Chris Smith: American Original.

American Movie is Chris Smith "doing what he does best: approaching folks on their own terms and turf, with an eye for everyone's squelch-resistant kernel of independence," writes Nicolas Rapold in the New York Sun. "American Movie and the director's four other films will screen at the Museum of Modern Art in a retrospective titled Chris Smith: American Original. The series spans from Mr Smith's 1996 debut, American Job, to his latest, The Pool, a fictional feature set in India that begins its premiere American run Wednesday at Film Forum."

"The Pool... has a lyricism that is new to Smith's work," writes Amy Taubin for Artforum. "Shot with a handheld 35-mm camera that gives a fairy-tale radiance to the riot of colors on the city streets and in the lush gardens around the rich man's house, The Pool roots its fantasy in the details of daily life."

Updated through 9/5.

MoMA's series runs through Monday.

Update, 9/1: For Filmmaker, Nick Dawson talks with Smith "about the challenges of shooting in India, directing actors whose language you don't speak, and his love of Pirates of the Caribbean.

Updates, 9/2: "There is nothing quite like the subtle pleasure of close but seemingly casual observation in a medium that often forgets how much natural grace, levity, and melancholy exists in the spontaneous actions of human beings," writes Steve Dollar in the New York Sun. "The gentle, gradual unfolding of circumstances and characters in The Pool is a quietly stirring reminder of how it can be done."

Its "rhythm is soporific, with the rich man's pool easily understood as a metaphor for privilege and the Portuguese-inflected soundtrack hinting to the region's colonial past," writes Ed Gonzalez in Slant. "The film's saving grace, though, is Smith's refusal to reduce Nana's pool entirely to a symbol of attainment."

Updates, 9/3: "In the manner of a Satyajit Ray film, The Pool avoids melodrama, the better to capture the texture of Venkatesh's vagabond life," writes Stephen Holden in the New York Times. "At first The Pool suggests an inspirational fable in which a selfless older man rescues a youth from the streets. But just when you expect the film to turn into a predictable, rose-colored valentine to opportunity and hope, it goes to a deeper, more ambiguous place."

"Descriptions of The Pool will surely reference neorealism and Satyajit Ray, though Smith's aesthetic amounts to practical handheld master shots and modestly lush cinematography emphasizing verdant foliage and the dusty haze of city streets," writes Michael Joshua Rowin in the L Magazine. "It's a style that evokes an unromanticized naturalism compared to the tourist brochure photography of, say, Vicky Cristina Barcelona, but it's also in the service of a fairly elementary fable that even at 98 minutes feels long."

More from Nick Pinkerton in the Voice, where John Anderson talks with Smith: "In hindsight, it seems like a fairly naïve idea to think we were going to go over and make the film in English..."

For IFC, Aaron Hillis talks with Smith "about India, being classified as a documentarian, and what he thinks about Todd Solondz's on-screen condemnation of his best-known film."

"What makes The Pool so special is how it uses such a seemingly simple framework to speak so profoundly about many different elements of human nature," writes Michael Tully at Hammer to Nail. "Without being forceful or pushy, Smith has produced a beautiful, tender film that thoughtfully addresses issues of adolescent yearning, universal poverty, and parental sorrow, without ever feeling like he's trying to speak so deeply. He lets these themes emerge from the inside-out, not the outside-in, using a direct, unadorned style to produce a work that is suffused with documentary-like realism and symbolic poetry at the exact same time. The Pool is a quiet marvel of a movie."

Update, 9/4: "The value of a film like Chris Smith's The Pool becomes more tangible when you begin to imagine what a lesser filmmaker might have wrought from the same material," writes Michael Koresky for indieWIRE. "The Pool is an unostentatiously crafted work about the daily travails and aspirations of an Indian teenager working at a hotel in the Goan capital of Panjim to help support his family, who live in an impoverished nearby rural village, and who dreams of something better by enviously staring at a nearby wealthy man's shimmering backyard pool from his tree perch. It could have been either mawkish or too self-consciously aping of a particularly neorealist style; instead Smith avoids both modes of address, using an expressive, incisive, and merely observant camera that rarely, if ever, calls attention to itself."

Update, 9/5: "The Pool doesn't seethe with class tension - or much tension at all, for that matter," writes Scott Tobias at the AV Club. "It's a funny, sweet-natured humanist character piece that looks beyond such distinctions without entirely transcending them. Based on a short story by Randy Russell, who co-scripted with Smith, the film has a refreshing sense of proportion without seeming as determinedly minor or mannered as other indies. It's a vivid piece of sketchwork."

Posted by dwhudson at August 30, 2008 2:44 PM