If the U.S. dramatic competition at Sundance this year failed to yield one truly great film, it did offer up a lovely surprise in writer-director Cherien Dabis' Amreeka, which follows a Palestinian single mother and her son as they emigrate from the West Bank town of Ramallah to the flatlands of the American Midwest.

In its basic outline, the movie sounds like a collection of hoary coming-to-America clichés: Upon arriving in suburban Illinois, Muna (the excellent Nisreen Faour) and 16-year-old Fadi (Melka Muallem) move in with Muna's sister, Raghda (The Visitor co-star Hiam Abbas), who herself dreams of returning to her homeland. Raghda's husband, a doctor, has seen one white patient after another take their business elsewhere following 9/11 and the Iraq invasion. And as Muna searches for a job and Fadi enrolls in a public high school, they too encounter the face of anti-Muslim discrimination at every turn. That Muna and Fadi aren't Muslims hardly matters. All that matters is that they look the part.

Like The Visitor, to which it will surely be compared, Dabis' film aspires to show the plight of Arab people living in the U.S. in the Homeland Security era. Only, unlike that film, Amreeka tells its story from the inside-out, without want or need of a white protagonist to serve as the audience's surrogate, and with real three-dimensional characters instead of blunt ideological instruments masquerading as human beings. Although Dabis (who is Palestinian herself) isn't entirely immune from painting in broad strokes -- once again, a white character's first encounter with falafel is deployed as a symbol of East-West bonding -- the details in the film feel lived-in and sincere. Systematically, one form of humiliation is traded for another: no longer subjected to daily searches by West Bank checkpoint guards, Muna instead finds herself flipping burgers at White Castle, while Fadi's classmates accuse him of plotting to blow up the school.

At the heart of Amreeka beats an irresolvable conundrum: that a nation founded by immigrants can be so narrow-mindedly conformist. Yet, given every opportunity for self-pitying ACLU hand-wringing, Dabis keeps the film's tone buoyant and light, making a fine comedy of deception out of Muna's efforts to convince her family she actually works in a bank, and laying the groundwork for a gentle, not-quite romance between Muna and the Jewish principal of Fadi's school. When most filmmakers want to say something important about cultural conflicts, they labor to bring tears to our eyes. Dabis, by contrast, makes us laugh at ourselves and, in turn, each other.

Amreeka was the best of several films at Sundance this year concerned with living in (or getting to) the U.S. as seen through foreigners' eyes, a couple of which seem poised for prizes at the festival's closing-night awards ceremony, which begins in an hour from now. One of those contenders is Student Academy Award winner Cary Joji Fukunaga's Sin Nombre, which won over audiences (and a lot of critics) with its violent story of a teenage Honduran girl and a Mexican teen gangbanger on the run who end up on the same perilous train journey to the U.S.-Mexico border. When they say "From the producers of The Motorcycle Diaries," they're not kidding: another lushly produced, impersonally directed piece of Central/South American slum porn, Sin Nombre hitches stylized suffering on to a direly predictable street-thug scenario (two friends, torn between their loyalty to the gang and to each other) while awating the inevitable plaudits of festival juries, American art-house moviegoers and Oscar voters. (No surprise: this is one of the only competition entries to arrive at Sundance with a distributor already in place.) Fukunaga's film is slightly less exploitative, and therefore marginally preferable, to Fernando Meirelles' rancid City of God -- but not by very much.

One of Anna Wintour's most significant (and profitable) contributions to Vogue, we learn in The September Issue, has been her decision to put movie stars -- rather than fashion models -- on the magazine's cover. That gives The September Issue an unintended but hardly insignificant point of connection with director Joe Berlinger's Crude, a remarkable documentary about the decade-and-a-half-long, multibillion-dollar class action lawsuit filed by indigenous Ecuadorian villagers against the Chevron oil company alleging toxic pollution of the local soil and water supply. At one point in Berlinger's film, longtime Amazon Rainforest advocate (and wife of Sting) Trudie Styler develops an interest in the case, and her involvement leads directly to a flurry of increased U.S. media attention (including a Vanity Fair profile of charismatic Ecuadorian prosecutor Pablo Fajardo). Whatever one thinks about the vacuity of celebrity culture, these two films convincingly argue that celebrities can and do make things happen, whether sustaining a magazine's viability or drawing attention to corporate America's latest atrocity. Certainly, in an age when shirtless pictures of Barack Obama are as much in demand by the tabloids as paparazzi snaps of Britney Spears, resistance is futile.

