The Screengrab : micheal j. smith

Movie Review: "Ballast"

Phil Nugent — Fri, 03 Oct 2008 17:00:00 GMT

Ballast, which was made in rural Mississippi with a small cast of non-professional actors, most of them African-American, begins with Lawrence (Micheal J. Smith, Sr.), who is discovered sitting in his living room in shock, with the body of his twin brother, a suicide, lying in bed in the other room. For a while, the movie cuts back and forth between Lawrence's sad story and the troubles of twelve-year-old James (JimMyron Ross) and his indulgent single mother Marlee (Tarra Riggs), without at first making it clear how their lives are connected. Bored and lonely, James hooks up with an older group of drug dealers and begins making drops for them on his bike. He also acquires a gun and begins seriously acting out, at one point barging in on Lawrence in his home and robbing him, though Lawrence is so far lost in his depressive misery that it feels a little off applying so active a verb as "robbing" to anything that could be done to him; sticking a gat in his face is like yelling at a dead dog to heel. Eventually, things go very wrong with James and his new friends, and as the increasingly desperate Marlee begins to flail out looking for a way to keep herself and her son safe, the central trio collide with a bang.

Ballast won awards for its first-time director, Lance Hammer, and its cinematographer, Lol Crawley, when it played at the Sundance Film Festival earlier this year, and it has since gone on to become one of the best-reviewed movies of the year. I was eager to see it myself, partly because I grew up in rural Mississippi myself, and the world this movie touches on doesn't show up in movies that often. Crawley gives the back country landscape a blue-tinged loveliness that's very easy on the eyes but is also a little at odds with the uninflected, "natural" performances of most of the male cast members. The world of this movie doesn't bear much connection to the Mississippi I know, not because there's no visible resemblance between the two, but because the movie feels airless and stylized and as devoid of any sense of ongoing life as a diorama. Yet at the same time, Hammer, who invokes Robert Bresson in discussing his intentions, seems to mean for his nonprofessional cast to bring something to the screen that's more "real" than trained actors can. Though it may be blasphemous to say it, Bresson himself wasn't always able to get what he needed out of the supposedly pure, malleable untrained actors he came to favor, and Hammer hasn't yet had the experience that Bresson had wracked up before he started treating the casting of non-actors as an essential part of his "transcendental style." Here, Micheal J. Smith has a solid dignity that isn't always enough to hold the screen but does translate into a respectful admiration for his character. But young JimMyron Ross has no idea how to communicate whatever is supposed to be inside his troubled character, and Hammer has no idea how to guide him. If the viewer is pure-hearted and sympathetic enough to have no end of intrinsic sympathy for a lost, fatherless kid who likes to wave guns around, lies all the time, and stupidly stirs up trouble that puts the people who care for him in mortal danger, that might not be a problem, but for the flawed mere mortals among us, watching this little punk who has no depths of inner life that the camera can pick up on run amok creating plot complications can get old fast. Tarra Riggs, who has won roles in a few other pictures since making her movie debut here, gives the movie's most nuanced performance, but even her work suffers a little because of the writer-director's failure to really get a handle on the kid at the center. This woman is supposed to have a past history of substance abuse, and she's supposed to be hard-headed and self-sufficient enough to have gotten past that and made a living for herself and her boy by scrubbing urinals. But she never suspects that her acting-out little snot of a son might be involved with drugs, even after her starts turning up with bruises on his face. For the first half of the movie, she's so sweet and reasonable beyond the call of duty that she seems delusional, and there's so little preparation for her flaring up emotionally after things turn bad that she seems deranged.

It's nice to see a movie whose characters qualify as "the working poor" that actually seems to be set in the same economic world we live in: no Hollywood screenwriter would be constitutionally capable of writing the scenes in which James tells his mother that he needs twenty dollars for school or a hundred or so dollars to get right with the drug dealers, and she reacts as if she couldn't imagine earning that much extra cash in a single lifetime. But a lot of Ballast falls solidly in the "worthy" category. Pauline Kael once said that one of the few ironclad rules about movies is that the good ones never leave you feeling virtuous, and by the time that the catatonic Lawrence, whose dog was taken in by a neighbor after its grieving owner went off the deep end, goes to fetch the animal so that he can use it to bring James out of his shell, virtuousness is just what the film seems meant to embody. It's artful and well-meaning, but there may also be some condescension built into its joyless depiction of the tragic zombie lives of the underclass. The Delta setting may be a hint that Ballast is meant as the cinematic equivalent of a blues song, but if it is, it's the kind you get from the academic appreciators of the form who don't get that the term "the blues" describes the state that the music itself is supposed to lift you out of.

