Still (2014)

STILL         C         
Great Britain  (96 mi)  2014  d:  Simon Blake 

This is another misguided revenge-gone-wrong saga, something of a holdover from the Charles Bronson vigilante justice movies from DEATH WISH (1974), but updated into a gritty, modern era, gang-infested North London atmosphere instead.  While the look is intentionally dark and dreary, much of it seeped in blackness, where color is literally drained from the screen, this film immerses itself in wretched miserablism with a touch of added torture porn, where the painfully trite dialogue written by the director is cliché’d and overly predictable, exploring more of the surface reality than what lies underneath.  Irish actor Aiden Gillen plays Tom Carver, a professional photographer specializing in street portraits of kids whose life is spiraling out of control at the moment, still reeling from the death of his own teenage son a year ago, who by chance bumps into a teenage street thug on the street, which escalates into a series of ever more brutal gang-related reprisals, turning this into a mind-numbing saga of neverending revenge.  While meeting with his ex-wife Rachel (Amanda Mealing) to visit the grave of their son, a regular occurrence in their lives, she describes him as “You’re an accident waiting to happen.”  No one knows how he got himself into this hapless situation or why he insists upon living in a cheap dive of an apartment in the heart of gang territory, but it’s clear that Carver’s way out of this self-imposed prison is to drink his way out of this pitiful state.  Of course the more alcohol he insists upon drinking only makes him a more pathetic figure, no matter where he exists, but unfortunately the majority of this picture is immersed in Carver’s non-stop drinking.  Other than Eugene O’Neill and a few other great playwrights, lead characters that drown their sorrows in alcohol are often a cheap substitute for realism in the movies, as here it adds absolutely nothing, but instead feels fake, like the audience is cheated out of a real performance by using a conventional device used on television.  This actually undermines the entire film, where what might otherwise be tragic becomes self-indulgent and pathetic when seen through the eyes of a masochistic fool that insists upon heaping more misery into his already wretched existence, a guy who apparently lives by the creed misery loves company.  

A low-budget film shot for less than half a million dollars, most of the action takes place in the cramped and claustrophobic confines of Carver’s apartment, where the audience is subject to long, drawn out, alcohol-fueled conversations between Carver and his ex-wife or Carver and his current girlfriend Christina (Elodie Yung) that only grow testy and irritable, usually ending with someone storming out the door in anger.  These are not subtle scenes, but are instead full-throttle flashes of rage and resentment where passions rise in wretched excess, often playing the blame game, where the residue of past sins resurfaces in spectacular fashion.  This personal more interior drama happening within the framework of a larger overall social drama is continuously in play, where the question becomes what influence each one has on the other.  The weakest link of the entire picture is the constant presence of Carver’s supposed best friend Ed (Jonathan Slinger), a slimy character with a seedy side to him, as he’s a freelance journalist always on the lookout for a headline grabbing story.  When gangs begin terrorizing Carver’s home, singling him out for street harassment, Ed goes on all-night stake outs trying to photograph the perpetrators in action and in this way identify who they are.  Throughout the film we rarely see them, but only hear about their menacing presence, where there is power in remaining anonymous and unknown, as neighborhood fears only increase when people feel isolated and alone.  Another developing theme throughout is a budding friendship between a young kid Jimmy (Joseph Duffy) that he photographs who’s brother was killed by the gangs, where he tries to offer encouragement and understanding, claiming he’s well aware of death and the feeling of loss, but the kid is sucked into the terrifying world of poverty, gangs and survival, toyed with and eventually targeted, where the hooligans want to teach him a lesson for befriending Carver.  This coincides with gang targets of Christina, who is attacked in the alleyways just outside the front door, where she is shamed, humiliated, and ultimately defeated, leaving Carver to fume on his own.

