Gary Dretzka
Noah Forrest
Leonard Klady
David Poland
Douglas Pratt
Ray Pride

April 18, 2003

Two hundred movies in a city of fourteen million six thousand miles from home... Over the next two weeks I'm going to have to learn priorities in Buenos Aires. That is, right after filing this column, with a few words with Peter Sollett about his delightful debut, Raising Victor Vargas, and a few words about how annoying Christopher Guest's improv medleys can be, especially his latest, A Mighty Wind.

Elevating the Lower East Side

The opening night of the Sundance is usually the most wasted evening of a festivalgoer's year: you get off a plane, drive up a mountain from Salt Lake City, dump your ruck, and you're expected to drive forty-five into town to suffer a second-rate, but star-ridden feature, some damp mitten like this year's attraction, Levity.

Distributor Samuel Goldywn Films pulled a fast one with a showing of Peter Sollett's Raising Victor Vargas in Park City and several hundred audience members got a sneak of my favorite movie from the fest, a small but genuine marvel. Razor-sharp, tender, specific and utterly fresh, Sollett's debut feature is one of those rare movies you're in awe of from the get-go.

Drawing on his superb half-hour 1999 short, Five Feet High and Rising, which won prizes at Sundance and Cannes, Sollett and his collaborators create a glorious, full-blooded, oft-profane, fully inhabited microcosm of life and love among teenagers on New York's Lower East Side. Using mostly nonprofessional actors, Sollett tells the story of Victor Vargas (Victor Rasuk) and his family: a younger sister, Vicki (Krystal Rodriguez), a younger brother, Nino (Silvestre Rasuk), and his old-school Dominican grandmother (Altagracia Guzman). At his most senselessly self-assured, Victor tries to be the cock-of-the-walk, but mostly, he's just the cutest dork on the block. He thinks he's Casanova, but he's a kid, alive the adrenaline tremor behind teenage hubris and self-regard. "Juicy Judy" (Judy Marte), the girl he longs for, slowly begins to sees through him.

Raising Victor Vargas is a rare contemporary sample of comic neorealism, a small movie that manages to quietly capture with looks and smiles the same things that required operatic conflicts in post-neorealist films like Visconti's Rocco and His Brothers. Another great trait is Sollett's immense compassion and empathy. He wrote the script for Bensonhurst, where he grew up, a white, predominantly Italian and Jewish neighborhood. It began as an autobiographical project, but he couldn't find the type of actors he wanted. Working with his partner Eva Vives, they wild-posted their East Village neighborhood. Most of the kids who responded were Latino. While they began with an autobiographical piece, Sollett worked for the two years between the short and the feature with the performers, observing them, asking about their lives, and bringing the fruit of their friendship to the screen. Raising Victor Vargas shows affection without sentimentality and a wry acknowledgment of the complexities of a family's conflicting desires. (It's also one of the great portraits of how teenagers tease each other.) The film benefits from an instinct for the documentary truth of directed improvisation, and is neatly sculpted through assured editing of Tim Orr's itchy, sensual super-16 handheld images.

Talking to the quiet, soft-bearded young director over the weekend, I wonder what could possibly hold over to his next movie. "The beautiful and intimidating truth about what I have learned in my last five years of filmmaking is that there are so few things written in stone. Each movie needs to made on its own terms." Of working with non-actors, he says, "Every actor needs to be directed with a vocabulary unique to the particular relationship you have with them."

The movie has a serenely confident air, but never seems predetermined. " I greatly admire filmmakers that appear confident in their moviemaking," Sollett says. "I sometimes dream of what it would be like to wake in the morning --whether it be to go to my desk or the set --and have all the answers. But I don't think that exists. I think that a confident filmmaker is someone who is confident in themselves that they are capable of utilizing their resources to make the best film possible, even under a great degree of pressure."

The camera's jittery. The characters tempt caricature. And Bergman, wasn't it Bergman who said cinema was a close-up of the human face? Sollett cops to a few influences. "Cassavetes, Fellini and Bergman," he nods. "I look at the films of these three directors and I see three filmmakers achieving a single goal, but utilizing, each of them a completely distinct cinematic vocabulary. What do I think they have in common? They are humanists. At their best they are mapping emotional terrain not charted anywhere else. They look deeply into their characters, weather they be deep or shallow and expose them for their best and worst they have to offer. And they are honest! So honest! So frequently their relationship to the world around them feels so positive. They are for the people! Human beings--life in general--are something of value in their films. People are more than a single objective or an obstacle or an object of sexual desire in their films. I admire their respect for humanity, even when they acknowledge that sometimes we harm each other unnecessarily."

Shooting a few hundred hours of footage, treating a feature like a documentary, can make a mess that's hell to untangle. "Certainly. I did everything that I could to look ahead and try to make things easier on myself and my editor Myron Kerstein but sometimes I did paint myself into a corner. We shot coverage, but not an irresponsible amount. Our shooting ratio was about 15:1. Not bad."

The reviews out of New York are ecstatic. Is that gratifying? "To a certain degree, yes. One of the reasons I'm making films is to communicate with people. I could never put into words what I am trying to communicate in 'Victor Vargas. Reading a good film critic can tell you what his or her relationship to the film was. How well did we communicate this? How deeply into the layers of the writing and performing did they see? And why? That's the level that I am interested in reading. So often a review reveals more about the critic than anything else, and that can be interesting, too!"

