The world of independent filmmaking is a strange beast that few seem able to tame. In the documentary (don’t be scared off) American Movie, the world of creating small films is studied as we follow Mark Borchardt for what seems to be an eternity as he works hard to complete his film(s). Filmmakers Chris Smith and Sarah Price spent years following Mark around his hometown of Menomonee Falls, Wisconsin, to document his life as he worked to wrap up his labor of love. For about fifteen years, Mark has been making horror films with his friends on his Super 8 film camera. Northwestern was the full-length film that Mark was trying to finish. He gets sidetracked by problems with financing and decides to first complete his smaller film, Coven, in order to sell that and secure more funding.

Mark finds investors in the strangest places (tight-wad Uncle Bill forks some over) and his ability to sell his ideas to cast and crew works because of his undying passion for the world of cinema. While his background doesn’t afford him any real money to back his dream (in fact, he’s deep in debt to just about everyone on the planet), he nonetheless has spent his youth studying the medium and teaching himself everything he could about making films. His knowledge of the technical side of filmmaking is very evident (especially when he is explaining to his young daughter about mixing new dialogue for the film, as if she can follow his tech-talk).

What American Movie does is showcase a person’s obsession. This film could have focused on any other passion, but they happened upon Mark and spent time letting us look behind the curtain of a unique and interesting group of people. From his friends (especially Mike, a childhood friend who exhausted most of his formative years taking acid, smoking pot and drinking heavily), to his Swedish mother for whom we feel sympathy, to sad old Uncle Bill and many other figures in Mark’s life. Most of his family believes that he won’t amount to much despite his visions of success but some still help him and wish him the best.

What the filmmakers know is how to remain in the background. They don’t become an intrusive force in the telling of this saga and manage to walk a fine line between making us laugh at the characters and laughing with the characters. All too often it can be too easy to use people as punch lines and this film stays away as best it can from forcing the characters to become just that. It shows off the best part of the human spirit when it comes to going all out for the goals we set for ourselves. Mark knows where his place in life is at the moment but he is self-aware enough of the rest of the world to know where he wants to be and what he wants to be doing. It makes it too hard to simply dismiss him as a mid-western hick with a camera and too much beer. (You might catch Mark on The Late Show With David Letterman where he has made a few appearances, composing short comic videos for the show.)

While obsession is not necessarily a healthy attribute, sometimes we all need it if we want to achieve our destiny and dreams. This bittersweet documentary is a fascinating look inside that world where there is one goal, and no matter what it takes to get there, ultimately it is worth it.

On the flip side of Independent films, sometimes the best intentions of a small film can go sour and the end product gets lost in a sea of other, similar films. Oxygen was a labor of love for another filmmaker, Richard Shepard, who spent years trying to get this film made. After directing such films as 1992’s The Linguini Incident with David Bowie and TV shows like Remember WENN, Shepard felt it was time to make the film that he had babied for years. In order to keep the casting the way he wanted (longtime friend and E.R., Newsradio, Liar Liar star Maura Tierney and The Thin Red Line and Summer Of Sam star Adrien Brody), Shepard took his film to a small independent company (Unapix, in a boost for their product line) where he could have more creative control over it. The problem with small budget films is that there’s simply no room for certain genre pictures to be made and thrive. You can’t have large action films with numerous explosions and special effects on a small budget and you can’t expect that the film will look as slick. What Shepard tries here in this story of a troubled cop (Tierney) and psycho killer (Brody), is to go for a larger-than-he-can-accomplish action/thriller. The car chase in the film feels anemic and non-threatening, but listening to the editor and the director on the commentary track of the DVD, they clearly feel as if they have crafted a true Ben Hur-like chase. Having a small budget and trying to construct a character thriller is limited by the number of cameras that you can have to catch multiple angles. This means you lose the intercutting between close-ups to wide shots and so on. While I’m a big champion of little, independent films, I know that there is a limit to what kind of film you can and cannot do and Oxygen would have worked better with more than a 1.2 million dollars budget.

In a story like this one, where our cop hero has many emotional problems to confront in order to face down the psycho who has kidnapped a wealthy woman for ransom and buried her alive, you have to have true depth. A film, with this subject matter, should either be really dark, gritty and graphic (which a small budget allows), or slick, taut and rounded-out (which a larger budget can facilitate). This movie straddles both, not knowing how far to go in each direction and how much of the characters we can get to really know. As good as Tierney is, she lacks the right quality and weight to pull off this role as a sick woman who is missing something important in her life. Her voice and authority aren’t there and that dilutes her confrontation of the evil Brody (who is reduced to smirking a lot).

It feels like Shepard has the right idea and truly knows what he wants to put up on the screen but he misses the mark and buries the film under its own weight.