Ballast.

"There isn't much talk and not a drop of cynicism in Ballast, Lance Hammer's austerely elegant, emotionally unadorned riff on life and death in the Mississippi Delta," writes Manohla Dargis in the New York Times. "Shot with a sure hand and a cast of unknowns, the film doesn't so much tell a story as develop a tone and root around a place that, despite the intimate camerawork, remains shrouded in ambiguity. Mr Hammer puts in the time, but never asserts that he knows this world and his black characters from the inside out, a wise choice for a white boy playing the blues."

"Hammer's film rotates a few main 'pared-down' techniques: withholding information with fussily constrained mobile camerawork, cutting forward to the middle of a scene's introductory action, or observing characters at a carseat-contemplative distance," writes Nicolas Rapold in the L Magazine. "The result can feel oddly overthought around the relaxed core provided by the nonprofessional cast (most often by [Michael J] Smith)."

Updated through 10/6.

"It represents the apotheosis of a certain neorealist and/or quasi-documentary trend in American independent movies, fueled (I think) by the influence of Belgium's Dardenne brothers, the recent rereleases of Charles Burnett's Killer of Sheep and Kent Mackenzie's The Exiles and the last 20 years or so of Iranian cinema," writes Salon's Andrew O'Hehir. "So we get the peculiar and arguably perverse spectacle of a group of young American filmmakers - including Chris Smith (The Pool), Chris Eska (August Evening) and Ramin Bahrani (Chop Shop) - almost eagerly painting themselves into a corner, making subdued, naturalistic, just-above-homemade movies about underclass characters that attract rave reviews but almost no paying customers.... I know, I know - it's crass and dunderheaded to mention money, and none of those guys was under the impression that he was making the next Bond or Batman film.... But movies are a business, people, and absent the invention of some yet-to-be-perfected digital distribution platform that actually generates a little money, this little neorealist wave of American cinema is about to strangle itself in the cradle."

"Ballast has a tender approach to character that is certainly poetic, but it's never mechanistic," writes Michael Koresky in Reverse Shot. "Hammer's characters are taciturn (Michael J Smith's store-owner Lawrence), frustrated and animated (Tarra Riggs's single mom Marlee), and youthfully erratic (Marlee's 12-year-old son James, played by JimMyron Ross) in ways that always feel true to their given situation; Ballast's only structuring 'device' seems to be its filmmaker's compassion."

"Ballast (another Frozen River, wallowing in the miseries of the underclass) is designed to provoke bourgeois moviegoers' pity," argues Armond White in the New York Press.

"Ballast doesn't portray the sensual Delta of popular imagination, the one drenched in sunshine and teeming with fecundity and song," notes Elena Oumano in the Voice. "Instead, the film's haunting tableaus of loss and healing are photographed against a wintry gray sky that casts a chill, bluish pall over the endless vista of bare, resting fields."

Interviews with Hammer: Marina Antunes (Row Three), Steve Dollar (New York Sun), Dennis Lim (New York Times), Rob Nelson (Film Comment) and Jeff Reichert (Reverse Shot).

Updates, 10/3: "Hammer's small-town wallow - in which characters suffer in stillness and silence - is itself a kind of art-house cliché," writes Noel Murray at the AV Club.

"There is virtue in industriousness: in the rituals of the store, the stocking of shelves, the keeping of hours," finds Joshua Rothkopf in Time Out New York. "If anything holds Hammer's slice of life back, it's that the movie is just getting started when things cut to black."

"The world of this movie doesn't bear much connection to the Mississippi I know, not because there's no visible resemblance between the two, but because the movie feels airless and stylized and as devoid of any sense of ongoing life as a diorama," writes Phil Nugent at Screengrab. "Yet at the same time, Hammer, who invokes Robert Bresson in discussing his intentions, seems to mean for his nonprofessional cast to bring something to the screen that's more "real" than trained actors can. Though it may be blasphemous to say it, Bresson himself wasn't always able to get what he needed out of the supposedly pure, malleable untrained actors he came to favor, and Hammer hasn't yet had the experience that Bresson had wracked up before he started treating the casting of non-actors as an essential part of his 'transcendental style.'"

Update, 10/4: "Hammer brings an outsider's detachment to his observations, but his obvious familiarity with the region results in an unforced authenticity, whether taking in the generosity of a neighborly gesture or a drug-dealing subculture that seems oddly similar to its urban counterparts," writes Andrew Schenker. "To watch Ballast is to continually navigate the tensions between artifice and naturalism that arise from the gap between the film's very deliberate aesthetic and its unforced presentation of character."

Update, 10/6: At Daily Plastic, Robert Davis notes that Hammer "not only alludes directly to the Dardennes with a shot of a guy on a motorcycle but also seems to have internalized the humanism that drives their style. Rather than use the camera to gawk at an unfamiliar world, Ballast feels like an attempt to live within that world for as long as possible."

Posted by dwhudson at October 2, 2008 3:19 PM