“The dirty little secret about Sundance is that the best films every year are the documentaries,” says Oscar-winning An Inconvenient Truth
director David Guggenheim in one of the trailers for this year's
Sundance Film Festival. Actually, it's more of an openly acknowledged
fact that Sundance's documentary selection is reliably stronger than
its narrative one. And so, having made it through 14 of the 16 films in
this year's U.S. Dramatic Competition (I'll see the remaining two — Adam and Amreeka
— today), I shifted gears yesterday and hunkered down for a full
schedule of docs at Sundance's newest screening venue: Temple Har
Shalom or, as it's known until Sunday, the Temple Theatre.
First on my itinerary was The September Issue, which arrived in Park City hyped as a nonfiction riposte to The Devil Wears Prada, which it both is and isn't. Although director R.J. Cutler (A Perfect Candidate) was allowed unprecedented access behind the scenes at Vogue
during the planning and production of its massive September 2007 issue
(at the time, the largest single issue of a monthly magazine ever
published), anyone who comes to The September Issue expecting a
warts-and-all portrayal of Vogue editor-in chief Anna Wintour is likely
to find the 90-minute film something of a let-down. That's not to say
that Cutler lobs softballs at the fashion world's perpetually
sunglass-ed high priestess, but rather that his primary interest is the
nuts-and-bolts running of a magazine, from the concept stages to the
moment the latest issue hits the newsstands. Of course, since this is a
movie about Vogue and not, say, Field and Stream, the
attendant glamour level is high, from the vertigo-inducing haute
couture to the parade of strapping models and actresses who grace the
magazine's coveted spreads.
In addition to following the Devil herself as she meets privately with
top name designers (Oscar de la Renta, Jean-Paul Gaultier, et al.),
scours the runways of the world's fashion weeks and passes final
judgment on what does and doesn't end up in print, The September Issue devotes nearly equal attention to Vogue's
flamboyant editor-at-large, André Leon Talley, and its legendary
creative director, Grace Coddington. And it's Coddington, a Welsh-born
former model whose hugely ambitious narrative photo shoots have become
a Vogue hallmark during her 30-plus years with the magazine,
who threatens to steal the movie right out from under her more famous
co-star. A force of calm at the center of Vogue's sometimes
tempestuous storm, Coddington is, by Wintour's own admission, “a
genius,” and you don't have to know much about fashion (or even take it
that seriously) to recognize the vivid, cinematic atmosphere and
compositional elegance of Coddington's work with some of fashion's
leading photographers.
Wintour, meanwhile, remains as coolly inscrutable to us as she does to
many of the people she works with on a daily basis. And why not? It's
to Cutler's credit that he neither plays into the stereotype of Wintour
as an unfeeling ice queen nor goes out of his way to warm her up. (He
also doesn't pry very deeply into her personal life.) Instead, he
portrays the world's foremost fashion tastemaker as a serious
businesswoman who has managed to not only keep Vogue at the
center of the zeitgeist for the past two decades, but to enlarge the
magazine's success at a time when most other printed media is going the
way of the dodo. For this alone, she commands our respect.
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