Go for Sisters

GO FOR SISTERS             B+       
USA  (123 mi)  2013  d:  John Sayles                 Official site

Oh, I’ve always felt like I was on the margins.  Once upon a time that’s what independent used to mean.                 —John Sayles

When people speak of American independent filmmakers, today they may immediately think of David Gordon Green or Jeff Nichols, both of whom come from the North Carolina School of Arts and are major influences on the contemporary landscape, but one of the strongest voices is John Sayles, the director of MATEWAN (1987), LONE STAR (1996), and Limbo (1999), who has been making films without studio backing since 1979, initially securing financing for his films by writing some genre screenplays for commercial projects like PIRANHA (1978), THE LADY IN RED (1979), and ALLIGATOR (1980).  A MacArthur Fellowship award winner in 1983, his methodical approach to filmmaking is largely built around his writing ability and his meticulous attention to detail.  In Sayles films, one always recognizes his ear for dialogue, complex characters caught up in moral uncertainty, a significant presence from secondary characters, a racially diverse world, a relaxed humor, extraordinary musical soundtracks, where his highly individualistic approach remains uncompromising even as he targets a mainstream audience.  While he has established a reputation as a novelist and a writer of literate and witty scripts, his own films steer clear of formula or convention and prove to be realistic, character-driven stories that are dramatically compelling while also remaining unpredictable.  Without a dependence on studio backing, Sayles leaves his own mark on his films by maintaining control over production, casting, and the final cut.  Making his 18th low budget film, Sayles is not only the writer and director, but also the editor and co-writer of the song heard playing over the end credits. Viewers weaned on Hollywood productions will find his quirky style amusing and filled with character idiosyncrasies while also feeling novelesque, where what’s unique to his films is the feeling afterwards that you have experienced something new and different, as if you have been immersed in another world.     

Nothing could be truer about this film, which begins in the mundane world of police bureaucracy, where the focus is on one individual parole officer, Bernice (LisaGay Hamilton), who patiently listens to a desperate woman’s erratic plea for mercy, explaining she was in the wrong place at the wrong time, but only there in the first place to respond to a plea for help, claiming she committed no crime.  Bernice, playing by the book, dispassionately refers her to a court hearing for a parole violation, much to the woman’s dismay.  While she believes she is protecting the public’s interest, she’s really listlessly going through the motions while her attention is elsewhere, receiving a disturbing series of cellphone calls about her missing son Rodney.  Since returning from a tour of duty overseas with the Marine Corps, she’s had little contact with him, causing her endless grief when she doesn’t know where he is.  Calling her next case, it turns out to be one of the girls she used to hang out with in high school, Fontayne (Yolanda Ross), now out on parole after serving some serious prison time, but she’s been called in for fraternizing with an ex-convict, where Bernice is filling in for her absent parole officer.  What brief time they spend together is offset by Bernice’s focus elsewhere, but she promises not to refer her case for a hearing.  When one of Rodney’s best friends turns up dead, with the police looking for him as a possible suspect, Bernice calls Fontayne for help in establishing contacts with her son’s known associates, assuming the worst, that he’s gotten himself involved in criminal activity.  This search through the seamy underworld of Los Angeles couldn’t be more intriguing, showing a side we rarely see, as no one is portrayed through stereotypes, but through character development even in the minor roles.  One of the contacts is Chula, Vanessa Martinez, who was the daughter who had such an amazing impact in the final scenes of Limbo, looking completely different here, playing one of Fontayne’s prison friends who’s trying to get her life back together.  In a brief personal moment, we realize they were lovers in prison, where Chula is moving on, but Fontayne is still living with those feelings, beautifully expressing how conflicted she is through subtle nuances.

