film Festival documentaries will follow shortly.

- Andrea Gronvall
June 26, 2007

Andrea Gronvall is a veteran Chicago-based journalist. She was the long-time producer of Siskel & Ebert and her reviews can often be read in the Chicago Reader

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