Nantucket nectar

The third annual festival has juice

by Peter Keough

Now in its third year, the Nantucket Film Festival is a delightful hybrid that continues to blossom. Officially committed to promoting the pre-eminence of the writer's art in the filmmaking process, unofficially dedicated to the schmoozing art involved in the same, with its laid-back parties and easy access to auteurs, the event succeeds on both counts.

Not that it hasn't its glitches, and on this island with its echoes of Melville and Moby Dick, they take on a serendipitous aura. Twenty minutes into the opening-night screening of local filmmaker Brad Anderson's Next Stop, Wonderland, a romantic comedy about synchronicity and fate, the power went out thanks to an offshore storm. At that point I found the film blithely accomplished -- the break-up scene in the opening-credit sequence alone was funnier than anything Woody Allen has done lately.

The full version I saw the next night wasn't as impressive, however. Hope Davis endears as the long-suffering nurse who keeps just failing to make contact with her as-yet-unknown soulmate; Alan Gelfant doesn't as the East Boston plumber who dreams of becoming a marine biologist. Meanwhile, the sketchily drawn supporting characters and a subplot involving gambling debts, Robert Klein, and a balloon fish are distractions. It's still three-quarters of a winning movie, if distributor Miramax doesn't tamper with it.

Another local product that makes a big initial impact but then loses focus is Southie, which is directed by actor John Shea and co-written by South Boston native James Cummings, who also plays the film's mad-dog mobster villain. Donnie Wahlberg brings a seething authenticity to Dannie, a townie who reluctantly returns home to pick up the pieces of a family broken by gang turf wars, alcoholism, and anomie. Although it captures the claustrophobic violence and feral tribalism that Will Hunting wimps out on, Southie goes soft on the issues it raises. Lawrence Tierney, who's masterful as a hoary gang leader, eloquently states the case against vengeance, but it proves mere lip service. Southie is ø Streets without the meaning.

A more mannered take on mob culture is British director Jez Butterworth's Mojo, which he based on his own play. In late-'50s London the burgeoning wave of rock and roll is represented by Silver Johnny (Martin Gwynn Jones), a pubescent stripling in a sequined jacket who regales girls (and boys) with his dancing in Ezra's Atlantic Club. Ezra himself has mob connections and gay inclinations, and the two combined get him in trouble with a mob kingpin played chillingly by Harold Pinter.

Although stagy and -- to American audiences -- largely unintelligible with its cockney accents, Mojo works as a moody exercise in decadent atmosphere, sexual pathology, and general hysterics not unlike Nicholas Roeg's Performancedan Gillen as Ezra's Prince Hal-like son is a major discovery, an edgy combination of Gary Oldman and Keanu Reeves.

Another discovery is Tamara Jenkins and her original and imaginative debut Slums of Beverly Hills. Fifteen-year-old Vivian Abramovitz (comic find Natasha Lyonne) has a more awkward adolescence than most; not only does her father, Murray (a sad, low-key and brilliant Alan Arkin), insist on moving the family from one ratty motel to another on the fringes of Beverly Hills (for the prestige and the school system), but her bust has developed with eye-popping generosity. Her drug-addled, party-girl cousin Rita (Marisa Tomei at her best) joins the melange, setting off an unlikely series of polymorphously perverse misadventures. Sad, bizarre, and hilarious, Slums is a one-of-a-kind, presumably autobiographical gem.

A one-of-a-kind work that fares less well is Australian director Nadia Tass's Amy. The waif of the title is an eight-year-old whom trauma has rendered mute. The gimmick is that Amy (Alana De Roma) can't communicate by speech, only by singing, and though De Roma has a fine pair of pipes, and a search party of torch-bearing policemen bursting into a chorus of song has a certain surreal appeal, the film ranges from the mawkish to the ludicrous.

Amy must have done something right, however -- it nearly won the festival's audience award for best picture. In the end that award went to Ernest Dickerson's ambitious and provocative Blind Faith. Set in the 1950s in New York City, Blind Faith tells the story of a young black man accused of the murder of a white boy and the tortured efforts of his policeman father (a scary Bill Duke) and lawyer uncle (an eloquent Courtney Vance) to save him despite himself. Accomplished and uncompromising, though flawed somewhat by a pedantic, present-day framing device, it was a late entry in the festival and might have been neglected if not for the crusading of its screenwriter, Frank Military, and festival founders Jonathan Burkhart and Jill Goode. Here's a case where blind faith in the writing process, not to mention good-old fashioned schmoozing, paid off.