Every year some over-hyped award-laden independent film faces a critical backlash, dissenting writers who cry it ain’t all that. This year it’s Ballast. To quote Armond White, from the NY Press:
“Director-writer Lance Hammer shows a black Mississippi family torn apart by a double suicide attempt, drugs and alienation. But you have to see through these ludicrous black phantoms to the actual white middle-class fantasies at the film’s core.”
Maybe “backlash” is a strong term for a handful of disgruntled critics, but I detect a similar sense of unrest in the audience.
The second time I saw Ballast, I dragged a friend along to Manhattan’s Film Forum (where it recently closed after a brief run). I told her that this film was everything I had been arguing for in American cinema (mostly on internet message boards, in my drawers—sad, really): Its angelic patience, its reverence for faces, silences and subjective experience (with more watchful over-the-shoulder shots than a ‘Nam combat doc) could teach American audiences how to look and listen again. Second time around, I was able to appreciate these qualities even more, as the story became fairly transparent, cleverly delineated though it was. Second time around, it was all about the beauty.
I suspect it was the story that had some of the folks in the Film Forum audience sighing, whispering and even snickering uncontrollably. Story-wise, Ballast can be easily mistaken for an entry in the Why We Be Black genre—films which depict underclass African-Americans scratching and surviving and tearing each other apart. Such films are said to exist mainly for the delectation of white liberals who like to think of poor blacks as lovable to the degree that they are irrational, impulsive and self-destructive. Mighty Joe Young in a do-rag. The fallacy of placing Ballast in this genre is as tragic as the critical backlash against Steven Spielberg’s The Color Purple adaptation, which reduced that film’s towering humanism to Song of the South T-N-T.
The first time I saw Ballast, knowing nothing about its maker, I spent no more than a cumulative total of five minutes thinking about the race of its characters or creator. Whenever little Lawrence wielded a gun that weighed more than him; when early on, James sat brooding, an inscrutable black hulk; when Marlee fumed and fretted over a tragic turn of events with the all the negro histrionics of Robert Downey, Jr. in Tropic Thunder — yeah, I thought about race. But that was it. Otherwise, the ethnicity of Marlee, James, and Lawrence rarely factored into my appreciation of their loss, desperation, insecurities, hopes and contradictions. These were Americans, these were human beings. I expect a white upper middle class author on a black working class subject to get some things “wrong”—that’s the way it is. What I hope for in such a film is an honest effort to capture something true.
When the lights went up at the second screening, Lance Hammer materialized to answer questions. He was slim and chalk white, with the drained expression of a serial blood donor. My friend muttered, “Garfunkel,” referring, I gather, to Hammer’s gentle demeanor and tree-line hair. Folks asked him the same questions about Ballast he’d answered everywhere else, and he graciously answered once more, in a Garfunkel/NPR drone. When he was done explaining himself, I felt like John the Baptist finally making Christ’s acquaintance. My friend whispered, “I think you need to go up there and make love to this man.” I said, “If he were a woman, I’d be nekkid right now.”
What got me all in a holy lather was Hammer’s insistence that he didn’t go to the Mississippi delta looking for a Why We Be Black tale to tale; that he just spent quality time with the people and the place, allowing himself to fall in love with both sufficient to inspire a feature-length film; that the story emerged from this process rather than from his limited imagination alone. He said the film is a testament to the beauty, not the tragedy or despair, of folks scratching and surviving in the delta, and his stripped-down filmmaking methods (natural light, real locations, non-actors) were the only way to achieve it. He railed against Ho’wood’s practice of using programmatic musical scores and other plastic elements to precision-engineer audience response. “If a scene in our film needed music in order to work, it had to be cut.”
Hallelujah and Amen. But one of the back-row snickerers, a black British woman, asked Hammer why he felt it necessary to tell his story with black characters. Her tone was lightly dismissive, reproachful. Hammer said simply that he didn’t see race while conceiving and making the film. Essentially, he arrived in Mississippi and went to war with the army he had.
The critical backlash against Ballast uses such naïve-sounding statements and correlative moments from the film itself for Hammer’s hanging rope. The backlash points out Hammer’s previous career designing sets for lousy Batman sequels as proof that he’s a hack-opportunist merely repackaging surefire Indiewood formula. The backlash, in my opinion, is silly.
I’ll even get the Grand Marshal of the backlash, Armond White, to back me up: “The problem for all of us is developing a less egocentric response to cinema. The transference of identity that people of color have always had to make at the movies is just the kind of theoretical, hypothetical leap of faith, pledge of fellow feeling that Hollywood filmmakers now refuse to return.” White was writing about Mississippi Burning way back in 1989, but his statement reminds me of what I like most about Ballast: Like Kent Mackenzie on The Exiles, Robert M. Young and Michael Roemer on Nothing But a Man, Hal Ashby on The Landlord, Martin Ritt on Sounder and Hector Babenco on Pixote, Hammer took the leap of faith, pledged fellow feeling across a socio-economic chasm. What’s more, his project joins a recent crop of films that sample unadorned physical reality and natural light to spiritual effect: Ulrich Seidl’s Import Export, Cristian Mungiu’s 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days, Jeff Nichols’ Shotgun Stories and Harmony Korine’s Mister Lonely. (I suspect Carlos Reygadas’ latest, Silent Night, belongs on the list, but I haven’t seen it yet.)
These disparate films have in common simple visual pleasures that their cosmopolitan audiences are too busy looking for intellectual challenge, political validation and snark target practice to give more than a shopper’s glance. Snickering and huffing in the back of the theater, eyes rolling right off the screen.
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