Chula leads them to Freddy Suarez (Edward James Olmos), a retired police detective who may have left the force involuntarily under mysterious circumstances, where in every character there’s a darker underside that remains hidden, that eventually comes out, but only after plenty of investigative legwork where they’re constantly thrust into each other’s lives.  The earnest devotion of Bernice and the world weary street smarts of Freddy and Fontayne make this one delicious movie experience, where a character study becomes a rambling road movie that veers out of control, especially when their leads take them across the border to Tijuana, seen as such a twisted and depraved town that Freddy nails it with pinpoint accuracy:  “This isn't Mexico.  This is like a theme park for bad behavior,” which mirrors a similar remark from Limbo:  “Think of Alaska as one big theme park.”  Somewhat reminiscent of Tilda Swinton’s subterranean Mexican journey in Erick Zonca’s JULIA (2008), the offbeat quality of the film is what provides the dramatic richness, taking us into a subculture of drugs, guns, kidnappings, and human trafficking, where money is made out of human misery and desperation.  The more we learn about this unsavory place, with its layers of gang protection and corrupt federales, the deeper trouble Rodney is in. While there is a build up of tense moments, there is also off-handed humor and personal revelations about their lives, where Sayles simply knows how to keep things interesting, not by creating action sequences, which would be the norm, but by weaving his characters in and out of tight spots, where the story is continually advanced through personal dialogue and through an exploration of their interrelations with a network of nefarious underworld figures, eventually leading to a bizarre outcome.  But at the same time, Sayles leaves room for smaller moments, the kind that never make it into bigger pictures, where he savors a brief encounter with Freddy and a runaway young mother hauling along her infant child, dreaming of life on the other side where she knows she’ll reconnect with her out of touch boyfriend.  Knowing the odds are against her, telling her “It’s a big country, bigger than Mexico,” yet he still stops to offer encouragement, buys her breakfast and hands her a few bucks, telling her he’ll try to help find him if she makes it across.  It’s a big hearted moment in an otherwise heartless world.  Perhaps even more memorable is Sayles allowing Olmos to wail away on a Rickenbacker electric guitar, a signature moment that reminds us that life isn’t always what it seems, that there’s always more waiting to be discovered under the surface. 

Limbo

LIMBO            A                                

USA  Germany  (127 mi)  1999  d:  John Sayles

A film that defies expectations, that spends most of its time exploring what might be an interesting relationship between a couple of drifters in a small fishing village in Alaska, that fills us with throwaway characters who are trying to make a profitable business out of living in Alaska, but also includes graphic images of workers in a fishing hatchery that shuts down, leaving many without work.  In this speculative market, we discover two world weary characters who have had their share of bad luck, who are instantly drawn to one another, but who are wary of troubled relationships, wonderfully expressed by their first date where he takes her to a salmon dying ground just exploding with fish who are flopping around in huge numbers until they die right there on the spot, an odd reflection of their own inner wounds.  It’s a peculiar moment, as neither is quite sure what to make of the other, but it’s clear both want something to develop. 

Oak Park native Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio, from de Palma’s SCARFACE (1983) fifteen years earlier or Scorsese’s THE COLOR OF MONEY (1986), is once again glowing in her role as a lounge singer who finds moments that she calls a “state of grace” onstage every night, as she finds meaning in the words of the songs that she gorgeously sings herself, effortlessly revealing her emotional vulnerability in every scene, while David Strathairn is the quiet, moody, more introspective man who carries his life’s troubles in his self-reflections, still haunted by a boating accident on his boat twenty years ago where two friends died.  It’s interesting how much is revealed from both characters that comes from other sources in an Altmanesque layering of overheard conversations as well as the lounge musical performances, especially Mastrantonio’s cover of Richard Thompson’s "Dimming of the Day," which is nothing short of pitch perfect.  Thompson can be seen here on YouTube:  Richard Thompson - Dimming Of The Day - California 2005 - YouTube (3:38). But while the camera is following this couple, there are brief vignettes of Mastrantonio’s teenage daughter, Vanessa Martinez, that are gently interspersed without comment or backdrop, but they also clearly indicate her state of dejection, exasperated by constantly moving from place to place and from the aftereffects of having to deal with her mother’s failed relationships.

Then suddenly the film veers off in another direction, leaving civilization and all its troubles behind as the three of them venture into unexplored territory, beautifully expressed by the Alaskan wilderness that initially feels liberating and filled with a wonderful sense of expectation.  But just as suddenly, unforseen circumstances occur and what was perceived as hopeful becomes overwhelmingly dangerous and forbidding, as they are trapped in a remote inlet by killers that we never see, but they are the only ones who know where the three of them are.  The cinematography of Haskell Wexler finds the gloom in the air, the cover of mist and fog in the dense green forest where they take cover and must attempt to survive.  Miraculously, a film that spends its whole time hovering around the budding relationship of two adults suddenly shifts to the poetic state of grace of the daughter, who reads passages every night from a diary left behind ages ago in a makeshift, broken-down hut from a family of fox hunters, where the hunter daughter was amazingly insightful in her intimate description of her parent’s deteriorating relationship, which matches this impending doom of the new inhabitants.  The tenderness in these readings is intoxicating and takes us into clearly unchartered territory, becoming one of the best and most poetic expressions of adolescence, eliciting a harrowing mood of sensitivity and sorrow as the world closes in around her.  Vanessa Martinez subtly steals the film right out from under the superbly crafted performances of the adults.  It’s a beautiful piece of storytelling that cleverly changes the focus of the film.  Even the quiet, eerily understated cries of Bruce Springsteen in the song “Lift Me Up,” heard in a live version here:  Bruce Springsteen - Lift Me Up Debut - 07/31/05‏ - YouTube (3:12), leaves the viewer in something of a hypnotic trance over the end credits from which there is no easy escape.  

