WASTELAND

by
Chris
Dashiell

The overlooked, the neglected, the lost.

GEORGE WASHINGTON, written and directed by David Gordon Green, doesn't present you with their plight or try to explain - it just makes you feel it.

The film thrusts us into a nameless small town, and into the lives of a group of kids - mostly black, some white - whiling away a summer and trying to make sense, somehow, out of a senseless environment of junkyards, abandonded buildings, and families inured to poverty. A 12-year-old girl named Nasia (Candace Evanofski) narrates the movie. She is thoughtful, poetic - her words are like wings beating against a cage. She has recently broken up with Buddy (Curtis Cotton III), a wiry, precocious kid with glasses, because he "acts too young." Now she is interested in moody, inarticulate George (Donald Holden), who has to wear a helmet because his skull is too soft. Nasia sees great things in George. She thinks he could be a hero.

Although the narrator is a girl, the film ends up focusing mostly on the boys. Nasia, her older sister, and her other friends, share humorous talk about boys, and a sense of togetherness. But the boys talk and act in ways that betray disconnection and emptiness. The first part of the film moves in the same wandering, seemingly aimless way as the characters. Then a sudden tragedy confronts the kids with a reality that they have trouble knowing how to deal with.

Green shows an uncompromising commitment to his own vision. He very deliberately assumes the point of view of his young characters, with no outside comment or position, and he succeeds in creating an overwhelming sense of strangeness, confusion and fear. The dialogue challenges stereotypes, venturing into an almost surreal poetic quality, or sometimes an abbreviated symbolism that reflects each character's special feeling. The conversations are often improvised, and most of the young non-professionals in his cast are strikingly natural, with Damian Jewan Lee a standout as a gruff older boy who can't cope with guilt.

Eventually George emerges as the film's main character. He assumes the role of a hero, even wearing a cape as he walks around town - in grotesque contrast to the underlying desperation. This picture is always going to places you don't expect it to. It is Green's first film, and he sometimes tries for effects that are all wrong. A few speeches come out of young mouths that sound utterly false. His mistakes, though, are commensurate with his strengths as a filmmaker. Helped by Tim Orr's terrific cinematography, he does things here with sound and mood and juxtaposition of dialogue with image, that you just don't see anywhere else.

The film was rejected by the Sundance committee. It's a messy work - not in style or craft, but in sensibility. I imagine that the judges just didn't know what to make of it. Many reviewers have faltered when trying to describe George Washington as well. The mistake is to try to see it as some kind of social commentary or critique. Green does not present an objective narrative about poverty or race or alienated youth, or anything like that. He creates a feeling - an extremely disturbing one.

That feeling is - nothingness. Nothing to hold on to. No support (from adults or from society in general), no sense of things with which to grasp one's life, no ground to walk on. Free falling. These kids have nothing, they know nothing for certain, and their only method of survival is to make it all up as they go along. George Washington creates the visceral experience of a terrifying voidness. It's a flawed first work, sometimes even a foolish one. It's also a courageous and important work that gives me hope, hope for a film art that addresses the predicament of people, the kind of people that other films won't even touch.

An illegal immigrant is alienated too, in a more literal sense. Paul Pavlikovsky's LAST RESORT explores the lonely realm between countries where people have no rights and only slender hopes to cling to.

Tanya (Dina Korzun), a Russian children's book illustrator, has come to England with her young son (Artyom Strelnikov) in the belief that a Brit she fell in love with will take care of them. The man doesn't show up at the airport, she is detained by immigration, and then she claims political asylum so as not to be sent back. The two of them end up stranded in a "designated holding area," complete with guard dogs and surveillance cameras, from which they are not allowed to leave, while the government looks at their case - a process that could take months.

They live in a bleak little seaside flat overlooking an abandoned amusement park (thus the pun in the film's title), and Tanya quickly begins to run out of money. The only way to make money in this "area" is either through dealing in black market goods, or - as Tanya discovers when a stranger offers her a deal - to pose as a model for cyberporn. Meanwhile, her 12-year-old begins to drift into a life of petty crime. Into this seemingly hopeless situation stumbles Alfie (Paddy Considine), the proprietor of a seedy local arcade. He's got "loser" written all over him, but he reaches out to the young mother. Trust is born, and eventually love, which leads to the slim chance of escape for all three.

Pavlikovsky captures the feeling of life on the margins.
The dilapidated world of Last Resort mirrors the spiritual dislocation of its characters. Delicately beautiful, Korzun plays Tanya with a convincing resilience - scared and tired but still sensitive, even romantic, she carries the movie.

Supposedly the script was put together, by director and actors, as the film was shot. That helps to explain the naturalness of the style and of all concerned. The picture is refreshingly brief (73 minutes), and like a good short story, it doesn't try to reach too far. Just a story of people stuck in a bureaucratic limbo, and unexpected love. A film that might help you feel grateful for what you have.

Modesty may be a virtue, but less isn't necessarily more. Take, for instance, TOO MUCH SLEEP, a clever little joke, written and directed by newcomer David Maquiling, that doesn't have enough on its mind to fill even its hour and a half length.

Jack (the engagingly befuddled Marc Palmieri) is a security guard who lives with his mother and doesn't seem to have much ambition beyond just sleeping a lot. After a distracting incident involving a pretty girl on a bus, he discovers that his gun has been stolen. The rest of the movie concerns his quest to get his gun back, in the course of which he meets a variety of weird characters, including his best friend's uncle (Pasquale Gaeta) who spouts appallingly banal wisdom with the accents and mannerisms of a Scorsese-type mobster, a sort of pseudo-Joe Pesci, if you can imagine such a thing.

On the plus side, Too Much Sleep has a number of bizarre and amusing bits of business, a deadpan tone that serves it well, and a pleasant performance from Palmieri, who looks like all the jocks you used to know in high school, except with a charming facility for clueless straight man reactions. In addition, Maquiling's point is subtle enough that the less discerning might very well not even get it. Without giving too much away, I'll say that it has something to do with the way we automatically identify with the protagonists of stories as heroes, i.e. representing "good" in some way. Maquiling takes advantage of this fact to twist the audience's mind into little knots. His main instrument for this purpose is Gaeta as the tough old guy, one of the most vulgar characters I have seen on screen in quite a while.

Not all of the actors display the same skill as the leads. In fact, there are a few performances that are downright bad. But that's not the real trouble. The problem is, the film's central conceit is too thin to sustain involvement. Maquiling hasn't come up with enough interesting incidents, or funny dialogue, to break the feeling of "So what?" that permeates his shaggy dog narrative. For a first film, it shows promise. But economics, as much as I hate to admit it, play a factor here. I paid almost eight dollars for Maquiling's bit of jest. If I had rented it as a video, or saw it on TV for free, I probably would have appreciated it more.

Both Last Resort and Too Much Sleep are part of the "Shooting Gallery" series, the brainchild of independent producer Larry Meistrich. He made a deal with Loews Cineplex to show six films per year, independent and foreign films chosen by Shooting Gallery, in the hopes of creating some buzz for pictures that might otherwise never achieve distribution outside of the major urban centers. Last year they scored with Croupier, which made a handy profit through word of mouth, and had a few smaller successes as well, including Judy Berlin and A Time for Drunken Horses. It's an admirable idea, and Loews has demonstrated some marketing savvy by promoting the pictures to a niche audience as an alternative to the usual Hollywood fare. Here's wishing continued success to the enterprise.

CineScene, 2001