Jason Sandford
Jason Sandford is a reporter, writer, blogger and photographer interested in all things Asheville.
Now that Sundance is over, the reviews for the award-winning Anywhere USA just keep coming. Here’s the latest, from Cinematical:
Anywhere, U.S.A. revolves around three separate stories — a torn relationship, a family born of crisis, an old man’s journey of self-discovery — but those brief capsules can’t possibly convey the loopy energy and bizarre brilliance Haney-Jardine splashes up on screen in strong, sloppy brush strokes.
And I don’t use that metaphor lightly; at times, Anywhere, U.S.A. feels more like a modern art project than a film. Haney-Jardine’s film mixes striking still photos, text overlaid the images on the screen, a wry sense of the absurd in the everyday, the capacity to see the banal in the extraordinary, and the capacity to find the extraordinary in the every day. … At its best, Anywhere, U.S.A. played like a hickory-smoked take on the same kind of modern mischief Miranda July showed us in You, Me and Everyone We Know.
And at the same time, I found myself thinking that Anywhere, U.S.A. might have played better as a series of modern art projects, or as a loose affiliation of shorts. There’s no real tie between the three segments aside from the dryly omniscient narrator and Haney-Jardine’s sense and sensibility.
And, as can so often happen at Sundance, the film’s deadpan can often simply read as dead space. (At 123 minutes, Anywhere, U.S.A. felt more than a little interminable at the 8:30 AM screening I attended at Sundance; others, reporting the same opinion from other screenings, made it somewhat more likely that my sense of fatigue wasn’t just a function of the pre-breakfast screening time.) …
Anywhere, U.S.A. fairly vibrates with enthusiasm and energy; at the same time, that energy often manifests itself in fidgety, manic distraction followed by too-long pauses to rest. A lot of the time, a Sundance debut makes you contemplate what the director might wind up doing next; Anywhere, U.S.A. made me wonder what Haney-Jardine wound up doing the first time around. That possibly says more about my tastes than Haney-Jardine’s skills and ambitions.
Anywhere, U.S.A. may not be consistent or coherent, but it definitely stood out, even against a backdrop as wild and weird as the slate of films surrounding it at Sundance 2008.
Here’s the indieWIRE take.
Here’s the Hollywood Reporter’s take.
Here’s Variety’s review.
Here’s a Washington Post story on the movie and the movie-maker.