Styler's involvement in the Chevron case is one of the few bright spots in Crude, which otherwise unfolds as an infuriating litany of South American exploitation, back-room glad-handing and bureaucratic dead ends. For nearly 30 years, beginning in the mid-1960s, the former Texaco oil company (acquired by Chevron in 2001) drilled for oil in the Euacdorian Amazon, in and around the ancestral homeland of the native Cofán Indian community. In 1992, Texaco's government-granted concession ended and the company ceded control of its drilling sites to the state-owned Petroecaudor, after allegedly embarking on a government-mandated $40 million "environmental remediation" project. And yet, today the soil and waters of the area still run black with oil, the Cofán are dying of cancer at an alarming rate, and the blame for this enviro-disaster is being passed between Chevron and Petroecuador faster than a Bobby Hull slapshot.

No stranger to gnarly courtroom thickets, Berlinger, together with his longtime filmmaking partner Bruce Sinofsky, previously directed the Sundance Audience Award winner Brother's Keeper (which centered around a fratricide trial in the small, dairy-farming community of Munnsville, New York) and the two Paradise Lost documentaries (about the ongoing travails of three Arkansas teenagers convicted, on questionable evidence, of murdering three eight-year-old boys). In the gripping, intrinsically cinematic Crude, he does an equally superb job of taking us through the twists and turns of a legal battle nearly as long as the Amazon itself, and with no discernible end in sight. As usual, Berlinger presents both sides of the case as fairly and non-judgmentally as possible, never inserting himself into the narrative and turning the audience, in effect, into the jury. Chevron even sends its in-house environmental scientist out to speak to the filmmaker in a defensive interview that plays like an extended Tilda Swinton outtake from Michael Clayton. Talk about your ice queens: next to this woman, Ana Wintour seems a positive ray of sunshine.

If Crude is the most urgent film I've seen at Sundance this year, Boy Interrupted is unquestionably the most harrowing. Directed by Dana Heinz Perry and photographed by her husband, Hart Perry, this documentary isn't torn from the headlines, but rather the bloodline. In 2005, the Perrys' 15-year-old son, Evan, committed suicide by jumping from the bedroom window of their New York City apartment -- something the bipolar teen had talked about doing since as early as age five. That event created an odd symmetry with the death, 30 years earlier, of Hart Perry's own younger brother, who asphyxiated himself with car exhaust at 21. Boy Interrupted tries to make sense of these two senseless acts by reconstructing them, through home movies and interviews with surviving friends and family, in frequently agonizing detail.

Nothing is private here, obsessive self-documentation the order of the day. "Filmmaking has been the family business for almost twenty years now," Dana Perry notes in a statement included in the movie's press kit, but it's actually even longer if you count the interview footage (included here) Hart Perry shot of his own parents in the immediate aftermath of his brother's death. Three decades later we see the Perry matriarch again, now suffering from dementia and a fair amount of willful amnesia, once more asked to replay painful memories before the camera's unforgiving gaze. The result is a deeply absorbing, undeniably creepy hybrid of catharsis and emotional exhibitionism -- a movie that twists your guts into a gordian knot, then sends you out of the theater wondering if there are limits to those things that should be filmed and publicly shown. Boy Interrupted is hard to reckon with, but even harder to shake off. If Capturing the Friedmans had been directed by the Friedmans themselves, it might have looked something like this.

"The dirty little secret about Sundance is that the best films every year are the documentaries," says Oscar-winning An Inconvenient Truth director David Guggenheim in one of the trailers for this year's Sundance Film Festival. Actually, it's more of an openly acknowledged fact that Sundance's documentary selection is reliably stronger than its narrative one. And so, having made it through 14 of the 16 films in this year's U.S. Dramatic Competition (I'll see the remaining two -- Adam and Amreeka --  today), I shifted gears yesterday and hunkered down for a full schedule of docs at Sundance's newest screening venue: Temple Har Shalom or, as it's known until Sunday, the Temple Theatre.