Enraged by the gang’s actions, Carver’s life disintegrates before our eyes, as Christina’s departure seems to have sent him over the edge, where his thoughts turn to vengeance, where Ed acts as his trusted Iago-like confidant that always seems to encourage the idea of direct confrontation, though from his perspective it may be little more than a good story.  Once Ed discovers the identity of the young kid, he’s a young street punk named Carl, British rapper Sonny Green (Sonny Green | The biography of Sonny Green) in his film debut, who is kidnapped, handcuffed, and dropped into Carver’s hands for his own brand of street justice.  The idea of taking matters into one’s own hands and wreaking vengeance is never a good idea, in fact it’s a rather preposterous piece of theatrics that borders on the ridiculous.  One doesn’t play God with other people’s lives, no matter how contemptuous they may be, and one should never allow oneself to get placed in that position.  To be that distrustful of an existing legal system of police, courts, and law and order only feeds into the chaos and street anarchy mentality that the gangs want, because in that game they can rule by fear.  Carver is just as psychologically unhinged and obsessed as Charles Bronson, where both think they’re doing society a favor by ridding the streets of these vile creatures, but like rats, there’s plenty more where they came from, and vigilantism doesn’t make a dent in the crime rate.  What finally unfolds is a theater of two individuals, one drunk and psychotically deranged, while the other is a psychopath in his own right, but he’s still just a juvenile kid.  While the adults unashamedly overact throughout, which grows irritating after awhile, the teenagers themselves are excellent, seemingly more natural, especially Green in this final sequence, where he more than holds his own onscreen, shaming Carver, who is wracked with guilt about his own shortcomings, seeing the world in black and white moral absolutes, where there is no in between, but Carl reminds him how much he neglected his own son while he was alive, where he didn’t even know him, where this haymaker hits Carver square on the jaw and comes as the final payback, suggesting there is a connection between indifferent parenting and gang culture, blurring the lines between innocence and evil, where in the end the boy he’s inflicting his wrath upon may as well be his own lost son.          

Beneath the Harvest Sky

BENEATH THE HARVEST SKY            B+ 

USA  (116 mi)  2013  ‘Scope  d:  Aron Gaudet and Gita Pullapilly         Official site

Good people make bad choices.            —Casper (Emory Cohen)

Aron Gaudet and Gita Pullapilly worked together for five years following the lives of three senior citizens who spent years greeting nearly one million returning U.S. troops when they arrive at the tiny Bangor, Maine airport in the documentary THE WAY WE GET BY (2009) before finally getting married in a wedding profiled in The New York Times Vows Section.  Their documentary film experience clearly effects the meticulous detail expressed in this film taking place entirely in the small border town of Van Buren, Maine, becoming a portrait of the hardscrabble life in the bleak and economically deprived town where the French-Canadian accents are built into the everyday language.  Infused with the best traditions of the American indie film style, which are often hampered by monetary restrictions, they make up for it in the authenticity of the experience, where the film offers a genuine view of what it’s like to grow up in the world of rural poverty, as afterwards the audience is likely to feel a familiarity with this tiny rural town with a population of less than 2000 inhabitants, as if we’ve been there, where there’s a comically derogatory reference to the movie FROZEN RIVER (2008), which covers similar territory.  The film immediately captures one’s attention by a scene in a high school classroom where they are studying S.E. Hinton’s 1967 teen novel The Outsiders, a novel published when the author herself was only 18, a realistic portrayal of poor teenagers from the wrong side of the tracks featuring the likes of characters named Sodapop and Ponyboy, who may as well be the leads in this film, featuring two fiercely loyal high school friends that couldn’t be more devoted to one another, Casper (Emory Cohen) and Dominic (Callan McAuliffe).  While Dominic is spending the summer helping out his parents with the potato harvest, he’s a smart kid with a bright future, but he continually gets drawn into the troubled affairs of Casper, a hothead Alpha male that plays by his own rules, thinking he’s infallible, making him a bit of a small-time hood with ambitions to get out of town, where their shared dream is to move to Boston (seemingly a million miles away) where they can watch Red Sox games.  