Mike D'Angelo at Sundance: Part 4

Peter Smith — Tue, 22 Jan 2008 20:15:00 GMT

Mike D'Angelo reports from the Sundance Film Festival:

Just a few minutes into Ballast, Lance Hammer's methodically withholding feature debut, I already felt confident of two things. One, I wasn't going to like this movie. Two, everybody else would, for reasons having little to do with Hammer's artistry and a great deal to do with his sensibility. Sure enough, shortly after I bailed at the end of reel two, weary of the film's mannered silences and artless shakycam, I found Robert Koehler's Variety rave, which predictably declared Hammer "a humanist artist" and praised his film for "engag[ing] audiences' best human responses." (As opposed to, say, their arachnoid responses.)

Alas, since I don't subscribe to the self-congratulatory notion that a film's worth hinges on the degree to which it reflects your own worldview, thereby making you feel good about yourself for admiring it — a phenomenon I've dubbed "soup kitchen cinema" — I can't join in the hosannahs. My friend Noel Murray of the Onion AV Club, who stayed to the end (and was somewhat underwhelmed), assures me that Ballast does eventually shake off its sub-Dardennes torpor and achieve some genuine power. But let me briefly recount the moments that made me decide I'd seen more than enough. (This will involve some mild spoilers concerning events that happen in the first few minutes, which you're likely to encounter anyway if you're so much as skimming other reviews/synopses.)

After a brief, lyrical pre-title sequence, we discover Lawrence (inexpressive nonprofessional Micheal J. Smith, Sr.), a heavyset black man, sitting on the couch in the darkened living room of a dilapidated house, just staring into space. A neighbor appears, first knocking and then, when Lawrence fails to respond, opening the unlocked front door and stepping inside. The neighbor, a middle-aged white guy, is looking for someone who turns out to be Lawrence's twin brother, and finds him lying dead in the bedroom, an apparent suicide. Naturally, the neighbor has questions for Lawrence, but Lawrence says nothing. He just keeps staring into space. Eventually, as the neighbor calls 911, Lawrence silently stands and walks out the front door, without so much as a glance at the neighbor; through the open door, we can see him disappear around a corner.

At which point I had to restrain myself from saying aloud "Aaaand gunshot in five. . . four. . . three. . ." I wasn't 100% certain whether Lawrence was about to return with a gun and blow the neighbor away or just shoot himself offscreen. But Hammer's setup for an "unexpected" act of violence couldn't possibly have been more clumsily blatant. If you don't know that a nonresponsive, near-catatonic character who abruptly leaves the room is about to do something horrific, you can't have seen very many movies in your life.

One offscreen gunshot later, Lawrence is in the hospital, having survived his suicide attempt. We get a series of brief, uninflected shots showing his surgery, his recovery, his discharge. (This is all in the film's first five to ten minutes.) People speak to Lawrence, but he never says anything in return. Weeks have now passed — we hear from a doctor that Lawrence was unconscious for ten days — and the same neighbor shows up, wanting to know whether Lawrence is okay; he's also come to return Lawrence's dog, which he's been looking after since the "accident." Lawrence opens the door when the neighbor knocks and then just stands there, silent, for the entire scene. Are you okay, Lawrence? Silence. I brought your dog back, figured you'd want him now. Silence. I guess I'll just keep him a while longer, then. Silence. You sure you're okay? Silence. All right then.

I'm sorry, but this is bullshit. We're not talking here about the melancholy expressionism of a Tsai Ming-liang or the perverse whimsy of a Kim Ki-duk. This is by no means a deliberately stylized world in which a mute character violates no rule of verisimilitude. Hammer is aiming for raw naturalism, and we're apparently expected to believe not only that Lawrence's behavior is a credible expression of grief (which I might buy in the immediate aftermath of his brother's death, but not weeks later following a lengthy hospital stay), but that the neighbor, who in all respects appears to be an ordinary guy, would simply accept these unmistakable signs of mental imbalance, never once pressing or protesting.

Ask yourself how you would react if someone you knew just stood there like a statue, making no response of any kind to anything you said. This nonsense bears no relationship whatsoever to genuine human behavior — it's just a novice filmmaker's misguided notion of what might constitute badass minimalism. That so many people seem prepared to take it seriously only shows how far good intentions will take you.