First on my itinerary was The September Issue, which arrived in Park City hyped as a nonfiction riposte to The Devil Wears Prada, which it both is and isn't. Although director R.J. Cutler (A Perfect Candidate) was allowed unprecedented access behind the scenes at Vogue during the planning and production of its massive September 2007 issue (at the time, the largest single issue of a monthly magazine ever published), anyone who comes to The September Issue expecting a warts-and-all portrayal of Vogue editor-in chief Anna Wintour is likely to find the 90-minute film something of a let-down. That's not to say that Cutler lobs softballs at the fashion world's perpetually sunglass-ed high priestess, but rather that his primary interest is the nuts-and-bolts running of a magazine, from the concept stages to the moment the latest issue hits the newsstands. Of course, since this is a movie about Vogue and not, say, Field and Stream, the attendant glamour level is high, from the vertigo-inducing haute couture to the parade of strapping models and actresses who grace the magazine's coveted spreads.

In addition to following the Devil herself as she meets privately with top name designers (Oscar de la Renta, Jean-Paul Gaultier, et al.), scours the runways of the world's fashion weeks and passes final judgment on what does and doesn't end up in print, The September Issue devotes nearly equal attention  to Vogue's flamboyant editor-at-large, André Leon Talley, and its legendary creative director, Grace Coddington. And it's Coddington, a Welsh-born former model whose hugely ambitious narrative photo shoots have become a Vogue hallmark during her 30-plus years with the magazine, who threatens to steal the movie right out from under her more famous co-star. A force of calm at the center of Vogue's sometimes tempestuous storm, Coddington is, by Wintour's own admission, "a genius," and you don't have to know much about fashion (or even take it that seriously) to recognize the vivid, cinematic atmosphere and compositional elegance of Coddington's work with some of fashion's leading photographers.

Wintour, meanwhile, remains as coolly inscrutable to us as she does to many of the people she works with on a daily basis. And why not? It's to Cutler's credit that he neither plays into the stereotype of Wintour as an unfeeling ice queen nor goes out of his way to warm her up. (He also doesn't pry very deeply into her personal life.) Instead, he portrays the world's foremost fashion tastemaker as a serious businesswoman who has managed to not only keep Vogue at the center of the zeitgeist for the past two decades, but to enlarge the magazine's success at a time when most other printed media is going the way of the dodo. For this alone, she commands our respect.

By the mid-point of Sundance 2008, the standout film of the dramatic competition was Lance Hammer's Ballast, which mined unexpected poetry from the story of a poverty-line black family making ends meet in the Mississippi Delta. This year, it's a film that casts an equally penetrating gaze on the trials and tribulations of disenfranchised blacks in the urban jungle of pre-gentrification Harlem, circa 1987. Adapted from the first novel by the Nuyorican poetess known as Sapphire, Push: Based on the novel by Sapphire immerses us detail by agonizing detail in the life of a morbidly obese 16-year-old, Clareece "Precious" Jones (newcomer Gabourey Sidibe), whose welfare mother (Mo'Nique) beats her with a frying pan, who is repeatedly raped at the hands of her father (resulting in one Down Syndrome baby and, early in the film, a second pregnancy), and whose only escape from her bleak existence are the vivid daydreams in which she imagines herself a ghetto-fabulous fashion model or pop star.

Directed by Lee Daniels, who established himself as a producer (with Monster's Ball and The Woodsman) before making his directorial debut with the risible 2005 mother-and-son assassin romp Shadowboxer, Push isn't half the piece of controlled, confident craftsmanship that Ballast was, but it may be that Daniels' crude, wildly undisciplined, anything-goes directorial style is exactly what the movie calls for. Hothouse melodrama one moment, pungent social realism the next, with dashes of slapstick farce (be they intentional or not) in between, Push takes the better part of an hour to settle on something resembling a consistent tone, yet even when the movie is at its most schizoid, you can't take your eyes off of it.
 
Not one for subtlety, Daniels puts black female lives destroyed by abuse and defeatism on the screen with a brute-force intensity and lack of sentimentality (The Color Purple this certainly isn't). He also gathers a collection of startlingly effective performances from such unlikely players as Mo'Nique (whose monster mom is anything but a one-note villain), Mariah Carey (deglamorized as an empathetic social worker) and the magnanimous Sidibe, who carries this exhausting and strangely exhilarating film on her mighty shoulders. Push is far from perfect, but there isn't much I've seen at Sundance this year that I wouldn't trade for the sight of a hard-won smile finally making its way across Precious Jones' stoic, beautiful, wounded face.

