COLDWATER D
USA (104 mi) 2013
‘Scope d: Vincent Grashaw Official
site
Another film that attempts to raise the level of social
awareness, highlighting the level of abuse taking place from the privatization
of juvenile detention centers that seemingly answer to no one, as they are not
regulated by the state, where parents often send their kids away to these
remote wilderness camps under near military rule because they can’t deal with
their out-of-control behavior, thinking a little discipline will do them
good. Little do they know that the
operators running the facilities are more out of control than anyone could
imagine, literally placing these kid’s lives at risk. Perhaps hoping to cash in on the festival
circuit success of Destin Cretton’s Short
Term 12 (2013), a film of near documentary social realism that explored the
volatile nature of abused teenage patients in a residential treatment facility,
crafted by someone who had first-hand experience working in similar facilities,
while here the story developed from a friend of the directors who was sent to
a reform facility and is supposedly inspired by real events. Grashaw was the producer and co-editor of
BELLFLOWER (2011), a low budget Sundance film with extremely violent overtones,
while directing, co-writing (with Mark Penney), and co-producing this
film. While the subject here is
intriguing, as is the lead performance by first time actor P.J. Boudousqué
(whose resemblance to Ryan Gosling likely got him the job), the heavy handed
approach used by the director emphasizes and exaggerates a level of sadism by
the sergeants in control that becomes sickening, bordering on torture porn when
they intentionally target infected wounds, refusing to treat a major injury
properly, cruelly inflicting methods of torture as part of their routine brand
of punishment. One questions the
fascination with the gruesome aspects of the details, prolonging the
uncomfortable factor in many of these scenes, emphasizing the unendurable pain
along with the helplessness of these individuals, like the intentional shock
effects in exploitation prison B-movies.
“We are in the business of transformation,” they are told once they
arrive to the facility, but instead they are brutally bullied and tortured into
blind obedience, using military style techniques to break down any lingering
effects of individuality, where the counselors on the grounds are former
inmates themselves.
Because of the film’s insistence upon continually
emphasizing the cruelty of those men in charge, the film takes on a one-dimensional
tone of evil, never developing any levels of characterization or complexity,
but leaving those men as little more than cardboard cut outs, spewing the same
venom throughout the entire film. They
are not shown as being human, but individuals that thrive on inflicting misery
onto others, as if this is the only fact that matters to them or offers meaning
to their otherwise empty lives. More
than likely these are ex-military men who were never able to make the
transition to peacetime, who continue fighting their own embattled inner
demons, but the director refuses to explore any hint of humanity in men who are
only shown to be monsters. Instead the
film is shown through a stream-of-conscious style through the eyes of a lone
individual, Brad Lunders (Boudousqué), who’s seen initially as a brash young
kid with a cute girlfriend (Stephanie Simbari), but he’s a lowlife that deals
in drugs and gets involved with the wrong people, which eventually leads to
disastrous consequences. Kidnapped in
the middle of the night by those that run this boot camp, where his clueless mother
yells “I love you” as they haul him away in the back of a van to a remote
juvenile prison facility that is 25-miles from the nearest town. After hearing the gung-ho speech from Colonel
Frank Reichert (James C. Burns), a former marine, it’s clear that whatever
deluded mission these men aspire to, they are really sadistic control freaks
that enjoy the unfettered power they have over what amounts to kidnapped kids,
where they see their jobs as making them miserable on a daily basis, rousting
them out of bed at the crack of dawn, forcing them to run long runs in the
desert heat without water, and then punishing those who can’t keep up, from
taking away privileges to locking them up for days on end in a detention center
where they are brutally tortured. While
the graphic reality sinks in, a backstory is filled in via flashbacks, where we
see scenes of Brad’s earlier life spiraling out of control, illustrating a
deteriorating sequence of events that led him to this godforsaken place. What’s perhaps most incomprehensible is that
these kids were not sent by some court-appointed agreement resulting from a
criminal case, but by their parents who are paying for this abominable
treatment.
Midway through the film, we discover a year has passed,
where Brad’s noticeable anger and temper have disappeared, as now he behaves
like the docile and obedient “slave” they have turned him into, where he’s been
given special privileges and told he has what it takes to make that next step
out of there. Initially, Brad despised
the trustees, inmates who cooperate with the counselors by being their eyes
and ears in the barracks, literally spying on the other kids and reporting
information back to the Colonel, but now he’s become one of them. While it appears he finally has a path out,
he’s thrown a curveball when one of his former drug running buddies Gabriel
(Chris Petrovski) arrives at the facility with that same badass attitude,
where he’s torn between trying to help his old friend and not doing anything
that would jeopardize his chances of getting out of there. The director supposedly spent ten years
researching the type of camps depicted here, but it remains disconnected to any
existing reality or outside world, where he lacks maturity or any cinematic understanding
of how to find or express anything unique about the subject, never really
getting under the surface, visually or otherwise, lacking observational skills,
where he simply skims over the lives of almost everyone involved. This is simply bad filmmaking, with no
directorial imprint, as this film could have been made by anybody, where the
focus is less on providing a realistic exposé of the detestable conditions of
the camp than the overcontrolling and disturbing expression of sadistic
behavior, which receives all the exaggerated emphasis in this film, becoming so
extreme and distorted that it loses any connection to reality. An equally brutal and sadistic film on the
exact same theme is Marius Holst’s 2012
Top Ten Films of the Year: #9 King of Devil's Island (Kongen av Bastøy)
(2010), a Norwegian film about a real life juvenile detention center on an
Alcatraz like island of Bastøy in the North Sea, which was historically the
site of monstrous acts of inhumanity to children, showing the same horrors,
but getting much deeper into the mindset of both the prison administrator and
these angry and vulnerable kids who are constantly being abused and taken
advantage of, where the administration’s intent is to make use of child inmates
for cheap, exploited labor. This film
lacks the subtlety and poetry of the Norwegian film, a much darker
psychological horror story that with little dialogue allows the boy’s point of
view to develop into a sense of community, as they are all victims of the same
inhumane living conditions. In
COLDWATER, there’s no sense of camaraderie, as outside of Brad’s flashbacks, we
never get to know any of the other characters.
Accordingly, there’s little sympathy generated onscreen to the highlighted
acts of abuse, or the kids rebellious response to it, where the film never
builds that sense of moral outrage that it’s looking for and instead exists in
a vacuum where nobody gives a damn.
