The Sundance film festival in Park City, Utah, showcases more than 150 feature films each year, among them everything from soporific character studies to gross-out comedy vehicles. Yet to many, Sundance is most closely associated with a particular strain of indie dramedy that came to dominate the festival in the mid-2000s, when the likes of Garden State and Little Miss Sunshine made their debuts. This subgenre has clung on for dear life ever since, even as its box-office clout has waned severely (more people appeared in the title of last year’s Me And Earl And The Dying Girl than showed up to watch it on opening weekend).
These glib, self-conscious films have turned the very word “Sundance” into something of a pejorative, but still they command industry attention: this year’s prime example, The Fundamentals Of Caring, sold to Netflix for an estimated $7m. In the film, which is now available to stream, Craig Roberts plays a teenage boy with Duchenne muscular dystrophy, an absent father, a bucket list of idiosyncratic life ambitions, and an imaginary best friend named Quigley. OK, so I made that last one up, but only to complete the full house of quirky US indie tropes.
Enter Paul Rudd’s rookie caregiver, who’s eager to show Roberts that there’s more to life than sitting around spewing the kind of softly sardonic musings that cut neatly into a 30-second TV spot. The pair set out on a road trip, in search of experiences both mundane and transcendent, and as they learn more about one another they realise that professional care is a two-way street – and so on and so forth.
Along the way, Rudd and Roberts are joined by a pair of spunky female characters who coax these two broken men out of their shells – and may or may not have thoughts, feelings and dreams of their own. It’s easy to mock films that subscribe so unthinkingly to the cliches of American indie cinema, so let’s continue: this is a movie in which an expositional montage plays out to music by a former member of the band Of Montreal.
If The Fundamentals Of Caring seems to sail by in half an hour – even though the laws of time, physics and IMDb put its running time at 93 minutes – that’s down to the chemistry between its leads, not to mention our overwhelming familiarity with the conventions of its genre. Despite a pretence of weighty introspection, the film is an easy watch because we’re learning its lessons for the thousandth time over, on the way to a conclusion that’s already been repeatedly validated.