Will someone please stop Susan Sarandon from playing grief-stricken mothers before this once-great actress becomes a one-trick caricature of her former self? Having fretted over a son feared missing in Desert Storm in Safe Passage, mourned the death of her son's fiancée in Moonlight Mile and most recently grieved for a son killed upon returning from Iraq in In the Valley of Elah, Sarandon makes it a four-peat with director Shana Feste's dubiously titled Sundance competition entry The Greatest, in which her 18-year-old son dies (by his own stupid fault) in a car crash and his surviving girlfriend (newcomer Carey Mulligan) subsequently announces that she's pregnant. Seemingly included by the festival only because of its shameless plagiarism of Sundance founder Robert Redford's Ordinary People, The Greatest is a mourning-family turkey with all the trimmings: a father (Pierce Brosnan) who can't bring himself to grieve; a mother who refuses to alter so much as one dust mite in the dead boy's room; a recovering-addict brother (Johnny Simmons) forever in the shadow of his golden-boy sibling; and an incessant love-songs-with-Delilah soundtrack meant to wring tears from even the stoniest of viewers. No movie at Sundance this year has depressed me more -- not because of the story it tells, but because of the creative bankruptcy it embodies.

What is the shape and size of a human soul? Does it look like a chickpea? A gumdrop? A pet rock? And if you could somehow extract your soul from your body, what would be left? Would you still be you? These are among the concerns taken up by writer-director Sophie Barthes' Cold Souls, an amusing divertissement that has injected some welcome levity into a Sundance dramatic competition dominated by visions of poverty, incest, domestic violence, dead children, bloody border crossings and the shadow of 9/11.

Barthes' film, which could alternately be called Being Paul Giamatti, features the hangdog American Splendor star as himself, in a gently existential comedy about the little-known but highly lucrative world of international soul trafficking. During the rehearsals for a stage production of Uncle Vanya, Giamatti begins to feel weighed down by Chekhov's lovelorn, chronically dissatisfied protagonist, finding himself unable to slip out of character when he goes home at night. At the suggestion of his agent, the actor puts his soul on deposit at a Roosevelt Island "soul storage facility" run by a kooky David Strathairn (not playing himself), then later opts for a soul transplant courtesy of a black market of Russian-harvested souls ferried to the U.S. in the bellies of human mules (one of whom is played by the excellent Russian actress Dina Korzun, last seen at Sundance as the wife of Rip Torn in Forty Shades of Blue).

Maria Vasilyevna Voinitskaya Full of Grace? Not exactly. Like a lot of Sundance entries past and present, Cold Souls begins with a blast of self-assured ingenuity that it doesn't quite sustain over the course of the entire feature. (I for one longed to see more of the havoc all Giamatti's soul-swapping wreaks on his marriage to an underused Emily Watson.) But Barthes' low-fi futurism, generous good humor and respect for the audience's literacy are easy to admire, and make Cold Souls vastly preferable to this year's other competition film about people searching for the answers to life's big questions.

In writer-director John Hindman's Arlen Faber, Jeff Daniels plays to the back row as a reclusive Philadelphia author who 20 years ago published a book, Me and God, that came to define spirituality for an entire generation. Now, as reclusive authors are wont to do in Sundance movies, Faber is slowly lured out of his shell by an aggressively annoying cast of supporting characters that includes an overbearing, overcaffeinated single mother (Lauren Graham) and a self-pitying alcoholic bookseller (Lou Taylor Pucci). "Hell is other people," Faber says at one point, quoting Sartre; but unlike the self-absorbed, misanthropic writer Daniels so effortlessly brought to life in The Squid and the Whale, this one never convinces as anything but the destined-to-be-lovable central figure in a wide-screen sit-com.

An existential quandary of a different sort drives director Nicholas Jasenovec's Paper Heart, a hydra-headed narrative/non-fiction hybrid in which the diminutive Asian-American comedienne Charlyne Yi (Knocked Up) sets out on a cross-country journey to discover whether true love is a reality or merely an illusion. For a while, as Yi decamps in Tennessee, Texas and Oklahoma, where she poses her disarming questions to an assortment of ministers, psychics, biology professors and barroom gurus, Paper Heart is a delight, as are the construction-paper-and-fishing-wire animated interludes Yi uses to dramatize key events from the lives of the several longtime married couples she interviews along her way. Of considerably less interest is the contrived "B" storyline (which eventually becomes the "A" storyline) in which Yi's own budding romance with Superbad and Juno star Michael Cera (who appears as himself) wreaks havoc with her progress on the documentary. But in Sundance -- as in most relationships -- a 60/40 success/failure ratio is nothing to scoff at.

