PARK CITY, Utah – As the 2010 Sundance Film Festival wound up, maybe the biggest surprise to emerge from the movies’ annual winter break was that Katie Holmes still has a career.
In “The Romantics,” Holmes turns in a sensitive, nuanced performance as a writer roped into serving as maid of honor at the wedding of her best friend and college roommate (Anna Paquin) — to her ex-boyfriend of five years (Josh Duhamel).
Holmes famously claimed her schedule was just too packed to allow her to reprise her “Batman Begins” role as Bruce Wayne’s love interest in 2008’s “The Dark Knight,” though her resumé between 2006 and 2010 consists of one episode of the TV show “Eli Stone,” the clunky comedy “Mad Money” and marriage to an all-controlling freak. She’s disarmingly fragile yet embittered in “The Romantics,” a sharp college-reunion dramedy with echoes of “The Big Chill.”
Sadly, Holmes is as interesting as a potted fern in her other Sundance film, the would-be sophisticated comedy “The Extra Man,” starring Kevin Kline and Paul Dano as Upper East Side fops who escort wealthy dowagers to dinner parties. She plays Dano’s fellow office worker.
Among other Sundance highs and lows:
* Jessica Alba gets her face beaten to a bloody pulp in perhaps the most outrageous scene of the festival, the psycho-sheriff noir “The Killer Inside Me,” in which a twisted lawman (Casey Affleck) inexplicably beats his girlfriend (Alba) to death with his fists 30 minutes into the movie. Director Michael Winterbottom’s film lingers lovingly on the bloody slaughterhouse gristle of Alba’s features in a scene that got audience members moaning with unease. “Disgusting,” one woman viewer told the director after the screening.
* In a major acquisition — reportedly close to $5 million — Focus Features (“Brokeback Mountain”) nabbed the lesbian comedy “The Kids are All Right,” director Lisa Cholodenko’s feel-good family tale of middle-aged women (Julianne Moore, Annette Bening) who have raised teenagers together. Some observers, though, wondered if the film was too sitcom-y for the art-house crowd yet too edgy for the mainstream audience that previously rejected such gay-themed Sundance hits as “Happy, Texas.” Cholodenko’s two previous films, “Laurel Canyon” and “High Art,” grossed just over $5 million combined.