A Different
Kind of Cinema
After yet another summer of comic book movies, superhero movies, and just
plain bad movies, most accompanied by paroxysms of praise from the usual unreliable
sources, perhaps viewers and reviewers should look for some other kind of
cinema. I do not refer to the much
celebrated “diversity,” which seems to translate as women, people of color, or
LGBTQ individuals instead of straight white males playing those same superheroes
in those same overproduced spectacles, a practice that still fails to make them
better films. A character of any gender
or race with superhuman abilities acting against a background of exploding sets
or engaging in an extended automobile chase or flying through the air or
battling it out with some unlikely villain still fails to make a bad idea
better. Over the last year or so,
however, a number of small, mostly unheralded works appeared, attracting too
little attention from critics and audiences; none is spectacular in any way,
but all are worth viewing.
Aside from their avoidance of stunts, pyrotechnics, and computer
generated effects, the element that most distinguishes three recent films is
the almost total absence of major stars.
The Florida Project, The Rider, and Leave No Trace tell their small, undramatic stories with simple
plots and ordinary people. The phrase
means exactly that—the movies show their subjects apparently playing themselves
in the stories of their lives. If any
people on the screen are really professional actors, I don’t imagine that many
in the audiences have seen or even heard of them before.
The only familiar face in The
Florida Project, Willem Dafoe plays the manager of a welfare motel where a
single mother, Halley (Bria Vinaite) and her daughter Moonee (Brooklyn Prince)
live, along with a number of other tenants, barely managing to survive. The simple, generally straight-ahead plot
shows the daily struggle of people scraping by, trying to cope with poverty,
joblessness, homelessness, eventually even hopelessness. In addition to all that they must cope with,
they face a bureaucracy that, however well meaning, manages to obstruct and
even oppress them. Focusing mostly on
the children who live in the place, the film looks almost as if the director,
Sean Baker, simply set up his camera and allowed them to just be themselves,
just be little kids; although the film refuses to settle for any kind of
satisfying closure, those children, running around the place, annoying other
tenants, playing games, eating treats, getting into trouble, yearning for
something more, something that they probably will never have, are both sad and
quite wonderful.
In some ways even more experimental than the latest art house favorite, The Rider shows once again how well
nonprofessional actors can perform on the screen--not amateur actors, who often
act their little heads off, but non-actors, again, ordinary people. Though hardly even flickering on the critical
radar screen, The Rider deserves a
good deal more attention from reviewers and audiences than it attracted. In a gritty, naturalistic manner, the movie deals
with people essentially playing themselves in the context of their own
particular situation; in effect it celebrates the small events that, like it or
not, make up the substance of all our lives.
The film chronicles the efforts of a severely injured young rodeo rider,
Brady Blackburn, played by Brady Jandreau, to resume his career; Jandreau’s real
father plays his father, and his developmentally disabled sister Lily plays his
sister Lily. Hoping that his
injury—apparently causing serious brain damage—will improve, he works at a
part-time job and occasionally employs his skill as a horse trainer; he dreams,
however, of returning to the rodeo. He
frequently visits a friend, Lane Scott, again an actual person, an actual
friend, playing himself, a quadriplegic paralyzed from his own accident, in
this case riding Brahma bulls. In a
moment that captures the poignancy of the whole situation, Brady talks with his
friend, exercises him as well as he can, while in the background a video
repeatedly shows Lane riding the bulls and the disaster that ensues, a moment
of triumph and tragedy that contrasts with the condition of the two injured
cowboys.
The minimalism, the drab naturalism, and the laconic dialogue reflect in
their own way the sensibility of the modern Western, the notion of a world long
past, where the ambitions of a cowboy, a rodeo rider, an admired celebrity
diminish into anonymity, and a promising career dwindles into a job as a
cashier in a discount store. The film,
however, also falls into the classic Western mode, paying tribute to an
honorable history, with many of the objects and themes associated with the
form—horses and riders, of course, panoramic shots of the endless, empty South
Dakota prairies, even a tragic shooting with a revolver. The
Rider displays a kind of bleak and understated eloquence in its
unsentimental and uncompromising story of a cowboy who only wants to ride his
beloved horse and compete in the rodeo.
It offers very little in the way of solutions beyond the vague promise
that life, as it must, goes on.
Based on a novel titled My
Abandonment, perhaps the most minimalist film of the trio, Leave No Trace confronts a simple and
possibly not uncommon situation in an era haunted by homelessness,
post-traumatic stress, and maybe even a sense of utter emptiness. The plot consists merely of the efforts of a father,
Will (Ben Foster), and his 13-year-old daughter, Tom (Thomasin McKenzie), to
live entirely off the grid, as the saying goes.
Living in a tent in the forests of the Northwest, they spend some of their
time eluding the park police, the rest merely subsisting, which seems to suit
them well. The film lacks a back story,
so one must assume that Will suffers from some form of PTSD; he visits a
veteran’s center, picks up pills, then sells them to a drug dealer for the
money to buy their necessities.
When Will breaks his leg, he and Tom find assistance from a small
community of somewhat reclusive people like themselves, who also dwell away
from cities and towns; though a good deal more normally connected to modern
life, the several families understand and sympathize with the plight of the
father and daughter. The period of
healing for Will becomes a period of adjustment for Tom, learning about the
hospitality and kindness of strangers, coming to understand something of a
society she has not really experienced.
The movie ends with a sad yet logical conclusion to the life she and her
father have shared.
All three films, as I noted earlier, depart drastically from contemporary
cinematic fashion; they deserve some attention, however, in part because of
that departure. They achieve, in a
sense, something of an experimental quality in their offbeat subjects, their
understated narratives, their refusal to compromise with reality and thus, their
honesty. They also affirm that some
filmmakers still dare to try something so old fashioned that it’s brand
new—small stories about ordinary people, simply told.
