SXSW FILM ‘08: My Top Five

[Picture above: Greta Gerwig and Joe Swanberg of Nights And Weekends]

I saw 18 films during my four days at the 2008 SXSW Film Festival. Here are a few words on my favorites:

1. Nights And Weekends – Easily the most gorgeous, arrestingly honest film I saw at this year’s festival. Joe Swanberg and Greta Gerwig’s supremely collaborative picture, Nights And Weekends, offers a tender, unflinching look at the arc of one couple’s romantic journey. Mattie and James negotiate the inevitable complications of trying to make a relationship work despite the geographical divide separating their lives in Chicago and New York, respectively.

Swanberg directed Gerwig in Hannah Takes The Stairs and you can sense a deep well of intimacy between the two actors, which partly explains why the romantic longing in this film feels so raw, so bruised and complicated (Swanberg is married to someone else in real life). Working without a script and using themselves as templates, the actors channel the dizzying highs and stomach-upsetting lows of craving a love that isn’t meant to be. The indie-budget, HD-cam look of the film makes it feel that much more like a documentary.

I’ve never seen an onscreen love story that felt this true to life—the cutting jokes, the embarrassing false starts, meandering conversational threads, breakups, makeups. The film also deserves recognition for humanizing the act of lovemaking, celebrating it as unrehearsed, giddy, occasionally spiked with conversation, vulnerable and playful. A big-budget Hollywood “love story” is content to offer boobs and moaning, while Nights And Weekends believes that sex does nothing for your story if it doesn’t unpack the characters’ emotional nakedness in the process.

Nights And Weekends isn’t just a triumph of Mumblecore filmmaking. It’s a living, breathing document of relational struggle and cooperative self-definition. And it’s a movie that will guide you with a steady hand through hurt and revelry, prying your heart wider open as a result.

2. The Black List – Film critic Elvis Mitchell and photographer Timothy Greenfield-Sanders captured interviews with a sprawling list of influential African Americans—subjects as diverse as Slash and Colin Powell, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and Toni Morrisson. The approach is simple. Get out of the way and let these individuals tell their stories. Mitchell, the interviewer, never appears in the film. And Greenfield-Sanders uses a camera technique that lets each subject speak directly to the audience instead of looking past the camera to the interviewer. Yes, there’s discussion of the black experience in America, but the stories are more so about the struggle for authenticity and self-confidence in a world that too often makes people—of any ethnic background—feel woefully insignificant.

3. At The Death House Door – I was exceptionally moved by this story of Reverend Carroll Pickett who worked as the death-house chaplain at Huntsville prison for 15 years. The film charts his journey from his early days as a proponent of the death penalty to his realization that, in the end, the death penalty accomplishes nothing but producing yet another dead body. Of the 95 executions that Pickett oversaw, he speaks of the one that changed him the most profoundly—the wrongful execution of Carlos DeLuna, who asked Pickett if he could call him “daddy” when they strapped him to the execution table (DeLuna never knew his father).
After the killing of a gas-station clerk, DeLuna was picked up near the scene of the crime without a single drop of blood on his clothes or body, while another man who looked like DeLuna confessed to the crime and had been seen with the murder weapon. You can feel the stoic reverend’s pain as he recounts the botched execution of DeLuna, which took 11 minutes to finally stop the man’s heartbeat. Sometimes the best ministry you can have is to keep your hand on the ankle of a dying man.

4. Second Skin – The video-game medium has introduced parallel universes where people can live out heroic fantasies that their boring nine-to-five existence just can’t rival. You can slay dragons, combat dark forces, raid castles, woo potential lovers and converse with other people role-playing in the game world, all without leaving your computer desk. While some might scoff, this documentary by Juan Carlos Pineiro Escoriaza examines the lives of gamers who are addicted to the fantasies provided by massively multiplayer role-playing games such as World of Warcraft.

The film persistently digs into the reasons for the countless hours logged by these hardcore gamers—some of whom spend upward of 12 hours a day in the game world. These are not loners. These are people in search of community and belonging. A number of the people interviewed counted themselves as actual residents of their virtual world of choice. As technology progresses and the line between reality and virtual experience gets increasingly blurred, how do we maintain our sense of self and identity? This film does an admirable job of probing these difficult issues.

5. Wellness – A hapless, middle-aged salesman named Thomas Lindsey (played by talented newcomer Jeff Clark, one of the many untrained actors to appear in this year’s slate of narrative features) bumbles his way around a small town trying to get people to invest thousands of dollars in an obviously bogus dietary-supplement racket called Wellness.

The most poignant scenes involve Lindsey assuring his wife during intermittent telephone conversations that things couldn’t be going better (he does confess in a moment of vulnerability, however, “I’m not tired…I’m weary”). Director Jake Mahaffey never lets you see Lindsey’s wife or hear her side of the phone call, suggesting the possibility of a much sadder self-delusion. And while the film draws occasional laughs at its protagonist’s expense—Lindsey posts homemade signs in a motel conference room containing quotes like “Your Future: This Is It,” “Investment!” and “Paradigm Shift!!”—Mahaffey displays a profound sensitivity for human striving, even the misguided sort.