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.