After falling in love with David Gordon Green’s Undertow, I checked out some of his other films. George Washington was first on the list because I saw that it was also part of the Criterion Collection. George Washington is not about a white man from the mid-1700’s, but rather a group of children set in a small, rural southern town. With not much to do, they spend their days wandering around the broken community and have conversations that form into a collage of innocence. After a tragedy happens amongst the group, they all come together and attempt to cover it up which leads to their individual quests for redemption. In one of the most poetically beautiful films I’ve seen recently, David Gordon Green tells the heartbreaking story of kids who are forced to enter the adult world early and make decisions that they shouldn’t have to make. Although I’m sure not everyone has had to go through what the kids in the film had to go through, I believe it is the perfect metaphor for teenage friendships. A group of kids who are as tight as can be part away from each other for something or another or perhaps no reason at all. Green manages to create some of the most real characters I’ve seen on film in everyway from their dialogue to their simple hand gestures and reactions. I think I might’ve been close to tears because of how magnificent this one was. Damn, it was good.