At the urging of others to stay away from Casper, as he’s always up to no good, Dominic is forced to constantly defend his friend, claiming others just don’t understand, yet their friendship feels reminiscent of the Biblical Cain and Abel saga, paralleled by two other brothers in the film.  The film is seen through the eyes of Casper, who is mostly a despicable character, someone we’ve all encountered at one point or another in our lives, the kind of guy destined for the penitentiary or death by the age of 25, as the only decisions he knows how to make are the wrong ones, where he makes a living glorifying the persona of being rebellious, almost always seen on the wrong side of the law.  We see him break into people’s homes and steal their prescription medicine, making him part of an underground, pharmaceutical black market network that transports pills across the border to New Brunswick, a business that’s been in his family for generations, where they pride themselves in being able to move contraband without detection.  Casper has a 15-year old girlfriend Tasha (Zoe Levin) who quickly becomes pregnant, where the adolescent tension is only aggravated by the fact that he orders her around, continually berates and belittles her, while both continue to live with their parents.  The feeling of being trapped is at the heart of the picture, as essentially every character plays into this dead-end scenario, with the potato harvest as the only thriving business in town, where there’s just no future for these kids unless they can get out.  Illustrating this point is Dominic’s short term relationship with Emma (Sarah Sutherland, aka Kiefer Sutherland’s daughter), a girl that’s already visited prospective colleges in Vermont, where she’ll soon be moving on, making their relationship tenuous at best.  The looseness of the film’s structure is part of its appeal, as it’s a highly impressionistic, stream-of-conscious mosaic connected by the raw and achingly lonely songs from musician Dustin Hamman, the front man of the group Run On Sentence, moving from unpretentious moments of raucous street euphoria to the saddest and darkest feelings of despair (the musical soundtrack can be heard in its entirety here: pre-order). 

While the film is told out of time, it has a tendency to get lost exploring its many jagged side plots, often growing messy and losing narrative coherence, which may detract some viewers, but what it does beautifully establish is more local flavor into the film, where the town itself may as well be the lead character, expressed through a series of vignettes showing a farm community at work, populated entirely by secondary roles that tend to come and go, or move in and out of view, where we might even see a drunken late-night moose chase on the highway or a rather incredible performance by a heavy metal punk band that suddenly appears out of nowhere.  Only Casper is a fully developed character, but as he’s such a mischievous and thoroughly detestable soul, treating everyone around him like shit, thinking he’s above it all and impervious to criticism, where the glorification of his character, flaws and all, is a difficult and often unpleasant journey, especially when he remains at the centerpiece of the film.  He’s obviously a bright, if misguided kid, with few options, where he has a tendency to continually get ahead of himself, to act before he thinks, where he never foresees the murky trouble that lies ahead, mirroring the adults around him, thinking instead that none of the dirt and muck will stick to him.  As he gets deeper into his estranged father’s (Aiden Gillen) business, Dominic calls him on it, claiming he’s become an errand boy for his father, which is exactly what everyone in town expected from him as he was growing up, where only Dominic had faith that he’d make more out of himself and become something different.  This disappointment leads to a personal tragedy that resembles a similar fate of Ponyboy’s best friend Johnny in The Outsiders, a heartbreaking moment that draws attention to the significance of these young lives, each so terribly fragile, with dreams dissipating into thin air after high school when few opportunities await them due to the economic bleakness that pervades the vicinity.  Written, directed, edited, and produced by this artistic team, it has a distinctively autobiographical, though male-tinged flavor, where the filmmakers lure in the viewer, with both inhabiting the same shared space for a brief duration of time.  Like Shunji Iwai’s ALL ABOUT LILY CHOU-CHOU (2001), another teenage angst film filled with brooding high school characters that get lost in an overpowering stylization, this is irrefutably impressive filmmaking, where the indie-style cinematography by Stephen Capitano Calitri is nothing less than mesmerizing at times, but there is a disconnect with so many of the people that inhabit this film, which may be the point, as the audience is left with an anguishing emptiness that literally stirs the soul in this barebones musical coda that brings down the closing credits, Run On Sentence "Wide Open Sky" YouTube (5:03).