Those searching for signs of how leaner economic times are being felt at Sundance 2009 need look no further than the fact that the festival's opening weekend yielded only one major sale -- and that one was something of a foregone conclusion. Although the tepid reaction to director Antoine Fuqua's Brooklyn's Finest from critics and audiences alike led upstart Senator Entertainment (which paid a reported $5 million for the North American distribution rights) to immediately start calling the film a "work in progress," you had to figure that if a cop drama from the director of Training Day, starring Richard Gere and Ethan Hawke, couldn't close a deal at Sundance this year, it really was going to be a long 10 days in the snow.

Meanwhile, one of the best films to premiere thus far in the festival's dramatic competition isn't even seeking a theatrical deal, but will go straight from Sundance to HBO in a little over one month's time. The movie is called Taking Chance and it would, admittedly, be a tough sell to moviegoers even in a boom market. Based on the journal kept by now-retired Marine Lieutenant Colonel Michael R. Strobl as he escorted the body of a decorated PFC killed in Iraq back to his family, Taking Chance has the double misfortune of arriving at a moment when the industry has reached an undeniable state of Middle East fatigue. "If they even see 'Asalaam alaikum' on the page, they close the script," one well-known Hollywood screenwriter recently told me, citing as an example a spec script he had recently sold, then been asked to rewrite so as to remove any reference to Iraq, Afghanistan or Islam. The box-office implosion of Ridley Scott's recent Body of Lies seems to have been the straw that broke this particular camel's back, but even many smaller, more indie-flavored dramas and documentaries about America's Middle East misadventures have been greeted with similar audience apathy.

I myself came with some degree of trepidation to Taking Chance, which on paper sounds like an unholy marriage of two recent films that tried and failed to effectively dramatize the homefront impact of the Iraq campaign: the vomitously maudlin Grace Is Gone (in which John Cusack shilled shamelessly for an Oscar as a father hiding the death of his Marine wife from his two young daughters) and the Paul Haggis-ed In the Valley of Elah (in which Tommy Lee Jones' Iraq vet son turns up dead and Jones responds by hanging an American flag upside-down). Then there's that too-clever-by-half title, Taking Chance -- because, you know, the fallen Marine's name was Chance and he's being taken home. And yet, this is an Iraq movie that consistently defies your expectations, and then exceeds them.

The directorial debut of the veteran indie producer Ross Katz (whose credits include In the Bedroom and Lost in Translation), Taking Chance announces early on that its intentions are of a procedural (rather than polemical) nature. The film begins on a black screen, while the soundtrack illustrates the Mahmoudiyah IED attack that leaves PFC Chance Phelps among its casualties. Katz then goes on to document the preparation and transportation of Phelps' body as it is packed into ice on the landing strip of a German air base, flown to the mortuary at Dover Air Force Base, x-rayed for explosives, vacuumed of moisture, cleansed (along with Phelps' personal belongings) of dried blood and finally prepared for burial. No detail is too small or insignificant for Katz -- one scene depicts the tailoring of new uniforms for the dead. All of it is filmed with a stark, clinical intensity that suggests this is work performed day in and day out, over and over again.

For many filmmakers, the default inclination would be to bring us as close as possible to Phelps, whether by way of flashbacks or testimonials -- to put an individual face on what might otherwise seem just another flag-draped casket. But it speaks to the tact, simplicity and intelligence of Katz's approach that he elects to keep Phelps a largely abstract figure -- or, rather, a representative one, of all those men and women who fight and die for our country, regardless of whether we approve of the conflict in which they fight.

It's hard, I think, for a movie to engender much respect for the U.S. Military these days, let alone convince you of the fundamental goodness of people, but Taking Chance manages to do both precisely by not trying too hard to do either. Katz's film is, at heart, a classically structured road movie that begins in the suburban homes and corporate military offices of Quantico, Virginia and gradually winds its way to the wide-open spaces of Wyoming. In between, Strobl (who is played in the film by Kevin Bacon) encounters ordinary citizens who disarm him -- and us -- with their quiet kindness and dignity: the flight attendant who gives Strobl her crucifix; the pilot who tells him he can remember the name of every killed-in-action soldier he has ever transported; and the old Korean War vet (a superb Tom Aldredge) who invokes a bygone era's sense of honor and duty. By that point in the film, we seem to have traveled not merely West, but back in time -- a feeling capped by a country funeral that Katz stages as though it were an outtake from My Darling Clementine.

