PARK CITY — Once in a while, you look up at a movie screen and a door opens. You step inside a stranger's mind to be transported into a place where you didn't plan to go. Often, it's a documentary that takes you to this place of new understanding of lives that, 90 minutes earlier, were completely foreign.
Juicy examples of this spiced the Sundance Film Festival this year. The other good news is that many from the documentary lineup will appear on public television, HBO or Showtime, so those of us who didn't catch them at the festival don't have to wonder if the films will make it to theaters.
Let's take two from this year's crop: "Born Rich," about fabulously wealthy twentysomethings, and "What I Want My Words to Do to You," about playwright Eve Ensler's writing project with female felons at Bedford Hills prison in New York.
In both films, the subjects speak from their hearts while cameras roll, simply because they want others to see them as human. The "Born Rich" kids have been defined by their families' billions, while the Bedford Hills women have been defined by their grisly crimes.
The women include Pamela Smart, made notorious in the Nicole Kidman feature "To Die For," and Judy Clark, a member of the 1960s radical group the Weather Underground.
In "Words," the women read aloud their essays of what led to their crimes, and what happened to them during their first years of incarceration. They open up, telling deeply personal stories, because Ensler listens without judgment.
Clark is one who has come to some understanding of herself. She writes about the day when she, as a grade-schooler, came down with chicken pox. She looked in the mirror, saw her face breaking out and was delighted. Her mother would have to stop, stay home from work and take care of her. She did so, but grudgingly.
Another woman killed the man who had once been a friend, until he overpowered and raped her. She shot him after he laughed at her pain and joked that he would rape her again if he felt like it.
Many of the women in Ensler's writing project had been disrespected, ignored and ridiculed by people they cared about. They later recognized how their need for attention and respect drove them to do irrational things, choices that formed chain reactions that finally exploded in homicide.
In the film, the women reveal that they saw scant kindness from anyone — until they went to prison. At Bedford Hills, they slowly found support from women of differing backgrounds. A black woman, sexually abused as a child, becomes a prostitute and turns her rage on an elderly customer. After killing him, she believes herself undeserving of life. Another inmate tries to give her hope.
"You've got to think about, what can you do now to make a difference," she tells her. The women do have opportunities to improve prison life, by teaching classes and working with children whose mothers are incarcerated.
"Born Rich," another New York-centered documentary, goes into the living rooms of young people steeped in money, but who, ultimately, don't inspire much envy.
Jamie Johnson, heir to the Johnson & Johnson fortune, says, "One thing I don't want to inherit is that fear of talking about money." So despite his attorney's advice to the contrary, he compiles a film of interviews with his counterparts. They include Ivanka Trump (daughter of Donald and Ivana), Si Newhouse (scion of the publishing empire) and Georgina Bloomberg, daughter of New York City Mayor Mike Bloomberg.
"It would be a low estimate to say 20 billion" as the worth of his family's holdings, Newhouse says. That figure has made his life largely artificial and not all that comfortable. Though his father provided him with a luxurious New York City apartment, he spends most of his time in his relatively tiny dorm room at Haverford College. "This is where I feel safe."
As soon as each kid's peers find out about their money, all relationships are called into question. Johnson talks about the day, when he was 10, his classmates found his father's name in Fortune magazine. The senior Johnson was listed among the world's richest men, and his worth estimated at $700 million. The teacher read the article aloud to the class. Before that day, Johnson says, he didn't know the extent of the family fortune, since his father never spoke to him about it.
The young filmmaker has seen other rich kids blow their money on drugs, yachts and other attempts at "finding themselves." He admits he's struggling to find his own passion. All his father can suggest is amassing a collection of historical documents. What Johnson and the others want is to do something to distinguish themselves. Like just about any twentysomething, they want their "worth" to be measured by their own accomplishments — not by a dollar amount.
Ivanka Trump, like the others, seems lonely. A stranger marched up one day to ask, "What's it like to have never felt any pain?" She says she could scarcely believe that anyone could be "so ignorant," to believe that money equals happiness.
E-mail: durbani@desnews.com