Amigo

Sayles on the set with Chris Cooper

AMIGO                       C+      

USA  (128 mi)  2010  d:  John Sayles

Sayles takes a stab at revisionist history in the American occupation of the Philippines from 1900 to 1902, but unlike his much superior MEN WITH GUNS (1997), a Sayles film that poetically examines the history of South America, this film is so uneven that it loses what it's so passionate about.  Shot in the Philippines, using a largely non-professional local cast speaking Tagalog, Sayles plunges ahead with a muddled effort that spends too much time attempting to bridge the gap between languages, where often both are being spoken at the same time, which along with subtitles is very confusing to the viewer, made worse by a Catholic missionary priest who translates everything through the views of the church. Instead of simplifying it all for the intended audience, Sayles only makes it more complicated, where the point about American soldiers insisting to speak English to people who have little capacity to understand is repeatedly drummed into the story.  What this film resembles is Kevin Costner’s DANCES WITH WOLVES (1990), which over sympathizes with the Indians, envisioning how a trained military captain could embrace the Indian culture as part of his mission instead of savagely attacking them into submission, which became the prevailing military order of the post Civil War era.  Similarly, this film goes to great lengths to humanize the Philippine community, despite the expressed vulgar viewpoints of the individual soldiers who continue to dismiss them as dark skinned and racially inferior.  Fresh off the Indian wars, many American soldiers were sent to the Philippines in an attempt to occupy the nation, an obvious parallel to Iraq and Afghanistan, where after Spain ceded the Philippines to the United States, the government belief under President Teddy Roosevelt was that it was an American duty and priority to bring democracy and a civilized government to inferior nations, where annexation was key, protecting the military and economic interests which would likely fall under the control of Japan or Germany if the U.S. didn’t intervene.  Rather than provide an objective view, however, Sayle’s dogmatic script is too preachy, where his aims undermine any sense of developing drama.

The film has its moments, however, where the relative calm in the remote village of San Isidro is broken by the arrival of American soldiers.  What they inherit is mostly a town of women and children along with a handful of male elders, as all the rest of the able bodied men escape into the heavily forested mountains where they lead occasional guerilla raids.  Like the American Civil War, this act pits brother against brother, where Rafael (Joel Torre) is the town leader who advocates peace and attempts to befriend the Americans while his brother Simon (Ronnie Lazaro) is the leader of the insurrectionists, which includes Rafael’s teenage son.  Led by American Lieutenant Compton (Garrett Dillahunt), a former architect, a small group of soldiers is left behind to establish a garrison in a rural outpost, where Sayles establishes a daily rhythm of life where each side cautiously but suspiciously attempts to live alongside one other, bridged by the biased, morally judgmental interpretation service of the Spanish Catholic priest (Yul Vazquez), who only exacerbates the pervasive mood of mistrust.  Only the women and children show an undivided, ritualistic need for the church, as this is all they’ve known, where the church’s teachings have provided the only semblance of education in the region due to the absence of schools, where all the adults are illiterate.  The loving marital relationship of Rafael and his church adhering wife Corazon (Rio Locsin) establishes an existing presence of harmony in Philippine relations, a harmony all but shattered by the American presence that blames Rafael for anything that goes wrong, punishing him with slave labor, where he is repeatedly jailed and continually turned into an example by the military superiors.   

The quiet, wordless scenes are the best, an elderly man playing classical guitar, languorous sequences of idleness from the neverending rain, planting rice in the muddy fields, a fiesta, a funeral ceremony, the community coming together to build a house, much like the Amish barn building sequence in WITNESS (1985), which along with some excellent choices of music offer inspirational moments.  The jovial interrelations between the old time village friends are deftly handled, as their playful spirit is a marked contrast against the vile behavior of the American troops, with the exception of one young trooper who develops a crush on one of the attractive young girls.  Chris Cooper enters the picture as an American Colonel who refuses to accept anything less than results, implementing the military view of imposed atrocities in order to send a vicious message to the villagers.  As far as history, the film doesn’t go far enough, as the Americans enacted the same scorched earth policy that it had shown to American Indians, using military superiority to annihilate indigenous Philippine populations, forcing them into crowded concentration camps where the stench and spread of contagious disease wiped out large numbers of civilians, while also inflicting brutal questioning, torture, and on the spot executions.  Though he only concentrates on one rural village, Sayles barely touches on these issues and instead suggests there are differences in military perceptions between those living with the natives and those prepared for an all out invasion.  In the eyes of the invaders, the life of a Philippino is demonized and has no value whatsoever, which only proves they have no business inflicting such horrors into the lives of cultures so radically different than their own which they really have little interest in understanding anyway.  History is filled with ventures just such as this, but Sayles fails to add anything new to this argument except to express his longstanding humanistic views that all men are brothers.      

