Daily Archives: Saturday, November 28, 2015

  • Ballast

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Lance Hammer (2008)

    This Sundance prize-winner has taken some time to appear in this country and it’s not hard to see why.  The BFI Studio has fewer than forty seats and was nowhere near full for the screening I went to:  at least three of the small audience left before the 96 minutes were up.  Ballast (which was also on at Curzon cinemas recently) is by no means a bad film – on its own terms it’s well done – but it’s not an illuminating one.  The writer-director-editor Lance Hammer, whose first feature this is, is a white Californian, who has worked as an art director on a number of the Batman films and on the Coens’ The Man Who Wasn’t There.  The people in Ballast are poor blacks living in the Mississippi Delta which, according to Amy Taubin in Film Comment, Hammer had been visiting ‘for ten years, drawn by the beauty and sadness of the place and “the endurance of the people in the face of sorrow”’.  It may have been admiration that attracted Hammer to his subject but his approach is, in effect, condescending.  Guns, drugs and struggling to survive are essential to the texture of the lives in Ballast.   It’s understandable that an outsider to the culture might feel that levity would be disrespectful.  But the film is punitively solemn:  Hammer appears to be so anxious on this count that he thinks allowing the characters to be funny is no different from making fun of them.  By refusing to allow humour to intrude, he limits the humanity of the people to whom he wants to do justice.

    Ballast begins with the discovery of the dead body of a man called Darius, in his bed in the small house he shared with his brother Lawrence (Micheal J Smith, Sr).  Shortly afterwards, Lawrence tries to commit suicide and fails, where his brother succeeded.  The film is about the consequences of Darius’s death for his estranged son, James (Jim Myron Ross), and the boy’s mother, Marlee (Tara Riggs), as well as for Lawrence.  The non-professionals Hammer has cast in these roles can hardly be faulted – the mother and son are particularly good (and show glints of humour, in spite of the direction).  But Hammer fixes them in their social situation in a way that constrains the freedom not just of the characters but of the actors too.  As tends to be the case in this kind of piece, the dialogue is convincing because, for the most part, it’s sparse:  the more of it there is – when characters are occasionally given the opportunity to speak their minds – the more conventional it sounds.    The bleakness of Ballast isn’t diluted by poor plotting, as it was in the kindred Wendy and Lucy.  (As in Kelly Reichardt’s film, a dog – an amiable, husky-mongrel – has an important role in Ballast.)  But the correspondence of the Mississippi weather with the characters’ frame of mind is obviously calculated – it’s grey and rainy most of the time with a brief sunny interlude when Lawrence and Marlee make peace and James starts getting a home education.  That said, the tones and textures of the muddy landscape are expressively photographed by Lol Crawley – and the film opens with a dynamically beautiful image of James running in a field, under a sky filled with an agitation of dark birds.

    15 June 2011

     

  • Bad Teacher

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Josh Kasdan (2011)

    Edward Lawrenson in The Big Issue sees Bad Teacher as a corrective to educator hagiographies like Dead Poets Society.  In this new comedy directed by Josh Kasdan (Lawrence’s son, whose last feature was Walk Hard:  The Dewey Cox Story), Cameron Diaz plays cynical, foulmouthed, drink-and-drugs-fuelled Elizabeth Halsey,  determined to stay with her job at a Chicago school only for as long as it takes her to land a rich husband.   When her mother-dominated fiancé dumps her, Elizabeth has to go back for another stint of teaching.  She decides she needs breast enlargements to land her man.  The school year is a series of schemes to get the money for the surgery.   The screenwriters Lee Eisenberg and Gene Stupnitsky, who’ve written most episodes of the American version of The Office, are well aware of the changing-kids’-lives traditions of classrooms on screen.  On her first day with her new junior high school students, Elizabeth shows them Stand and Deliver with Edward James Olmos.  After that, she gets more eclectic:  any film will do because it means she doesn’t have to do any teaching.  The idea of an anti-role model at the blackboard doesn’t seem that subversive after Half Nelson but the film-makers have a more basic difficulty.  There’s nowhere to go with Bad Teacher:  it’s going to be a letdown if the protagonist changes her ways; and a commercially safe package like this can’t allow Elizabeth’s mercenary heartlessness to triumph.  The eventual compromise is pointless because it makes for an ending so tentative and perfunctory it’s not much less of an anti-climax than it would have been if Elizabeth had turned 100% good teacher.  Bad Teacher is very crude indeed – often verging on the offensive not because it’s gross but because it’s obvious and lazy.  The whole thing feels like a series of sketches.  But they’re held together by some good one-liners and some very agreeable performers, who are well directed by Kasdan.

    Cameron Diaz is as limberly glamorous as ever – although she’s older too (not far off forty now).  This gives a bit of an edge to her presence here – with her big lips (and bright red lipstick), she’s almost excessively luscious.  She’s a skilled and charming comedienne but what’s rather intriguing is the jadedness Diaz gives off:  it’s as if she’s aware she’s been in undemanding roles a bit too long now.  Lucy Punch as Elizabeth’s bête noire, a gratingly wacky goody-goody called Amy Squirrell, is lively and resourceful:  but, in contrast to Diaz (who occasionally seems to be reminding herself to get involved in the film), Punch works a bit too hard.  (Her determined hold on an American accent reinforces this impression.)  Justin Timberlake is Scott Delacorte, the new boy in the staff room who Elizabeth’s after, and he’s excellent.  He uses his neat good looks to fine satirical effect and gives Scott an educated pusillanimity that’s actually very appealing.  Timberlake times to perfection his lines about an Ethiopian restaurant (‘At last they’ve got their own cuisine:  progress’) and when, on a school outing to the Lincoln museum etc in Springfield, Scott asserts, ‘I really hate slavery’.  His dry humping scene with Diaz is genuinely, surprisingly funny.

    Jason Segel is an oddity:  you can sense his wit but he doesn’t seem to know how to use his voice or his face the way that you expect of an experienced actor.   Yet Kasdan did well to cast him as the gym teacher Russell Gettis, who likes the look of Elizabeth as much as she despises him.  Segel’s lack of precision complements Timberlake very effectively – and because Segel seems like a person who’s wandered onto set rather than a practised performer, the final pairing off of Elizabeth and Russell isn’t quite as bad as it deserves to be:  Segel gives it an accidental quality that alleviates the falsity.   In the smaller roles, slender caricatures are given amusing substance by, among others, Phyllis Smith (a hopelessly single middle-aged teacher), John Michael Higgins (the school principal, who’s adopted a dolphin), Matthew J Evans (a geekily sensitive boy in Elizabeth’s class), Molly Shannon (his eagerly encouraging mother) and Dave ‘Gruber’ Allen (a senior member of the staff – and awkwardly droll in the way that only teachers can be).

    19 June 2011

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