And so this year’s Sundance has officially begun, with grief over the loss of founder Robert Redford and its move from long-running home Park City likely to drown out the sounds of anyone talking about the first narrative premiere. It wouldn’t be the first time it has started with a whimper (unofficial opening day films have previously included misfires like After the Wedding, Freaky Tales, Netflix’s Taylor Swift doc and last year’s Jimpa) but there’s something specifically disappointing about a film such as Carousel showing at a festival such as Sundance.
It’s the sort of small, character-driven American indie that has served as the festival’s lifeblood for almost 50 years and, as the system has expanded in some ways and shrunk in others, the sort that has often struggled to make it far out of Park City. Back in 2023, a quiet, disarming and perfectly Sundance film called A Little Prayer premiered yet didn’t get released until late last summer and was seen by a precious few. The world is not kind to films like Carousel at this very moment and while I would love to see this particular subgenre flourish in the way it used to back in the 90s and 00s, it’s hard to muster up much in the way of strong feelings here.
That’s ultimately a bit of a problem for a film all about the headiness and enormity of love, both lost and found, where feelings should be front and centre. Writer-director Rachel Lambert wants us to be enchanted and she busies her film with lush, consuming music choices (some dodgy sound mixing often means some songs are a little too consuming) and longing, loving shots of nature and her persistence pays off – at times. Her last film, Sundance 2024’s Sometimes I Think About Dying, boasted a similar sensory loveliness to it, both films capturing the bewitching pull of a certain leafy small-town life. But there’s only so much that can be achieved by direction alone and as much as she might try to pull us into her story via her visual and aural heavy-lifting, her erratic and underdeveloped script just doesn’t demand the attention she thinks it deserves.
Her actors try their best to convince us that there’s more beneath the surface. Chris Pine, who has been drifting a little of late, makes an appealing case for a later-stage career in smaller, talkier fare, convincingly playing an emotionally limited doctor who finds himself lost in his 40s. His daughter (Are You There God, It’s Me Margaret’s Abby Ryder Fortson) is struggling with anger and anxiety, his practice (where he works alongside Sam Waterston and The Other Two’s Heléne Yorke, both underused) is in financial dire straits and then there’s the reappearance of a long lost love (Jenny Slate) who may or may not lead him to the happiness he has been missing.
It’s Sundance 101, which doesn’t always have to be a bad thing, but Lambert is too skittish to keep us in her character’s lives for longer than brief, often maddeningly flat moments. It’s hard to know what we should be holding on to, Lambert making the classic mistake of confusing underwritten with subtle, and as the power of her skills as director start to wear off, we’re stuck with a script full of characters we don’t really know or care about. There’s an effectively drawn out and messy argument between the central pair in the last act but we watch as if we’re snooping on a couple at a restaurant, transfixed by the intensity of the emotions (it’s extremely well-performed) but genuinely unsure what it is they’re talking about. It almost feels like a clumsily condensed miniseries with scenes and characters cut for time, and as comfortable as Pine and Slate might be with one another (they have enough chemistry to power a better movie), we’re just not sure who it is that we’re watching.
It’s up to us to fill in the many gaps but it’s hard to find the energy to keep bothering, as a listlessness creeps off the screen and into the audience. Lambert does find herself some interesting knots (the push and pull of parenting someone else’s child, processing the juvenile abandon of romance as a mature adult) but she can’t find an emotionally satisfying place to take them and an epically over-egged romantic ending leaves us entirely un-swooned. Carousel, like many a ho-hum Sundance film, spins around and around but has nowhere to go.
Carousel is screening at the Sundance film festival and is seeking distribution
