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
