Wesley has already written about the mesmerizing Hurricane Katrina documentary "Trouble the Water," but having caught up with this festival favorite this afternoon, I'm finding it hard to dismiss. One thing struck me right off: Since "Trouble" avails itself so heavily of the amateur video-camera footage of 9th Ward resident Kimberly Rivers, the movie functions as a real-life "Cloverfield" -- a monster-movie where the monster is weather. Which makes George W. Bush, FEMA head Mike Brown, and a soulless post-hurricane bureaucracy the equivalent of those arachnoid mini-monsters that jump on people and rip their hearts out.
"Trouble the Water" also makes the rather startling claim that disaster can make you a better person. Rivers' husband, Scott, allows as how he was just another drugged-up neighborhood loser and probably would have ended up "in jail or underground" if the hurricane hadn't forced him to forge bonds with the people around him (including a local rival and now close friend). By the end of the movie he's seen doing construction work with a boss who's clearly a mentor; Kimberly, too, has a bigger, richer sense of herself for her heroic behavior during an unimaginable time. Amidst all the damage it wrought, who knew Katrina could also blast a person's horizons open?
I also finally saw "Ballast," an unnaturally quiet drama set in the Mississippi Delta region that has some of the most respectful word of mouth in the entire festival. For good reason: Lance Hammer's mysterious tale of three survivors of a fourth man's suicide is an astonishingly controlled piece of filmmaking, with shots that evoke classic landscape photography and performances that are so real as to seem invisible. The movie has a slow arc toward redemption but nothing in it seems forced or remotely Hollywood; everything's rooted in the low skies and endless spaces of the setting. Daringly, Hammer doesn't use a musical score of any sort, and the silence is both oppressive and ultimately liberating. Here's some video of the director explaining why he decided to dispense with music.
The Patti Smith documentary, "Patti Smith: Dream of Life," was ten years in the making and had a lot of input from the singer, so it's not terribly surprising that the final result plays a lot like a Patti Smith song: oblique, impassioned, dancing on the edge of mindboggling pretentiousness, and often exhilirating. I'm a fan so I quite liked it, but I can't say the same for the two older women next to me, who sighed heavily as this impressionistic journey -- as far from the standard talking-head bio-doc as you can get -- rolled toward the two-hour mark.
"Secrecy," from Harvard film-prof godhead Robb Moss and Harvard science-history brainiac Peter Galison, attracted a very particular crowd: articulate, knowledgable, and borderline paranoid. The film's a balanced polemic (no, that's not a paradox) about our government's rapidly growing fetish for hiding information from its citizens; you can actually feel the movie focusing your understanding of the issues as you watch. The post-film discussion was heady and occasionally emotional; here's some video of Moss explaining why the Valerie Plame scandal was not included in the mix.
Overall, my early Sundance gloom -- see yesterday's Globe article -- has dispelled, as I've seen some very good movies and people seem excited about them for the right reasons. Or, as Robb Moss said to me after the "Secrecy" screening, "When you?re at Sundance it seems like it?s the whole world, and the metric of the whole world is whether you sell something. But most things don?t sell, and really what Sundance is fantastic about is putting your film in play." With the onus of the Big Buy mostly gone from the picture, audiences seem more than happy to play.
