BLOGGING SUNDANCE: Star sucking, plus some impressively morbid achievements

Sundance might be bending over backwards to chide audiences [into championing creativity over celebrity stature], but you know what they say about leading a horse to water. Two of the five films I saw on Saturday featured accomplished big screen performers, and both will likely receive a fair share of notices as a result: Delirious, with Steve Buscemi, and Grace is Gone, with John Cusack.

In the case of Delirious, Tom DiCillo's screwball comedy about the lonely life of a paparazzi in New York City, I fear that some people won't be able to see through the stars and acknowledge the movie's blaring mediocrity. The main character, a luckless freelance photographer named Les, is portrayed by Steve Buscemi, basically doing his trademarked temperamental good-for-nothing wiseguy routine. DiCillo tries to get us to feel sorry for the guy, which is damn near impossible, considering that Buscemi plays such great assholes. Even the New York Times has acknowledged the unsettling trend that finds Buscemi's characters getting killed off in most of his roles (including The Sopranos), a fact that might stem from his ability to make audiences want to see him get axed. He doesn't die in Delirious, but the work itself feels like the corpse of a movie treatment that once seemed like a good idea. It veers from a send-up of NYC publicity chaos to a buddy comedy, then teases with some vaguely homoerotic themes, morphs into a thriller, and suddenly throws everything out the window for a mindlessly cheery finale.

Buscemi's performance meets cute with Michael Pitt's s cardboard cutout role as a homeless stud who finds shelter and leadership in the photographer's home, then abandons him when the prospects of fame come knocking. Following his mentor to various red carpet swag events, Pitt's character falls for a celebrity singer named Karma (Kate Beckinsale), seeing past the superficiality of her portrayal in the media to the real beauty of her gentle soul, and blah blah blah, let the kissing commence. There are moments when Delirious could have been really great, if a little more consideration for audience intelligence had been applied to the production. The best scene takes place when Karma invites Pitt to her house for a private birthday party, and Les, whose only real encounters with celebritydom takes place from the distance of a camera lens, follows along. Suddenly in a situation where he can no longer hide from his insecurities, Les gets hit with a panic attack and finds himself unable to respond when party guest Elvis Costello (playing himself) tries to strike up a conversation. Here Buscemi shines: the photographer compensates for his nervousness by breaking the relaxed vibe of the event and snapping photos, promptly pissing off everyone there. The situation offers compelling insight into the character's psyche; he relies on the distance and non-commital quality of the still image to shroud himself in fantasy. But the scene still doesn't work, because, after all, we're watching Steve Buscemi and Elvis Costello, both immediately recognizable celebrities, creating an unwanted self-referential effect, as though the two well-known men were winking to each other as they acted out the scene. It might have worked better if a fictional musician was used, but why spoil their fun? (That's a rhetorical question.) Donny's out of his element this time around.

And now that I've filled my quota for [references in this blog to The Big Lebowski], let's get to Grace is Gone, which joins Snow Angels and Great World of Sound (more on that last one soon) as one of the best movies I've seen here so far. Cusack crafts the finest performance of his career as a middle aged father whose wife dies in Iraq. Sound like a radical departure from the stereo-hoisting antic of Anything Else? You better believe it—more than simply playing against type, Cusack melts and molds himself into his character in a way that demonstrates a range that makes his slew of romantic comedies look like juvenile whining (which they usually are, even the good ones). The movie opens with an instantly absorbing scenario: Stanley (Cusack), stares vacantly around a roomful of women whose husbands have been sent to Iraq. As far as I know, it's the second time that an Iraq war support group has appeared in a fictional movie (the first being Home of the Brave, which made the meeting seem like an AA gathering), and altogether more credible for its subtlety. "I was proud to see her go," Stanley tells the room in a distanced monotone, chilling for its broad implications. After the heartbreaking sequence that has Stanley discover the awful truth of his wife's final fate, the movie takes a sudden turn away from basic tragic storytelling and into a psychological exploration of the hindrances and contradiction of private mourning. Unable to confront his two young children about their mother's death, Stanley decides to take them on a road trip. Both chillingly minimalist and conceptually profound, Grace is Gone captures a resolutely American fable that transcends political grandstanding to explore the personal politics of family balance. Cusack's character isn't likable, and his run-of-the-mill flag-waving justification for the war comes across as less Cindy Sheehan than George W. Bush, but even lost souls deserve some sympathy for their plight.

Last year's Sundance road trip movie was the overblown star-studded comedy [Little Miss Sunshine]. This year, Grace is Gone takes the set-up into darker depths. The tone matches most of the festival's stronger entries. Are filmmakers getting more cynical or just unhappy? It depends on who you ask. Some people seem to have gone batty over the mood swing: Teeth, a cheap B-movie sensation that people either love or abhor, is the story of a virginal high schooler who discovers that her vagina contains a lethal row of shark-like teeth, which tends to leave her unwanted gentlemen callers somewhat less endowed. The concept has plenty of energetic stabs at preachy Bible-thrumping campaigns against sexual indulgence, but I doubt Planned Parent would offer their endorsement. "Vagina dentata! It's true!" shouts a mutilated gynecologist after his painful encounter with the bone-crunching cavern. It's Reefer Madness for the sex ed crowd, although considering all the severed schlongs decorating the movie's more memorable scenes, I suppose it could be considered an apt analogy for the country's current position overseas.