Down to the Bone (2004) from Johnny Web (Uncle Scoopy; Greg Wroblewski)

Sundance hasn't yet achieved the nearly-infallible status of Cannes, where the prize winners are almost guaranteed to be total crap, but by God they are trying. The guiding principle of independent film seems to be that one achieves perfection as the depression level of a film approaches 100 and the slickness approaches 0. Thus, if you have the most depressing film ever made, and it seems to have been made on a home video cam, you can almost be assured that it will come home from Park City with some honors, irrespective of its merits.

So it went with Down to the Bone, which combines two of my least-favorite cinema conceits: "drugs suck," and "life sucks so bad it forces you to take drugs." Vera Farmiga plays a lower middle class housewife who goes through the motions of suburban motherhood in upstate New York, but is actually a serious closet druggie. As time goes on, she becomes less closeted. Then she falls in love with her drug counselor. Then he falls back on his own rehab and stars shooting the big "H." Then she figures, "Oh, what the hell," and follows him. Then she gets arrested ...

Do I need to give any more details? If you watch any independent films, you've seen this all a zillion times before. About the only new wrinkle this film has to offer is that the doomed drug addict is a heterosexual and doesn't like pudding. You can learn something interesting - she is actually a better cashier when coked-out than when sober. Getting clean hurts her job performance. That's a twist.

Oh, did I mention that the film doesn't have an ending? Hoity-toity critics, of course, viewed that as a positive. You know the drill: "offers no easy solutions," "no neat and tidy resolution." It's realistic. Get it? One critic wrote: "The film is so pitch perfect and realistic, it seems you are there with these people, watching their lives unfold before you as it happens." Another comment was, "There was so much verisimilitude I thought I was watching a documentary. This film nails it, addiction, blue collar people, small time life."

That is the film's main strength. If offers a completely realistic portrayal of everyday life and how it relates to her drug cravings. Needless to say, that is also its main weakness. How much of everyday blue collar winter life in upstate New York do you want to watch unfold as it happens, as portrayed in documentary style, photographed by a hand-held video camera in natural light, and never brought to a conclusion? If your answer is "can't get enough," this is your dream-film.

Predictably, 93% of critics gave it a positive review, one of the highest scores of the year.

Vera Farmiga won the L.A. Film Critics award for the best performance of the year last year.

In this film.

Honest. A film that nobody ever saw.

That award sometimes acts as an Oscar harbinger, but in this case it was a harbinger of nothing. Farmiga received no other awards nor nominations during hardware season. The L.A. Film Critics were out there by themselves, presumably standing in left field at Dodger Stadium when they made that announcement. Farmiga does seem like a good actress, a talent she hopes to demonstrate some day in front of an audience, something not possible here. This film only grossed $30,000 in the entire United States, and never played outside of New York and L.A.

Oh, sure, a gross of $30,000 indicates a complete lack of interest in the film, but there is a happy ending to the story. Even though they returned the camera to Rent-a-Center a few days late and incurred a penalty fee, they still made a substantial profit.