book reports

The Sundance Kids: How the Mavericks Took Back Hollywood
James Mottram
London: Faber and Faber, 2006.

Peter Biskind spoiled film books. By recycling all the gossip he could dredge up, Biskind deflected attention from the movies and onto the (admittedly, pretty fallible) people behind them. And publishers loved it. Who wants to read about the movies when they can learn about sex, drugs, and Harvey’s titanic fits of temper? So it’s a pleasure to find a book for a general audience that tries to understand recent American cinema through the films. Mottram offers an engaging take on trends he perceives since the 1990s, and the result is brisk but not breezy. It also puts forward an interesting argument, though one that seems to me skewed and insufficiently backed up.

The Sundance Kids is organized chronologically. The story starts with the 1989 Sundance success of sex, lies and videotape and goes on to trace the way in which certain filmmakers, usually christened at the festival, gained a measure of power and fame in the mainstream industry. The tale concentrates on Soderbergh, Bryan Singer, David O. Russell, Tarantino, Alexander Payne, Wes Anderson, P. T. Anderson, David Fincher, Sofia Coppola, and Spike Jonze. Each chapter gives us a bit of industry background, a little about each filmmaker’s projects during a certain time slice, and then commentary on selected films. Most of the quotations come from original interviews conducted by Mottram, so the book is sprinkled with fresh material giving the filmmakers’ points of view.

Mottram usefully detours into the history of mini-majors like New Line and Miramax, and he includes studies of important collaborators like Charlie Kaufman. Most of the chapters group the movies of different filmmakers together, often by genre or theme, so for instance Mottram clusters The Royal Tenenbaums, About Schmidt, and Punch-Drunk Love under the rubric “Family Ties.” The epilogue brings us up to Bubble and thus yields a pleasing arc: Soderbergh, to some extent the protagonist of the whole enterprise, is still pushing in fresh directions.

The film discussions are neither quick critiques nor long-winded explications. Predominantly thematic, they seek to show the distinctive concerns of each film and filmmaker. While he largely favors the most widely admired titles, Mottram’s admiration for the films drives him to make some unorthodox points. He puts forth a convincing case for The Underneath, which even Soderbergh disdains, and offers a less-than-admiring account of About Schmidt. He is convincing on the virtues of Boogie Nights, Three Kings, and many other films that get several pages of attention. This book is serious about the movies in a way that Biskind never tries to be.

The story gains its unity by some fairly severe constraints. Despite being lauded at Sundance, filmmakers like Jarmusch, Hartley, and Solondz are ruled out from the start because they “have remained camped out on the East Coast, largely avoiding entanglements with the studios.” Haynes is given short shrift, Aronofsky is saved for the very end because of the studio project The Fountain, and Kevin Smith is skipped over because he’s basically a writer whose work “has yet to make an impact on the medium of cinema.” In short, Mottram is interested in Indiewood, the directors who find ways to make “personal” projects more marketable than films like Down by Law or Safe or Happiness.

The remark about Smith typifies what is for me a weakness of the book. Mottram has accepted the belief that personal cinema is possible only by sticking it to the Man. He reiterates the standard story that the 1970s was an era of independent visionaries crushed by the rise of the blockbuster, and that filmmakers of the 1990s revived the dreams of Altman, Ashby, Coppola et al. This seems to me too simple. Excellent films were made within the studio system in the 1970s. (Singer was inspired by Spielberg.) And many of the most lauded “personal” films of the period fall squarely into the Hollywood tradition, though sometimes repurposing conventions of the art cinema (e.g., The Conversation). It may be time to retire this cliché of the 1970s as a golden age, now that right-wing filmmakers are appealing to it. Jason Apuzzo, one of the directors of the Liberty Film Festival, is quoted in a recent Hollywood Reporter as saying: “It’s like the ’70s all over again—except this time, conservatives are the outsiders challenging the system.” Talk about unintended consequences.

Overpraising the 1970s makes the 1980s seem lame, a period when according to Mottram “directors no longer held the reins” and there appeared “a dearth of auteur-driven cinema.” But what then to make of Lynch, Burton, Levinson, Zemeckis, and Cameron? Surely Blue Velvet, Beetlejuice, Used Cars, Diner, and The Terminator are as offbeat and provocative as anything from the 1990s. Mottram seeks out racial and gender identity subtexts in Singer’s handling of the X-Men franchise, but the idea of thickening the genre blockbuster that way goes back to studio projects like Blade Runner, The Abyss, and Terminator 2.

Mottram says that his protagonists are embarked on a quest for “personal filmmaking inside a system geared toward crushing the life out of such movies.” But is the System such a behemoth? Soderbergh explains that in planning the action sequences of Ocean’s 11 he studied Fincher but also Spielberg and McTiernan. “Those three guys, when they’re shooting physical sequences, they’re just impossible to beat.” Even Linklater remarks: “It’s good to have a budget—you can have music and take your time to do it right. People are so like ‘Oh, sellout!’ It’s ridiculous.”

At the same time, I wonder if that the filmmakers here are as innovative as Mottram suggests. He doesn’t on the whole offer evidence that his star directors have contributed new styles or forms to filmmaking. I expected him to make the case for artistic innovation, especially since he’s written a useful monograph on the making of Memento, but instead he retreats to calling these folks “mavericks” because they are “unorthodox or independent-minded”—a fairly vague claim. To show their originality, Mottram would have to dig deeper into the hows and whys of their storytelling strategies and audio-visual techniques.

I’d argue that these filmmakers’ reliance on traditional genres, from detective stories to romantic comedy, and their relatively undistinguished visual styles (even Fincher’s floridness falls into the grime-and-grain look of 1990s crime movies) don’t constitute much of a break with contemporary mainstream practice or long-standing traditions. Certainly nothing in the 1990s films discussed here compares with the fresh approaches to be found in Iran or Asia at the period. If our measure is “an impact on the medium of cinema,” Kiarostami, Hou, Kitano, Edward Yang, Wong Kar-wai, and several other filmmakers leave the Americans in the dust. The indie and Indiewood directors have, it’s true, launched some adventurous work in narrative structure—things like parallel-universe stories, network plotting, overlapping time schemes, and unreliable narration. But then the same impulse toward storytelling experiment can be found in studio efforts as well, from Groundhog Day to Love Actually.

My reservations won’t be unfamiliar to readers of Kristin Thompson’s Storytelling in the New Hollywood or my The Way Hollywood Tells It. So the conversation is far from over. For the moment, Mottram has provided a clear and cogent overview of important filmmakers and trends. Everyone interested in contemporary American cinema should read The Sundance Kids.