E-Mail This Article to a Friend At the end of the world? The Sixth Provincetown International Film Festival BY GERALD PEARY

There’s hot-seat pressure in being the first critic to go on record about A Home at the End of the World, which I saw at a special preview screening at last week’s sixth Provincetown International Film Festival. If I rave about this Colin Farrell–starring adaptation of Michael (The Hours) Cunningham’s 1990 novel, then everybody’s happy: Warner Brothers Independent for having its new picture praised and Provincetown for being the place where an important film was discovered. If I write negatively? Then Warner regrets letting its film out of the can at tiny P-town and the studios consider boycotting the fest next year. And all parties will ask, "Who allowed that anti-Hollywood critic into the sold-out screening?"

Fortunately, I have an out. As I was reminded by everyone who was anyone at Provincetown, "What you are watching isn’t a completed film." Warner is still tinkering with A Home at the End of the World, so it would be inappropriate of me, I was told, to review it. Okay, no review. I will suggest that it could be in Warner’s interest to put back as many excised scenes as possible. The Provincetown version is a rather rushed, clipped telling of Cunningham’s tale, which traces the homo-erotic friendship of Jonathan and Bobby, from their Ohio childhoods through their life in Greenwich Village to self-exile in the Woodstock countryside.

Regardless of his cut, director Michael Mayer can be commended for casting someone without film experience, stage actor Dallas Roberts, as unhappy Jonathan, who (this is clearer in the novel) finds oodles of sex partners but can’t be intimate. Roberts holds his own in scenes with movie stars Farrell, Robin Wright Penn, and Sissy Spacek. A Bush-hating Houstonian residing in New York, he talked freely after the Provincetown screening: "Colin was very generous, even the first week: ‘Chill, this will work out.’ Colin, that kid, is an actor with chops, you can’t fake it. Robin would ask the cinematographer what lens he was using, and then it seemed to impact her performance. I had no idea of these things! I hope she conducts a seminar."

Roberts was taken seriously for the part, he says, because he appeared at that rare audition where he actually knew the person across the table, Mayer. "Usually it’s a monkey dance, you’re up for a role promised to Matt Damon, you audition but you don’t know what for. It’s all a mind guess. I’m nobody, I get 10 auditions a week, and it hurts every time they say no. It’s chaos." Stage or screen? "In a theater, you have much more control of your performance, but in a film, you’re 20 feet high. That’s cool!"

What were the discoveries at Provincetown? Jim de Sève’s Tying the Knot is a potent, emotional call-to-arms on the issue of gay marriage. Are you among those who thinks same-sex matrimony isn’t that pressing a concern? Michael Moore would cheer at how brilliantly Sève builds his case demonstrating the urgent need to change our archaic laws. He tracks several heartbreaking personal stories in which one long-time gay partner dies and the grieving other is left without any property because the judiciary refuses to recognize relationships where there’s no marriage license. Here is that rare film that, shown to moderate straights, could change attitudes.

Also, Mary Trunk’s The Watershed, a documentary probe of the filmmaker’s family history, starting 25 years ago, when everything went awry. Jack Trunk, father of seven, walked out on his family for a new woman. Paula Trunk became a bed-ridden alcoholic, leaving her kids to fend for themselves. The good news: there was a rescue by enlightened, child-loving cousins, and today the Trunk siblings are as camera-articulate as they are angry.

Then there was the 2004 Filmmaker on the Edge Award, whose deserving winner was Jim Jarmusch, the estimable New York filmmaker of Stranger Than Paradise, Mystery Train, and Dead Man. "I’ve seen them all," summer-in-Provincetown’s John Waters said of Jarmusch’s works. "I’ve paid for them all. He created his own genre, and he just gets better and better."

What genre? The moderator of the event, film critic B. Ruby Rich, called Jarmusch’s efforts "Lost in Translation" movies that feature people from various cultures talking past each other, road movies even when there’s no highway. Jarmusch’s award: a statue of the Provincetown tower. "I’m really honored," he said. "This is the tower where they imprisoned the Marquis de Sade."