Taking Chance isn't always as good as that. Like many first-time directors, Katz has a tendency to use original music as an emotional crutch, and his subtle, tasteful direction occasionally verges on being too discrete for its own good. Still, Katz has made one of the few Iraq movies that, along with Brian De Palma's Redacted, Kathryn Bigelow's The Hurt Locker and parts of Kimberly Peirce's Stop-Loss, feels vital to our celluloid record of this seismic moment in American history. He has also created an extraordinary showcase for Bacon, who is the sort of actor audiences get in the habit of taking for granted (he has never been nominated for an Oscar) because he is so consistently good and so rarely self-aggrandizing. Here, his largely nonverbal performance consists of a rigid military posture and a face that is a remarkable palimpsest of grief and the impotent rage Strobl (a Desert Storm vet) feels at having passed up his chance at a second tour of duty.

This is a movie to see, whether on large screens or small. That most people will only be able to experience it the latter way is unfortunate, yet entirely understandable, given that theatrical distribution -- for all but the biggest Hollywood blockbusters -- has now devolved into a loss leader for DVD sales and cable broadcast. So it's not all that surprising that HBO Films, which had a modest theatrical success in 2002 with Real Women Have Curves and another one the following year with American Splendor, set a February 21 broadcast date for Taking Chance before Sundance even began. Factor in the day-and-date cable/theatrical models already being embraced by IFC Films and Magnolia Pictures and we may well be entering the era in which the true success of indie movies will be measured not in ticket sales but rather in TiVo downloads. Happy viewing.

For the first time in its 25-year history, the Sundance Film Festival opened Thursday night with a movie from Australia. It was also the first time the festival has opened with a feature-length animation -- one, I feel confident in saying, that is among the strangest animated films ever made. Written and directed by Adam Elliot (who won an Oscar in 2004 for his 23-minute animated short, Harvie Krumpet), Mary and Max chronicles the unusual pen-pal relationship between a shy, gloomy eight-year-old Australian girl from the Melbourne suburbs and an obese, 44-year-old Jewish man living in New York. They meet by chance, when Mary (voiced at first by newcomer Bethany Whitmore and later by Toni Collette) rips Max's name out of an international address book at her local post office and writes him a letter on a whim.

That begins 20 years of correspondence in which Mary and Max (voiced by Philip Seymour Hoffman) become each other's best (and effectively only) friend in the world, despite the paralyzing anxiety the former's letters strike in the latter (with their uncomfortable questions like, "Where do babies come from?"), and despite the efforts of Mary's perpetually plastered, kleptomaniac mother to stop the letters dead in their tracks. And who can blame her, really? After all, this sort of relationship between an older man and a pre-pubescent girl just isn't done, just isn't normal.

Well, as it happens, nothing in Mary and Max is within even shouting distance of normal. A true outsider's movie, the closest it comes to a "well-adjusted" or "socially acceptable" character may be the bully who terrorizes young Mary on the schoolhouse playground. But the rest of Elliot's claymated ensemble suggest the love children of Roald Dahl and Todd Solondz -- among them Mary's withdrawn, taxidermy-obsessed father, her legless, agoraphobic neighbor and the nearly blind atheist woman who regularly cooks Max bowls of disgusting soup. (And to think, I haven't even mentioned Max's imaginary friend, Mr. Ravioli.) In Elliot's world, even the animals are outcasts: Mary gives shelter to a rooster that falls of a slaughter wagon, while Max's pet cat is a one-eyed stray with chronic halitosis. Max is also the owner of a series of pet goldfish, all named Henry, each of whom dies a stranger and more grotesque death than the one before -- as for that matter do many of the movie's human characters.

Pixar this most certainly isn't. In fact, where most feature-length animated films, by sheer virtue of the painstaking labor involved, aim to reach the broadest possible audience, Mary and Max -- which took over a year to produce, at an average rate of five seconds of finished animation per day -- is as insular and private as any live-action "personal filmmaking." As it happens, Elliot did base the film in part on his own longtime pen-pal relationship with a New York man diagnosed (like Max) with Asperger Syndrome, the autism-like disorder that limits its sufferers' ability to interpret nonverbal communication. But when I say Mary and Max is a personal film, I mean more in spirit than in letter. I mean that this is a movie that seems to well up from a place of such pain and suffering that it's as if Elliot had cut open some long scabbed-over wound and let it bleed anew all over the screen. Certain to traumatize children (and even some adults), Mary and Max may be the first "cartoon" that will find its most sympathetic audiences in support groups and mental hospitals.

