Rating high in the unvarnished truth department, “Ballast” does not bring enough entertainment to the table to merit the price of admission. A commendable exercise in plainness does not constitute a reason to see this film
Although breakthrough director/writer Lance Hammer’s new Mississippi Delta saga “Ballast” may have taken home the Best Director award at Sundance it is unlikely to attract a massive audience. The film, for all its intrinsic value and its inarguable honesty, is slow. It moves like watching grass grow or like conversations at the local old folks' home. Shot with commendable adherence to Lars von Trier’s “Dogma” conventions (handheld camera, no sets, no lighting and all shots on location) this film almost sets a new standard in plainness.
A film for film school, “Ballast” presents an extremely minimalist style in a very minimalist Mississippi Delta. Most viewers will have never thought of the Delta as being as featureless as it is shown in this film. The lighting is dull and flat and there is not a single structure, sign or feature of the landscape that suggests any reason why anybody in their right mind would live in the region.
But James (JimMyron Ross) lives there. In fact, the twelve year old lives there and does drugs. Why is that not surprising? He does drugs and he delivers drugs and eventually, running low on cash, as twelve year olds with drug habits often do, he robs the man next door, Lawrence (Micheal J. Smith Sr.). Lawrence has just witnessed the suicide of his brother and has tried to kill himself with a gun shot to his rib cage. James steals Lawrence’s gun and robs him of enough cash to buy about a day’s worth of crack.
In the course of doing that he threatens the older drug dealers with his gun. At that point he is on the run from the fate that awaits twelve year olds when they threaten sixteen year olds with guns to avoid paying their drug debts. James mother Marlee (Tarra Riggs) is fired from her job scrubbing urinals because her employer’s customers can’t stand the pressure of her working in the establishment.
Are we having fun yet?
The good news is that the story doesn’t get any more depressing than that. The bad news is that it doesn’t get a lot less depressing, either. Von Trier’s “Dogville” is a depressing story shot in the Dogma convention (OK, neo-Dogma); but it is interesting and entertaining. This film is neither interesting nor entertaining nor does it tell a story that has not been told before about how disadvantaged people can stick together and obtain a measure of wellness.
Are we being preached to? If so, director/writer Hammer would do well to try to bring his future audiences a little more entertainment and a little less lesson. This is not film school, nor is it church.
This is a first time effort for cinematographer Lol Crawley and, although he doubtlessly followed orders, the resulting photography is unnecessarily plain. This film could take advantage of moving backgrounds such as trains to inject some energy into a scene while at the same time using a flat background as a pallet for human misery and redemption. This film doesn’t do that. The only thing that moves in any of the scenes is a car pulling into the gas station for a fill up.
If you are in the mood for something simple, as plain and honest as any indie film could possibly be, the Mennonite of feature films, consider, say, Charles Burnett’s 1981 “Killer of Sheep.” The film echoes the unvarnished honesty of the neo-realists of the time, forever bookmarked by Vittorio De Sica’s “Bicycle Thieves” and other works by Jean Renoir and Michelangelo Antonioni. These films used unskilled actors taken from the shooting locale and/or used local persons as extras to back-up the scripted leads.
But the good news about “Killer” is that it doesn’t focus so much on the bad, dreary and depressing. It shows life as a balance and doesn’t come off as guilt-tripping the audience into watching it.
Directed and Written by: Lance Hammer
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