Putty Hill

PUTTY HILL                          B                     

USA  (85 mi)  2010 d:  Matthew Porterfield

This is what you might call spur-of-the-moment filmmaking, because as the filmmaker was set to begin filming one movie called METAL GODS, the financing from grants for that project fell through at the last minute.  But since a camera crew and a group of non-professional actors were ready to go, they instead shot this film on the fly from a hastily put together 5-page script, costing $20,000, shot on HD Cam in less than two weeks in Baltimore in August of 2009.  It’s taken nearly two years following a year on the festival circuit for this project to find the public, and even then, opens on very few screens.  Porterfield’s first film, HAMILTON (2006), ran just slightly over one hour and felt like a minimalist, non-narrative mood piece, a near wordless, slice of life mosaic that was interesting in the abstract, where the story was secondary to the rich construction of character and place, where the artful beauty was in lyrical observation.  Once more, offering few embellishments and only a scant narrative, this film offers a window into a lower-middle class fabric, feeling almost like eavesdropping, offering a rare authenticity into the world of the people inhabiting this neighborhood.  But in an unusual twist, the director himself from behind the camera asks random questions to kids on the street that have a connection to a young twenty-year old who recently died of an overdose, asking if they knew him, for how long, and if they’re going to the funeral service.  This is reminiscent of THE BIG CHILL (1983) or RETURN OF THE SEACAUCUS SEVEN (1979), but it’s a much more scattered approach, as many of the friends barely know one another, and are connected to only one small piece of the puzzle, while his neighbors may have known him his entire lifetime. 

This approach offers a broader range of social fabric, including kids coming in from out of town who fit right into their little cliques that they were a part of when they left.  Unlike the spoiled brat rich kids seen on TV shows or in Hollywood comedies, these kids lead more modest lives, where a large part of it is sitting around and doing nothing, feeling bored and alienated not only from the adults, but the world around them.  Many of their conversations together don’t really lead anywhere, as feeling disconnected and not having anything to say is what they’re used to.  The offscreen questions have a way of bringing people together by a common purpose, but the viewer never gets the impression this group is a cohesive whole, more like a collection of various parts, where the camera observes their behavior one piece at a time, like a finely observed character study.  There is an exquisite scene where a bunch of kids go swimming in the natural flora of a local creek, and another where the camera finds a lone soul at a bike and skate park, where the commonality of age and interest begins to represent a social strata, but more often than not we observe these characters one at a time as they interact with family or friends.  Unlike HAMILTON however, here it feels important to know the myriad of relationships, such as who’s related to the family of the deceased.  With many of the kids feeling like interchangeable parts, this gets lost in the maze, which is a troubling factor.  The film simply doesn’t provide much help in identifying the relevant players.  Instead, it prefers to mix them all together while insisting upon its own structural ambiguity, which doesn’t really work with a documentary style questioner.

Nonetheless, much like Portland indie director Gus van Sant, this film offers a unique portrait into adolescence just by allowing kids to be kids in their natural habitat.  The cluttered interior rooms where they hang out are especially insightful, having a much more anarchistic look of rage and alienation, offering few signs of the typical look of teenage conformity.  The young high school girls, however, all look like hippie chicks, where in that respect, this could just as easily be a West coast van Sant production.  Gone are the copycat mall reproductions, each kid an Abercrombie & Fitch assembly line copy of the next, including that mile-a-minute mode of Valley girl speech.  These kids speak naturally, even quietly, without the incessant use of cell phones and without forcing their opinions on others, where none of them seems to spew a political agenda.  But despite the window into youth culture, which certainly feels authentic, one wonders if that is enough, especially as it’s all leading to a funeral service which has a noticeably quicker editing scheme, where people are cut off abruptly, which doesn’t happen anywhere else in the film.  As a viewer, one might have preferred to keep the cameras rolling, continuing the theme of feeling like an observer at a real event, such as the rambling but unforgettable bar sequences with Gene Hackman doing a striptease from Jerry Schatzberg’s SCARECROW (1973) or Cassavetes’ classic imperfections in the roundtable bar tributes to the deceased from HUSBANDS (1970).  Instead, perhaps due to lack of time, this sequence feels hastily put together, where we’re only seeing the edited highlights, like a greatest hits montage.  Still, despite the quibbles, the film extols a natural sound design where cars passing and dogs barking are every bit as important as words getting lost in various conversations, where like Altman, the director can change the focus not just with the lens but with the use of sound.  The final sequence returns to an exquisite lyrical abstraction, a free-ranging experimental design of music and light that inventively goes out in style.