This isn't exactly new territory for Elliot, whose films could be considered the antidote to 98 percent of Hollywood movies and television programs, with their smiling, airbrushed characters who rarely encounter a problem that can't be resolved by the end of act three, and who seem far more plasticine than Elliot's clay avatars. The title character of Harvie Krumpet was a Touette's-afflicted Polish refugee who gets struck by lightning, loses a testicle and eventually succumbs to the ravages of Alzheimer's and suicidal depression. Likewise, Mary and Max spirals towards suicide (and electroshock therapy), occasionally permitting a ray of hope to shine down on the characters, only to just as soon dash it with storm clouds. When the post-graduate Mary authors a book-length study of Asperger's, a humiliated Max shows his appreciation by ripping the "M" key from his typewriter and dropping it in the mail. And when Mary finds what she thinks is love in the form of a handsome classmate, he turns out to have his own very special, very male pen-pal -- with benefits.

The depressive air weighs heavy, but never quite overwhelms the film, thanks to Elliot's unfailing ability to find moments of levity amidst the pervasive despair. In spite of everything I've said thus far, Mary and Max is a very funny movie that manages to laugh at its eccentric characters without mocking them, reducing them to grotesques, or suggesting that they should strive to "overcome" their "handicaps." In Elliot's view, to paraphrase the Firesign Theatre, we're all manic depressives on this bus, and how much you enjoy the film may well depend on whether you share in that opinion or simply can't understand why these miserable people don't quit their whining and get with the program.

When I left the opening-night screening of Mary and Max, I wasn't entirely sure if Elliot had pulled the thing off, and even 36 hours later, I think the movie errs in the way of many a debut feature made by directors accustomed to working in the short form. That is, it runs out of ideas before it runs out of running time. At 60 minutes, the movie might have been great. At 90, it remains a strikingly original, uncompromising piece of work. Visually, it is a marvel of tinsel-and string, hand-crafted design, from the pale, pear-shaped characters to its vision of New York City as a chiaroscuro urban jungle in which the only flashes of color are those that arrive in the post from Down Under. Then there is Hoffman's splendid performance, which demands an even more dramatic vocal disappearing act than Truman Capote's adenoidal whine. Max's voice -- a raspy, Yiddish-inflected huff -- is so difficult to imagine issuing forth from Hoffman that if you didn't know it was him you, well, wouldn't know it was him. And what greater compliment can one pay a character actor than that?

In the eight years that I've been covering Sundance, this is one of the only times the opening night film has been less than a calamitous failure, and maybe the only time it has been a movie of serious ambition, worth talking, thinking and arguing about afterward. "This can be a very inspiring time for artists," Robert Redford opined on the stage of the Eccles Theatre just prior to the Mary and Max screening, trying to put some kind of optimistic spin on the current hard times. That's the sort of programmatic spiel (like last year's dubious festival mantra, "Focus On Film") that usually makes hardened Sundance vets roll their eyes. But after seeing Mary and Max, I can't help thinking that Redford might be on to something.

"Will everyone be wearing black?" a friend asked over dinner the other night when the subject arose of my imminent departure for the 2009 Sundance Film Festival. "I'm so glad I'm not going to Sundance," confided one longtime film publicist at this week's Los Angeles Film Critics awards dinner, as if she had escaped sentencing to a leper colony. Indeed, this year, it feels like a funereal pall has descended on Park City, Utah before the curtain has even risen on January's annual powwow of independent filmmakers, distributors and deep-pocketed passholders hoping to catch a glimpse of Jennifer Aniston as she tries not to slip on the ice. When the festival does kick off tomorrow evening, with the world premiere of Oscar-winning animator Adam Elliot's debut feature, Mary and Max (featuring a clay-mated Philip Seymour Hoffman as an obese Jewish man with Asperger's syndrome), it will do so at the center of a perfect storm of indie-film bad voodoo.

From the economic crisis to the recent downsizing or shuttering of multiple indie and mini-major distributors to the threat of protests stemming from the Utah Mormon community's heavy backing of California's Proposition 8, Sundance 2009 is starting out from a defensive crouch. But most worrisome of all may be the undeniable fatigue that critics and audiences -- indeed, the entire industry -- seem to be feeling about American independent films in general and Sundance movies in particular. Just one title from last year's festival, the documentary Man On Wire, managed to finish in the top 25 in the recent L.A. Weekly/Village Voice poll of more than 80 prominent North American film critics, while of the 10 highest-grossing indie releases at the 2008 U.S. box office, only Patricia Riggen's Under the Same Moon was a Sundance world premiere -- and it had screened at the 2007 edition of the festival.

