Friday, Nov. 14, 2008

Rich movies, poor crowds

The Lone Star International Film Festival is showing terrific movies to disappointingly sparse crowds.

Christopher Kelly

There are few greater pleasures than to walk into a screening at a film festival with low expectations -- and end up seeing a movie that knocks you off your seat. It happened to me last night, on day two of the Lone Star International Film Festival, at the 8:30 p.m. screening of 'Wendy and Lucy, at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth.

Having found director Kelly Reichardt's previous efforts, River of Grass and Old Joy, poky and pointless, I arrived fully expecting to bolt after fifteen minutes; in fact, I told a friend to expect a phone call by 8:45 p.m., so that we could make a plan to meet for drinks.

Well, the phone call and the drinks never happened. (Sorry, Carla!) Instead, I found myself steadily enraptured by this spare, eloquent movie about a young woman named Wendy (Michelle Williams), who, without much money, is trying to make her way to Alaska. But things quickly go awry for Wendy -- her car breaks down, her dog Lucy goes missing -- until her very existence suddenly seems to be in peril. .

Like Reichardt's other pictures, the pacing is slow, and the attention to the details of the landscape borders on the perverse. But this time the director has a narrative worth following, and a mesmerizing lead actress; and you steadily find yourself drawn completely into the plight of Wendy. There is also a sequence in this movie -- two long trackings across the fronts of cages at a dog pound -- that is among the most arresting things I've seen in years.

So here's the million dollar question: Why weren't there more than 45 people at the screening last night? It's not like Wendy and Lucy is a total obscurity -- it arrived in Fort Worth after high-profile berths at the Cannes, Toronto and New York film festivals. And it's not like there were dozens of other movies happening at the same time.

Indeed, now that the festival is up and running, and putting forth a genuinely impressive line-up of films, it's disappointing to see that the crowds aren't turning out. Before Wendy and Lucy, I was one of only about twenty people at the Four Day Weekend Theater to see a Russian curio called Nirvana. Granted, this ultra-stylized portrait of Russian junkies was patience-trying (I bolted after about forty minutes); but this is precisely the sort of offbeat, daring programming that needs to be encouraged and supported.

Seriously, Fort Worth: Get with the program. You have a film festival in front of you that's worthy of any major city, and you have the opportunity to see movies that are going to be hard to encounter otherwise. (Wendy and Lucy will have a very limited release, courtesy of a new company called Ossciliscope, beginning in late December.)

But without some bodies in those seats, this festival is going to have trouble making it to a third year.

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