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An unusually subdued Sundance carries on

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January 24, 2012|By Ty Burr

Chris Rock and Spike Lee at the Sundance Film Festival. (CHRIS PIZZELLO/ASSOCIATED…)

PARK CITY, Utah - Tracy Morgan was briefly in the Park City Medical Center after collapsing Sunday outside an event here. A weekend blizzard had moviegoers staggering and limousines spinning through the worst weather in festival memory. And Spike Lee is mad as hell.

It’s safe to say that the drama at the 2012 Sundance Film Festival has been largely off the screen.

The most dramatic, and by far the saddest, news was the death yesterday of Bingham Ray after suffering a stroke at Sundance last week. Ray, the former head of October Films and United Artists, was a much-loved legend who many credit with helping to shepherd the boom in off-Hollywood filmmaking during the 1990s, and word of his passing spread across the festival Twitter-sphere like an electronic pall. Feisty, creative, intrepid, he was a moving force in indie cinema and a genuine character, and he was stricken in the prime of his career. There will surely be memorials announced before the festival ends Sunday, and there will be many, many glasses raised on Main Street in the coming days.

As for Morgan, a cynic might wonder if the “30 Rock’’ comedian had simply taken a look at the festival lineup. At midpoint, this appears to be the softest, least-focused Sundance in many a moon, with high-profile titles failing to find audiences and precious few discoveries among the unknowns. There have been distribution deals, but nothing on the order of 2011’s record number of buys. No Sundance “It Girl’’ has emerged on the order of last year’s Elizabeth Olsen and Brit Marling. (The closest thing may have been established 34-year-old character actress Melanie Lynskey, who gets a rare lead in the smart but overwritten “Hello I Must Be Going.’’)

More to the point, enthusiasm for the movies here has been hard to come by, and disenchantment has been a more common response to the higher-profile films scheduled in the festival’s Premiere section. When one of the better-received star vehicles at Sundance, the Richard Gere financial thriller, “Arbitrage,’’ is praised as a perfectly serviceable Sidney Lumet knockoff, you know a festival is struggling to find its tone. Even such storied filmmaking iconoclasts as Lee and Stephen Frears have come up short.

Frears was in town searching for buyers for “Lay the Favorite,’’ an antic, cartoonish farce that only proves how much the British director (“The Grifters,’’ “The Queen’’) doesn’t understand about Las Vegas and American pop culture. With satisfying character performances from Bruce Willis and Catherine Zeta-Jones, and an over-the-top turn by Rebecca Hall as a stripper-turned-bookie, “Favorite’’ seems destined for a Redbox near you.