fb-pixelSundance day 2: A serious day - The Boston Globe Skip to main content
ty burr

Sundance day 2: A serious day

Getty Images for GREY GOOSE

Child kidnapping, campus rape, suicidal writers — just another day of fun and frolic at the Sundance Film Festival. The offerings in Park City tend to fall into two camps, the stringently serious or the studiously ironic, and if you don’t schedule your screenings carefully, you may experience a one-day royal flush of heaviosity or hipness. I drew the serious hand on Friday, which started out as a questionable decision and improved from there.

Last things first: “The End of the Tour” is a movie that really, really, really shouldn’t work but that unexpectedly really does. Is there an audience for a dramatic recreation of a 1996 road trip that Rolling Stone journalist David Lipsky took with David Foster Wallace, the much-loved, much-mourned author of “Infinite Jest” and many great essays and footnotes? Probably not. Perhaps the literati and the Wallace cult, intensified since his suicide, in 2008, but they might be chased off by the casting: Jesse Eisenberg as Lipsky and — hold on to your hats — Jason Segel (”The Five Year Engagement,” “Sex Tape”) as Wallace. When I sat down in the Eccles Theater for the film’s premiere, I sensed an audience needing to be convinced.

Advertisement



And we were. “The End of the Tour” is no one’s idea of an action movie. Mostly it follows the journalist and the author as they piddle around Bloomington, Ill., fly to Minneapolis for a book reading of “Jest,” and chew over matters large and small, philosophic and mundane, writing and women. If anything, it’s an INaction movie: “My Dinner with David” as a (slightly) moveable feast. Yet as written by David Margulies from Lipsky’s book and directed by James Ponsoldt (”The Spectacular Now”), “Tour” gets a handful of things almost eerily right. The social dynamic of writers, especially when one is a good talker and the other is a better artist. The insecurities, jealousies, admiration, and undercutting that can result from such an imbalance. The parasitic nature of journalism: There are details in “The End of the Tour” that I recognize as both creepy and on target, such as Lipsky waiting until Wallace leaves the room so he can catalogue into his tape recorder the contents of his subject’s house.

I don’t know whether the movie’s portrayal of David Foster Wallace is accurate, having never met the man. Having read a fair amount of his work, I can say it feels true in its self-effacement, bleak humor, and almost obsessive need to pin down honesty of intent through language -- the words that for him came more easily on the page than in life. Segel uses hair and make-up, Wallace’s bandanna and lank tresses, to make us forget about the actor’s comedy resume, but he convinces most in his stooped bearing and in the speech patterns that thoughtfully start and stop and suddenly burst with insights that make Eisenberg’s Lipsky seem very small indeed. It’s a very touching piece of acting, as concerned with authenticity and decency as the man himself appears to have been. It now remains to be seen how a studio can sell this wayward valedictory for an immense, shaggy talent.

Advertisement



“The Hunting Ground” isn’t nearly as nuanced as “End of the Tour,” and it doesn’t try to be. A documentary by Kirby Dick and Amy Ziering (”The Invisible War”) about the epidemic of campus rape, it amasses statistics, studies, and stories to create an enraging portrait of colleges where sexual predators go unpunished, rape victims are hounded from campus, and school administrators stick their heads in the sand, cowed by the threat of lawsuits and bad publicity. Rough in patches and longer on persuasiveness than style, the film puts a lot of brave women from dozens of colleges across the country in front of the cameras to tell their stories. (Lest Boston readers think this isn’t a local problem, Harvard, Tufts, Brandeis, and Emerson are all represented.) Dick and Ziering continually circle back to two University of North Carolina students, Annie Clark and Andrea Pino, as they build a national network of rape survivors and file Title IX complaints against, at last count, 90 institutions. In other words, the victims are doing the work that their supposed protectors in college administrations, police departments, and prosecutor’s offices aren’t. “The Hunting Ground” is damning in the details and thorough in its approach, parsing the reasons for front-office foot dragging, interviewing a confessed campus rapist, exploring the Greek system’s culture of drunken machismo, and always returning to the women and their stories. The Sundance premiere had politicians in the audience (Senators Barbara Boxer and Kirsten Gillibrand) and Clark, Pino, and other survivors of campus rape up front taking questions after the screening. Asked by one audience member what she wants people to take from the film, Clark responded, as a start, “Believe us. Just believe us.”

Advertisement



Rounding off my day’s screenings was “Stockholm, Pennsylvania,” the film debut of Newburyport-raised writer-director Nikole Beckwith and a movie that bites off a lot and chews it with gusto and difficulty. It begins as a muted, brooding tale of a young woman (Saoirse Ronan) returned to her parents (Cynthia Nixon and David Warshofsky) after nearly two decades being held captive in a basement by a creep (Jason Isaacs). She was kidnapped when she was 4 and these two kindly people calling themselves Mom and Dad are complete strangers to her. It’s an intriguing notion that gets a convincing workout before the film’s midpoint, when things take a turn for the bizarre. I won’t spoil what happens, but I will say that Nixon has always had a scary-crazy side that this movie does its level best to exploit and might even have succeeded if Beckwith had had the courage to go full gonzo. As it is, “Stockholm, Pennsylvania” settles for tastefully weird near-camp, which does no one any favors, and the ending is simply wrong. But the movie’s ambitious and Beckwith has chops, as a writer and as an observer of quietly freaked-out human behavior. We’ll be hearing more from her.

Advertisement