Mike D'Angelo reports from the Sundance Film Festival:
You know it's a strange year at Sundance when the best movie you've seen was directed by the guy responsible for Jerry Springer's crass bid at big-screen stardom. Can't say I much blame Neil Abramson for omitting Ringmaster from his press kit bio, but his latest film, American Son, more than atones for that admittedly grievous sin. Just please don't immediately click the hell outta here when I tell you the premise: Mike (Nick Cannon), a young Marine fresh out of whatever the jarheads call basic training, spends a four-day furlough in Bakersfield, CA, visiting friends and family — none of whom know that he's shipping off to Iraq the moment he returns to base. I know, I know. Really, though, this isn't an Iraq movie. Think of it more as 25th Hour with combat duty in lieu of prison. Nothing that happens, least of all Mike's "character arc," is especially revelatory, but the film boasts an immediacy and specificity that puts most of this year's other American indies to shame. It's a rare film in which you genuinely feel as if you've just been plunked down in the middle of a life in progress; every character, no matter how small or insignificant, seems to have an existence that extends beyond the requirements of that particular scene. Even Mike's hesitant romance with a Latino girl he meets on the Greyhound into town (Melonie Diaz, who's become the breakout actor from Raising Victor Vargas) mostly succeeds in avoiding cliché. Screenwriter Eric Schmid has a knack for introducing salient aspects of Mike's background — his parents' messy divorce; his brother's descent into criminal behavior — without belaboring them or turning them into pat psychological explanations; he also has a strong feeling for the reckless anomie that tends to overcome young adults trapped in small towns and devoid of realistic prospects. In the unlikely event that the film does get picked up, though, I hope they find a better title for it than American Son, which makes it sound like precisely the sort of grandiose, tendentious Thesis Statement that Abramson, Schmid and the cast so deftly avoid.