In Bruges Gives Sundance A Bloody Good Start

Sundance founder and eminence Robert Redford, taking the stage of the Sundance Film Festival's largest venue a little after 6 p.m to kick of the fest with the screening of In Bruges yesterday, wrested the word "change" back from the presidential candidates to aver that it's something of which America is "desperately in need". He was droll enough to josh that the video wallpaper promoting the festival on the big screen behind him (a lengthy through-the-windshield shot of increasingly back-roads, local terrain) resembled "the driveway to my house", tucked in a reference to festivals' unwelcome phenomenon of "ambush marketers", and offered a guarantee that we would enjoy the film.

Indeed, though it's marked by a few more splashes of syrupy blood than your garden-variety dark gangster comedy, and by one distressing if inadvertent killing that tests one's resolve to stick with it, the film got nice receptions at both its early and later screenings. Not just a return to earlier promise for Colin Farrell but perhaps the performance he'll want to nail to his wall for good, it's an often droll and quotable two-hander with Farrell and Brendan Gleeson (both hilarious and touching by turns in the film) that occasionally opens the door to other fine actors, like discovery Clemence Poesy, who lives up to her charming moniker. Ralph Fiennes' London gangster kingpin (we first see him in his country estate) is indeed part Ben Kingsley in Sexy Beast, but with a dose of the whimsy found in Pierce Brosnan's re-energizing, manic turn in Matador.

Do gangsters, like movie grunts in the foxhole and Sopranos soldiers, really sit around taunting and mugging so colorfully? Perhaps not, but playwright Martin McDonagh has the profane fluency to make us glad these ones do. People scattered to dinners and parties still running the best lines to each other, and Focus Features co-head James Schamus stood in the freezing temperatures on the street outside event venue The Lift, taking congratulations on this film which Focus twigged to early on and plans to platform to a fairly wide audience later this winter.

Inside, Farrell and Gleeson huddled and chatted, and Mary Kate Olsen sidled up for a squeeze. That's Farrell--a still-unedited Irish boy who will give you a hug if you need one, and his deep Hibernian empathy is fully evident as the memory-tortured hit man here. What he's done through inexperience and ineptitude is unforgivable--even Fiennes' character believes that to his East End bones--and watching Farrell process it redeems and uplifts this tale and keeps it from sliding off the rails into a kind of Guy Ritchie slapdash.

The predicted feeding frenzy to acquire films really can't have traction for another day or so, although HBO quickly picked up the documentary The Black List under undisclosed terms, but with at least one party planned with Paris Hilton as the centerpiece and a passel of name stars already on the ground or due soon, it should be a buzzy festival. Among the eagerly anticipated screenings today were a pair of comic relief entrants-- The Wackness and the Amy Adam/Emily Blunt starrer Sunshine Cleaning, ring, as well as one from on the much-noted dark underbelly Sundance is showing this year, The Yellow Handkerchief.

(Mary Kate Olsen and Colin Farrell at the Focus Features party, January 17; Photo by Alexandra Wyman/WireImage)