Every year some over-hyped award-laden independent film faces a critical backlash, dissenting writers who cry it ain’t all that. This year it’s Ballast. To quote Armond White, from the NY Press:
“Director-writer Lance Hammer shows a black Mississippi family torn apart by a double suicide attempt, drugs and alienation. But you have to see through these ludicrous black phantoms to the actual white middle-class fantasies at the film’s core.”
Maybe “backlash” is a strong term for a handful of disgruntled critics, but I detect a similar sense of unrest in the audience.
The second time I saw Ballast, I dragged a friend along to Manhattan’s Film Forum (where it recently closed after a brief run). I told her that this film was everything I had been arguing for in American cinema (mostly on internet message boards, in my drawers—sad, really): Its angelic patience, its reverence for faces, silences and subjective experience (with more watchful over-the-shoulder shots than a ‘Nam combat doc) could teach American audiences how to look and listen again. Second time around, I was able to appreciate these qualities even more, as the story became fairly transparent, cleverly delineated though it was. Second time around, it was all about the beauty.
I suspect it was the story that had some of the folks in the Film Forum audience sighing, whispering and even snickering uncontrollably. Story-wise, Ballast can be easily mistaken for an entry in the Why We Be Black genre—films which depict underclass African-Americans scratching and surviving and tearing each other apart. Such films are said to exist mainly for the delectation of white liberals who like to think of poor blacks as lovable to the degree that they are irrational, impulsive and self-destructive. Mighty Joe Young in a do-rag. The fallacy of placing Ballast in this genre is as tragic as the critical backlash against Steven Spielberg’s The Color Purple adaptation, which reduced that film’s towering humanism to Song of the South T-N-T.
…Read more
Here are some quick reviews of two SDFF films that I watched via screeners before touching down in Denver, and the one film I managed to see in town before succumbing to jet lag/altitude exhaustion. Oddly and entirely accidentally, all three films have something to do with aging males and their identity crises.
Karl Rove, I Love You
A self-mocking psuedo-documentary from the mind of Dan Butler (a journeyman supporting actor best known for a recurring role on Frasier), Karl Rove, I Love You has far less to do with the titualar “ultimate supporting actor” than with the personal fallout of engagement in our super-polarized political culture. What begins as a documentary on Butler as the archetypical “invisible” character actor (he’s consistently compared to Philip Seymour Hoffman, only “less famous”) morphs into a document of Butler’s mid-life crisis passion project, a one man show designed to expose the world to the “Real” Karl Rove. Butler begins the project wanting to hit the Bush administration where it hurts, but slowly comes to empathise with Rove, turns his show into a mildly-satiric love-letter, and alienates his single-minded friends and collaborators in the process.
Not always laugh-out loud funny, but well-paced and consistently engaging, Karl Rove, I Love You uses the natural conflict between (pervasively and unquestioningly liberal, and largely openly gay) Hollywood and (socially conservative but morally ambiguous) Red State actors to explore how angry obsession can offer the same kind of madness, identity salvation and pure pleasure as romantic passion. But more interestingly, it’s also about breaking down a black-and-white cipher and finding a whole person. It always feels more like a sitcom than a credible documentary (and the last twenty minutes really push the limits of disbelief), but it’s just creepy enough to work.
…Read more
Posting may be a bit light today and Friday, as I’m heading to Denver to attend the final weekend of the Starz Denver Film Festival. Kevin and Paul will be posting a bit while I’m gone, so be nice to them. Hopefully I’ll find the time to scribble something about the films screening while I’m there, including Starting Out in the Evening, the much-lauded doc A Walk Into the Sea, and the comedy Karl Rove, I Love You. And if you’re in Denver, come see me speak on this panel on Friday. It’s very important that I put as many sympathetic plants in the audience as possible.