Sollett keeps up with other filmmakers. "Adaptation, About Schmidt, Punch Drunk Love -- I have a different relationship to all of these films, but perhaps what they have in common is that these filmmakers are exposing themselves, their world views and doing it in such a way that we all have access to it. The other day during an interview a journalist was clearly trying to provoke me to say something condescending towards studios and studio filmmaking. I wouldn't do it. Perhaps I'm focusing on this how these filmmakers have navigated studio waters through their filmmaking as opposed to an examination of their expression or individual voice. It's probably because I am in awe of them and I am trying to figure out my own next move."

Blow, Wind, Blow

When people find out what I do for a job, they'll often offer their favorite movies.

If it's Harold and Maude, I forgive them. Not a bad movie, bu tI'm met too many people who say that that dark whimsy's their beloved. But if it's Waiting for Guffman, which I hear a lot, I get very, very wary. (Don't even say the word "Corky" around me.) The casts of Christopher Guest's improvisational smug-u-mentaries include several performers I admire mightily, but a movie like Best in Show or his latest, an oh-so-daring spoof of the most whitebread aspects of the 1960s folk music phenomenon, leaves a rotten feeling in the pit of my stomach: this man despises his characters, and probably the rest of the world as well. Rob Reiner's career has made some detours since directing This Is Spinal Tap, but to compare that deadpan treasure to Guest's increasingly sclerotic later work is simply silly.

The lifeless whimsy of A Mighty Wind follows the preparations for a tribute concert to the mentor of a group of folk musicians, forty years after their glory days. While someone in their fifties might recall the subgenre being sent up by Eugene Levy, Catherine O'Hara, Guest, Harry Shearer, Michael McKean and others, to most audiences, they'll be an inconsequential gathering of harmless souls wearing funny clothes, deeply oblivious to a world that has moved on, and talking in non sequiturs.

Fred Willard has said that his goal in his role as a dog show announcer Best of Show was to know as little as possible about dogs. (His giddy stupor always impresses.) It's a rule that seems hard and fast with Guest and his cheap work: little of the lives of the untalented obsessives he sneers at are rooted in the realities of the milieus he chooses. Instead, like the ephemeral jokes in the second Austin Powers movie that seemed wreathed in coils of marijuana smoke and self-adulation, we get attitudes, inanity and occasional dick and porn jokes. It's "This American Lite," as if Guest were Ira Glass without a whit of curiosity. (Glass has a deal with Warner Bros. to make movies based on "This American Life" chapters, which surely won't fall prey to this kind of nonsense.)

Guest says his work is about people who lose sight of the larger world because of their personal obsessions, but it's actually rooted in the two-drink minimum kind of Thursday night improvisational comedy you'd see in an L.A. comedy club. Even with weeks and weeks of editing, there's little chance that the material is going to have more than a scattershot shape. Working with an outline and compiling many hours of improvisations with his performers, the result is about letting your friends build castles in the clouds, drawn from whatever jokes and situations have worked for them throughout their decades in and out of clubs. It's lovingly detailed contempt. Guest likes to say his movies could be about any obsession, from thimble-collecting to selling urinal pucks, since the behaviors have more to do with the bag of tricks the particular comic brings to the craft service table. At best, the result is whimsical. At worst, it's dire, like trying to insist that, say, potholders or funny, or to draw on Guest's aristocratic English originals, it's like saying, "Aren't tea cozies extraordinary?"

If you look at an inspired piece of work like Sundance 2003 prizewinner American Splendor, capturing the life and imagination of curmudgeonly storyteller Harvey Pekar, or Peter Sollett's empathetic marvel, Raising Victor Vargas, you wonder why Guest's wan work gets past so many viewers' bullshit detectors. (Victor Vargas is a film that uses improvisation in ways that match Mike Leigh's work, and there's love in every frame.) Even when there are snootfuls of laughter coming from critics assembled in the screening room for a Guest picture, I'm in pain.

Guest is as myopic as his characters. To dwell on characters' funny haircuts and funny clothes is to make a Disneyland version of a passionate, captivating moment in history. In A Mighty Wind, Guest avoids references to the politics of the Civil Rights era he's puddling around in, a time which begat, among other artists, Bob Dylan. David Hadju's complex and entertaining history, "Positively 4th Street: The Lives and Times of Joan Baez, Bob Dylan, Mimi Baez Farina and Richard Farina," chronicles a world, filled with sex, passion and politics, that has no place on Guest's chaste yet sniggering planet. (Unless the title is an errant poke at Dylan's still-influential "Blowin' in the Wind.")

But Guest says avoiding reality is intentional. He claims that he played folk music in Greenwich Village in the 19560s at the Bitter End, so he didn't have to research. Of protest singers, Guest told my Movie City News colleague Gary Dretzka, "It probably would have added too much baggage, because the undercurrent of their music was so serious. That's not what the story's about. We use folk music as a backdrop for a story about these characters and how they're trying to get back to that life." Co-writer Levy and O'Hara play a lighter-than-air folk duo whose reunion at the tribute concert is the primary plot device. Despite O'Hara's brilliant gravitas in comedic roles, it's dreary and involving, but Guest told Dretzka is what the movie is to him. "It's very emotional, and that emotion is what's at the core of the movie. You couldn't lay a heavy civil-rights thing on top of that."

Beyond marginalizing what doesn't tickle his fancy, the 55-year-old Fifth Baron Haden-Guest of Saling in the County of Essex in the Peerage of the United Kingdom--who is eligible for a seat in the House of Lords--is, simply a snob. His work is insufferable but for the bright lights of lunatics like Willard or O'Hara. The real world's a funny place-funny-peculiar and funny-ha-ha. Until you drop ten bucks on a quaint little stinker like this.

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