Sundance 2010: New Yorkers are a mess

It usually takes me four to five days of being in Park City to get homesick. But after watching three back-to-back portraits of neurotic New Yorkers, I was ready to hop a plane to JFK at the drop of an LES-hipster porkpie hat. Not that anyone would necessarily recognize the “New Yorkers” of Josh Radnor’s HappyThankYouMorePlease; the film’s urbanites who strut and fret around downtown bars and swank eateries bear about as much resemblance to actual Manhattan residents as the characters from Friends. There’s the wanna-be novelist (Radnor) who’s saddled with a lost African-American foster kid—don’t ask—and is crushing hard on a local bartender-cum-singer (Kate Mara); a charity worker (Malin Akerman) who suffers from alopecia and the unwanted attentions of a nerdy dude (Arrested Development’s Tony Hale); and a couple (Zoe Kazan and Pablo Schreiber) who bicker over whether they might have to [Gasp!] move to Los Angeles. The horror!

From it’s McSweeney’s-ish title to its boob-tube trite dialogue (”We shouldn’t be together, we’re a mess!” “So let’s clean each other up”), Radnor’s directorial debut is the exact kind of indie-cutesy malarkey that we’d hoped the brave new John Cooper world would have tempered. “Cinematic rebellion,” my ass! This is vintage Sundance warm-’n'-fuzziness, partially redeemed by Kazan and Schreiber investing their confused lovers with a sense of weathered-relationship history. They make you feel like you’re watching human beings in a bona fide life crisis, as well as giving you a break from Radnor’s ain’t-I-charming? mugging, the blatant moppet-sploitation of an adorable kid or poor Akerman gamely propping up an underwritten part. Nice try, but NoThanksWe’llPassWhat’sNext.

After the screening, an audience member asked Radnor what might happen to these characters in seven or eight years. The potential answer is that they’ll morph into the emotionally dysfunctional New Yorkers of Nicole Holofcener’s Please Give. Like HTYMP, this ensemble piece puts its slightly older city-dwellers through some serious life-is-cruel-and-unfair paces: infidelity, bad romantic decisions, fear of mortality, the inconvenience of having to wait for your elderly neighbor to die so you can renovate her apartment (and crushing guilt over the same).

Unlike the earlier movie, Holofcener’s film benefits from her excellent ear for candidly rude dialogue and an ability to get out of her actors’ way. Check out how Rebecca Hall and Amanda Peet’s estranged siblings pick at each other’s weak spots, or business-life partners Catherine Keener and Oliver Platt negotiate a critical-condition marriage, and you’ll see why performers gravitate to working with her; they’re given a lot to chew on and the chance to roam free. To enjoy watching the talent trade bitter banter and dig their teeth into roles written for adults, however, you have to get over the same bourgeois existential ennui that is the veteran indie director’s stock in trade (see Lovely and Amazing, Friends with Money). There are scenes in Please Give where, after being forced to feel sorry for rich, pretty people boo-hooing their life, that you’d swear the title should be followed by Us a Break. There are also a handful of smaller, pitch-perfect moments that almost make suffering through such upper-middle class hand-wringing worth it.

And then there’s the down-and-out downtowner of Daddy Long Legs. If you were lucky enough to catch Joshua Safdie’s 2008 drama about a young kleptomaniac, The Pleasure of Being Robbed, then you know that this next-gen filmmaker has a knack for blending lo-fi rawness and an odd sense of lyricism. His follow-up, codirected with his brother Benny, works a similar mojo as it follows Lenny (played by Frownland’s Ronald Bronstein) through his day-to-day dreariness. The one bright light in this divorced projectionist’s life are his two sons; the fact that he’s as much a doting father as a complete fuckup only makes his inability to parent correctly that much more poignantly. (And trust me: This guy ends up making some serious bad-dad moves.) Even when the Safdies swerve into the surrealistic—you’ll never look at the giant mosquito at the Museum of Natural History the same way—the emphasis is always on Lenny’s attempt to reconcile life in an occasionally harsh metropolis. It’s hard to be a saint when you’re living in the city, but this is an NYC that can be cold and unforgiving or can offer up the chance to experience something off-the-cuff and unique in a blink. Now this is an exciting, depressing, rough-and-tumble NYC that I recognize immediately. The movie is part of the Sundance Selects series via IFC’s on-demand (check your cable channels). Do not miss it.