Despite a general decline in high-ticket acquisitions, Sundance 2008 nevertheless saw its share of foolhardy overspending on sub-par, supposedly commercial movies that proved to be anything but -- among them the much-ballyhooed Hamlet 2 (which stalled at just under $5 million worldwide after Focus Features paid a reported $10 million to buy it), Choke (which returned $3.6 million on Fox Searchlight's $5 million investment) and the Barry Levinson debacle What Just Happened?, whose title could be taken as a metaphor for the present state of the indie film scene. Finally released by Magnolia Pictures (a subsidiary of the film's production company, 2929 Entertainment), it grossed all of $2.6 million despite a cast that included Robert De Niro, Sean Penn and Bruce Willis.

Faring little better, the handful of artistically ambitious movies that surfaced at Sundance 2008 found it more difficult than ever to escape the festival-circuit ghetto. Lance Hammer's double prize-winning Ballast was first acquired by IFC, then re-acquired (and ultimately self-distributed) by Hammer after he balked at the terms of the deal. Aza Jacobs' Momma's Man got caught up in the collapse of stalwart indie distributor THINKFilm, was subsequently picked up by the smaller Kino International and finally trickled into a handful of art houses across the country. And, as of this writing, the excellent Japanese film Megane remains without U.S. distribution of any kind.



What direct impact -- other than fewer late-night bidding wars in Harvey Weinstein's condo -- all this will have on Sundance 2009 remains to be seen. Certainly, there will be no shortage of new product on display, even if the most buzzed-about attraction of the festival's first half seems sure to be a small-screen one: the inauguration of the 44th President of the United States.

As for the movies, the "Premieres" section (a.k.a. the part of Sundance where you are most likely to see something unforgivably awful featuring a name star) alone brings us the latest from Superbad director Greg Mottola (Adventureland) and Training Day's Antonie Fuqua (Brooklyn's Finest), the re-teaming of Y Tu Mamá También co-stars Diego Luna and Gael Garcia Bernal (in Rudo Y Cursi, directed by Carlos -- brother of Alfonso -- Cuarón) and Jim Carrey and Ewan McGregor as penitentiary cellmates turned lovers in I Love You Phillip Morris.

Among those titles vying for Sundance's coveted dramatic Grand Jury Prize are The Office star John Krasinski's adaptation of the late David Foster Wallace's Brief Interviews with Hideous Men; The Greatest, this year's obligatory drama about a family coping with the death of their teenage son; and Taking Chance, this year's obligatory drama about the Iraq War. Meanwhile, the films screening in the festival's reliably strong documentary competition promise to touch on everything from African-American "hair culture" (the Chris Rock-produced Good Hair) to the soil beneath our feet (the unambiguously titled Dirt! The Movie) to the Prada-wearing Devil herself, Anna Wintour (The September Issue).

Most timely in its intent, director Eric Daniel Metzger's Reporter purports to follow Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times columnist Nicholas D. Kristof as he travels to the Congo in the summer of 2007. "The crisis in journalism in real," writes Sundance festival director Geoffrey Gilmore in the film's program note, before declaring the film "required viewing for anyone who cares about the future of ideas." Given the way newspaper readership has been heading, that one should really pack them in.

For the next 10 days, I'll be posting here regularly, direct from Park City. But in the meantime, we begin our coverage of Sundance 2009 with two stories from this week's print edition of the Weekly that cast a glance back to happier Sundance times. One is a wide-ranging interview with Steven Soderbergh, whose debut dramatic feature, Sex Lies and Videotape, premiered at Sundance 20 years ago this week and forever altered the course of both the festival and the independent film landscape. The other is a profile of actor-writer-director Wendell B. Harris, Jr., whose own debut feature, Chameleon Street, won the Sundance Grand Jury Prize the year after Sex, Lies, from a jury that included none other than Soderbergh himself. One of the most striking indie films of the '90s, it too promised great things to come, but whereas Soderbergh has gone on to direct nearly 20 films in 20 years, Harris has made exactly none. And there you have the enduring conundrum of Sundance and American independent cinema in a nutshell.